Pokahoe: Home to 'The Pathfinder' John C. Frémont, press magnate Watson Webb

Pokahoe, built by James Watson Webb in 1847-48 in what is today's Sleepy Hollow Manor, is pictured ca. 1920. (Images of America: Tarrytown & Sleepy Hollow, The Historical Society Inc, Tarrytown & Sleepy Hollow)

A remarkable stone house overlooking the Hudson River in today's Sleepy Hollow Manor was once home to two of the 19th century's foremost political figures.

Pokahoe was built in 1847-48 on a 53-acre tract on the east bank of the Hudson River by General James Watson Webb (1802-1888), an iconic — and controversial — newspaper publisher and powerful political hack who stoked national racial animosities to bolster his positions and the parties he supported: first Jeffersonian Democrats, then Whigs and finally Republicans.

Webb, who eschewed his given name James and was invariably addressed as Watson, bought the property in 1846 from George Beekman, whose family owned much of what is now known as the Village of Sleepy Hollow, but was known colloquially as Beekmantown at that time, and later became North Tarrytown. The name Sleepy Hollow was adopted in 1996.

This portrait of General J. Watson Webb
 (Feb. 8, 1802-June 7, 1884) was taken
 by Mathew B. Brady between 1855 and 1865
 when Webb was between the ages of 53 and 63.
(Mathew B. Brady, Levin C. Handy-Mathew
B. Brady Collection, Library of Congress)

Webb was the son of Revolutionary War hero Gen. Samuel Blatchley Webb, a member of the general staff of Continental Army Commander in Chief General George Washington. Watson Webb's mother died when he was 3, his father when he was five. The young orphan was raised by relatives.

Webb was commissioned a second lieutenant in the U.S. Army in 1819 by special compensation of Secretary of War John Calhoun. At the time, military commissions were only supposed to be awarded to West Point graduates, but Webb appealed to Calhoun citing his father's distinguished Revolutionary War record and association with George Washington. Webb was promoted to first lieutenant in 1823. He served mainly in the Midwest, at that time the western frontier of the nation, and specifically at Fort Deaborn, Mich., with occasional skirmishing against Native American tribes, until he resigned his commission in 1827. 

As an Army officer, he was primarily involved with the purchase and distribution of supplies for and to the troops. He went by the title "General" after being named engineer-in-chief for the State of New York in 1851 with the accompanying rank of brigadier general. His family says he accepted the post but held it briefly before resigning. Others say he never accepted the job, but latched onto the honorific and never gave it up.

Pokahoe, shown here in a 2017 real estate listing photo, has been renovated, remodeled and modernized including removal of a couple of upper floors in the mid-1950s after it had been abandoned for about 30 years and fell prey to vagrants and vandals. Its original three-story profile was lost, but the house is listed on the National Register of Historic Places and still stands at 7 Pokahoe Drive in Sleepy Hollow Manor off Route 9 (Broadway) in Sleepy Hollow, just south of the Phelps Memorial Hospital campus. Its most recent renovation began in 2002 and lasted 18 months. The house still still stands on a three-acre site overlooking the Hudson River to its immediate west (rear right in photo).

In 1823, he married Helen Lispenard Stewart, daughter of Irish immigrant Alexander L. Stewart, a rich Manhattan banker. The marriage would prove a boon for the young Webb in the not-so-distant future.

Almost immediately after leaving the army, Webb's father-in-law bought the New York newspaper The Morning Courier, an unabashed propaganda organ for presidential hopeful Andrew Jackson and the Jacksonian Democrats of whom Webb was a fanatical supporter. Stewart immediately named Webb to run the paper. In 1829, Stewart added the New York Enquirer to his portfolio and Webb's as well, merging the two papers into the New York Courier and Enquirer. Webb was publisher of the Courier and Enquirer, inheriting it after Stewart's death in 1838, for all 32 years of its existence. He sold it to the New York World in 1861 when he entered diplomatic service.

