During most of the Revolutionary War the Ravens Wood farm remained in possession of the British occupation army under General Henry Clinton, and the Raven Woods grand farmhouse built by Robert Blackwell was occupied as the Headquaters of Lord Rawdon, afterward the Marquis of Hastings. In the mansion's backyard was an ancient blockhouse, antedating even the old mansion by many years, which had been built for protection from the Indians.

The historic mansion as Ravens Wood later was later converted into a boarding school. It is in this mansion that the author Washington Irving wrote his popular book "A History of New York" under the comic pseudonym "Diedrich Knickerbocker", and is also where the famous author James Fenimore Cooper wrote his popular book "Water Witch". The scene of the celebrated chase of the Water Witch by the British was laid directly in front of this house: "The gunboat swept down the farther side of the island (Blackwell's) directly in front of it, and the Water Witch was on this side. The gunboat ran aground on the rocks on the south side."

The old mansion was characteristically Dutch. The rooms had low ceilings. There was nothing of the imposing aspect of the mansions built on the banks of the Hudson. Comfort, not style, was the motto of the builder. Its fireplace was a veritable curiousity and its immense chimney was large enough to drive a team of horses through. Accross the fireplace was a stretched long iron pole for holding pots and kettles and great pieces of meat toasting before the fire. There was a wine vault located near the fireplace.

During the Revolutionary War the British cut the image of a crow's foot on the mansion's great front iron door, to give public notice that the house had been confiscated. That great old door was as old as the house itself. as was the great heavy knocker upon it which had thumped more than once under the hands of Governor Peter Stuyvesant, Sir Henry Clinton, Washiongton Irving, Cooper and many other notables now sleeping in the soil. The door is now the property of the Long Island Historical Society, and in 1944 was at the home of James Tisdale in Flushing, New York.

Prior to its demolition during the twentieth century, this moss covered old stone mansion had an unequalled atmosphere most redolent of olden times. There remained hanging on the wall, in a dining room where Lord Rawdon and his British officers ate many a meal during the Revolutionary War, a handbill signed by patriot alderman Gleason and others calling for a massmeeting to protest an oppressive British law. But the mansion's stone walls had darkened from age and many of its old beams were rotting.

We will miss Robert Blackwell's old stone farmhouse, for it was part of the romantic history of our nation's infancy. Our memory of it, however, will be retained.