The Project Gutenberg EBook of America, Volume III (of 6), by Joel Cook
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Title: America, Volume III (of 6)
Author: Joel Cook
Release Date: January 4, 2013 [EBook #41776]
Language: English
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Inconsistent hyphenation and spelling in the original document have
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The Table of Contents for this book refers to it as Volume II. The
Title Page and List of Illustrations refer to it as Volume III.
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AMERICA
[Illustration: _A Cowboy_]
_EDITION ARTISTIQUE_
The World's Famous
Places and Peoples
AMERICA
BY
JOEL COOK
In Six Volumes
Volume III.
MERRILL AND BAKER
New York London
THIS EDITION ARTISTIQUE OF THE WORLD'S FAMOUS PLACES AND PEOPLES IS
LIMITED TO ONE THOUSAND NUMBERED AND REGISTERED COPIES, OF WHICH THIS
COPY IS NO. 205
Copyright, Henry T. Coates & Co., 1900
CONTENTS
VOLUME II
PAGE
VIII. AROUND THE HARBOR OF NEW YORK, 3
IX. THE ENVIRONMENT OF LONG ISLAND SOUND, 89
X. ASCENDING THE HUDSON RIVER, 129
XI. A GLIMPSE OF THE BERKSHIRE HILLS, 241
XII. THE ADIRONDACKS AND THEIR ATTENDANT LAKES, 271
XIII. CROSSING THE EMPIRE STATE, 329
XIV. DESCENDING THE RIVER ST. LAWRENCE, 399
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
VOLUME III
PAGE
GRANT'S TOMB, NEW YORK 58
WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT AT "CEDARHURST," ROSLYN 94
PALISADES OF THE HUDSON 132
UP THE HUDSON FROM THE WATER BATTERY, WEST POINT 162
STATE CAPITOL, ALBANY, N. Y. 204
AROUND THE HARBOR OF NEW YORK.
AMERICA,
PICTURESQUE AND DESCRIPTIVE.
VIII.
AROUND THE HARBOR OF NEW YORK.
Hendrick Hudson -- The Ship "Half Moon" -- Manhattan Island --
New Amsterdam -- Hudson River -- Fire Island -- Navesink
Highlands -- Sandy Hook -- Liberty Statue -- Governor's Island
-- Jersey City -- Hoboken -- Weehawken -- The Kills -- Perth
Amboy -- Staten Island -- New Dorp -- Commodore Vanderbilt --
Hackensack River -- Passaic River -- Paterson -- Newark --
Elizabeth -- Rahway -- Raritan River -- New Brunswick -- Battle
of Monmouth -- Molly Pitcher -- Greater New York -- Battery
Park -- Bowling Green -- Broadway -- Trinity Church -- Famous
and Sky-Scraping Buildings -- Wall Street -- National City Bank
-- St. Paul's Church -- City Hall Park -- Chemical Bank -- Dry
Goods District -- Cooper Institute -- Peter Stuyvesant -- Union
Square -- Tammany Hall -- Madison Square -- Fifth Avenue --
Washington Square -- Little Church Around the Corner -- Murray
Hill -- John Jacob Astor -- Alexander T. Stewart -- Fifth
Avenue Architecture -- The Vanderbilts -- New York Public
Library -- Famous Churches -- Jay Gould -- Metropolitan Museum
-- Central Park -- Museum of Natural History -- Morningside
Park -- Riverside Park -- Spuyten Duyvel Creek -- Battle of
Harlem Heights -- Fort Washington -- Morrisania -- Croton
Aqueducts -- High Bridge -- The Bronx -- Van Cortlandt Park --
Bronx Park -- Pelham Bay Park -- Hunter's Island -- East River
and its Islands -- Hell Gate -- Brooklyn Bridge -- City of
Churches -- Brooklyn Development -- Fulton Street -- Brooklyn
Heights -- Plymouth Church -- The Beecher Family -- Church of
the Pilgrims -- Pratt Institute -- Greenwood Cemetery -- Its
Famous Tombs -- Ocean Parkway -- Prospect Park -- Coney Island
-- Its Constant Festival -- Brighton and Manhattan Beaches --
View from the Observatory.
HENDRICK HUDSON.
The redoubtable navigator for the Dutch East India Company, Hendrick
Hudson, after exploring Delaware Bay, sailed along the New Jersey
coast and entered Sandy Hook, discovering, on September 11, 1609, the
Hudson River. There is a vague tradition that the first European who
saw the magnificent harbor of New York was the Florentine, Verrazani,
who came as early as 1524. Hudson was searching for the "Northwest
Passage," and when he steered his little ship, the "Half Moon," into
the great river, with its swelling tide of salt water, was sure he had
found the long-sought route to the Indies. He explored it as far up as
the present site of Albany, creating a sensation among the Indians,
who flocked to the shores to see the "great white bird," as they
called the "Half Moon," because of its wide-spreading sails. He traded
with them for tobacco and furs, finding the Lenni Lenapes on the
western bank and the Mohicans on the eastern side, and to impress them
with his prowess, put them in a great fright by shooting off his
cannon. Upon returning from Albany, the Indians gave him a feast on an
island, breaking their arrows in token that they meant no treachery.
Hudson had a goodly store of seductive "schnapps," and offered them
some in return for their hospitality. They examined it closely, smelt
it, but passed it along without tasting. Finally one, somewhat bolder,
partook, and drinking a good deal, fell in a drunken stupor for
several hours. When finally aroused he said the Dutchmen had the
strongest water he had ever tasted, and the other Indians then became
eager to try the fire-water too, and soon they were all under its
influence, and thus became firm friends of the Dutch.
The scene of this great carousal is said to have been the island where
is now the city of New York. The Indian word Man-a-tey means "the
island," and from this they named the place Man-a-hat-ta-nink, the
"island of general intoxication." Ticknor, in his guide-book, gravely
tells us that "from the scene of wassail and merriment which followed
the meeting of the sailors and the Indians, the latter called the
island Manhattan, "the place where they all got drunk." Thus, at the
beginning, this noted locality acquired a reputation which many attest
as existing with undiminished lustre in maturer years. By way of
variety in this connection, it may be related that Washington Irving,
in Knickerbocker's veritable history of New York, has this to say:
"The name most current at the present day, and which is likewise
countenanced by the great historian Vander-Donck, is Manhattan, which
is said to have originated in a custom among the squaws, in the early
settlement, of wearing men's hats, as is still done among many tribes.
'Hence,' as we are told by an old Governor, who was somewhat of a wag,
and flourished almost a century since, and had paid a visit to the
wits of Philadelphia, 'hence arose the appellation of man-hat-on,
first given to the Indians, and afterwards to the island'--a stupid
joke, but well enough for a Governor." Irving continues: "There is
another, founded on still more ancient and indisputable authority,
which I particularly delight in, seeing it is at once poetical,
melodious and significant, and this is recorded in the before-mentioned
voyage of the great Hudson, written by Master Juet, who clearly and
correctly calls it Manna-hatta, that is to say, the island of Manna,
or, in other words, 'a land flowing with milk and honey.'"
NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS HARBOR.
About five years elapsed after Hudson's discovery before a colony was
firmly fixed on Manhattan Island, which, when fairly started in 1614,
was a little palisade fort and four small log houses. The Dutch called
their possessions the Niew Netherlands, named the colony Nieu
Amsterdam, and the land across the East River was known as Nassau, the
earliest name of Long Island. Hudson was so impressed with the
Highlands and the Catskills, which he passed in exploring the river,
that he named it the "River of the Mountains," but this was changed
by the Dutch to Mauritius, in honor of Prince Maurice of Nassau. The
Indians along the banks called the river Shatemuc and Cahohatatea. The
English, shortly after the discovery, began calling it the Hudson
River, but later, it was generally styled the North River to
distinguish it from the Delaware or South River; and North River is
the name now generally used in New York. The Manhattan colony was of
slow growth, and the first Dutch Governor sent out was a Westphalian,
Peter Minuit, a thrifty old fellow, who, by again making good use of
"schnapps," bought the whole of Manhattan Island in 1626 from the
Indians for beads and trinkets valued at sixty guilders, about $25.
There were a thousand people there in 1644, making the original Dutch
aristocracy of the "Knickerbockers," this name being adapted later
from Irving, and they impressed their peculiarities upon the early
city; but their descendants have largely given place to a newer
aristocracy of wealth and an army of immigrants from all races. The
last Dutch Governor, Peter Stuyvesant, arrived in 1647, and for
protection the colonists had then built a fence across the island
along what is now the line of Wall Street. An Indian scare a few years
later caused this to be replaced with a wall of cedar palisades, and
it ultimately developed into the city wall. Thus enclosed, the Mayor
of New Amsterdam was required to walk around the walls every morning
at sunrise, unlock the gates and give the keys to the commander of
the fort down at the Battery. When the Duke of York's English
expedition came over in 1664 and overturned the government of old
Stuyvesant, surnamed "Peter the Headstrong," and his Knickerbockers,
at the same time changing the city's name to New York, it had three
hundred and eighty-four houses, and in 1700 the population had
increased to about six thousand. The first English Governor was Sir
Edmund Andros.
The remote sources of the Hudson River are in Hamilton and Essex
Counties, in the Adirondacks, in northeastern New York State, the
highest at four thousand feet elevation above the sea, the head
streams being outlets for a large number of highland lakes. The river
flows over three hundred miles to the sea, and has few tributaries,
the largest being the Hoosac and the Mohawk. Its lower course is a
long tidal estuary, the tidal head being at Troy, from whence the fall
in level to the ocean is only about five feet. The estuary below
Manhattan Island expands into the noble New York harbor, enclosed
between Long Island on the east and Staten Island on the west, the
latter being the Indian Aquehonga, meaning the "high sandy banks." The
harbor entrance from the sea, at Sandy Hook, is eighteen miles below
the city. Inside Sandy Hook is the lower bay, of triangular form,
extending nine to twelve miles on each side, the Narrows, a deep
channel about a mile wide at the northeastern angle, opening into the
upper bay, which is an irregular oval, about eight by five miles. This
extends northward into the Hudson River, westward into Newark Bay, and
has the tidal strait of East River leading north to Long Island Sound,
on the eastern side of Manhattan. Within the bays and rivers around
New York there are over a hundred miles of available anchorage ground,
and the Government is now making a channel to the sea through Sandy
Hook bar, forty feet deep at low water.
ENTERING NEW YORK HARBOR.
The approach from the sea to Sandy Hook is first guided for the modern
navigator by the flashing white light on Fire Island, a low sand-strip
on the Long Island Coast; and then there rise in front the Highlands
of the Navesink, on the Jersey Coast south of Sandy Hook, with a pair
of twin lighthouses perched upon their green slopes. The Hook, a long
strip of yellow sand enclosing the harbor, also has another lighthouse
on its northern end. Here are the expanding works of a formidable fort
defending the harbor entrance, and an artillery trial and proving
ground. Behind the Navesink Highlands and the Hook, the Jersey shore
of the lower bay stretches far back westward into Raritan Bay, thrust
up into the land between New Jersey and Staten Island. The green hills
of this island, crowned with villas, make the northwestern boundary
of the bay. To the right hand of the Hook, and north of the entrance,
is the sand strip of Coney Island, with its stretch of hotels and
buildings, the popular seashore resort of New York. Within the Hook is
the lower Quarantine on the west bank of Romer Shoal, and over
opposite is Gravesend Bay, behind Coney Island. The Narrows, where the
Hudson has forced an outlet through a broken-down mountain range, is
partly obstructed by an island reef of rocks. The hill-slopes,
together with the island, are fortified, Forts Hamilton and Tompkins
being on either hand, named after Alexander Hamilton and Daniel D.
Tompkins, the latter having been a Governor of New York and
Vice-President of the United States. On the island is the little red
sandstone Fort Lafayette, where many famous political prisoners were
confined during the Civil War. Within the Narrows the upper bay
spreads out, the high Staten Island hills, covered with noble
mansions, rising on the left hand, while on the right are the hamlets
on the lower shores of Long Island, with the distant tombs of
Greenwood Cemetery behind. The villages of Clifton and Stapleton and
the Quarantine Station are on Staten Island, Stapleton being the
yachting headquarters. Bedloe's and Ellis's Islands are passed, the
latter being the landing-place of arriving emigrants, while on the
former, now called Liberty Island, is the colossal Liberty Statue
presented to the United States by France in commemoration of the
Centenary of the Declaration of Independence in 1876. This statue,
designed by Bartholdi and erected ten years later, is a female figure
holding aloft a torch--"Liberty enlightening the world." It is made of
copper and iron, and weighs two hundred and twenty-five tons. The
statue is one hundred and fifty-one feet high, and stands on a granite
pedestal one hundred and fifty-five feet high.
Over on the western side, behind these small islands, the Jersey shore
recedes, and the strait making the boundary of Staten Island, which
the Dutch named the Kill von Kull, stretches around behind that island
to Arthur Kill and sundry railway coal-shipping ports on its banks,
where the great coal roads come out from the Pennsylvania mines. Just
in the entrance to East River is Governor's Island, with an
old-fashioned circular stone fort, called Castle William, and the more
modern defensive work, Fort Columbus. On Governor's Island is the
United States Army headquarters. This old Castle William, with another
very similar circular fort, then called Castle Clinton, on the Battery
at the lower end of Manhattan Island, were the defensive works of New
York in the eighteenth century. Castle Clinton is now an aquarium. Red
Hook, the jutting point of Brooklyn, is opposite Governor's Island,
and above it the East River opens, the strait flowing between New York
and Brooklyn, and connecting the harbor with Long Island Sound,
twenty miles distant, beyond the famous "Hell Gate," once the terror
of the mariner, but since improved by costly rock excavations which
have made a deep and safe channel. Through the East River and Hell
Gate flows the greater part of the Hudson River tidal current. Both
the East and North Rivers are lined on either side for miles by piers
crowded with shipping, and the tall towers and ponderous cables of the
Brooklyn Bridge rise high above the East River, while behind the
foliage-covered Battery Park stretches the metropolis, with its many
huge buildings.
