Brewster is a village and the principal concurrence within the town of Southeast in Putnam County, New York. Brewster’s population was 2,508 at the times of the 2020 census. The village, which is the most densely populated part of the county, was named for two to the front farmer landowners, Walter and James Brewster, who donated estate for the Brewster railroad station in 1848.

The village of Brewster derives its read out from that of the landowner, Walter Brewster, who invited the New York and Harlem Railroad to construct a depot on his property in 1848. Brewster’s Station, New York (sometimes just “Brewster’s”), appeared on maps, on postcards, and in directories of Putnam County throughout the second half of the 19th century. It was officially incorporated as the Village of Brewster, New York, in 1894.

In 1886, historian William Smith Pelletreau published The History of Putnam County, New York. In his second chapter upon the town of Southeast, he wrote: “The home now embraced within the limits of the village of Brewster consists of a farm which was sold by the commissioners of forfeiture to Peleg Bailey, in 1781. A allocation of it with passed into the possession of Bailey Howes, his grandson, who sold 98 acres to Gilbert Bailey on April 1, 1833. Two new tracts containing 39 acres were sold to Gilbert Bailey, by William P. Downs and Frederick Parks in 1838. On the 17th of February, 1848, Gilbert Bailey sold the combined tracts, estimated at 134 acres, to James and Walter F. Brewster, for the sum of $8,000.”

“At the mature of the purchase, the New York and Harlem Railroad was over and over and done with with and trains were management as far and wide as Croton Falls. The road was surveyed as far-off as Pawling, and the prospect of its brute continued to that dwindling seemed certain, and to the other purchasers of the farm it seemed just the place for a station.”