Webb broke with the Jacksonian Democrats in the early 1830s — Jackson had been elected president to the first of his two four-year terms in 1828 — and helped name the new major opposition party, the Whigs, predecessor to today's Republic Party. The Whigs were led by U.S. Senator and Congressman Henry Clay and named after a British anti-monarchist party of the same name, the implication being that Jackson was a would-be monarch.

This 2017 real estate listing photo shows Pokahoe as it appears looking east
up from the Hudson River in Sleepy Hollow.

Webb showed a penchant for dueling. In the winter of 1937/1938, Maine Congressman Jonathan Cilley accused Webb of bribery in a speech on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives. Irate, Webb wrote a letter challenging Cilley to a duel to avenge his honor. Webb gave the letter to a friend, Kentucky Congressman William Graves, to pass along to Cilley. When Graves approached Cilley with the letter, Cilley refused to acknowledge it, saying he could not be held accountable for comments he made on the floor of the House. Graves, who had no previously known issues with Cilley, took umbrage at the response and challenged Cilley to a duel himself. Graves shot and killed Cilley in February 1838 in Washington, D.C. 

On July 11, 1842, Webb was shot and wounded below the knee in the second round of shots in a duel of his own with Kentucky Congressman Thomas F. Marshall, nephew of America's first Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, John Marshall. The cause of the duel was an editorial Webb wrote accusing Marshall of going on an alcohol-fueled bender of 44 days and consequent absence from Capitol Hill, Marshall demanding satisfaction. The duel took place at daybreak on the Pennsylvania-Delaware border and the wounded Webb recuperated at the United States Hotel on Chesnut Street in Philadelphia where he jokingly told reporters, "I am confined to bed under Marshall law."

Marshall actually demanded a third round of shots be fired so he could deliver the coup de grace, but Webb's seconds refused, citing Webb's being handicapped by blood loss from his wound.

While many things about Pokahoe have changed since the mansion was built by Gen. J. Watson Webb in 1847-48, one thing that has remained much the same is the magnificent western view from the first floor porch overlooking the Hudson River, shown here in a 2017 real estate listing photo.

Webb was convicted and sentenced to two years incarceration at Sing Sing prison for his role in the duel, but was pardoned by New York Gov. William H. Seward.in 1842 before reporting to prison.

In 1834, Webb played a central role in the deadly Anti-Abolitionist Riots that began on July 7, 1834 in Manhattan and lasted until National Guard troops ended it on July 12. Webb fueled the fire by publishing screeds denouncing mixing of races at any levels, but primarily sexually. It was a particularly sensitive subject because slavery had finally ended in New York State on July 4 just seven years earlier. Blacks in New York celebrated July 4, 1827 and July 4 thereafter as Emancipation Day.

Webb sought payback for his support of Whig and Republican politicians. In 1850 he was appointed U.S. Chargé d'Affaires to Austria by new Whig President Zachary Taylor and served in the post from February to May when he arrived in Vienna. But the U.S. Senate refused to confirm the appointment, no knock on Webb, but rather as a protest of the Austrian monarchy's treatment at that time of its vassal state of Hungary. In 1861, Webb was named Minister to Turkey, and was confirmed by the Senate but refused the assignment to the Ottoman court in Constantinople, reportedly seeking a more financially lucrative appointment. In October 1861, he got what he wanted, appointment as Minister to the Court of Emperor Dom Pedro II of the Empire of Brazil by new Republican President Abraham Lincoln.