JERSEY CITY AND STATEN ISLAND.
Communipaw, the lower end of Jersey City, is opposite the Battery, and
above it the Jersey City front on the Hudson River is occupied for
miles by railway terminals, making a succession of piers, ferry-houses
and grain elevators. Originally Jersey City was the sandy peninsula of
Paulus Hook, a tongue of flat farming land stretching down between the
Hudson River and Newark Bay. The termination of this peninsula is
Communipaw, long a sleepy village, originally granted to a Dutch West
India Company Director--Michael Pauw. He was proud of this domain, of
which he was the patroon, so he called it Pavonia or Communipauw, the
"Commune of Pauw." His Dutch garrison massacred the Indians in the
neighborhood, and soon afterwards, in retaliation, they exterminated
all the Dutch but one family. At Jersey City there come out to the
Hudson River all the great Trunk Line railways from the West, with the
single exception of the New York Central Railroad. In the Revolution,
the site of the present Pennsylvania Railroad Terminal Station was a
British fortification, which was partly stormed and captured, with a
number of prisoners, in 1779, by Major Henry Lee. Jersey City is
entirely a growth of the nineteenth century, at the beginning of which
it had a population of only thirteen persons, living in a single
house. It now has two hundred and fifty thousand, and is replete with
important manufacturing establishments, its expansion having come from
the overflow of New York and the wonderful development of its railway
system. While spreading over much surface, yet it presents little
attraction beyond the enormous railway terminals and factories. The
traveller rarely stops there, but rushes through to get into or out of
New York. To the northward is Hoboken, with sixty thousand people,
including many Germans, and it has large silk factories. Here, in
strange contrast with the commercial aspect of everything around, the
river front rises in a bluff shore, crowned by a grove of trees and
running up into a low mound, whereon is the "Stevens Castle." This was
the home of Edwin A. Stevens one of the projectors of the Camden and
Amboy Railroad. He endowed the Stevens Institute of Technology at
Hoboken, and spent his declining years and much of his railway
fortune in building the "Stevens Battery," a noted warship, for New
York harbor defense, which he bequeathed his native State of New
Jersey, and that Commonwealth shortly afterwards sold it to be broken
up for old iron. Beyond is the village of Weehawken, with the Elysian
Fields, where Aaron Burr killed Alexander Hamilton in the duel of
1804, then a pleasant rural resort, but now largely absorbed by
railway terminals. This duel arose from political quarrels, and at the
first fire Hamilton received a wound from which he died the next day.
Behind Jersey City rises the long rocky ridge of Bergen Hill, through
which all but one of the railways cut their routes by tunnels or deep
fissures, and its outcroppings above Weehawken come forward to the
Hudson River bank in the grand escarpment of the Palisades. These
remarkable columnar formations of trap rock extend for twenty miles
along the western shore of the river, and in part appear to be built
up of basalt. To connect the various railways terminating at Jersey
City with New York, a tunnel is being constructed under the Hudson
River; and two others, and also a gigantic bridge, are projected.
I have already referred to Staten Island, which is the western border
of New York harbor, where its pleasant hill-slopes add so much to the
scenic beauty. The narrow "Kills," stretching for nearly twenty miles
down to Perth Amboy, make its western boundary, separating the
island, which is the Borough of Richmond in Greater New York, from New
Jersey, to which by right it is said to belong. It covers about sixty
square miles, with its diversified hill-slopes rising in some places
to an elevation of over four hundred feet, and has probably seventy
thousand population. It is shaped something like a leaf, hung, as it
were, upon the long projecting peninsula between Newark Bay and New
York harbor, the Kill von Kull stretching westward to divide it from
this peninsula, which at that part is the town and port of Bayonne,
running off into Bergen Point at the lower end of Bergen Hill. It was
from Bergen Point that General Washington in 1787 was rowed in a barge
to New York, to be inaugurated the first President of the United
States. From Elizabethport, on the western side of Newark Bay, the
Arthur Kill stretches, a narrow strait, far southward, broadening
somewhat into Staten Island Sound, and debouching at Perth Amboy into
the western end of Raritan Bay. Perth Amboy was the terminus of the
original line of the Camden and Amboy Railroad. It was the capital of
the Colonial Province of New Jersey two centuries ago, and its
eligible position at the confluence of Staten Island Sound and the
Raritan River and Bay, the point of union of the various interior
water ways, made it at that early period very ambitious. In fact,
"Perthtown, or Ompoge on Ambo" (the Indian name for the point, which
meant "round and hollow"), then rivalled New York in commercial
importance. Its name came from the Earl of Perth, one of the grantees
of lands in East Jersey. Early travellers flocked thither, praising
its merits; and even William Penn was persuaded to go over and look at
it, oracularly declaring, "I have never seen such before in my life,"
whatever that might have meant. But New York, with its great harbor,
ultimately overshadowed Amboy, and it has since dropped out, even as a
way-station on the route between the two leading cities. It has about
fifteen thousand inhabitants, and its trade chiefly consists in
shipping coal and fire-clay, brought out by the railroads.
The loyal Jerseyman will never forgive New York for having captured
Staten Island. After the English came to New York in 1664, under the
grant of King Charles II. to the Duke of York of all the country from
Canada down to Virginia, the Duke granted to Berkeley and Carteret the
portion lying between the Hudson and Delaware Rivers. This grant
grieved the New Yorkers, for they said it gave away the best lands
around their harbor, so they tried to get it all back, and managed to
capture Staten Island. Some sharp fellow invented the fiction, on
which they resolutely insisted, that the Arthur Kill was really the
Hudson River; and, taking possession, they never gave it up. A legal
contest was fought for over one hundred and fifty years, and it was
not until 1833 that a treaty between the two States declared the
Kills to be their boundary. Staten Island is about sixteen miles long,
and from its eastern slopes has a noble outlook over the Lower New
York Bay towards the ocean. Fine beaches line these coasts, which rise
sharply into hills inland, and most of the eligible sites are crowned
with villas. It was at Stapleton, on Staten Island, that Commodore
Cornelius Vanderbilt, the head of the great family, was born in 1794,
and he laid the foundation of his great fortune, at the age of sixteen
years, by sailing a ferryboat to New York, six miles away. Upon a
plateau in the centre of the island is the village of New Dorp, the
original settlement of the Vanderbilts, a farm of about four hundred
acres. Here the Commodore came in his youth, and here his son, William
H. Vanderbilt, was born and lived for many years, an agricultural
laborer for his father. Here also is a little Moravian church they
attended, and upon a terraced hill behind it, the highest part of the
island, is the spacious gray granite mausoleum, within which rest the
two great millionaires, father and son, with some of their children.
In the old churchyard are the graves of many other Vanderbilts and
their collaterals. At Port Richmond, over on the Kill, the most
considerable town on the island, and formerly the county-seat, is the
house, now a hotel, in which Aaron Burr died in 1836.
