Tarrytown: The Capture That Unraveled Benedict Arnold
New York
Tarrytown on the Hudson is thought to get its name from the Dutch word for wheat: this was farming country when Dutchman Frederick Philipse received a royal grant of about fifty-two thousand acres along the Hudson in sixteen ninety-three. But its most famous moment came during the Revolutionary War. On September twenty-third, seventeen eighty, three local militiamen stopped a man traveling south on horseback through the neutral zone near the village.
The traveler gave his name as John Anderson. When the militiamen searched him, they found papers hidden in his boot: the plans to West Point, signed by a general named Benedict Arnold. The traveler was actually British Major John André, Arnold's co-conspirator.
André was hanged as a spy. Arnold, warned in time, escaped to a British ship. The incident made Tarrytown a place of patriot legend, and Washington Irving later made the surrounding hills famous as the setting of Sleepy Hollow.
