revolutionary war

The Undiscovered Country: Northern Manhattan in 1904

Seaman Drake Arch in 1904

In 1904 Inwood’s first modern apartment building appeared on the corner of Dyckman and Broadway (then still referred to by many as the Kingsbridge road). The erection of the Solano and Monida Apartments should have have served as warning that the agrarian lifestyle residents had known for so many generations was  nearing an end.  So [...]

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A Civil War Veteran and His Inwood Truck Farm

Inwood Truck Farm post

Imagine yourself a soldier returning from the Civil War. Disoriented. Jobless. Before that bloody War Between the States you had been a farmer.  A New York City farmer at that! But Manhattan had changed much in your absence. You simply couldn’t plant a potato patch wherever you pleased anymore. Gone were the wide-open farms and [...]

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A Grain Field in City Limits: Inwood, 1895

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A GRAIN FIELD IN CITY LIMITS NEW YORK HERALD July 14, 1895 It Waves at 211th Street Awaiting the Reaper and Is Manhattan’s Last IS ON HISTORICAL GROUND That Part of the Island Was Devastated by Two Armies in the Time of Washington POINTS OF INTEREST NEAR BY “RIPE and awaiting the scythe of the [...]

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Inwood in 1886

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The below article originally appeared in the New York World on December 26, 1886. While much in Inwood has changed since this description was first set into type, much has remained the same.  The original clipping is housed the the genealogy room of the New York Public Library. “Few New Yorkers are familiar with the [...]

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The Old Nagle Cemetery

Inwood Cemetery, NYC

In mid-17th century Jan Nagle and Jan Dyckman traveled to the New World and settled in northern Manhattan. For more than two centuries the families farmed the land, raised cattle, planted orchards, built bridges and homes and even intermarried. And while Dyckman is a familiar Inwood name, largely thanks to the preservation of the post-Revolutionary [...]

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Where Cobwebs Thrive on Manhattan Isle

Libby Castle

When New York Tribune reporter Eleanor Booth Simmons explored the hills of Inwood and Washington Heights in 1921 she discovered a quaint country community rapidly being swallowed by the big city. In this article she gives us a guided tour of the still standing homes of once rich and powerful families including Nathan Straus, James [...]

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17th Century Dyckman Goose Feud

Dutch period thumb

In “Ballads of  Old New York,” published in 1920 by Arthur Guiterman, there is a description of a brief but bitter feud between early Inwood settlers Jan Dyckman and Jan Nagle. Settlers who, by all accounts, were the best of friends until one fateful day in the 1680′s. The story, which is referenced in other [...]

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