Hastings-on-Hudson, officially incorporated as a village in 1879, had long before developed a distinct character as both a factory town along the river and a country village on the hills above, with mills, modest homes, boarding houses, bars, farms, grand estates, summer houses, and growing commuter residences. Its name may have come from an early settler, from a lost 18th-century Hastings on Long Island Sound, or, most popularly, from William Saunders, a British immigrant and owner of the village's first factory, who thought the Palisades resembled the cliffs near Hastings on England's south coast; until the early 20th century it was called Hastings-Upon-Hudson. Arrowheads and ancient trails suggest Native Americans, probably Algonquins, camped and hunted here, and after the Dutch arrived in the 17th century the area became part of the Philipse family holdings until their support for the British in the American Revolution led to the division and auction of their lands. During the Revolution, a blacksmith's shop and Peter Post's tavern served both sides, and in September 1778 Post warned American forces about a British-hired Hessian raiding party moving north from Yonkers, leading to an ambush near the Edgars farm in what has been called The Battle of Edgars Lane; Post was badly beaten by the British but later became a major landowner. Washington Irving also owned much of downtown Hastings between 1814 and 1817 but lost money on the venture. Water power from a stream and later the Hudson River helped bring manufacturing, and after the railroad arrived in 1849 industrialization expanded with axel and cable mills, sugar refineries, an asphalt paving block works, and a chemical plant, while the Croton Aqueduct, built in the 1840s to carry fresh water to Manhattan, later became part of the village's public paths. Quarrying, probably the village's first industry, began in the 1830s with marble and granite quarries supplying building stone along the eastern seaboard. Over time Hastings attracted notable residents including Giuseppe Garibaldi, David Farragut, painters Carl Brandt, George Harvey, and Jasper Cropsey, the scientist John William Draper and his family, photographer Lewis Hine, architect Richmond Shreve, Jacques Lipchitz, Florenz Ziegfeld and Billie Burke, Frank Morgan, Leonard Rose, Jonathan Winters, Kenneth Clark, and at least four Nobel Prize winners. In 1930, 66% of Hastings' 7,097 residents were foreign born, mostly from Eastern Europe or the British Isles, and seventy-five years later the population was about the same while 22 foreign languages were spoken in students' homes, with Spanish the largest share, showing that the village's diversity continued.