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From the dinosaurs and the glaciers to the first native peoples and the first European settlers, from Dutch and English Colonial rule to the American Revolution, from the slave society to the Civil War, from the robber barons and bootleggers to the war heroes and the happy rise of craft beer pubs, the Hudson Valley has a deep history. The Hudson Valley: The First 250 Million Years chronicles the Valley's rich and fascinating history and charms. Often funny, sometimes personal, always entertaining, this collection of essays offers a unique look at the Hudson Valley's most important and interesting people, places, and events.
An elegant homage to the many deserted buildings along the Hudson River--and a plea for their preservation.
Winner of the 2012 Award for Excellence presented by the Greater Hudson Heritage Network The diverse contributions to Environmental History of the Hudson River examine how the natural and physical attributes of the river have influenced human settlement and uses, and how human occupation has, in turn, affected the ecology and environmental health of the river. The Hudson River Valley may be America's premier river environmental laboratory, and by bringing historians and social scientists together with biologists and other physical scientists, this book hopes to foster new ways of looking at and talking about this historically, commercially, and aesthetically important ecosystem. Native people's influences on the ecological integrity of aquatic and shoreline communities were generally local and minor, and for the first 12,000 years or so of human use, the Hudson River was valued mainly as a source of water, food, and transportation. Since the arrival of European colonists, however, commerce has been the engine that has driven development and use of the river, from the harvesting of beaver pelts and timber to the siting of manufacturing industries and power plants, and all of these uses have had pervasive effects on the river's aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems. In the meantime, aesthetic movements such as the Hudson River School of painting have sought to recover and preserve the earlier pastoral landscape, anticipating the more recent efforts by environmentalists that have led to dramatic improvements in water quality, shoreline habitats, and fish populations. Despite the pervasive forces of commerce, the Hudson River has retained its world-class scenic qualities. The Upper Hudson remains today a free-flowing, tumbling mountain stream, and the Lower Hudson a fjord penetrated and dominated by the Hudson Highlands. The Hudson's unique history continues to affect current uses and will surely influence the future in remarkable ways.
Today's travelers between New York City and Albany are more familiar with the Thruway than with the old Albany Post Road. But for centuries, this was the main highway between the Big Apple and the capital, and many exciting events occurred along its path in the Lower Hudson Valley. The Dutch Philipse family of Sleepy Hollow engaged in piracy, and tales of such misdeeds from the region inspired Washington Irving to write some of his most beloved stories. Later, prisoners used the road as an escape route from the original Sing Sing prison. During Prohibition, a "beer hose" ran through Yonkers, allegedly placed along the route by beer baron Dutch Schultz. With illustrations by Tatiana Rhinevault, local historian Carney Rhinevault uncovers the stories hidden behind the old mile markers of the Albany Post Road.
The Hudson Valley is rooted in the mysterious. In fact, author Washington Irving called it "the spellbound region." But whether fact, superstition, or legend, the mystery of the region is detailed here through an amazing range of sites from enigmatic stone structures and ancient petroglyphs, to battlefields, haunted mountaintops, and popular waterfalls. Tales of ghosts and strange creatures, a hint of the supernatural, and attention-grabbing folklore and real-life experiences abound, including a fair share of lost treasure--from the infamous pirate Captain Kidd and outlaw Claudius Smith, to the more modern gangster, Dutch Schultz. Each of the 20 chapters includes mystifying stories, beautiful and expansive photography, and a "Getting There" section that provides coordinates and detailed directions to the location. So whether you're in the mood for an armchair vacation, or real visits to mysterious places, the Hudson Valley region is the place to be.
