Hastings-on-Hudson developed late as an incorporated village, officially becoming one in 1879, but long before that it had grown into a community of 1,228 people with a distinctive mix of factory town and country village life. Along the river stood mills, modest homes, boarding houses, and many bars, while the hills above held farms, estates, summer houses, and homes for commuters. Its name has uncertain origins, though the most popular explanation credits William Saunders, a British immigrant and owner of the village's first factory, with naming it for the resemblance of the Palisades to the cliffs at Hastings on England's south coast; until the early 20th century it was called Hastings-Upon-Hudson. Arrowheads and ancient trails indicate that Native Americans, probably Algonquins, camped and hunted there, and in the 17th century the area became part of the Philipse family holdings. After the Philipses sided with the British during the American Revolution, their land was divided and auctioned to speculators and local farmers. During the Revolution, Peter Post overheard news in September 1778 of a British-hired Hessian raiding party moving north from Yonkers, warned American forces, and helped set up an ambush near the Edgars farm in what became known as the Battle of Edgars Lane; badly beaten afterward by the British, he later became a major local landowner. Washington Irving also speculated in local land between 1814 and 1817 but lost money. Water power first drew manufacturing to Hastings, and after the railroad arrived in 1849 industrialization expanded through axel and cable mills, sugar refineries, an asphalt paving block works, and a chemical plant. The Croton Aqueduct, built in the 1840s to carry fresh water to Manhattan, followed a route that is now a public path, and quarrying, probably the village's first industry, supplied marble and granite from the 1830s to builders along the eastern seaboard. In later years 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, sculptor Jacques Lipchitz, Florenz Ziegfeld and Billie Burke, Frank Morgan, Leonard Rose, Jonathan Winters, Kenneth Clark, and at least four Nobel Prize winners. Its diversity remained a defining trait: in 1930, 66% of its 7,097 residents were foreign born, mainly from Eastern Europe or the British Isles, and seventy-five years later the population was nearly unchanged while students' homes reflected 22 different foreign languages, with Spanish the largest share.