The vineyards of Croton Point

Benson John Lossing saw Croton Point as a cultivated landscape. His 1866 description moves from the river and the peninsula's names to the vineyards and orchards of the Underhill family. The details offer a better entry into the story than a claim that Croton invented American wine. ^[1]

Two brothers on the point

Lossing described vineyards belonging to Richard T. Underhill and his brother William. He gave their combined extent as about eighty acres, about sixty belonging to the doctor. A figure from one visit cannot settle the size of every planting across decades, but it does correct the impression that all the vines belonged to one man. ^[2]

An earlier description in Bolton's 1848 history identified Catawba and Isabella grapes on the peninsula's slopes and orchards and vineyards on its higher ground. This passage concerns a landscape the writer could observe in his own period; it is a different kind of evidence from Bolton's much later retelling of a Revolutionary incident. ^[3]

What the name Senasqua can tell us

A 1682 deed, transcribed in Bolton's later edition, records Navish for a neck of land and Senasqua for an adjoining meadow. That is documentary evidence that the name was in use in the seventeenth century. It does not date the word to the age of the peninsula's oldest archaeological deposits. ^[4]

The grape varieties Croton and Senasqua connect Underhill's horticultural work with local names. Later local histories describe his experiments and the recognition his grapes attracted. Those accounts are useful introductions to the subject; contemporary horticultural descriptions are the appropriate next source for the varieties' exact parentage and first-fruiting dates. The archive's account of the Grape King

Lossing also recorded the name Sarah's Point. Our earlier article wrongly treated that name as a translation of Senasqua. His account does not establish that linguistic relationship. Similar names and successive uses of a place are not proof of a shared meaning.

A cultivated and industrial shore

The vineyards did not simply disappear and become the family's first brickworks. The county's history describes Richard's wine-growing enterprise and William's brickmaking as overlapping uses of the peninsula. County history of Croton Point

That overlap changes the view. The peninsula supported both a carefully tended agricultural experiment and an industry working its clay. River access connected both enterprises to markets beyond Croton.

The evidence is in the differences

The vineyard acreage in an 1848 description need not match a later visitor's estimate. A name in a colonial deed need not carry an unchanged meaning through thousands of years. A family's agricultural and industrial interests need not fit separate chapters.

These differences make the Underhill story worth reading closely. Lossing's observations, the deed transcription and the county's account show a changing landscape without requiring an unsupported national “first” or an invented explanation of what Underhill intended when he named a grape.

Updated October 16, 2026. Corrected the vineyard acreage attribution, the overlap of vineyards and brickmaking, and unsupported claims about the antiquity and translation of Senasqua. Removed unverified national-first claims and speculation about Underhill’s motives.