SOME NEW JERSEY TOWNS.
Westward from Bergen Hill and the Palisades are the meadows which
stretch down to Newark Bay, and meandering through them to form it are
the Hackensack and Passaic Rivers. The name of Hackensack means, in
the original Indian dialect, the "lowlands," and it was given by them
also to the channel around Bergen Point, by which the waters of Newark
Bay reach New York harbor. This river drains the western slopes of the
Palisades. Passaic means "the valley," and the name seems to have
referred to the country through which that stream flows. The Passaic
River, which is ninety miles long, comes from the mountains of
Northern New Jersey and flows a tortuous course to Paterson, fifteen
miles northwest of Jersey City, where there is an admirable water
power which has created a manufacturing town of over one hundred
thousand people, having extensive silk and cotton mills and locomotive
factories. The river describes a curve, forming the boundary of the
city for more than nine miles, on all sides excepting the south, and
its rapids and falls descend seventy-two feet, the falls being a most
picturesque cataract with fifty feet perpendicular descent. The town
was named after Governor William Paterson of New Jersey, who signed
its incorporation act July 4, 1792, the manufacturing corporation
projecting it having been formed under the auspices of Alexander
Hamilton.
The Passaic flows onward past Newark nine miles west of Jersey City,
another extensive and prosperous manufacturing city of two hundred and
fifty thousand inhabitants, turning out goods of all kinds with an
annual value of over $100,000,000. This city spreads far across the
flat surface above Newark Bay and adjoining the Passaic, and to the
northward its suburbs run up into the attractive hills of Orange.
Market Street is a fine highway through the business section, while a
large area is covered by comfortable and handsome residences, among
which passes Broad Street, its finest avenue, one hundred and
thirty-two feet wide, shaded by majestic trees, bordered with many
ornamental buildings, and skirting three attractive parks embowered
with elms. Newark is a great iron and steel centre, makes fine
jewelry, good carriages and excellent leather, and also brews much
lager beer. Yet few would suppose it had a strictly Puritan origin. In
1666, hearing the praises of East Jersey, a body of discontented men
of Connecticut, headed by their pastor, Abraham Pierson, journeyed to
the Passaic meadows and bought these lands from the Hackensack Indians
"for one hundred and thirty pounds, twelve blankets and twelve guns."
In early life the pastor had preached at Newark in England, for which
he had quite an affection, and he gave the Jersey settlement its name.
When Philadelphia was founded, the fame of Newark spread down there as
a producer of excellent cider and seductive Jersey apple jack. Its
most famous son of modern times was General Phil Kearney.
Five miles beyond Newark the diminutive Elizabeth River flows down to
the Kills, and here is the city of Elizabeth, with fifty thousand
people, noted as one of the handsomest of the Jersey towns. Like
Newark and Paterson, it is really an outlying suburb of New York,
providing homes for much of the overflow of population, who rush into
the metropolis for business every morning, and back again every
evening. Under the name of Elizabethport it spreads down to the Arthur
Kill, and over there are most of its factories and extensive
coal-shipping piers. The original settlement dates from 1665, when it
was named in honor of Lady Elizabeth, wife of Sir George Carteret, one
of the grantees of East Jersey. The early inhabitants were largely
Puritans, and its chief establishment is the extensive works of the
Singer Sewing Machine Company. Here was founded the College of New
Jersey, afterwards removed to Princeton, and a tablet marking the
original site was unveiled in 1897. A few miles beyond, another little
river flows down to the Kills, first named after old Rahwack, the
Indian sachem whose tribe owned the land thereabouts, and here is
another thriving town, Rahway, which is noted for its carriages. At
Menlo Park, nearby, the electrical inventor, Thomas A. Edison,
sustained by New York capital, toiled for years in seclusion to
perfect his discoveries, and developed the germ that has grown to
such vast proportions. The "Wizard of Menlo Park" afterwards located
his chief laboratory and his home at Newark. Then, crossing what are
known as the "Short Hills" westward, past many villages, among them
Metuchen, once the domain of Metuching, the Indian "King of the
Rolling Land," we come to the Raritan River, thirty-one miles from
Jersey City.
Here debouches the Delaware and Raritan Canal at New Brunswick, a city
of twenty-five thousand people. The Raritan flows through the red
shales and sandstones of Central New Jersey, generally a
chocolate-colored stream, and goes off to form Raritan Bay, fifteen
miles below. Factories cluster on the New Brunswick lowlands along the
river and canal, but there is a handsome town built upon the higher
grounds, encircling the lower and older portions like a crescent. The
Dutch came here from the Hudson River early in the eighteenth century
and found a village which had been started by some fishermen from Long
Island. They organized the town, naming it in honor of the Ducal House
of Brunswick. Its most prominent feature is Rutgers College, housed in
red sandstone buildings upon attractive grounds, alongside the
railway, a venerated foundation of the Dutch Reformed Church,
originally chartered by King George III. as "Queen's College," but
afterwards receiving the name of Rutgers from a benefactor in 1826. It
has an important adjunct in the New Jersey Agricultural College.
There is also the Dutch Reformed Theological Seminary, the first
established in America, and dating from 1771, its main building, also
named from its chief benefactor, being Hertzog Hall. An early
traveller, visiting New Brunswick in 1748, described it as "a pretty
little town with four churches;" and these quaint buildings are still
there, the ancient Christ Church being surrounded with the graves of
the first settlers. Eighteen miles to the southeast the Revolutionary
battle of Monmouth was fought in June, 1778, and a monument
commemorates it at Freehold (Monmouth Court-house). Sir Henry Clinton,
having evacuated Philadelphia, was marching towards New Brunswick,
intending to embark on the Raritan for New York. Washington, coming
from Valley Forge in pursuit, gave him battle. The day was very hot,
and the result was an uncertainty, General Charles Lee's misconduct,
for which Washington reprimanded him on the field, preventing a
victory, and at night the British withdrew quietly. Lee was afterwards
court-martialed and suspended from command for a year. Monmouth was
the scene of "Molly Pitcher's" famous exploit. She was Mary Hays of
Carlisle, Pennsylvania, wife of John Hays, a soldier in the First
Pennsylvania Artillery. Molly was with the army, and engaged in
bringing water to the battery, which was behind a hedgerow, her
husband managing one of the cannon. The British made a charge, and a
shot killing him, the officers, having no one to manage the gun,
ordered it withdrawn. Molly saw her husband fall and heard the order;
dropping her bucket, she seized the rammer and served the gun with
skill and dexterity. Next morning General Greene presented her to
General Washington, who conferred upon her the office of Sergeant. She
afterwards lived at Carlisle Barracks, and died there in 1823.
GREATER NEW YORK.
