“Village of Cold Spring occupied. Troops approaching Oyster Bay,” was the news that grew in great letters on the boards an hour later. Nothing more came from either of these two points. Evidently the enemy had cut communications at once.
Along the Connecticut Shore
News began to arrive now from the Connecticut shore. The advancing forces, having joined west of Bridgeport, were moving in mass along the contracted coastal plain of southwestern Connecticut. Troop trains, preceded by armored pilot engines, rolled in long procession along the whole system of the New York, New Haven and Hartford Railroad, all the tracks of which had been repaired by civilians impressed to do the work. On all the many tracks there was traffic in only one direction,—westward, toward New York. The trains, moving in echelon, went forward steadily as clock work.
Along the magnificent motor road that was the old Boston Post Road, cavalry and motor patrols and detachments advancing in the same direction, seized town after town.
They occupied Fairfield, where Paul Revere stopped over night on his way to report to Washington. They entered with swords clanking and imperious motor horns croaking into old Saugatuck, where the Colonials had fought General Tryon when he landed to burn Danbury. They took Norwalk and South Norwalk. They quartered men in the estates of Darien.
They swept on through rich Stamford, whose inhabitants are Connecticut people by residence and New Yorkers by occupation. They took Greenwich.
The Invaders of Long Island
From Roslyn, Long Island, came word that all the invading vessels that could find room at the Cold Spring wharves were unloading material. The character of the derricks that had been rigged, said the report, indicated that extremely heavy guns were being handled.
A bulletin that went up immediately afterward announced that the army was crossing the State line from Connecticut into New York, and that advance patrols already were passing through the New York State town of Port Chester.
The enemy was now only twenty-five miles from New York City. This, and the actual entrance into State territory, caused a senseless, headlong fright. It spread even into the councils of the Citizens’ Committee and city officials in the City Hall. Men jumped to their feet and exclaimed that the bridges over the Harlem must be dynamited at once. Others proposed to demolish the great suspension bridges by cutting away the suspending rods and letting the roadways fall into the East River, that the Long Island invader might be kept from crossing.