Dobbs Ferry: Where Washington Decided to Win the War

This village on the Hudson takes its name from a ferry that a man named Dobbs ran here in the early seventeen hundreds, the first safe crossing north of the Palisades cliffs. In the summer of seventeen eighty-one, George Washington and the French general Rochambeau camped the allied armies here, probing for a weakness in the British lines at Manhattan, twelve miles south. Then on August fourteenth, a courier arrived from French Admiral de Grasse in the West Indies.

De Grasse's message convinced Washington to abandon the Hudson plan entirely and march four hundred miles to Virginia. Five days later the armies broke camp on the road through present-day Dobbs Ferry, beginning the march that ended with Cornwallis's surrender at Yorktown and American independence.