John C. Frémont is shown at age 43 while running for the White House as the nation's first Republican Party presidential nominee in 1856. He and Know Nothing Party nominee Millard Fillmore, a former president, had been members of the defunct Whig Party and split the anti-Democratic Party vote.That split vote led to easy victory by Democrat pro-slavery advocate James Buchanan despite only receiving 45.3 percent of the popular vote. Frémont (33.1 percent) and Fillmore (21.5 percent) split 54.6 percent of the vote. (Wikimedia Commons, public domain)

He resigned from the Brazil post on May 26, 1869 during the first term of President Ulysses S. Grant when he was accused of extorting about $140,000 ($3 million today) from the Brazilian government. No wrongdoing was ever proven. Interestingly, during Webb's tenure in 1866 and onward, the Brazilian emperor encouraged former Confederate slave holders to emigrate to Brazil with their slaves with the enticement of cheap land to develop Brazil's cotton economy. Slavery remained legal in Brazil until 1888, 23 years after the end of the Civil War. Some 20,000 former Confederates — called Os Confederados in Portuguese — took up the offer and moved to what became the municipality of Americana outside São Paulo.

Webb and Helen had eight children, three of whom died in childhood. When Helen died in 1848, he was left with the five surviving children ranging in age from 13 to 24. Webb had a reputation as a lady-killer and stylish dresser and lived up to it. He remarried within months, this time to 22-year-old Laura Virginia (Lena) Cram, daughter of a wealthy brewer. His new wife was actually two years younger than her oldest stepchild, Webb's 24-year-old son Robert Stewart Webb. Watson Webb and Lena would go on to have five sons of their own, all of whom called Pokahoe their home

The estate was sold in 1862 to Ambrose Cornelius Kingsland (1804-1878), whose flourishing New York mercantile business included dry goods, sperm oil, shipping and real estate. The company owned a fleet of whaling ships. Kingsland was a one-term mayor of New York City, serving from 1851-1853. He initiated legislation in 1851 that led to the establishment of Central Park. And he already had deep roots in Tarrytown and North Tarrytown, which would be renamed Sleepy Hollow in 1996.

Kingsland didn't occupy the property. He sold it within a year to U.S. Army Gen. John Charles Frémont, not far removed from an 1856 failed run for the White House against Democrat James Buchanan and Know Nothing Party candidate Millard Fillmore as the nation's first Republican Party presidential nominee. Buchanan won with 45.3 percent of the vote as Frémont and Fillmore, a former Whig vice president who had become president upon the death of Zachary Taylor in July 1850, split the anti-Democrat vote. Frémont finished second at 33.1 percent and Fillmore was third at 21.5 percent.

Frémont, a soldier and explorer. was one of California's first two U.S. senators, one-time military governor of California and one-term governor of the Arizona Territory.

This is a sketch by illustrator Herbert S. Kates in 1932 of General J. Watson Webb's original Sleepy Hollow mansion, Pokahoe. Webb's estate was sited at what is now Sleepy Hollow Manor and was owned in the late 1860s and early 1870s by "The Pathfinder," Major General John C. Frémont. (Westchester County Historical Society)

Frémont was a remarkable character who made his way in the world despite an out-of-wedlock birth. Contrary to stereotypes of the sons of antebellum Georgia, Frémont was an anti-slavery, equal rights, pro-Unionist who fought for his country, made and lost fortunes and died destitute in Manhattan in 1890.

Frémont was a complex character, rightfully honored for a vast array of remarkable achievements, rightfully condemned for others, including massacres of West Coast native peoples and a reluctance or refusal to follow orders from military and political superiors. 

He was the illegitimate son of a married woman, Anne Beverly Whiting, daughter of a prominent Virginia planter and slave owner, Col. Thomas Whiting. Col. Whiting died shortly after Anne's birth. She went on to marry Revolutionary War veteran Major John Pryor in 1798 in Richmond, Va., when she was 17 and he was in his early 60s.

John C. Frémont, a colonel at the time, is shown in an 1856 presidential election campaign poster that plays up his reputation as "The Pathfinder" with members of his expedition in the background at left. He appears to be pictured in the Rocky Mountains.

Pryor served in the Continental Army from 1777-1783.

