Staten Island Timeline

Staten Island Timeline - 1700s

1729
Richmond Town is established as the county seat of Richmond County

1774: June 21
Daniel D. Tompkins, Island resident who developed Tompkinsville, is born in what is now Scarsdale, N.Y. New York Governor from 1807 to 1817 and Vice President of the United States under President James Monroe. He was a leader in the fight to abolish slavery in New York State.

1776: July 2,3
9,000 Redcoats commanded by British General William Howe land on Staten Island and set up headquarters in New Dorp. During the Revolutionary War the British presence on mainly loyalist Staten Island will climb as high as 30,000 British troops.

1776: Sept. 11
John Adams, Benjamin Franklin and Edward Rutledge hold peace talks with British commander William Howe. Howe offers clemency in return for surrender at the home of loyalist Lt. Col. Christopher Billopp in Tottenville now called the "Conference House". The conference fails and the American Revolution continues.

1780: January 15
2,500 American troops march across the frozen Kill Van Kull from Elizabeth, NJ to Port Richmond and attack British positions in West Brighton and New Brighton. Loyalist spies report the movements of the Americans allowing the British to call for reinforcements who push the American forces back across the ice to New Jersey.

1783: December 5
The last British troop ship departs the newly formed United States from Staten Island. Staten Island crowds gather to jeer the departing warships as they pass through the Narrows. The last shot of the Revolutionary War is fired from a departing British vessel at the Staten Islanders. By the end of the war Staten Island was almost completely deforested to supply fuel for British army campfires.

1788
Staten Island is divided into four official townships: Northfield, Southfield, Westfield and Castleton.

1794: May 2
"Commodore" Cornelius Vanderbilt is born on Long Island and moved to Stapleton, Staten Island as a child. He began sail-powered ferry service between Staten Island and Manhattan which he expanded into a railroad and shipping empire. At one point he was the richest man in America. Vanderbilt went to school in Port Richmond until the age of 11. The Vanderbilts later moved to a Stapleton house that stood at the present site of the Paramount Theater on Bay Street, Stapleton

1799
Creation of a Quarantine station for immigrants with Yellow Fever and Small Pox is authorized to move from Bedloe (now Liberty) Island to Tompkinsville. Elizabeth Bayley Seton, the first American Roman Catholic Saint, assists her father, the New York City Health Officer, Dr. Richard Bayley.