The cultural landscape of the Hudson River Valley is crowded with ghosts--the ghosts of Native Americans and Dutch colonists, of Revolutionary War soldiers and spies, of presidents, slaves, priests, and laborers. Possessions asks why this region just outside New York City became the locus for so many ghostly tales, and shows how these hauntings came to operate as a peculiar type of social memory whereby things lost, forgotten, or marginalized returned to claim possession of imaginations and territories. Reading Washington Irving's stories along with a diverse array of narratives from local folklore and regional writings, Judith Richardson explores the causes and consequences of Hudson Valley hauntings to reveal how ghosts both evolve from specific historical contexts and are conjured to serve the present needs of those they haunt. These tales of haunting, Richardson argues, are no mere echoes of the past but function in an ongoing, contentious politics of place. Through its tight geographical focus, Possessions illuminates problems of belonging and possessing that haunt the nation as a whole. Table of Contents: Introduction 1. "How Comes theHudson to this Unique Heritage?" 2. Irving's Web 3. The Colorful Career of a Ghost from Leeds 4. Local Characters 5. Possessing High Tor Mountain Epilogue: Hauntings without End Notes Index Reviews of this book: The author traces changing versions of several ghostly tales that mutated over time to reflect local conditions and controversies as well as national political issues like abolitionism. Richardson shows that, thanks to the Hudson Valley's long history of settlement, the 'legendizing impetus' created by Washington Irving, and the area's established position as a tourist destination, it inspired at least three sometimes overlapping traditions of hauntings: the 'aboriginal' Dutch and Indian hauntings, the Revolutionary War hauntings, and industrial hauntings, which are traced in Maxwell Anderson's High Tor (1937) and T. Coraghessan Boyle's World's End (1987). --J. J. Benardete, Choice Possessions is a rare and brilliant book that seamlessly combines history and literature--revealing how richly they can support one another. It is a great pleasure to read: both fluent and profound. --Alan Taylor, author of American Colonies and William Cooper's Town This is a lively, well-written, and engaging interdisciplinary study. Richardson pursues two main goals: probing in considerable detail a body of early national folklore and its modern revivals and testing some more general notions about the uses to which such lore is put in the periods when it is recovered, reshaped, and reinvigorated. It is smart without being condescending, locally inflected without exhibiting the least bit of piety - and, I think, quite suggestive for scholars looking at other domains far beyond the Hudson Valley. She gives us a way of understanding how the "local" has figured in the cultural construction of Americanness. --Wayne Franklin, author of Discoverers, Explorers, Settlers and The New World of James Fenimore Cooper
Explores the long-neglected rural dimensions of northern slavery and emancipation in New York’s Mid-Hudson Valley. Slavery and Freedom in the Mid-Hudson Valley focuses on the largely forgotten history of slavery in New York and the African American freedom struggle in the central Hudson Valley prior to the Civil War. Slaves were central actors in the drama that unfolded in the region during the Revolution, and they waged a long and bitter battle for freedom during the decades that followed. Slavery in the countryside was more oppressive than slavery in urban environments, and the agonizingly slow pace of abolition, constraints of rural poverty, and persistent racial hostility in the rural communities also presented formidable challenges to free black life in the central Hudson Valley. Michael E. Groth explores how Dutchess County’s black residents overcame such obstacles to establish independent community institutions, engage in political activism, and fashion a vibrant racial consciousness in antebellum New York. By drawing attention to the African American experience in the rural Mid-Hudson Valley, this book provides new perspectives on slavery and emancipation in New York, black community formation, and the nature of black identity in the Early Republic. “Groth provides a systematic overview focused on the history of African Americans in the Mid-Hudson Valley during the decades before the American Revolution through emancipation and during the national political struggle for abolition and the regional struggle for civil rights.” — Andor Skotnes, author of A New Deal for All? Race and Class Struggle in Depression-Era Baltimore
New York's version of Los Angeles's famous La Brea Tar Pits? Sand Dunes in the city of Albany? Frederic Church's Olana, a gift of the Ice Age? A Niagara Falls in Philmont? Mastodons in Greenville? The Vanderbilt Mansion and Springwood, FDR's home in Hyde Park, at risk? Join Professors Robert and Johanna Titus on a tour of the Hudson Valley and see this familiar region with new eyes the eyes of geologists who see a half-mile-thick sheet of ice grinding its way down the valley and overtopping even the highest mountains. With the Tituses as your guides, -see- an ancient Manhattan high and dry with the Atlantic shoreline 100 miles to the southeast, North/South Lake State Park as a giant and frigid -waterslide park,- and the immense expanse of Glacial Lake Albany stretching the entire length of the Hudson Valley with its deltas that would become the sites of some of America's most famous estates. Finally, witness the cataclysmic flood that cascaded through the valley at the end of the Ice Age as a great ice dam broke and a gigantic wall of water swept down the valley. The Tituses take the reader through the Catskills, the Shawangunks, the Taconics, along the banks of the Hudson River, to Bash Bish Falls and Lake Taghkanic to all those unique and beautiful places that make the Hudson Valley -the landscape that defined America- and demonstrate that all this rose phoenix-like from the devastation caused by the slow, inexorable advance of a grinding, half-mile-thick bulldozer of ice and the raging flood that followed its retreat. The result of these devastating events is the landscape that inspired the Hudson River School painters and America's pioneer landscape architects gifts of the Ice Age, and the familiar landscape we enjoy today.
A newly updated and revised edition of the classic and definitive guide to the best of the Hudson River Valley. For the last 20 years this has been the most trusted guide to exploring the Hudson River Valley's myriad attractions and providing everything the visitor?and resident?needs to know to enjoy this newly designated National Heritage Area that has been called ?America's Rhine.? Visit presidential homes ? great estates built by founding fathers and 19th-century tycoons ? a remarkable assortment of art museums with Old Master paintings and contemporary masterpieces ? the battlements of West Point and the site of the most important struggle of the Revolution ? the homes, studios and painting sites of Hudson River School artistsperforming arts centers ? the oldest and most famous horse-racing track in the country ? wineries ? lighthouses ? arboretums ? hot-air ballooning, river tubing, and bird watching for bald eagles ? historic districts ? antiquarian bookstores, antiques
A beautiful tribute to the Hudson River and the 400th anniversary of Henry Hudson’s voyage.