While many places in Westchester have the feeling of wildness, traffic is always within earshot; and now, as we descended along Black Brook into Honey Hollow, the sound of cars was very near. The woods above the hollow were steep and rocky, and several huge granite blocks had fallen on each other in such a way as to make a perfect natural shelter. Once, my brother and I released a raccoon at the mouth of this cave, and, to thank us for its months of captivity, it chased us angrily all the way down the hill to our car.

       IN Mount Kisco, where I was born, there are seven traffic lights, two supermarkets, nine churches, two temples, and nine banks, none of which has ever been robbed. On summer evenings, the local boys often get together at the diamond in the park for a game of slow-pitch softball. With their hair in headbands and muscles bulging under their T-shirts, they play on teams sponsored by Flynn's Insurance, Mardino's Restaurant, and fourteen other local businesses. On winter afternoons, the late sun lingers on the old corniced storefronts of Main Street and catches the slate shingles on the spire of the United Methodist Church, making them gleam like fish scales. With an active business district and quiet, tree-lined back streets, it's a cozy little burg of about ten thousand-small enough for you to know your neighbors, big enough to get lost downtown among strange faces.

       "Kisco" means "a muddy place" in the Delaware Indian language, and most of Mount Kisco is bottomland on the floor of the Harlem Valley. Until the seventeenth century, it was the hunting ground of two Algonquian tribes and the inundated home of large numbers of beaver. Not much is known about these Indians except that-unlike the Seneca, to the north-they didn't eat the flesh of their enemies and became warlike only when the Dutch began to destroy their villages. An early document suggests that Wampus, an Algonquian chief, lived in an elm-bark lodge about where the lodge of the Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks stands today. Arrowheads that residents of Mount Kisco have found in their back yards indicate that the area may have been a major camp site of an earlier tribe, between three and nine thousand years ago. By the eighteenth century, the beaver had been tra?ped out of the valley, and the Indians massacred or scattered. Their descendants live on reservations in Ok!ahoma, Wisconsin, and Ontario. Only a handful can speak Delaware.

       Around 1720, several families came up from Long Island and settled on the valley rim. One cluster of houses, called Kirbyville, sprang up about where the bowling alley is now.  A second, New Castle Corners, occupied the present site of Friendly's Ice Cream Shop, half a mile away. About the only outside contact the settlers had was with a missionary who would come up from the Episcopal Church in Rye every so often and preach to them. New Castle Corners grew faster, because there a brook rushes steeply into the valley. During the nineteenth century, its water was turning the wheels of a grist mill, a cotton mill, a woollen mill, and factories where needles, bricks, women's shoes, and men's shirts were manufactured. The largest concern at the Corners was the Spencer Optical Works. It is supposed to have been, at one time, the largest optical works in the country. It burned in 1877 and was then rebuilt, before finally leaving New Castle in 1888. Children playing in the woods on Spencer Street occasionally unearth spectacles ground there a century ago.

       In the eighteen-forties, the newly formed New York & Harlem Railroad Company decided to run a line of track up the Harlem Valley. By 1847, there was rail service between Manhattan and New Castle Station, as it was called. With the New York City market only about an hour away, the dirt farmers in the surrounding country became dairy farmers, leaving their milk cans at New Castle Station early every morning. Little frame houses spread block by block from the depot until soon the valley floor was covered with them. In 1848, the train depot took the name Mount Kisco, after the bold, rocky bluff on the eastern rim of the valley. In 1875, Kirbyville and New Castle Corners merged with the depot hamlet. On the western bluff, Captain Merritt's Hill, there arose a number of impressive Victorian structures, on whose porches the well-to-do could sit of an August evening, listening to the katydids and gazing with satisfaction on the town that was burgeoning below.

       Westchester's period as an important center of dairy production did not last long. When the Erie Canal and the railroads opened up the fertile reaches of the Midwest, it wasn't hard to persuade a farmer in the boulder-strewn Northeast to part with his spread and give up a life that had been difficult at best. By the eighteen-eighties, the small, subsistence farmer was virtually extinct in Westchester.

       Even as the farmers were leaving, there was an influx of new people into the area. Much of the land was being bought up by New York businessmen who had done well enough to afford a place in the country. One country road outside Mount Kisco was bought up b)T a Wall Street firm and parcelled off among its senior partners. At the same time, thousands of penniless immigrants from southern Italy were arriving at Ellis Island and making their way up into Westchester. Mount Kisco offered them plenty of opportunit)T. Laborers were being hired to build the Croton Dam, to man the factories and build the stone walls that line the roads around Mount Kisco; some of the most beautiful stonework in the world is to be found in north-central Westchester. The Italians carted materials to the hilltops where splendid mansions were being erected. Some stayed on as gardeners after the estates were finished. Around the turn of the century, a man named Petrillo was the main padronc, or agent, for the immigrants. He would arrange for their passage, hire them out, and keep them in his boarding house for twelve dollars a week. Since they made only fourteen, and the balance was usually drunk at his bar, his proteges had few prospects. Then someone finally set off a keg of dynamite on Petrillo's porch and put an end to his exploitative operation.

       Many of the Italian immigrants lived in a bustling ghetto called Sutton's Row. (The site was recently smothered by a new Shoppers Bazaar and its enormous parking lot.) From there, it was a mile or so to the Spencer Optical Works and the other factories in New Castle Corners, where many of them worked. A few old-timers still remember the sound of hobnailed boots as the Italians tramped through the village at dawn. Working conditions at the Corners were less than optimal, and during the eighteen-eighties the Italians staged several riots there. Then the jobs disappeared. By 1888, Kirby Pond, the lake behind the dam at the Corners, was stagnant and eutrophic, and the stench was becoming unbearable. Some people feared that it might become a breeding ground for malarial mosquitoes. So Judge William Leonard, who owned the mill pond, had it thoroughly drained. Others were concerned about the "character hitherto unknown to the region" which the Italian "imports" were bringing to Mount Kisco. But even after the collapse of the industries at New Castle Corners, the Italians kept coming.

       The square in the heart of town is named for Jefferson Feigl, a Mount Kisco man killed in France on the first day of the German drive from St. Quentin, March 21, 1918. Lieutenant Feigl volunteered his services to his country while a student at Harvard University, and he was the first American artillery officer to fall in the war. On an island in the middle of Jeff Feigl Square, surrounded by the continual flow of traffic, stands the painted zinc-alloy statue of an Indian. The Indian gazes east. His left hand grips an unstrung bow, and his left foot is slightly advanced. He ears buckskin breeches and a headdress of three up right feathers, and has a cape tossed over his naked shoulders. His long, flowing hair is anointed with pigeon droppings. The statue was donated in 1907 by a longtime Mount Kisco resident and temperance leader, David Fletcher Gorham. Water used to gush from its base, beneath a plaque proclaiming "GOD'S ONLY BEVERAGE FOR MAN AND BEAST." It Soon became the town's best-known landmark. Travellers were told to turn left or right, or to go straight, at the Indian. An oil truck knocked it from its pedestal in 1925; it was restored. According to local legend, Greta Garbo placed a wreath about its neck in 1932, and it somehow managed to appear in the seventeenth series of "Ripley's Believe It or Not."

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