Benedict Arnold and British Major John André met in this area in September 1780 to arrange the surrender of West Point. André was captured carrying evidence of the plot, tried, and executed as a spy; Arnold escaped to British lines. The conspiracy threatened the strategic Hudson Highlands but failed before the fortress changed hands.

Arnold commanded West Point while secretly negotiating with the British for money, rank, and the surrender of the fortress. André came upriver aboard HMS Vulture and met Arnold at or near Haverstraw. Delays and American fire forced the ship away, leaving André to return overland in civilian clothing with plans concealed in his boot. Militiamen captured him near Tarrytown. Papers exposed the conspiracy, but warning reached Arnold in time for him to escape. Washington strengthened the Highlands, and André was hanged at Tappan. The marker identifies the meeting area within a plot spanning several Hudson Valley sites.

The marker should be read as an anchor within a larger battlefield rather than as proof that every movement occurred at its exact base. Eighteenth-century roads, shorelines, fields, and property boundaries have changed, and combat unfolded across space. Accounts also differ in numbers, timing, and emphasis according to the observer. Responsible interpretation distinguishes secure facts from later dramatic detail while explaining why commanders valued the terrain. The event mattered not only for casualties or possession of ground but for its effect on morale, movement, supply, and subsequent decisions. Civilians nearby faced fear, property loss, wounded men, and military demands that standard battle narratives can obscure. Preserving the location allows visitors to connect operational history with a real landscape and to see the Revolution as a sequence of linked local actions rather than a short list of famous engagements.

For HistoryGPS, the most useful interpretation begins with the site’s exact relationship to the event. A marker may stand at a surviving building, an approximate camp, a grave, a changed road, or simply the best accessible point from which to understand a vanished place. Modern development and later reconstruction can obscure eighteenth-century geography, while commemorative inscriptions often compress long careers or complicated campaigns into a sentence. The narrative must therefore distinguish contemporary evidence from tradition and avoid placing every associated achievement on the marker’s footprint. At the same time, the location gives national history a local scale. It reveals the roads, institutions, households, labor systems, and communities through which military and political decisions took effect. Reading the marker critically preserves its genuine connection while acknowledging uncertainty, change, and the broader human consequences of revolution.