Page:Historic towns of the middle states (IA historictownsofm02powe).pdf/163

 insist that the bell was dug up, and that it gladly used its long silent tongue in Freedom's cause as behooved a Liberty Bell. It hung during the present century, old inhabitants tell us, in the cupola of the Newburgh Academy, and was at length sold and melted for a new one by an iconoclastic school Board.

At the breaking out of the war for American Independence there were but a dozen or more houses on the Glebe, and a few to the south. Among these was the stone residence of Colonel Jonathan Hasbrouck which had been built in part by Birgert Meynders. Lieutenant Cadwallader Colden had his home near and there were many among his satellites willing to drink damnation to the Whigs when asked by the ever vigilant Committee of Safety to sign the pledge.

It may be thought strange that Newburgh has been considered of great Revolutionary importance when no battles were fought nearer its vicinity than those of Stony Point and Forts Clinton and Montgomery, but, although the place had an hereditary tendency to toryism, its geographical environment filled it to overflowing with plucky patriots. It is well known that it was the design of the British to get posses