onkers was a town between 1788 and 1855.
The Village of Yonkers was incorporated on April 12, 1855. It extended one and seven-tenth miles along the Hudson River, and its average breadth was eighth-tenths of a mile.
Edward P. Shonnard’s farm was in the northern part of this territory and Thomas F. Ludlow’s farm in the southern part of it. The population of the town was 7,554.
Yonkers became a city in 1872. In 1880, the population was 18,189. By 1900, a mere twenty years later, there were 47,931 inhabitants. This remarkable increase in population was due in great part to the growth of industry here between 1850 and 1900 and to the large scale immigration which accompanied that growth.
Until 1890, immigration to the United States was almost exclusively from western and northern Europe. Since Yonkers was close to the Atlantic Ocean and New York City, many immigrants came here to live and work. The potato famine in Ireland in the later 1840s brought many Irishmen to New York, and the construction of the railroad through Yonkers in 1847 brought many of them here as laborers; some would eventually settle here. Immigrants from Scotland and England were working here even before 1865; their numbers grew after Alexander Smith established his carpet mill here in that year. There were, in fact, so many Scots here in the 1870s that Yonkers was for many years called “The Scot City.” Political antagonism between the Scots and the Irish of Yonkers was not unheard of, but by the turn of the century the Irish had gained control of the political picture and also of the police force.
The character of the immigration to Yonkers eventually changed and, after 1890, people from southern and eastern Europe began to outnumber those from northern Europe. Thousands came from Russia, Austria-Hungary, Greece, Italy and the Balkan Peninsula.
Like the growth of industry, the growth of schools was rapid here in the last half of the 19th Century. In 1872 there were six district schools. School One was on Tuckahoe Road; Union Free School Two was on Ashburton Avenue (it later moved to a location between Waverly and School Streets); and School Three was at Mosholu until Kingsbridge was separated from Yonkers (a new School Three was then built on Hamilton Avenue). It is uncertain when the original schools Four and Five were started. School Six was built in 1861. On July 12, 1881, John Adams Nichols became the first Superintendent of Schools. In 1884 Charles Eugene Gorton became Superintendent and played an outstanding part in making the Yonkers public school system one of the finest in the country. He was superintendent until his death in 1922. Gorton High School is named after him.