Pryor hired immigrant Charles Frémont from Lyons, France to tutor his wife in 1810 and the tutor and Anne began an affair and Anne then abandoned Pryor, eventually settling in Savannah, where John C. was born in 1813. Charles Frémont died when John C. was 5 and Anne took the boy and the unwed couple's two other children, Elizabeth and Frank, and settled in Charleston, S.C. She survived on a modest income from cash and slaves she'd inherited from her late father. One of those slaves was a woman named Hannah who raised young John C. Frémont and his siblings, her benign hand likely firing John C.'s devotion to the abolition of slavery and demand for racial equality.

Frémont had a knack for ingratiating himself with rich benefactors. First, a Charleston lawyer named John W. Mitchell took Frémont under his wing, paying for the boy's early education. Frémont entered the College of Charleston at 16 in 1829 and was expelled at 18 in 1831 for cutting classes. Fortunately, he had assimilated a strong base in mathematics and natural sciences before his expulsion.

Lt. John C. Frémont eloped with Jessie Ann Benton (pictured in an 1876 portrait at age 42) in 1841 when he was 28 and she 17. The daughter of powerful U.S. Senator Thomas Hart Benson of Missouri, Jessie had turned down two proposals of marriage by the time she was 16, including one from sitting President Martin Van Buren, a widower 40 years her senior. (Wikimedia Commons, public domain)

He then found a new patron in wealthy Charleston planter and politician Joel Roberts Poinsett. Poinsett, a former two-term U.S. Congressman and U.S. Minister to Mexico under Presidents Andrew Jackson and John Quincy Adams. Poinsett secured Frémont an appointment as a math teacher aboard the Navy sloop U.S.S. Natchez, setting in motion Frémont's career as an officer and adventurer. In 1833, he sailed to South American ports aboard the Natchez. He resigned from the Navy in the mid-1830s and was commissioned a second lieutenant in the U.S. Army Corps of Topographical Engineers, surveying routes in the South and Midwest for the fledgling railroad industry.

While in Washington, D.C., to report on trips he'd made to explore lands between the Missouri and Mississippi rivers, Frémont met powerful U.S. Senate leader Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri, the architect and political force behind westward expansion known as Manifest Destiny. To Benton's chagrin, the 28-year-old Frémont eloped with Benton's 17-year-old daughter Jessie Ann in 1841. She had already spurned two suitors who proposed marriage, including sitting President Martin Van Buren, ca. 1840. Van Buren was 40 years her senior and a widower whose wife died in 1819, 21 years earler. Benton was furious at her marriage, not deeming Frémont socially suitable, but grew to accept the couple because of Jessie's obvious devotion to Frémont. Benton'' eventually became a powerful patron of his son-in-law..

Mountain man and explorer Kit Carson (left) served as a guide and friend to John C. Frémont (seated) during Frémont's expeditions of discovery throughout the West in the 1840s.The pair's exploits, made public in a series of reports co-written by Frémont and his young wife, Jessie, helped propel many Americans to a life of adventure and Western expansion, part of what became the notion of Manifest Destiny. (Wikimedia Commons photo, public domain)

v earned his sobriquet "The Pathfinder" in the 1840s when he led three expeditions under Act of Congress with help from Senator Benton to explore the vast Western United States from St. Louis into California and Oregon. His Congress-sanctioned and funded expeditions were in 1842, 1843 and 1845. He undertook another in 1848 that he funded himself. The expeditions involved as few as 21 and as many as 100 members each. The expeditions were diverse, including soldiers, scouts, Native Americans, Creole and Canadian fur trappers familiar with the plains, rivers and mountains, as well as topographers, hunters and guides. One guide was a constant companion, the famed Charles Houston (Kit) Carson.

His reports on the expeditions were co-written by wife Jessie and their romantic, adventurous style spurred Americans to pack up and head West.