The Dutch city of New Amsterdam, which became New York by the English
conquest in 1664, was of slow growth. It had hardly more than twenty
thousand inhabitants at the time of the Revolution, being less than
either Boston or Philadelphia, and a map made in 1767 shows that the
town scarcely extended beyond Wall Street. At the beginning of the
nineteenth century there were sixty thousand people, and its rapid
growth began through large immigration after the War of 1812, and was
stimulated by the completion of the Erie Canal in 1825, which gave it
greatly increased foreign trade. By the new Charter of "Greater New
York" coming into operation in 1897, the city was made, next to
London, the largest in the world, being expanded beyond Manhattan
Island, so as to include all the outlying cities. It now consists of
five boroughs, Manhattan, the Bronx, Brooklyn, Queens and Richmond,
having an area of three hundred and twenty square miles, and a
population exceeding three and one-half millions. If Jersey City and
the other New Jersey settlements on the west side of the Hudson were
added, the population would be four millions. This great city is about
thirty-five miles long from north to south, and nineteen miles wide.
The long and narrow island of Manhattan stretches thirteen miles,
while it is not much over two miles broad in the widest part, and
sometimes narrows to a few hundred yards, particularly in the northern
portion. The Harlem River and the winding strait of Spuyten Duyvel
separate northern Manhattan from the mainland. The island is very
rocky, excepting the southern part, which is alluvial, and at the
upper end the cliffs rise precipitously from the Hudson over two
hundred and thirty feet into Washington Heights, and the surface
descends sharply on the eastern side to the Harlem flats. It does not
take the visitor long to recognize, however, that the capacious
harbor, the converging rivers and numerous adjacent arms of the sea
combine all the requisites of a great port, and they could not have
been better planned if human hands had fashioned them. There is a vast
wharf-frontage, for over fifty miles of shore-line are available for
shipping, thus accommodating an almost limitless commerce. This has
made the metropolis and continues its wonderful growth.
At the lower end of Manhattan is the Battery Park, of about twenty
acres, with the elevated railways coming over it from both sides of
the city, and joining at the lower point of the island in a terminal
station at the South Ferry. Here were located the old forts for the
city defense, but the park superseded them after the War of 1812, and
in the earlier years of the nineteenth century this was the
fashionable resort for an airing. The old circular fort, Castle
Garden, now the Aquarium, was formerly a popular place of amusement,
and here, under the auspices of the great manager, Barnum, Jenny Lind
made her first appearance in America in 1850. The Park contains a
statue of John Ericsson. The lower point of the island is Whitehall
Slip, and here is the Government Barge Office, an appanage of the
Custom House. To the northward of the Battery is the Bowling Green,
the space between them having been the site of the original Dutch
palisade fort which guarded New Amsterdam. A row of fine residences
was built here, which afterwards became the favorite locality for
steamship offices, and the new Custom House is now being constructed
on their site. This Bowling Green, a triangular space of about a
half-acre, was in the early days surrounded by the homes of the
proudest Knickerbockers. For seven years during the Revolution, and
until the evacuation, November 25, 1783, this was the British
headquarters. Here lived Cornwallis, Howe and Clinton, Benedict Arnold
occupied No. 5 Broadway, and Washington's headquarters was in No. 1,
on the west side, now occupied by the towering Washington Building,
rising nearly three hundred feet to the top of the cupola. To the
eastward is the spacious Produce Exchange, in Italian Renaissance,
with its huge square tower, part of the ground on which it stands
having been the site of the house where Robert Fulton lived and died.
Talleyrand also once lived on Bowling Green. In the centre is the
statue of Abraham de Peyster, an original Knickerbocker, erected in
1895. There was a leaden statue of King George III. here at the
opening of the Revolution, but it was pulled down when the Declaration
of Independence was promulgated in 1776, carried to Litchfield,
Connecticut, and melted into bullets for the Continental soldiers, so
that it was facetiously said at the time that "King George's troops
will probably have his melted Majesty fired at them."
BROADWAY.
The two smaller streets on either side of the Bowling Green, Whitehall
and State Street, unite to the northward and form Broadway. This is
the chief highway of New York, and one of the most famous in the
world, extending in various forms all the way to Yonkers, a distance
of nineteen miles. The long and narrow formation of Manhattan Island
puts Broadway longitudinally in the centre of the city, and
necessarily throws into it an enormous traffic. One can hardly make
any extended movements in New York without getting into Broadway.
Hence the noted street has its show, always on exhibition, of the
restless rush of life in the modern Babylon. The architecture of its
great buildings, which tower far skyward, excites admiration, and its
perpetual din of traffic, with the moving crowds and jam of vehicles,
is the type of New York activity. This wonderful street is eighty feet
wide between the buildings, and extends of that width from the Bowling
Green five miles to Central Park at Fifty-ninth Street; and from its
upper end, beyond this, the "Grand Boulevard," one hundred and fifty
feet wide, with pretty little parks in the centre, is prolonged
northward. In its course, which inclines somewhat to the westward,
Broadway diagonally crosses Fifth, Sixth and Seventh Avenues, and at
the Central Park boundary intersects Eighth Avenue. Here is the
"Merchant's Gate," entering the Park from Broadway, the opposite
entrance from Fifth Avenue being known as the "Scholar's Gate." The
intermediate entrances at Sixth and Seventh Avenues are the "Artist's
Gate" and the "Artisan's Gate."
A survey of Broadway gives the best idea of the characteristics of New
York. Its lower course is a succession of wealthy financial and
business establishments and huge office buildings, and the adjacent
streets on either side are similarly occupied. Banks, trusts,
insurance offices, and manufacturers' and merchants' counting-rooms,
railroad and steamship offices are everywhere. But in the midst of all
this display of worldly wealth and grandeur is the quiet graveyard at
the head of Wall Street, wherein stands the famous Trinity Church. Its
chimes, morning and evening, summon the restless brokers and business
men to attend divine service, though few may take heed. It is a
wealthy parish, with over $500,000 annual revenue, maintaining a
magnificent choir and various charities, and owns valuable buildings
all about. The old graveyard stretches along Broadway, and in Church
Street, behind, the elevated railway trains rush by every few minutes.
It is part of the valuable domain of Trinity Church that "the heirs of
Anneke Jans" have long been trying to recover. Anneke Jans Bogardus
was an interesting Dutch lady who died in Albany in 1663, having
outlived two husbands. The first husband owned the whole of the Hudson
River front of New York between Chambers and Canal Streets, with a
wide strip running back to Broadway. Her heirs sold this to the
British Colonial Government, and it was known as the "King's Farm,"
being afterwards given as an endowment to Trinity Church. This is what
the present generation of heirs want to recover, but thus far have
gained more notoriety than cash by the effort.
