Central Yonkers

George Burnham’s peaceful 1850s Yonkers scene depicts a verdant ravine with a cow grazing beside a stream, probably the Saw Mill River. By 1859, the year this painting was made, trains had been stopping at Yonkers for almost ten years, enabling an insurgence of industrialism that far outpaced traditional commercial river traffic. If this painting does indeed depict the Saw Mill River, then a factory—harbinger of the new industrial age—may have been located just around the bend and deliberately ignored by the artist.