Blood, Trauma, and Biohazard Cleanup in Hawthorne, NY

Hawthorne is a hamlet and census-designated place in the town of Mount Pleasant, Westchester County, lying near the geographic center of the county.

The 2020 census counted 4,646 residents in Hawthorne, packed into just 1.1 square miles — a density of more than 4,200 people per square mile.

The hamlet was originally known as Hammond's Mills and was part of Frederick Philipse's Philipsburgh estate; on September 23, 1780, Major John André stopped here to ask directions after his fateful meeting with Benedict Arnold.

After the Revolutionary War the settlement was called Unionville; its Reformed Church of Unionville was built in 1818, a one-room schoolhouse followed in 1832, and a railroad station on New York Central's Harlem Division opened in 1847.

The hamlet was renamed Hawthorne in honor of Rose Hawthorne Lathrop — known as Mother Mary Alphonsa, daughter of author Nathaniel Hawthorne — who in 1901 founded Rosary Hill Home in the area to care for people with incurable cancer.

Rosary Hill Home is still operated today by the Dominican Sisters of Hawthorne, the religious order Mother Mary Alphonsa founded.

Hawthorne is the final resting place of Babe Ruth, James Cagney, Billy Martin and Dorothy Kilgallen, all interred at Gate of Heaven Cemetery in the hamlet.

On July 12, 2006, an F2 tornado struck Hawthorne, heavily damaging a California Closets warehouse and injuring three people; it remains the strongest tornado recorded in Westchester County.

Hawthorne's children attend the Mount Pleasant Central School District — Hawthorne Elementary School in the hamlet, and Westlake Middle School and Westlake High School in neighboring Thornwood.

The Hammond House, one of the hamlet's surviving colonial-era homes, was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1980.