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    Mount Vernon Revisited
    Mount Vernon Revisited
    Mount Vernon Revisited
    Ebook224 pages1 hour

    Mount Vernon Revisited

    By Dr. Larry H. Spruill, Donna M. Jackson and Mayor Ernest D. Davis

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    About this ebook

    Mount Vernon Revisited commemorates pivotal milestones of the past 150 years while offering indicators of the city's potential and identity.


    An important gateway suburban community, Mount Vernon was formed around the construction of two commuter rail lines to and from New York City. In the first quarter of the 20th century, its contiguous borders with Greater New York, rapid population growth, automobiles, petroleum, and industrial development set the stage for the encroachment of urban realities on the upwardly mobile founders' hopes for a sustained and prosperous suburban lifestyle. Through images that illustrate the power of 20th-century transportation technologies, new energy sources, and dynamic demographic forces on this "City of Happy Homes,"

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherArcadia Publishing
    Release dateSep 15, 2014
    ISBN9781439647264
    Mount Vernon Revisited
    Author

    Dr. Larry H. Spruill

    Larry H. Spruill, PhD, has spent a half century living and working in Mount Vernon and has served as city historian for the past 25 years. He is an author, award-winning photographer, and history professor at Morehouse College. Donna M. Jackson is a lifelong Mount Vernon resident and a public history and heritage program professional. She serves as assistant city historian, is on the Westchester County Historical Society Board of Directors, and is an executive administrative assistant at the Mount Vernon Board of Education.

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      Book preview

      Mount Vernon Revisited - Dr. Larry H. Spruill

      Room.

      INTRODUCTION

      Although the township of Eastchester (1664) was among the earliest Westchester settlements, no village of noticeable pretensions had arisen until the 1850 founding of Mount Vernon. John Stevens and the Industrial Home Association No. 1, composed mostly of shopkeepers, skilled tradesmen, and people of modest means, organized to escape New York City’s high rents to become suburban home owners. Stevens was interested in a new settlement 30 minutes from New York City by boat, train, or stagecoach. He chose an Eastchester site at the intersection of the New York–New Haven and New York Central Railroads.

      Building a new city on New York’s rural doorstep was a formidable task. The association purchased five farms totaling 370 acres for $75,000. On January 10, 1851, the settlement was named Mount Vernon. In the spring, the village was laid out into streets and avenues, and a train depot was erected. By the end of the year, 36 houses had been built. By August 1852, the number had increased to 300. In December 1853, a majority of citizens voted for a hotly contested plan for incorporation. On March 7, 1854, five village trustees were selected to serve the 1,370 inhabitants.

      During the same time as the founding of Mount Vernon, the Teutonic Homestead Association, composed principally of Germans, established a town, West Mount Vernon, building houses near the New York Central Railroad along the Bronx River. A third settlement, Central Mount Vernon, was formed between the two existing communities. The three were consolidated in 1878. John Stevens died in 1882. After 29 years of rapid growth, the village of Mount Vernon became a city in 1892.

      Revisiting Mount Vernon’s origins and progress requires a review of John Stevens’s biography. Traditionally seen as a romantic reformer, new documents reveal that Stevens was not merely an ambitious merchant tailor. His previously unquestioned social background has become surrounded in myth. He undoubtedly cared about middle-and working-class people and their desire to become home owners, but his distinguished personal life was more affluent and privileged than previously known.

      Though Stevens was born and died in New Jersey and buried in the Bronx, he is often referred to as the Father of Mount Vernon, New York. Little is known of his family upbringing, the source of his bold ambitions. His remarkable genealogy answers long-standing questions about his motivations and self-confidence. His uncommon entrepreneurial spirit was admirable, but not without personal precedence. A person with sterling character and experience was necessary to inspire 1,000 families to invest in this risky homesteading venture. A closer look at Stevens’s pedigree reveals that he was a noteworthy man from an extraordinarily privileged, well-educated family of economic, political, and technological greatness.

      John Stevens was a direct descendent of four generations of men bearing the same name. He was born into an influential, landed aristocratic New Jersey family that had partaken in and benefited from the American Revolution. The name John Stevens can be found among the elites who founded the United States and helped establish the nation’s prominence among the great 19th-century European powers.

      The Stevens family was one of America’s early engineering and technological dynasties. From their Hoboken estate, they designed and built prototypes that became modern railroads, trains, and trolleys, steam-powered water vessels, and automobiles. In 1809, his uncle, John Stevens III, built a steamboat that sailed from Hoboken to Philadelphia, becoming the first steamship to successfully navigate the open ocean. In 1811, another Stevens ship began operation as the first steam-powered ferry service between New York City and Hoboken. In 1815, the first railroad charter in the United States was given to Stevens III for the New Jersey Railroad. Railroads, steamships, and even engine-powered carriages (automobiles) were embedded in the family’s heritage.

      The great aunt of Mount Vernon’s John Stevens, Mary Stevens, married Robert Livingston, who partnered in 1807 with Robert Fulton and built the Clermont, the first commercial steamboat. It sailed up the Hudson River from New York City to Albany, carrying passengers the 150 miles in 32 hours, which normally took a week. Fulton and Livingston were close friends and associates of John Stevens III. Transportation technologies were a Stevens family legacy. Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken was the consequence of gifts from a long line of men named John Stevens.

      The city’s founding father was a son of America’s most prestigious family of engineering visionaries. The establishment of Mount Vernon enabled John Stevens to create a laboratory for pragmatic application of modern transportation technologies and to test their impact on people, commerce, and cities.

      Stevens’s full biography explains why, from the beginning of Mount Vernon, mass transit was central to its evolution and success. Equally important is an understanding of the city founders’ great interest in obtaining jurisdiction over Eastchester Creek and its connection to Long Island Sound. Just as the New Jersey Stevens family founded Hoboken, with its access to the Hudson River and New York City, acquisition of the lowly tidal waterway at Mount Vernon’s southern borders would provide similar access to New York. From its village origins, Mount Vernon expected to one day control Eastchester Creek and use it as an all-water route to Greater New York. Federally funded dredging and channel-deepening projects along the creek began as early as 1873, and they were not completed until

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