Poundridge, New York
Poundridge, New York
POUNDRIDGE, NEW YORK. 2 July 1779. As part of the intense skirmishing for control of the Neutral Ground, after dark on 1 July, Sir Henry Clinton sent Banastre Tarleton with two hundred men toward this place, twenty miles northeast of White Plains. Tarleton's command included seventy regulars from the Seventeenth Light Dragoons, detachments of John Simcoe's Queen's Rangers and his own British Legion, and a detail of mounted jägers. His target was being used as a base for Westchester County militia, stiffened by part of Colonel Elisha Sheldon's Second Continental Light Dragoons. When his guide briefly took a wrong road, Sheldon's videttes spotted the British. Tarleton launched a charge that pushed Sheldon back two miles from the village before reaction forces began pouring in and he had to withdraw, completing a sixty-four-mile round trip in twenty-three hours. The raiders burned several buildings, including the church, to retaliate for snipers, and carried away a flag that had been found with some officers' baggage. Although he claimed to have inflicted twenty-six or twenty-seven casualties, the Americans actually lost ten wounded and eight missing in action; Tarleton admitted having one man killed and one wounded. He gloated over the raid, but like most such actions in the area, it was inconclusive.
SEE ALSO Clinton, Henry; Simcoe, John Graves; Tarleton, Banastre.
revised by Robert K. Wright Jr.