OSSINING  , a

village of Westchester county, New York, U.S.A., 30 M . N. of New York city, on the E. bank 9f the Hudson river . Pop . (1900) 7939, of whom 1642 were foreign-born; (1910, U.S. census) 11,480 . It is served by the New York Central & Hudson River railway, and by river steamboats . It is finely situated overlooking the Tappan Zee, an expansion of the Hudson river, and has excellent facilities for boating, sailing and yachting . The village is the seat of Mount Pleasant Academy (1814), Holbrook School (1866) and St John's School (1843), all for boys, and has a fine public library . The Croton Aqueduct is here carried over a stone arch with an eighty-foot span . At Ossining, near the river front, is the Sing Sing Prison, the best-known penitentiary in the United States . In 1906 a law was enacted providing for a new prison in the eastern part of the state in place of Sing Sing . The site of Ossining, originally a part of the Phillipse Manor, was first settled about 1700, taking the name of Sing Sing from the Sin Sinck Indians . The village was incorporated in '813, and was reincorporated, with enlarged boundaries and a considerably increased population, in 1906, the name being changed from Sing Sing to Ossining in 19o1 .