Dover (Images of America: New York)

Through the years, Dover's landscape has been greatly shaped by the contributions of its many influential residents. Upon his arrival, Richard Sackett, the first English settler in eastern Dutchess County, gazed at the soaring hillsides and gave the town its current name. Dover's most important and pivotal event occurred in 1731, when it hosted representatives at an interstate boundary conference. That indenture signing set the judicial line between the colony of Connecticut and the province of New York. After 1845, the railroad exported iron and brought artists like Asher Durand, whose painting of Dover's plains hangs today in the Smithsonian American Art Museum. With the train came tourists and painters, who were drawn to the sites they saw in Durand's works. In the 20th century, the area changed again as old farms disappeared and new industry moved into town. While the community sent men to war and compassionately housed the mentally ill, the Dover Drag Strip made history as one of the first big drag racing tracks.