By Eloise L. Morgan, Bronxville Village Historian

Mar. 2, 2016:  We could be living in villages called Gramatan Hills or Crawford Hills if a couple of early twentieth-century movements had been successful.

In the 1910s and 1920s, newcomers to Bronxville repeatedly sought to rid themselves of a name that was unfavorably confused with the Bronx, advocating instead for Gramatan Hills. The 1920s also saw Tuckahoe debate renaming itself Crawford Hills to eliminate associations with a rough-and-tumble past.

These are tidbits of history gleaned from the newly digitized historic newspapers of Eastchester, Bronxville, and Tuckahoe, which have just gone online. 

For the full stories and other questions about local history, see the Hudson River Valley Heritage website (http://news.hrvh.org/), where local newspapers covering the years 1902 to 2007 are hosted. Papers dating from 1902 through the early 1930s are already available, and the remaining newspapers will be posted periodically during 2016.

Now searchable are:

• The Bronxville Review (1902-1927) (http://news.hrvh.org//bronxvrev) 

• The Eastchester Citizen Bulletin (1918-1926) (http://news.hrvh.org/eastchesterbulletin)

• The Tuckahoe Record (1925-1927, 1929-1931) (http://news.hrvh.org/tuckahoerecord) 

• The Daily Record (1929) (http://news.hrvh.org/dailyrecord) 

• The Bronxville Press (1925) (http://news.hrvh.org/bronxvpress) 

Still to go online later this year are additional years of the Review, the Bronxville Press and:

• The News (1912-1913)

• The Bronxville Review-Press (1937-1953)

• The Bronxville Reporter (1946-1953)

• The Bronxville Review Press and Reporter (1953-2000)

• Review Press (2000-2007)

The digitization of more than a century of local newspapers, all of which carried news of Bronxville, Eastchester, and Tuckahoe, provides a superb source of historical information that is readily available to researchers anywhere. The project was funded jointly by Eastchester 350th Anniversary, Inc., and The Bronxville Historical Conservancy and planned and coordinated by Bronxville Village Historian Eloise L. Morgan.

Currently researchers can search the full text, including ads, of all issues of each newspaper title separately (put quotation marks around search terms of more than one word).

In addition to looking for specific search terms, it is also possible to search by issue date and read through each issue page by page. When the full collection is digitized and posted later in the year, it will be possible to search through all ten local newspapers at once. 

Pictured here:  The Bronxville Public Library.

Photo by A. Warner