People have lived for a long time in this beautiful valley, where a natural trail from New England to the Hudson makes a gentle bend along the edge of the Great Swamp. Nearby traces of campsites date back three thousand years, and before the arrival of Europeans, Indian tribes from Connecticut and the Hudson Valley shared the area as a summer hunting ground. The trail later became one of the main roads used by settlers from New England who began arriving in the early 1730s, and it appears on a map made for General Washington in 1778. The center of Patterson, then called Fredericksburg, stood at Triangle Inn Corner, now the intersection of Routes 311 and 292. The remains of the original three-way intersection and the foundation of the tavern there were destroyed when the intersection was improved by N.Y.S.D.O.T. Patterson was an important town and a center of local government and culture, unlike towns along the Hudson River in the western part of the county that were connected to the markets of NYC and the West. The coming of the railroad in 1840 and its expansion during and after the Civil War changed that, making Patterson a prosperous agricultural center and shifting the town center along Main Street from Triangle Inn Corner to the railroad line. Now Patterson is changing again, as the interstate has replaced the railroad and the automobile has taken people from the land to jobs in other areas. Through all these changes, this bend in the road on the edge of the swamp has remained a special place where people have shared hunting campfires or church suppers, celebrated births and buried their dead, worshipped their God, remembered their heroes, taught their children, and shared with each other lessons learned from the land.