Before dawn on November 20, 1776, a British invasion force of 5,000 troops under Lord Cornwallis landed here and, guided by Bergen County residents Joseph Hawkins, Isaac Perkins, and John Aldington, climbed the rough road to the top of the cliffs and marched south to capture Fort Lee. At sunrise, Lt. John Clifford of Heard’s Brigade, New Jersey State Troops, saw them, commandeered a horse, and warned the garrison at Fort Lee. About 3,000 soldiers led by Generals George Washington and Nathanael Greene then retreated over the Hackensack River at New Bridge on their way toward the relative safety of Pennsylvania. The landing place was used in later raids and was finally blocked with felled trees in 1780. From colonial times, local farmers also brought their harvests down a steep road through a natural break in the cliffs to the dock here for shipment to New York City markets. After Peter Huyler improved the road and dock about 1840, the place became known as Huyler’s Landing. Through the 1870s, a multiracial, multiethnic community of boatmen, ship-builders, fishermen, quarrymen, and their families lived and worked here, while sloops, steamboats, and smaller vessels carried people, firewood, farm goods, fish, and stone between Huyler’s Landing and ports along the Hudson. A few residents remained into the early twentieth century, after the Interstate Park Commission acquired the land.