Long ago I read the book "Private Yankee Doodle" by Joseph Plum Martin, a revolutionary war veteran. It was available at the Peekskill Public Library.
While stationed at Peekskill in May, 1777, Militiaman Joseph P. Martin describes a place, Continental Village, it was assumed, where soldiers were inoculated against smallpox.
"I was ordered off, in company with about four hundred others of the Connecticut forces, to a set of old barracks, a mile or two distant in the Highlands, to be inoculated with the small pox. We arrived at and cleaned out the barracks, and after two or three days received the infection, which was on the last day of May. We had a guard of Massachusetts troops to attend us. Our hospital stores were deposited in a farmer's barn in the vicinity of our quarters.
"One day, about noon, the farmer's house took fire and was totally consumed, with every article of household stuff it contained, although there were five hundred men within fifty rods of it, and many of them within five rods, when the fire was discovered, which was not till the roof had fallen in. Our officers would not let any of the inoculated men go near the fire, and the guard had enough to do to save the barn, the fire frequently catching in the yard and on the roof, which was covered with thatch or straw.
"I was so near to the house, however, that I saw a cat come out from the cellar window after the house had apparently fallen into the cellar; she was all in flames when she emerged from the premises and directed her course for the barn, but her nimble gait had so fanned her carcass before she reached the place of her destination that she caused no damage at all.
"I had the small pox favorably as did the rest, generally; we lost none; but it was more by good luck, or rather a kind of Providence interfering, than by my good conduct that I escaped with life. There was a considerable large rivulet which ran directly in front of the barracks; in this rivulet were many deep places and plenty of a species of fish called suckers."
These passages kindled my own memories of the place. I used to play pick-up football in Frank Smith's yard (Mr. Zeliph's old house) bordering Sprout Brook, near the location mentioned in Martin's narrative. Also, Paul Kuty and I used to wade in the brook to get mussels and crayfish for use on our trap line. My brother John and I used to pick wild Concord grapes along the brook's east side, just north of the small Sprout Brook Road bridge. Due to the building of the lake dam in 1929, suckers could not pass upstream as they did during Martin's time. John and I speared suckers below the dam, just as Martin and his fellow soldiers speared suckers in Sprout Brook near the soldiers' barracks.
Smallpox killed about 130,000 people during the Revolutionary war. George Washington recognized smallpox as a constant threat to the war effort, and he ordered all hand-delivered post and dispatches dipped in vinegar, to prevent the spread of smallpox. He also ordered inoculation of troops. The method of inoculation was called variolation, and live pox was inserted by lancelet directly into the skin. This produced a milder form of smallpox with a fatality rate of one percent.
I include another relevant entry by Joseph P. Martin. In the summer of 1779 he and troops of his company were employed to take King's Ferry at Verplanck Point. The British, however, reinforced this location opposite Stony Point on the Hudson. Martin writes:
"We then fell back and encamped, but soon after we broke up our encampment and fell back on Robinson's farm, just below West Point, on the eastern side of the river; here we lay the rest of the season, employed in building two strong bomb-proof redoubts, on two hills near the river. Sometime, late in the fall, the British evacuated all their works and retired to New York."
British Colonel Beverly Robinson's house was situated at the foot of Sugar Loaf Mountain on the Hudson. He and his wife, Susannah Philipse Robinson, owned a "long lot," approximately 4 miles x 12 miles, which included the area now called Continental Village. John Meers was the first registered settler of Continental Village in 1737, and Beverly Robinson built a grist mill there in 1762. All of the farms were tenant-farms, with rent and terms of lease set by Beverly Robinson. He owned all improvements to the land, and several tenant-landlord disputes occurred when he tried to shorten leases from ten years to one year. In 1781, after the land had been expropriated, the small lots in Continental Village were sold to existing tenants. Two of these families were the Odells, and Crofts.
In 1860 French's Gazetteer of the State of New York listed one church and twelve houses in Continental Village.
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