216 The Story of The Bronx 



ward and then northeast to the Mile Square. To-day, it is 

 the road that bounds the seventh to the eighteenth holes of 

 the golf course at Van Cortlandt Park. It probably had its 

 origin in the travel of the farmers of the Mile Square to the 

 mill at Van Cortlandt 's to have their grain ground. The road 

 can still be followed up the steep hill in Van Cortlandt Park, 

 then it turns east into East 233d Street, the northern boundary 

 of Woodlawn Cemetery. Beyond this, the ancient highway 

 existed until the early part of 1912 as a rural lane, winding 

 along as the northeastern boundary of the park and called 

 Mount Vernon Avenue. After it crosses McLean Avenue, 

 the city line, it is continued in Yonkers over a fine macadam 

 street, called Kimball Avenue. 



About one thousand feet from the bridge over Tippett's 

 Brook, on the Mile Square Road, a road branched off to the 

 southeast and connected with the Boston Road to the west of 

 the bridge at Williams's, about East 210th Street. This was 

 the Gun Hill Road, so called from Revolutionary days. It 

 still exists, and has within the past few years been widened, 

 graded, and macadamized. The name is given to the road 

 both east and west of the Bronx River, though the greater 

 part of it to White Plains Avenue is really the Boston Road. 

 A few yards of both of these ancient roads may be found on 

 either side of the reservoir-keeper's house at Williamsbridge ; 

 their ancient junction is now within the walls of the reservoir. 



About three hundred yards from where the Gun Hill Road 

 joined the Boston Road, another road led directly to Yonkers at 

 Valentine's Hill; this is to-day, substantially, Jerome Avenue, 

 crossing the Gun Hill Road between East 210th and East 21 ith 

 streets. Its extension to the southward to the Macomb's 

 Dam Road and its conversion into a driveway was one of the 

 acts of the Tweed regime in New York, 1870-72. For a 



