n the early 19th Century, life in the Town of Yonkers was no different from life in many of the other little towns in the Hudson River valley. It was a quiet life, with people cultivating their farms and improving their homes. Some of them were employed in gristmills, sawmills, blacksmith shops, taverns and country stores. But the vast majority spent their days in that never ending round of chores which the farmer must perform. Now and again this monotony would be interrupted by a trip to some special place, such as the Lawrence Tavern at Hunts Bridge (near what is now Yonkers Avenue and Bronx River Road).

A tavern was usually a long, low building, two stories high with an open stoop extending along the entire front. The sign post announced its name. Inside were the tap room and the dining room; bedrooms were on the second floor. It was the place where the stage stopped and the seekers of news dropped in.

Yonkers’ best known tavern in 1813 was the Indian Queen Inn on the corner of what is now South Broadway and New Main Street. By 1851 the building was removed to make way for the famous Getty House.

The Indian Queen was a stopping place on the stage coach route from New York to the state capital. Letters and newspapers were taken from the mail bags and kept in the post office until called for. It was the center of life in those days and would remain so until the the steamboat began to interfere with it.

On Sunday people might attend divine service at St. John’s Episcopal Church, which stood on property given to it “forever” by the state legislature in 1786–87 and known as the Glebe. On the other side of town were the Methodist church and the Episcopal chapel. This chapel became the independent parish of St. John’s in 1853 and still stands on Underhill Street in the Colonial Heights section of Yonkers.

In 1795 the state legislature, in an effort to encourage schools, promised to give annually for nine years to the county of Westchester a sum of $1,192, upon condition that the voters of each town should appropriate a sum equal to one–half of what was received. In the first year Yonkers received twenty–five dollars and seven shillings, but this was reduced in the following years.

Old records tell of a school house on North Broadway south of Greenburgh, and another near the corner of what is now Tuckahoe Road and Saw Mill River Road. This was probably what is known as old Number One School.

Ebenezer Baldwin came to Yonkers in 1804 to supervise the rebuilding of the steeple of St. John’s Church. He remained here and established another school.

Old School Number Two was established on North Broadway just north of Ashburton Avenue in 1833. There were by then also private schools on Locust Hill and North Broadway.

From these beginnings emerged the Yonkers school system, which is still a combination of public and private schools.

This, then, was the sleepy little town of Yonkers in the morning of the 19th Century. But mighty forces were at work which were to change the character of the place from a farming community to an industrial city by the dawn of the 20th Century. An advance sign of these changes was the coming of the steamboat.

Robert Fulton’s Clermont must have appeared to those who first saw it as an outlandish boat––it had exposed paddle wheels which were fifteen feet in diameter and was still equipped with masts and sails––but it was soon making weekly round trips from New York to Albany. There was no landing at Yonkers because of the lack of a pier, but by 1826 John Bashford would row out any prospective passenger to the steamboat for the fee of eighteen pence.

Mr. Bashford owned a sloop–landing on the Nepperhan River just below where Warburton Avenue runs into Main Street. On this dock was a hotel, a general store, post office and a row of buildings.

It was truly an attractive spot with an adjoining garden. In 1823 a sloop left Yonkers every Monday and Wednesday carrying freight and passengers. (The passenger rate varied from 25 to 50 cents.) Sloop days were great business days. The farmers from East Yonkers would bring their produce to the boats, reaching the river by way of Tuckahoe Road and Ashburton Avenue. The general store in the Square did a rushing business, and many of the farmers would also stop in at the Indian Queen.

In June 1831 two visitors from France stopped off in Yonkers en route to Greenburgh, Alexis de Tocqueville and Gustave de Beaumont. They had come to America to study the American penitentiary system and Tocqueville’s observations of the young, growing country would lead him to write the classic study “Democracy in America.” Reaching Yonkers by sloop and spending a June afternoon here, Beaumont sketched the landscape while Tocqueville hunted the local fowl.

It was Lemuel Wells, resident of Yonkers from 1813 to 1842 and owner of the Manor House and all the property from Point Street south to below St. Mary Street, who finally built a wharf an eighth of a mile long for steamboats. Before that the landings had been made across the river at Alpine, New Jersey.

Certainly by 1825 the Yonkers farmer was much more active as he shipped oats, rye, wheat, corn, hay, potatoes, apples, peaches, pears, cherries, walnuts, chestnuts and pickles to New York.

Pickles were a specialty of the Yonkers farmer, and Yonkers became known as a pickle port. Men and boys might be seen driving their cattle, sheep, and lambs to market in New York along the Albany Post Road.

The railroad sounded the death knell of this rustic simplicity. By 1844 the New York and Harlem Railroad was running to White Plains and making a stop at Tuckahoe. By 1849 the construction of the Hudson River Railroad from Spuyten Duyvil to Dobbs Ferry was complete.

View of Yonkers, 1858