During the War of Independence, Tarrytown was the scene of numerous conflicts between the "cowboys" and "skinners," bands of unorganized partisans who carried on a kind of guerilla warfare, the former acting in the interest of the colonists, and the latter in that of the king. On the old post road on Sept. 24, 1780, Maj. Andr['e] was captured by three Continentals, John Paulding, David Williams, and Isaac van Wart. The spot where Andr['e] was captured is now marked with a monument--a marble shaft surmounted by a statue of a Continental soldier. Tarrytown lies principally along either side of a broad and winding highway, laid out in 1723, from N.Y.C. to Albany. It was called the King's Highway till the War of Independence, then called Albany Post Road, and the section of it in Tarrytown is known now as Broadway. The delights of traveling in the days when the road was first laid out are suggested in the following description: "The coach was without springs, and the seats were hard, and often backless. The horses were jaded and worn, the roads were rough with boulders and stumps of trees, or furrowed with ruts and quagmires. The journey was usually begun at 3 o'clock in the morning, and after 18 hours of jogging over the rough roads the weary traveler was put down at a country inn whose bed and board were such as to win little praise. Long before daybreak the next morning a blast from the driver's horn summoned him to the renewal of his journey. If the coach stuck fast in a mire, as it often did, the passengers must alight and help lift it out." [Illustration: Old Mill at Tarrytown Built in 1686 The Manor House, the Old Church and the Mill were erected by Frederick Philipse, the lord of several thousand acres, in what is now Westchester County. The mill, much dilapidated, still exists.] Many of the stirring incidents of Fenimore Cooper's novel, _The Spy_, occurred in this neighborhood, and the town is particularly described in _The Sketch Book_ of Washington Irving who was for many years the warden of the old church and is buried in the old Sleepy Hollow burying ground. With Cooper and Washington Irving (1783-1859) American literature first began to exist for the world outside our own boundaries. The _Knickerbocker History of New York_, in which the Dutch founders were satirized, was practically the first American book to win appreciation abroad. This and later books "created the legend of the Hudson, and Irving alone has linked his memory locally with his country so that it hangs over the landscape and blends with it forever."