On 20 November 1776 British general Charles Cornwallis led 5,000 men across the Hudson and up a primitive farm road in the Palisades to begin the march south to capture the American fortifications at Fort Lee (A on the map, lower right). Word reached the outnumbered garrison in time for it to evacuate Fort Lee, marking the beginning of the Continental Army's strategic retreat across New Jersey.
As shown by the nearby plaque, placed in 1928, by the first decades of the twentieth century a tradition had developed that the British forces landed here, at what was known as Upper Closter Landing or the Closter Dock (later called Alpine Landing, B).
Research begun in the 1960s by Cresskill historian John Spring, however, relying upon documentary evidence from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, eventually led to wide acceptance that the British forces in fact landed at Huyler's Landing - called Lower Closter Landing or the New Dock during the Revolution - about a mile and a half south of this spot (C).
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