Pound Ridge

Woods, Ridges & Stone Walls

Pound Ridge is a quiet, wooded town of about 5,000 people in the northeast corner of Westchester. It is bordered by the Mianus River Gorge, reservoir lands and the Ward Pound Ridge Reservation, and the town leans into the character of preservation. Shops and restaurants cluster at Scotts Corners, a charming hamlet once known for antiquing and, in the 1800s, as “Basket Town.”

The name “Pound Ridge” comes from a “pound,” an enclosure of saplings that Native Americans built on one of the ridges to hold deer and other game. English Captain Nathaniel Turner bought the land in the 1640s, and settlers from Stamford arrived in the early 1700s. Pound Ridge was incorporated in 1788. Through the 19th century the town lived on dairy farms and cottage trades. Shoemakers turned out shoes made to fit either foot for about $1.20 a pair, and Pound Ridge baskets, a craft with deep Indigenous roots, were prized by oyster fishermen on Long Island Sound.

The railroads bypassed Pound Ridge, and by 1920 only 515 people lived here. Then in 1929 the inventor and businessman Hiram Halle arrived from New York City and began restoring the town’s old houses. Benny Goodman later settled here too, and wrote a tune called “Pound Ridge.”

In 1925 Westchester County bought more than 4,000 acres in the north of town for what became the Ward Pound Ridge Reservation, now the county’s largest park. Three-acre zoning since 1959 and New York’s first local wetlands law, passed here in 1969, have kept Pound Ridge true country ever since.