In 1846, Frémont and Carson and their expeditionary forces delayed their return to St. Louis after arriving in California because they'd received word of an imminent state of war between Mexico — which owned California at the time — and the U.S. Frémont's forces massacred hundreds of Native Americans in the area while stirring up American emigres to revolt against their Mexican overlords.

Frémont, who encouraged local Americans to join his forces in what he called the California Battalion, joined forces with the commanders of the U.S. Pacific Fleet, first Commodore John Sloat and later Commodore Robert F. Stockton and their naval and marine forces to take key California enclaves including Los Angeles. Stockton ordered the California Battalion to be inducted into the U.S. military under the direction of Frémont whom he promoted to the rank of major.

Artist Hugo Ballin in 1931 illustrated the signing of the Treaty of Cahuenga, which ended the Conquest of California and brought a ceasefire between the Californios and Americans. Californio Andres Pico  (seated) signed as Mexico's representative, while U.S. Army Lt. Col. John C. Frémont (standing, right of table) signed as U.S. representative.The treaty was signed at the Campo de Cahuenga on 13 January 1847, ending the fighting of the Mexican-American War within Alta California (modern-day California).

On Jan. 13, 1847, Mexican forces surrendered to Major Frémont and signed the Treaty of Cahuenga at Campo de Cahuenga — today the Los Angeles neighborhood of Studio City — ending hostilities in what was effectively the new American territory of California. On Jan. 16 Frémont was appointed military governor by Stockton, but storm clouds were on the horizon that would ravage Frémont.

Stockton faced a military leadership challenge from U.S. Army Brigadier General Stephen W. Kearny who arrived with troops in California in December 1846 believing that he was in charge of military forces in the territory. After the signing of the Treaty of Cahuenga, Kearny ordered Frémont and his forces to join Kearny's army. Frémont refused, believing he as under Stockton's command.

The situation deteriorated as Kearny, with support from Washington, was given the power to appoint himself military governor in early February. He then was going to name Col. Richard B. Mason to replace him in that post and take charge of Frémont and his troops. Mason had social standing that Frémont lacked, in particular as a direct descendant of U.S. Founding Father George Mason, a framer of the Constitution and author of the Bill of Rights. When Mason arrived in Los Angeles, Frémont failed to submit to his authority and challenged him to a duel. While the duel was postponed, Frémont was arrested on Aug. 22, 1847 while returning to the East. He was charged at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas with mutiny, disobeying orders, assumption of powers and several other military offenses.

Frémont was found not guilty at his court martial of the most serious charge of mutiny, but was convicted of disobedience to a superior officer and military misconduct and sentenced to dishonorable discharge with no prison time. President James K. Polk stepped in, recognized Frémont's war service, his popularity with voters and kinship with powerful Senator Thomas Hart Benton, and decided to commute his sentence and reinstate him in the Army.

Frémont felt Polk hadn't gone far enough in offering what he believed to be a partial pardon and he resigned his commission and left the military.

Historians in general believe Frémont's actions in California and the military hierarchy were questionable at best and likely criminal to at least some degree at worst, but could excuse some of his behavior on the extenuating circumstances in which he found himself.

A civilian by 1848, he began his self-funded expedition to the West and had an associate by him a ranch, Rancho Las Mariposas, in the Sierra Nevada foothills at today's Mariposa, Calif. Frémont was furious because he'd wanted land near San Franciso, but the ranch was 100 miles from any settlement and was useless scrub land. Before he could unload the land and get his money back, gold was found on ranch property during the California Gold Rush and he became a wealthy man.

In 1850 he became one of the fledgling State of California's first two elected U.S. senators.

• Major General John Charles Frémont is shown in his new uniform after being assigned to head the Union Army's Department of the West, based in Missouri, at the opening of the Civil War in 1861. Months later, he would issue his so-called Frémont Emancipation that precipitated his removal by Abraham Lincoln. (Library of Congress, photo by George Gardner Rockwood of New York)

At the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861, Frémont was appointed to command the military Department of the West, based in the border slave Union state of Missouri, and promoted to the rank of major general by President Abraham Lincoln. He had some minor successes in a hostile environment in which rebel guerrilla Missourians outnumbered Unionists in the state and he was hamstrung by an almost complete absence of military equipment and supplies. 