In 1696 the first Trinity Church was built, being afterwards burnt,
while a second church was built and taken down, to be replaced by the
present fine Gothic brownstone edifice, whose magnificent spire rises
two hundred and eighty-four feet. This church was dedicated in 1846,
and its chancel contains a splendid reredos of marble, glass and
precious stones, the memorial of William B. Astor, while the bronze
doors are a memorial of his father, John Jacob Astor. The churchyard
is chiefly a mass of worn and battered gravestones, resting in the
busiest part of New York, the oldest stone being dated 1681, for it
has been a burial-place more than two centuries. Near its northern
border is the Gothic "Martyrs' Monument," erected over the bones of
the patriots who died in the British prison-ships, moored over on the
Brooklyn shore during the Revolution. There are hints, however, that
it was not so much the reverent memory of these heroes that prompted
the erection of the monument as the desire of the vestry to stop the
proposed opening of a street through the yard. There is also a
remembrance that, while these patriots were in prison dying, among
their relentless foes was the Trinity rector, Dr. Inglis. When General
Washington came into New York in 1776 he desired to worship at the
church, and sent an officer to Dr. Inglis, on Sunday morning, to
request that he omit reading the usual prayers for the king and the
royal family. The rector refused, and afterwards said: "It is in your
power to shut up the churches, but you cannot make the clergy depart
from their duty." Among the noted graves is that of Charlotte Temple,
under a flat stone, having a cavity out of which the inscription
plate has been twice stolen. Her romantic career and miserable end,
resulting in a duel, have been made the basis of a novel. William
Bradford's grave is here, one of Penn's companions in founding
Philadelphia; but he removed to New York, published the first
newspaper there, and for fifty years was the official printer. A
brownstone mausoleum covers the remains of Captain James Lawrence of
the frigate "Chesapeake," killed in action in 1813, when his ship was
taken by the British ship "Shannon," his dying words being, "Don't
give up the ship." Here also are buried Alexander Hamilton, Robert
Fulton, Albert Gallatin and other famous men, almost the latest grave
being that of General Philip Kearney, killed in the Civil War.
SOME FAMOUS BUILDINGS.
The great number of immensely tall office-buildings on lower Broadway,
literally "sky-scrapers," so encompass the street as to give it the
appearance of a deep canyon as one gazes along it between them. The
Bowling Green Building out-tops the Washington Building, and there are
the Welles, Standard Oil and Aldrich Court Buildings, the latter
marked by a tablet of the Holland Society, being erected on the site
of "the first habitation of white men on Manhattan Island." Opposite
it is one of the most curious appearing of these tall structures, the
Tower Building, nearly two hundred feet high and only twenty-five
feet wide. Just above, the tall light sandstone building of the
Manhattan Life Company is surmounted by a cupola three hundred and
fifty feet high. The Empire Building rises twenty stories, and the
American Surety Building at the corner of Pine Street, nearly opposite
Trinity churchyard, twenty-three stories, three hundred and six feet,
being surmounted by the various weather-gauging instruments of "Old
Probabilities." Here are also the magnificent buildings of the Union
Trust and the Equitable Life Companies.
Opposite Trinity Church, Wall Street leads off from Broadway, with
winding course and varying width, down to the East River, following
the line of the ancient Dutch palisade wall which it has replaced.
Here is the financial centre and the domain of the bankers. One block
down, Broad Street enters from the south, and the narrower Nassau
Street goes out to the north. At this corner, on the one hand, is the
white marble Drexel Building, Mr. J. Pierpont Morgan's office, and on
the other the United States Treasury and Assay Office. The huge
Manhattan Trust Building also is there, rising three hundred and
thirty feet, and opposite is the Stock Exchange, while across Broad
Street from the latter is the Mills Building, the home of many bankers
and brokers. In Nassau Street is the magnificent building of the
Mutual Life Insurance Company. These financial structures at Broad
and Wall Streets are regarded as the most valuable real estate in the
world. The Treasury and Assay Office contain most of the gold owned by
the Government, and in the latter the kegs of gold are made up that
are shipped to Europe. It holds millions of gold bars that make annual
excursions in fast steamers across the ocean and back again, to adjust
our varying foreign exchange balances. The Treasury is a white marble
building fronted by an imposing colonnade and a broad flight of steps,
and here is a bronze statue of Washington on the spot where he was
inaugurated the first President of the United States in 1789, the
location being then occupied by the old Federal Hall, where the first
Congress met. Farther down Wall Street, the next corner is William
Street, where there is a massive dark granite building with an
elaborate Ionic colonnade. The interior contains a large rotunda
surmounted by a dome supported by eight immense columns of Italian
marble. This building was originally constructed for the Merchants'
Exchange, and it afterwards became the Custom House. It is hereafter
to be the office of the National City Bank, the largest financial
institution of New York. Wall Street goes on to the river, where there
is a ferry to Brooklyn. Down William Street is the broad, low, granite
building, with a columned portico, of the Farmers' Loan and Trust
Company, another financial institution of renown.
It is evident, as Broadway is traversed northward between the huge
office-letting structures, reared skyward, and among them the little,
narrow, crooked streets, pouring their traffic into the main stream,
carrying a vast, surging mass of humanity, that the crowded-in New
Yorker, deprived of lateral expansion, thus seeks needed relief by
mounting upward. Fulton Street here stretches across the island from
river to river, the turmoil from its conflicting streams of traffic
showing the full tide of restless development in lower Broadway. Above
is the white marble Park Bank and the enormous St. Paul Building,
rising three hundred and eight feet, twenty-six stories high. Opposite
is the sombre church of St. Paul, with a tall spire, the oldest
church-building in New York, built in 1756, containing the memorial of
General Montgomery, who fell at the storming of Quebec in 1775, and in
the graveyard a monument to Emmet, the Irish patriot. Just beyond is
the triangular City Hall Park, with Park Row diagonally entering
Broadway. Here can be got an idea of the rush and restlessness of New
York, for two enormous streams of traffic pour together into lower
Broadway, at probably the worst street-crossing in the world.
THE CITY HALL PARK.
The New York City Hall Park was the ancient "Commons," or public
pasturage, and it now contains the headquarters of the city
government, and may be regarded as the political and business centre.
It is enclosed by Broadway, Park Row and Chatham Street, a triangular
space, formerly a sort of garden around the City Hall, but now well
occupied by other buildings. At the southern extremity is the
Post-office, which cost $7,000,000, a grand granite structure in Doric
and Renaissance, with a fine dome and tower, which are a landmark for
miles. Around this Park, and in the many streets radiating from it,
are a vast aggregation of corporate institutions and great buildings
devoted to all kinds of business. Here are the offices of newspapers,
banks, trusts, insurance companies, railways, lawyers, politicians,
exchanges, etc., with lunch-rooms and restaurants of every grade,
liberally provided to feed or stimulate the multitude. The famous
hotel of a past generation, the Astor House, rich in historical
associations, stands on the opposite side of Broadway from the
Post-office. Along Park Row are the great newspapers, and here is
Printing House Square, adorned with statues of Benjamin Franklin and
Horace Greeley, appropriate in this region deluged with printer's ink.
Here is the Ivins Syndicate Building, finished in 1898, the loftiest
structure in New York, twenty-nine stories, its towers rising three
hundred and eighty-two feet. The tall and narrow Tribune Building, of
red brick with white facings, has its clock tower reared two hundred
and eighty-five feet, while beyond is the Pulitzer Building, of
brownstone, with a gilded dome, its apex rising three hundred and
seventy-five feet. The building of the American Tract Society on
Nassau Street is twenty-three stories and three hundred and six feet
high, with a restaurant on the top. Park Row runs into Chatham Square,
over which the Brooklyn Bridge terminal comes out, with elevated and
surface railroads all about. This is a location of cheap shops and
concert halls, and is prolonged into the Bowery, an avenue of the
humbler classes, lined with shops, theatres and saloons, generally
crowded, and having four sets of street cars running on the surface,
besides the elevated roads above. The ancient Dutch farms on this part
of the island were known as the "Bauereies," whence came the name of
the street.
