A brief history of Fisher Hill

Before White Plains

The land Fisher Hill sits on lay in the homeland of the Weckquaeskeck, a Munsee-speaking Wappinger band. Native peoples have lived in what is now Westchester for at least seven thousand years; by around 1000 AD they were living here in small villages and farming the land. They called this place Quarropas — traditionally translated as the white marshes, or the white mist that hung above the wetlands. In November 1683, English Puritan settlers from Rye, then a border town of the Connecticut colony, purchased about 4,400 acres here. Whether the English name translated Quarropas or came from the white balsam that grew on the plains has never been settled, and title to the tract stayed in dispute for nearly forty years.

The Revolution comes to the hill

On July 11, 1776, the Declaration of Independence was read to the public from the White Plains courthouse steps — two days after the Provincial Congress, meeting in that same courthouse, voted to approve it and made New York a state. That October the war arrived in the neighborhood itself. Washington's army, defeated on Long Island and pushed back through Manhattan, reached White Plains on October 21, and he made his headquarters north of the village at the house of the widow Ann Fisher Miller; some accounts place him first at the Jacob Purdy House. Ann Fisher was a daughter of the same Fisher family the hill is named for.

Washington's line ran three miles, from Chatterton's Hill — Battle Hill — to Purdy's Hill and across Broadway. The British and their Hessian allies held the ground east of the Bronx River, northward from the Scarsdale border through Fisher Hill and along the York Road, which we now call Post Road. British guns stood on Fisher Hill — the Historical Society places Captain Anthony Farrington's Royal Artillery here — and fired across at the Continental positions on Chatterton's Hill. The Battle of White Plains began in earnest on October 28, 1776; Washington withdrew his troops northward on October 31, and on November 5 Howe abandoned the White Plains position, turning back toward Manhattan the following week.

The Fishers

Family tradition traces the line to a William Fisher, born in England, who married Adriana Wynant Vander Burg in 1693. Their son Johannis — John — was born in 1704 and settled in White Plains in the 1740s, building the Fisher homestead on Orchard Street, beside what is now I-287. The family held land here for generations. Myndert Fisher, a farmer and large landowner in the nineteenth century, owned everything bounded by Winchester Street to the east, Martine Avenue and the railroad to the north, Post Road to the south, and Tibbits Avenue to the west. Fisher Avenue, Fisher Court, and Fisher Hill itself most likely carry his name. He died in 1885.

The railroad, the parkway, and a neighborhood

Rail service reached White Plains from Manhattan in 1844, turning an all-day journey by coach into a two-hour commute. It was the beginning of the change from farmland village to city: wealthy Manhattanites came first for weekend country estates, and then people came to stay and commute.

Fisher Hill's own building boom came with the new century. Photographs of the Ridgeview Congregational Church under construction in 1900 show Midland and Ridgeview Avenues as unpaved dirt roads with no houses in sight. By 1906, both were paved and Ridgeview was built out with homes along both sides — the neighborhood we recognize today, arriving in the space of six years.

The second great change came by car. New York City authorized the acquisition of land for Bronx Park in 1884; the Botanical Garden was chartered there in 1891, and by the turn of the century the park held the Bronx Zoo as well. The Bronx River that ran down to them was, by then, a public health hazard — fifteen miles of water fouled with human, animal, and factory waste, and there was real fear it would sicken the zoo's animals. A state commission first floated the idea of a road along the river in 1895; the Bronx Parkway Commission itself was created in 1906, and spent the better part of two decades buying land, stopping the sewage, and persuading factories to move. The fifteen-mile Bronx River Parkway opened in 1925, thirty years after it was first proposed. With a railroad and a parkway both running to Manhattan, White Plains grew in earnest.

By the numbers

The first federal census, in 1790, counted 505 people in White Plains — forty-six of them enslaved. There were 575 in 1800. Twenty-six years after the railroad arrived, in 1870, there were 2,630; by 1890, some 4,500. Growth came fastest in the decades on either side of 1900, and the city kept climbing: 35,800 residents in 1930, and 40,327 in 1940. Today White Plains is home to roughly 60,000 people, and its daytime population swells to something near 250,000. About 4,000 of us live on Fisher Hill — a neighborhood notably diverse in ethnicity, age, and income.