In early 1660, a small group of English settlers sailed from Greenwich to Manursing Island, and there they established a village they named Hastings. Over the following two years, they purchased the island as well as a substantial part of the adjacent mainland from the local Lenape indigenous people, who called the coastal area Peningo.
According to Rev. Charles W. Baird’s 1872 history of Rye:
“The bounds of Hastings, extended about as far north, on Peningo Neck, as the present village of Port Chester. But some time elapsed before any improvements were attempted in this direction. For two or three years certainly, the planters confined themselves to their insular home…
“There is a tradition that in those early times the farmer would spend the day in toil on his rough plantation and then at sundown return, for safety from wild beasts and savages, to the village across the creek.”
In 1663, the leaders of what was then known as the “plantation of Hastings” applied to the Colony of Connecticut and obtained the rights and privileges of a fully constituted town.
By 1664, the population of the island village of Hastings had grown so large that new settlers were awarded home lots on the coast, close by the island. Baird notes:
“Thus by the year 1665 there had sprung up two infant settlements within the bounds of Hastings: the one on the island, the other on the shore of Peningo Neck, stretching across to Blind Brook. The latter, we find, had begun to be known by the name of RYE…On May11, 1665 the General Court of Connecticut passed an act merging these settlements under the name the town has borne ever since…”
In the preface to his history of Rye, Baird states: “This book has grown out of a discourse prepared in the year 1865, when the two hundredth anniversary of the organization of the town of Rye occurred.”
After 1665, the territory within the Town of Rye rapidly expanded through additional land purchases, as described by Baird:
“The southern part of it alone comprised the tract between the Byram River and Mamaroneck River, while to the north it extended twenty miles, and to the northwest an indefinite distance. These boundaries…included, beside the area now covered by the towns of Rye and Harrison, much of the towns of North Castle and Bedford in New York, and of Greenwich in Connecticut; whilst in a north-westerly direction, the territory claimed was absolutely without a fixed limit.”
The first reduction in Rye’s territory occurred in 1695, when Rye was in the Province of New York, having been transferred from the Colony of Connecticut by royal decree. John Harrison, newly arrived from Long Island, claimed to have “purchased” from a Native American a large tract of Rye’s land, which was approved by the governor of New York. The people of Rye were so angered by the governor’s decision that the town seceded to Connecticut, but it was ordered to rejoin New York in 1700. Because of the disruptions and loss of records during the revolutionary period there is little information about the territory and governance of Rye until late in the 1700s.
According to Baird (writing in 1871): “The territory of the town was reduced to its present size by an act of the legislature, March 7, 1788. White Plains and Harrison, which had previously formed a part of Rye, as ‘precincts,’ or districts of the town, were then constituted as distinct towns.”
The town of Rye continued essentially with the same governance until 1868 when Port Chester, which had changed its name from Saw Pit in 1837, was incorporated as a village by an act of the state legislature. That change was followed by incorporation of Rye as a village in 1904 and as a city in 1942.
As a result of those changes, the territory of the Town of Rye now contains two villages – Port Chester and Rye Brook – and the Rye Neck section of the village of Mamaroneck. It also includes Crawford Park and Rye Town Park. Although the histories of Rye and its people date back to 1660, the organization of Rye as a town and governmental entity began with the passage of an act by New York’s provincial government in 1665.