OCA to Dobbs Ferry (8/11/26)

Bob and I headed back out on the OCA (Old Croton Aqueduct) trail today. We have walked it north for about an hour from right in our neighborhood, and we’ve walked it south as far as the village of Irvington. Today, we drove to Irvington to walk the trail from there to Dobb’s Ferry. It was a warm walk, as it is a bit more humid than yesterday and much of our walk in Dobb’s Ferry was not shaded,

Just as a reminder, the Croton Aqueduct was built in the 1830s to bring water from the Croton Reservoir, 41 miles north of New York City, into the city using just gravity to convey the water. In 1968, the state bought 26.2 miles of the original aqueduct path to create a linear park.

As when we walked from Tarrytown to Irvington, we saw a number of lovely homes along the trail.

Mercy University is a private, non-sectarian, non-profit, co-educational research university. Its main campus is on these 66 acres in Dobbs Ferry, but it also has campuses in Manhattan, the Bronx, and Yorktown Heights. It offers more than 90 undergraduate and graduate programs.

The portion of the trail that we walked today is sometimes on the same level as the surrounding land, but is sometimes above the areas surrounding it.

Dobbs Ferry, also in Westchester County, is a village of about 11,500 people today. It is named for the ferry service started in the early 1700s by John Dobbs. The ferry service provided key transportation for American forces in August of 1781 to allow additional troops to join Washington’s in a battle at Yorktown that helped end the war. The ferry service here continued until 1945.

We walked along Main Street in Dobbs Ferry and saw a number of retail stores and restaurants as well as a bank and a library in a mix of older and newer buildings.

We then walked across the train tracks, via the walkover bridge, to check out the Dobbs Ferry Waterfront Park. We even got a faint view of part of the New York City skyline.