Yorktown

Forty square miles of rolling hills, farmland, residential areas, and a beautiful scenery. These are the things that make up a town known as Yorktown in New York. This is the town that I grew up in. Looking past the farmland and the scenery, Yorktown wasn’t always like this. Yorktown used to be inhabited by Native Americans. It was a very different place back in the day, compared to what it is now.

Some of the first known inhabitants of Yorktown were the Mohegan, Osceola, Amawalk, Kitchawan, and Mohansic tribes. These were also names of local towns and places in the area. These tribes originated from all over North America but mainly from the southern end of Lake Champlain south to Dutchess County, New York and from Schoharie Creek in the west to central Vermont in the east. They then mainly migrated to the lower New York region near Yorktown in the 1650’s. Yorktown was officially a part of the Manor of Cortlandt. The Manor of Cortlandt was a royal manor founded by King William III of England in 1697. He made this Manor for the Van Cortlandt family. Cortlandt Manor is also the name of the town that directly borders with Yorktown.

Yorktown was first explored by a Portuguese captain commissioned by Charles I of Spain to find a northern passage to the Spice Islands in 1525. Yorktown was then officially visited by Henry Hudson, an employee of the Dutch East India Company in 1609. The river that borders Yorktown, which was known as the San Antonio River, was renamed after Henry Hudson.

One of Yorktown’s upmost important features of it’s whole history was the role that it had played in the Revolutionary War. The reason that the town of Yorktown had such a strategic role in this war was its geographical location. The Pines bridge that crossed the Croton river was guarded by the first Rhode Island Regiment. This regiment was an integrated group that consisted mainly of African American and Indians. The Pines Bridge was, at the end of the war, the only way to truly cross the Croton River.

The first European settlers to visit the Westchester area, the county in which the town of Yorktown is located in, were Giovanni de Verrazzano in 1524 and Henry Hudson in 1609. These European settlers were sponsored by the Dutch West India Company in the 1620’s and 1630’s. This means that New York was founded by a joint stock company. A joint stock company was a specific type of business organization that is very similar to a corporation. The thing about these types of companies is that they are seen as partnerships in terms of the law. New England settlers began arriving in the 1640’s. Many of the explorers and settlers that stayed in the Westchester area were from New England seized the control of the majority of the Westchester County. There were a lot of estates and manors that were established at this point in time.

The relationship between the native peoples and the settlers varies depending on who is being