Sloatsburg: Mills in the Ramapo Pass

The Ramapo River cuts through a narrow mountain pass here, and that rushing water made this spot industrially valuable from the earliest days of American settlement. By seventeen ninety-two, Isaac Sloat had built a dam across the Ramapo with sluice gates and a millrace to power mills and a tannery. His son Jacob expanded the operation in eighteen fifteen with a cotton mill that later specialized in cotton twine after Jacob patented a dressing process.

The village took the family name. When the Erie Railroad pushed its line through the Ramapo Pass between eighteen thirty-six and eighteen forty-one, Sloatsburg became a stop on one of the main routes connecting New York City to the interior. The pass itself was the same corridor used by Native American trails, colonial roads, and later Route Seventeen and Interstate Eighty-Seven. Today the village sits at the gateway to Harriman State Park, a very large state park.