NEWBURG, or Newburgh, a city of the United States, the capital of Orange county, New York, occupies a commanding position on the steep slopes of the west bank of the Hudson, about 60 miles north of New York. It has a large river trade, especially in coal and lumber, contains engine-factories, a cotton-mill, a bleachery, a lawn-mower factory, &c. Hasbrouck House, an old stone mansion which served as Washington’s headquarters in 1782-83, has since 1850 been maintained by the State, and contains a considerable collection of historical relics. The population was 17,014 in 1870, and 18,049 in 1880.

The site of Newburg, then occupied by a clan of the Minsis (Delaware) tribe, was recognized by Hudson in 1607 as a “pleasant place to build a town on”; but it was not till 1709 that the Palatine Parish of Quassaic, as it was at first called, was settled by a number of Germans from the Palatinate of the Rhine. In 1752 the name of Newburgh or Newburg was adopted from the likeness which the place bore to Newburgh on the Tay in Scotland. It was here that Washington rejected the proposal to make him king, thereby checking the incipient mutiny which the anonymous “Newburgh Letters” were designed to excite, and here the army was disbanded. A city charter was obtained in 1865.