Perhaps Frémont's greatest contribution to the Union cause was one overlooked at the time. Seeking a new leader to head a key Union outpost at Cairo, Illinois who would take control of the Mississippi River, isolating Confederate troops west of the Mississippi and starve Rebel forces downriver by cutting their river supply lines, Frémont ignored his expert advisers and in early October 1861 plucked an obscure brigadier general — considered to be an incompetent drunkard by many of his contemporaries — for the Cairo posting: Ulysses S. Grant.

Frémont explained his decision at the time, saying that Grant was an "unassuming character not given to self elation, of dogged persistence, of iron will."

Grant, of course, would be so successful that he would take command of all Union forces, guide the Union to victory, and eventually serve two terms as U.S. president.

The Grant appointment was possibly the last decision of consequence Frémont would make in the military. He was removed from his post weeks later in November 1861 after issuing his own slave emancipation order without Lincoln's or the Army's permission.

The so-called Frémont Emancipation of Aug. 30, 1861 declared martial law in the State of Missouri ordering confiscating all property held by rebels in the state — including slaves — and freeing any slaves so confiscated. Lincoln cajoled Frémont — unsuccessfully — to change his order, fearing it would tip Missouri and other border states to secede. Frustrated by his wayward general, Lincoln revoked the order himself on Sept. 11, 1861. 

Frémont spent a short time with the Mountain Department in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia in 1862, but turned down a secondary command with the Army of Virginia when it was created that year, feeling insulted he would be forced to answer to a junior officer. He returned to New York to await a better command that never came. Frémont finally resigned from the Army in 1864 and took up residence at Pokahoe. 

He was the nominee of the Radical Democracy Party for U.S. president that same year, supporting a platform that alleged Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation only freeing slaves held behind rebel lines didn't go far enough and also pressing for racial equality for Blacks. His running mate was former Congressman and Union Army General John Cochrane. The pair failed to gain traction in the race against Lincoln and withdrew from the race in on Sept. 21, 1864, six weeks before the election.

In 1866, Frémont lost much of his wealth after investing in the failed Pacific Railroad of Missouri. He lost the rest of it in the Panic of 1873 and declared bankruptcy. In 1878, President Rutherford B. Hayes appointed him Arizona Territorial governor. He was an absentee governor, spending little time in the territory and resigned in 1881 after being told he must govern on-site. His political career over, he retreated to New York where he resided on Staten Island.

He lived primarily on the meager earnings of his wife, Jessie, a writer of four historical memoirs about the couple's life during the Civil War and in the West published in his lifetime, as well as many stories published in popular magazines. She also co-wrote her husband's 1887 "Memoirs of My Life." Gen. Frémont died in Manhattan on July 13, 1890, three months after being reinstated as an Army officer to allow him to retire and receive a pension. It is always reported that the Frémonts were destitute for the last decade of John C.'s life, but their destitution was relative. They never appear to have been without food or a roof over their heads, for example. He died after a sudden attack of an abdominal infection. After her husband's death, Congress awarded Jessie an Army widow's pension of $2,000 a year — about $62,000 today.

John C. Frémont's widow, Jessie Ann Benton Frémont, is shown ca. 1900 in the Los Angeles home she was presented by admirers after her husband's death in 1890. (Online Archives of California, photo by C. Wharton James, Pasadena, Calif.)

Jessie lived out her final years at a Los Angeles house she was gifted by a committee of ladies of the city as a sign of their regard for her. She was restricted to a wheelchair for a couple of years before her Dec. 27, 1902 death at age 78.