Chambers Street bounds the City Hall Park on the north, and upon it
faces the Court-house, a massive Corinthian building of white marble,
finished in 1867, famous as the structure which the "Tweed Ring" of
that time used to extract about $15,000,000 from the city treasury on
fraudulent bills, or more than five times the actual cost of the work.
It stands on part of the site of an old fort, which in the Revolution
was the British outpost commanding the approach to the city by the
Northern or Bloomingdale Road, now Broadway. The City Hall, to the
southward, is a less pretentious and much older building, constructed
in the Italian style, of white marble with freestone at the back to
the northward, it being supposed at the time of its completion, 1812,
that "no one of importance would ever live to the north of the
building," then a broad expanse of farms. Here is the office of the
Mayor and the meeting-place of the Board of Aldermen, and its chief
apartment is the "Governor's Room," adorned with portraits of various
Governors of New York and Revolutionary patriots, and having among its
treasures Washington's desk and chair which he used when first
President of the United States, and also the chairs of the First
Congress. To the southwest of the City Hall a fine statue of Nathan
Hale, an early victim of the Revolution, executed by the British in
New York in 1776, faces Broadway.
Near Chambers Street and the northern end of the Park a noted building
stands on the opposite side of Broadway, a modest brownstone structure
without any pretension nor of much height, but containing a famous
bank, whose phenomenal success is everywhere known. This is the
Chemical Bank, originally started as a chemical manufacturing company
with banking privileges. The chemistry seems to have been a failure
and soon abandoned, but the banking talents were so well developed
that the shares of $100 par value have sold for over forty times that
sum. The capital is only $300,000, but it has amassed a surplus over
twenty times the amount, and is the strongest bank in New York. Among
the large shareholders are said to be three New York ladies who
married foreign titles--the Dowager Duchess of Marlborough (who was
Miss Pine, afterwards Mrs. Hamersley, and now Lady Beresford), the
Duchess de Dino (Miss Sampson), and the Comtesse de Trobriand (Miss
Jones). It is here that the noted Mrs. Hetty Green generally conducts
her financing, a lady of immense fortune and peculiar ideas, who has
been one of the greatest money accumulators of New York. Across
Chambers Street, and occupying an entire block, is the building that
originally was "Stewart's Store," where the late Alexander T. Stewart
made most of his success in the dry-goods trade, now converted into a
vast office building for all kinds of business. This was the outpost
of the "Dry Goods District," for Broadway northward for several
blocks, including a wide belt of adjacent streets, now deals with all
kinds of products of the mill and loom, clothing and similar articles.
Here are located the agents and factors for many mills at home and
abroad, and their traffic sometimes exceeds a thousand millions of
dollars a year. The pulse of the American dry-goods trade throbs in
this locality, weakening or strengthening as poor or good crops give
the farmers and working-people a surplus to spend upon dress. Mr.
Stewart once said that if every woman decided to pass a single season
without a new bonnet it would sufficiently diminish trade to bankrupt
this whole district. Canal Street crosses New York through the
northern portion of the district, a broad highway, formerly a water
course draining an extensive swamp across Broadway to the Hudson
River. In this locality, east of Broadway, are two famous regions--the
"Five Points," now, however, much improved, and "Chinatown." The
latter, in Mott Street, has its Joss House, restaurant, theatre and
opium joints, and is picturesque with swinging lights and banners. In
Leonard Street, standing where once was part of the swamp, is the
noted Tombs City Prison, thus named because originally it was a sombre
gray building in the gloomy Egyptian style, but this was recently
replaced by a modern structure. The Criminal Courts adjoining are
connected with it by a bridge.
PETER COOPER AND PETER STUYVESANT.
At Bond Street, in advancing up Broadway, are encountered the
booksellers, this with adjacent streets being the home of much of that
trade. In Lafayette Place is the spacious Astor Library, and in the
wide Astor Place is the handsome new building of the Mercantile
Library. The former is now a part of the New York Public Library. A
half-century ago the site of the Mercantile Library was occupied by
the "Astor Place Opera House," then a leading theatre, and in the
adjacent streets occurred the "Macready riots" in 1849. The rivalries
of Edwin Forrest and Macready resulted in an effort by the partisans
of the former to prevent the latter from playing in the Opera House
on the night of May 10th. The Forrest faction attacked the building
with stones, and the police being unable to control them, troops were
called out, and, firing several volleys along Astor Place, they
suppressed the riot and dispersed the mob, but at a cost of about
sixty killed and wounded. At the end of Astor Place and its junction
with Third Avenue is the Cooper Institute, occupying an entire block,
a large brownstone building with a fine front, founded and endowed in
1857, at a total cost of about $1,000,000, by Peter Cooper, for the
free education of men and women in science and art. His statue stands
in front. It also received in 1900 additional gifts from his executors
and $300,000 from Andrew Carnegie. Peter Cooper was a wealthy
manufacturer and merchant of the broadest philanthropy. At a recent
anniversary of the Institute his son-in-law, Abram S. Hewitt, speaking
of him, said: "Fifty years ago three men, all of whom started in life
as poor boys, got together and talked over various ways by which they
could be of benefit to the public. They were Peter Cooper, Ezra
Cornell and Matthew Vassar. The latter said he would found a school
for girls, and he founded Vassar College. Mr. Cornell said he would
found a school for boys, and he founded Cornell University. Peter
Cooper said he would found a school for both girls and boys, and he
founded Cooper Union. But Mr. Cooper's school differs from the others,
in that here, any boy or girl may receive an education absolutely
free of charge." Opposite the Cooper Institute is an immense red
building, the "Bible House," the home of the American Bible Society,
where the Scriptures are printed by the millions, in all languages,
for distribution throughout the world--over eighty different languages
and dialects being used.
Diagonally northeast from Astor Place runs Stuyvesant Street, formerly
the country lane leading out to the ancient farmhouse of old Governor
Stuyvesant, surnamed "Peter the Headstrong." Here was built "St.
Mark's Church in the Bowerie" in the last century, then a mile out of
town, and the quaint little Stuyvesant House still stood, at that
time, perched on a high bank near the church, having, with its
odd-looking overhanging upper story, been built of small yellow bricks
brought out from Holland. In the days of New Amsterdam this region was
Governor Stuyvesant's "Bauerie," and to it he retired when compelled
to surrender to the English in 1664. He lived in this secluded spot
for eighteen years, dying in 1682, and his brown gravestone occupies a
place in the wall of the church. He was the last of the Dutch
Governors, energetic, aristocratic and overbearing, and described by
Irving as a man "of such immense activity and decision of mind that he
never sought nor accepted the advice of others;" Irving further saying
that he was a "tough, sturdy, valiant, weather-beaten, mettlesome,
obstinate leather-sided, lion-hearted, generous, spirited old
Governor."
