156 Old Stone Hill Road

The house is known as the Amon Marshall Homestead and is dated to 1769, seven years before the Declaration and ten before the British came up this road. It was added onto by successive generations rather than built once and left, which is why the roofline steps and the plan wanders and no two rooms sit at quite the same level.

Pound Ridge is named for a pound. The Wappinger built enclosures on these ridges to drive and hold game, and the name outlived everyone who knew what it meant. Nathaniel Turner bought the land from its owners in the 1640s. The town incorporated in 1788 and did not settle on spelling itself as two words until 1948.

Banastre Tarleton left Yonkers late on the first of July, rode north through a rainstorm with several hundred cavalry and infantry, and struck at first light. Major Ebenezer Lockwood's house burned, and the Presbyterian church, and the meeting house. This house was ten years old that morning and is still standing, which is most of what needs saying about it.

By 1920 there were 515 people left in Pound Ridge and the farming was finished. Hiram Halle arrived in 1928 at sixty one and spent the Depression buying thirty three houses here and paying more than sixty local men to put them back together, and kept at it until he died in 1944. The reason Pound Ridge still looks like Pound Ridge is one man deciding that it should. What has just been done to this house belongs to that tradition rather than to the renovation business.