Pell'S Point was a Revolutionary War engagement fought in New York, 1776. It was a British victory.
Following his triumph at Long Island in the closing days of August, General Sir William Howe, who commanded British land forces throughout North America, brought his men ashore at Kip's Bay on Manhattan's eastern shore on September 15. In response, George Washington pulled his forces back to Harlem Heights, an elevated plateau at the northern tip of Manhattan Island. This location suited Washington well militarily; rocky terrain shielded his rear on two sides, bordered further by the Hudson and Harlem Rivers, and additional rugged ground lay to the south, separating his men from the British. When the British launched an assault the following day, they suffered defeat in what became known as the Battle of Harlem Heights. A lull settled over the campaign for roughly a month afterward, as both armies held their entrenched ground, neither side committing to a fresh course of action. On the American side, officers suspected Howe would either strike directly at Fort Washington or attempt to outflank them by landing somewhere along Long Island Sound. To prepare for either scenario, a war council divided their forces: Washington retained 10,000 troops to hold Harlem Heights and Fort Washington, Maj. Gen. William Heath took another 10,000 to protect the vital King's Bridge crossing, and Maj. Gen. Nathanael Greene received 5,000 men to secure the Hudson's far bank near Fort Constitution. Nearly a month passed, twenty-six days in total, before Howe abandoned any notion of striking Harlem Heights and Fort Washington head-on, opting instead for a flanking approach. This maneuver led to fighting at Westchester Creek, remembered afterward as the Battle of Throgs Neck, sometimes rendered Throg's Point.
Howe set his main force in motion on Saturday, October 12, loading roughly 80 vessels and sailing up the East River through Hell Gate toward Throgs Neck, while three brigades under Lord Hugh Percy stayed behind on Manhattan. Throgs Neck, called Throckmorton's in earlier times and known variously as Throggs, Throck's, Frog's Neck, or Frog's Point, forms a slender finger of land wedged between the East River and Long Island Sound. A road happened to connect Throgs Neck straight to King's Bridge, running directly behind the American lines, a detail that worked in Howe's favor since he intended to use it to flank Washington's men and trap them against the Hudson. Screened by fog, General Henry Clinton led an advance contingent of 4,000 soldiers onto Throgs Neck. What they discovered, much to their frustration, was that this was no peninsula at all but an island cut off from the mainland by marshland and a creek. Only two routes offered passage to the mainland, a causeway with a bridge at one end and a ford at the other, and American troops held both. Colonel Edward Hand, along with somewhere between twenty five and thirty men drawn from the 1st Pennsylvania Regiment, took cover behind stacked cordwood at the causeway, and meanwhile Major William Stephens Smith led a small guard in tearing up the bridge's planking. Caught off guard, the British pulled back and tried instead to force the ford, only to run into yet another American detachment stationed there. Reinforcements soon swelled the American ranks defending both crossings to more than 1,800 men, prompting Howe to abandon the effort and search for a landing point elsewhere. Historian Otto Hufeland, in his foundational study Westchester County during the American Revolution, 1775-1783, observed that the delay of four thousand British troops, backed by abundant artillery, at the hands of just twenty five Americans sheltered behind loose cordwood, revealed both the courage of those riflemen and glaring flaws in British leadership. He noted further that seizing the King's Bridge road would not have guaranteed the American army's immediate destruction, though its chances of escape would have shrunk considerably, and a British success there might well have brought the war to a close. Instead, Howe set up camp on Throgs Neck, remaining for six days as reinforcements and supplies arrived from New York, among them 7,000 Hessian troops under General Wilhelm von Knyphausen. Just past midnight on Friday, October 18, Howe's army boarded ships once more, this time setting course for Pell's Point, near Pelham, a short distance to the north.
Once word reached Washington of the landing at Throgs Neck, he recognized the danger of being trapped on Manhattan and resolved to shift his army toward White Plains, a location he judged
As morning broke, British forces came ashore, with Clinton's advance guard, some 4,000 light infantry and Hessian jägers, touching land first. Waiting for them further inland stood four regiments totaling roughly 750 men, commanded by John Glover. Glover happened to be surveying the scene from a hilltop with a telescope when he spotted the enemy vessels approaching. He dispatched an officer, Major William Lee, to bring word to Charles Lee, Washington's second in command, and request instructions. No orders came back, and faced with silence, Glover decided on his own to strike.
He assumed direct command over the four regiments: his own 14th, the 13th led by Colonel Joseph Read, the 3rd Continental Regiment under Colonel William Shepard, and the 26th Continental Regiment commanded by Colonel Loammi Baldwin. To guard against being outflanked, he held back the 150 men of the 14th Continentals in reserve. Before covering even half the ground separating the forces, Glover's men encountered the British advance guard. He sent a Captain forward with a company of 40 men to hold the enemy at bay temporarily while he arranged the remainder of his troops.
Glover's plan called for an ambush: he positioned the regiments of Read, Shepard, and Baldwin at intervals along stone walls flanking the road that ran from the landing site toward the interior. Each regiment was told to hold its ground for as long as possible before
Following this engagement, Glover pulled his men back to Yonkers the following day. On the American side, 8 men had died and another 13 suffered wounds, while the losses among British and Hessian forces remain uncertain to this day. Howe's dispatch on the matter cited only 3 British dead and 20 injured, yet said nothing about Hessian losses. Given that Hessian troops constituted most of the landing party, it stands to reason they absorbed a large share of the casualties as well. In the days that followed, information gathered from British deserters led the Americans to believe the enemy had suffered somewhere between 800 and 1,000 men killed or wounded, a figure most likely inflated. Loammi Baldwin, a colonel who witnessed the fighting firsthand and later gained recognition for cultivating the apple variety bearing his name, placed the number of British and Hessian dead at 200, though historian David McCullough considers this figure clearly overstated. Historian George Athan Billias, however, defends Baldwin's numbers, pointing to a separate deserter whose account lends some credibility to the estimate. Whatever the true figures, it seems certain that the British and Hessian forces suffered more heavily than the Americans did.
Before the fighting began, the Church of Eastchester nearby, which would later be preserved as Saint Paul's Church National Historic Site, had been converted into a hospital for American wounded, and it may have served Hessian soldiers as well once the battle ended. A brochure produced by the National Park Service for the site notes that ninety men perished on that first night within the church walls and were laid to rest in a sandpit within the churchyard. Over a hundred years afterward, workers digging new graves uncovered a mass burial site containing five Hessian soldiers, and in 1910 a memorial marker was placed there. Documentation traced these remains to five particular privates belonging to the Regiment von Knyphausen. It seems probable that the cemetery holds additional soldiers' graves beyond those already identified.
Because the British advance had been slowed, Washington's main force was able to withdraw safely from Harlem on Manhattan Island toward White Plains. Howe, meanwhile, advanced his troops at a measured pace through New Rochelle and Scarsdale. Then, on Monday, October 28, he launched an assault with 13,000 troops, defeating Washington at what became known as the Battle of White Plains. Manhattan's final American holdout, Fort Washington, surrendered on November 16. Following these setbacks, Washington led his army in retreat across New Jersey and on into Pennsylvania, setting the stage for the later Battles of Trenton and Princeton.
Shaded area is the surveyed battlefield boundary; the pin marks its centre.
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