Mill Pond

Visitors to the park might be surprised to learn that Van Cortlandt Lake (recently renamed Hester and Piero’s Mill Pond) is actually a pond, and moreover, it is a constructed body of water, not a natural phenomenon. Fed by the hillsides of Yonkers, Tibbetts Brook flowed through here and continued south into Kingsbridge where it emptied into the Spuyten Duyvil Creek. Just south of this point, Tibbetts Brook became a tidal estuary, where fresh water from the brook mixed with Salt Water from the Harlem River. The estuary supported a vast salt marsh from this point south that was abundant with oysters. In early colonial documents, that estuary and marsh was called by its Lenape name–Muscoota. Oysters were a valuable food source for the Lenape, who continued to harvest oysters in this area well into the 18th century. In addition to oysters, the cordgrass that grew in the salt marsh was highly sought after by European colonists for cattle grazing.

In the early 1700s, Jacobus Van Cortlandt owned a mill here that was powered by the current of Tibbetts Brook.  But in 1718, he purchased additional land here from George Tippett for the purpose of creating a mill pond, which could provide more reliable power to the mill.  After that land purchase, the brook was dammed and the land on either side of the brook was flooded to create the mill pond.  While there are no surviving records documenting the construction, enslaved African laborers certainly performed the hard work of building the dam, as was true of all labor-intensive construction projects on the plantation.

In the mid-1700s, Piero, the enslaved African miller, produced grain and lumber at the gristmill and sawmill at the south end of the mill pond. From there, these products were brought to market by an enslaved African boatman named Levellie. It is likely that Levellie navigated his boat on Tibbetts Brook through the salt marshes of Kingsbridge and then onto New York City, with lower Manhattan, and its large food market, as his destination.