Jessie and John C. Frémont shared five children, three of whom would have spent time at Pokahoe and survived their parents. The other two died in childhood. Son John C. Jr. was born in 1851 while his family was living on its Mariposa ranch, graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy in 1871 while the family was living at Pokahoe and rose in rank to rear admiral, his distinguished naval career coming to an end only at his death in 1911 age age 59.

Title to Pokahoe reverted to Ambrose C. Kingsland in 1873 when Frémont went bankrupt. 

One-time New York City Mayor Ambrose C. Kingsland bought Pokahoe from J. Watson Webb, sold it to John C. Frémont, then took possession back from Frémont when The Pathfinder declared bankruptcy in 1873. Kingsland is pictured in an 1887 oil-on-canvas portrait by Daniel Huntington, who copied an earlier original painting. (New York Chamber of Commerce Portrait Collection)

Kingsland's heirs sold the Pokahoe estate to retired Manhattan jeweler Elbert Brinckerhoff (E.B.) Monroe in 1892 and it remained in possession of Monroe's widow, Virginia Marquand Monroe, for decades after E.B.'s 1894 death.

E.B. made his fortune as a partner in the Manhattan jewelry firm Ball, Black & Co., the nation's top jewelry house, specializing in jewelry and silver before being overtaken by Tiffany & Co., whose founder, Charles L. Tiffany, also lived on a Hudson Valley Gilded Age estate — Tiffany Park in nearby Irvington, N.Y.

Monroe followed his father, Ebeneezer, into Ball, Black and married the adopted daughter of the company's founder, Georgia-born Frederick Marquand after E.B.'s first wife died in 1870. Monroe retired from business at a young age — about 45, no later than 1882.

Elbert Brinckerhoff (E.B.) Monroe is shown in an 1886 oil-on-canvas
portrait by artist Francis Sullivan at the Yale University Art Gallery.
The portrait was donated to Yale by E.B.'s widow Virginia in 1913.
E.B. was awarded an honorary master's degree from Yale during his lifetime.

Ball, Black introduced the safe deposit vault to the nation's parlance, building a hardened underground facility at its Broadway and Prince Street location which was guarded by six armed men at all times. It is said that wealthy Southern families who had supposedly lost everything in the Civil War, saw many of their valuables survive unscathed after all in Ball, Black's vault.

When Virginia Monroe died on July 11, 1926, she left an estate valued at $3 million, $48 million today.

The entrance to the Pokahoe estate, by then under the proprietorship of E.B. Monroe's widow Virginia is pictured in 1897. The orbs pictured atop the entry pillars are unexploded cannon balls fired by Mexican forces during the Mexican-American War and brought back to the U.S. by the hero of the Battle of Veracruz, Commodore Matthew Calbraith Perry, who presented four of them as gifts to his close friend, Pokahoe builder General J. Watson Webb. The four shells adorned the tops of four pillars at the entry to Pokahoe. Perry would go on to become a neighbor of Webb's in his own nearby property, The Moorings. (The Peterson Magazine, June 1897 edition)

In 1927 Sleepy Hollow Manor Inc. purchased 53 acres of the former Webb/Frémont/Kingsland/Monroe Pokahoe estate on which to build single-family homes. It remains a prominent part of the Village of Sleepy Hollow today, sited on the east bank of the Hudson River immediately south of the Phelps Memorial Hospital Center at Northwell Health campus between the river and U.S. Route 9 (Broadway) and immediately north of the 40-acre Peabody Preserve.

The upscale neighborhood development which still includes the original Pokahoe mansion, albeit reduced in height and completely renovated, remodeled and modernized, remains at 7 Pokahoe Drive, Sleepy Hollow, on a three-acre parcel of land overlooking the Hudson River today. The house sold for $2.9 million in 2017.

Visitors to Sleepy Hollow Manor will find familiar names on street signs, names such as Fremont, Webb and Kingsland roads in addition to Pokahoe Drive. Also prominent in the development is Fremont Pond.