THE RAILROAD MAKES ITS WAY INTO WESTCHESTER COUNTY

In the 1840s the coming of the railroad changed conditions from the rural to the urban. The farmer no longer had to send his produce to the New York City markets by boat or wagon and the city dweller soon moved to the country, traveling each day to and from his work in the city. The Harlem Railroad was the first to enter Westchester County. Chartered in April 1831, its cars ran from Park Row to 14th Street in November 1932, by September 1842 it reached Williams Bridge and two years later Hunt’s Bridge (later called West Mount Vernon) and White Plains. The New Haven Railroad Company was chartered by Connecticut in 1846. Between 1846 and 1847 the line was constructed, running through what is today Westchester County.

 John Stevens, son of Joseph and Elizabeth Stevens, was born in Elizabethtown, New Jersey on April 17, 1803. His father was a farmer whose acreage covered about the area now known as Cranford. It was here that he imbibed and cultivated the love of nature which was the germ of his life’s ambition – to establish a community of homed in the midst of rural quiet and beauty. His education, other than that received from the “silent monitors or field and forest,” was the best that the common schools of the day afforded. In early manhood he was apprenticed to the tailoring trade, and after having acquired a thorough knowledge of business he entered into partnership with Robert Barry together with whom, under the firm name of “Barry & Stevens,” he conducted a merchant tailoring establishment at No. 4 Waterstreet, Elizabethtown. A few years later this partnership was dissolved and he moved to New York where he opened a clothing store at No. 19 John Street. His life in New York was marked by frequent change of address, both business and home.