Between 1844 and 1851, the Hudson Valley chronicler John M. McDonald traveled across Westchester County and interviewed more than 400 people who had lived through the American Revolution. He recorded the conversations in his own hand, in a series of notebooks now held by the Westchester County Historical Society. McDonald presented his findings to the New-York Historical Society on October 7, 1862, but he died before he could publish them. The notebooks lay in private hands for decades. In April 2025, WCHS digitized the entire collection and made it available through CONTENTdm and New York Heritage.

The McDonald Interviews are the most important oral-history collection from the American Revolution in the Lower Hudson Valley. They are also the only surviving record for many of the small wartime episodes in towns like Croton-on-Hudson, Ossining, Yorktown, North Castle, Pines Bridge, and Cortlandt Manor — episodes that show up in our other stories under their familiar names: the Tea Party at Teatown, Nimham's last stand, the cannon at Teller's Point, the Battle of Pines Bridge.

For 175 years the only way to read these interviews was to travel to Elmsford, request the manuscript notebooks, and decipher McDonald's rapid 19th-century cursive yourself. WCHS has now digitized the page images, but the actual handwriting was never transcribed. In April 2026, as part of the history.croton.news project, we ran the manuscript pages through Google Gemini's vision model to produce the first machine-readable text of the interviews. The transcriptions on this site are the result. Each one is a faithful reading of what is on the page — preserving McDonald's spelling, his marginal notes, and the editorial annotations later added by the WCHS scribe John English. They have not been edited for clarity.

Where our reading of the manuscript contradicts the published Teatown narrative, or any other modern secondary source, you will find the finding documented on the Original Research page. Each interview below is linked to the Westchester County Historical Society's CONTENTdm record so you can see the manuscript page yourself and check our work.