Returning to Broadway, for a mile or more it, with the adjacent
streets, is the great retail shopping district. Here on the pleasant
afternoons are throngs of shoppers. A short distance above, Broadway
bends to the left, displaying Grace Church, with its rich marble
façade, beautiful spire, and adjoining rectory, chantry and church
house, an unique ecclesiastical group, dating from 1846, when it was
far "up town," but now almost covered-in by the huge surrounding
stores. Fourteenth Street crosses beyond, and here is Union Square, a
pretty oval park of about four acres, adorned by an ornamental
fountain and statues of Washington, Lafayette and Lincoln. Large
buildings and stores surround the square, the chief being Tiffany's
noted jewelry establishment. Fourteenth Street is a wide avenue, with
an extensive shipping trade. To the eastward of Broadway is the
Academy of Music and the noted Tammany Hall. This is the seat of the
"Tammany Society," established in 1789 for benevolent purposes, but
now controlled by the Democratic political organization ruling New
York. The Hall is a capacious brick structure with stone facings,
surmounted by a statue of its presiding genius, the old chief and
warrior of the Lenni Lenapes, St. Tammany, who with outstretched hand
beneficently looks down upon the street. The sturdy Indian, however,
was probably more used to the mild and just methods of William Penn
and his Quakers on the Delaware than to the political schemes on the
Hudson, of which fate seems to have made him a patron saint.
MADISON SQUARE.
Broadway reaches Madison Square at Twenty-third Street, another wide
highway crossing the city, and also intersects Fifth Avenue, which is
the western side of the Square. This junction has a park of about six
acres, surrounded by large hotels and noted buildings, and alongside
the triangular intersection of Broadway and Fifth Avenue is a handsome
granite monument to General Worth, a hero of the War with Mexico. The
plateau on which it stands is usually availed of as the site for the
official reviewing stage for processions. This Square is the great
centre of elaborate civic and military displays, and has, with its
surroundings and the light stone of the adjacent buildings, an air
that is decidedly Parisian, it occupying much the same position for
New York as the Place de la Concorde in Paris, or Trafalgar Square in
London. In Madison Square are statues of Admiral Farragut (the finest
statue in New York), William H. Seward, President Arthur and Roscoe
Conkling. At the northwest corner of the Square was for many years
Delmonico's famous restaurant, since moved farther up town. Its owner,
after feeding wealthy New Yorkers on the choicest viands for several
decades, finally lost his mind, and in a fit of aberration wandered
over into the wilderness in New Jersey, and becoming lost in the
woods, actually died of starvation. The new Appellate Court of New
York is on the eastern side of the Square; at the northeast corner is
the Madison Square Garden, and at the southeast corner the Madison
Square Presbyterian Church, where the great clerical censor of New
York, Rev. Dr. Parkhurst, occupies the pulpit. Madison Square may be
regarded as the social centre of modern New York. Far to the northward
Fifth Avenue stretches, with its rows of palatial brownstone
residences, and towards the north-northwest Broadway extends for two
miles to Central Park, passing many hotels, theatres, and the tall
"French flats" that have been devised for residences in the crowded
city where the land surface is so scarce. It also passes, at the
intersection of Sixth Avenue, the Greeley and Herald Squares, with
statues of Horace Greeley and William E. Dodge, and the _New York
Herald_ Building. A short distance beyond is the Metropolitan Opera
House, the finest theatre in the city, rebuilt after a fire in 1893.
Broadway at Fifty-ninth Street reaches the southwest corner of Central
Park and intersects Eighth Avenue, and here is the Columbus Monument,
a tall shaft surmounted by a marble statue, erected in 1892. Broadway
then becomes the magnificent "Grand Broadway Boulevard," with rows of
trees, prolonged far northward.
FIFTH AVENUE.
Fifth Avenue, one hundred feet wide, is probably the New York street
that is most talked about, for they say the main object of working so
hard to get rich in the metropolis is to be able to live in a fine
mansion on Fifth Avenue. This great highway extends northward almost
in the centre of Manhattan Island, but it has an humble beginning,
starting from the original "Potter's Field," where for many years the
outcast and the unknown were buried and over a hundred thousand
corpses are believed to have been interred. When the city spread
beyond this cemetery it was decided to make the place a park, and thus
was formed Washington Square on Fourth Street, a short distance west
of Broadway, an enclosure of about nine acres. From this Square Fifth
Avenue is laid in a straight line six miles northward, to the Harlem
River. The fine Washington Centennial Memorial Arch spans the avenue
at the southern end, near the Square, marking the Centenary of
Washington's inauguration as President. In the lower portions the
famous avenue has been largely invaded by business establishments, but
above, it is the finest residential street in the world, there being
four or five miles of architectural magnificence, in which for two
miles it borders Central Park. The street displays the best dwelling
and church architecture, the progress northward into the newer
portion showing how the styles have changed. All railways have been
carefully excluded from this street. At the southern end the older
houses are generally of brick, gradually developing into the use of
brownstone facings, and then into almost uniform rows of elaborate
brownstone buildings, with imposing porticos reached by high and broad
flights of steps. The rich yet gloomy brown is somewhat monotonous,
but as Central Park is approached this is broken, as all styles of
designs and materials are used. Fifth Avenue has the great "Methodist
Book Concern" at Twentieth Street, and in this neighborhood are also
several of the leading book houses. The wealthy and exclusive Union
Club is at Twenty-first Street, with the Lotus Club in a more modest
house adjacent.
Northward from Madison Square the great street stretches up the
aristocratic grade of Murray Hill, with its rows of stately buildings.
Parallel and a short distance eastward is Madison Avenue, also a
street of fashionable residence, and second only to Fifth Avenue in
grandeur. At Twenty-ninth Street is the plain and substantial granite
Dutch Reformed Church, and to the eastward is an odd-looking little
church that has attained a wide reputation. It is a picturesque
aggregation of low brick buildings, set back in a small enclosure
between Fifth and Madison Avenues, and looking like a quaint mediæval
structure. Some years ago a pompous rector, when asked to read the
last prayers over the dead body of an actor, sent the sorrowing
friends to this church, saying he could not thus pray for the ungodly,
but they might be willing to do it at the little church around the
corner. The public quickly caught on, through newspaper aid, and the
result was that this attractive Church of the Transfiguration
performed the last rites in presence of an overflowing congregation,
and its official title has since been overshadowed by the popular one
of "the Little Church Around the Corner." It is much attended by the
theatrical fraternity, and contains a handsome memorial window to
Edwin Booth.
Mounting the gentle grade of Murray Hill, we come to Thirty-fourth
Street, the locality typifying the two greatest fortunes amassed in
America before the advent of the Vanderbilts. The whole block between
Thirty-third and Thirty-fourth Streets is occupied by the towering
Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, built of brick and sandstone in German
Renaissance, and occupying the land originally the home of the Astors,
while across Thirty-fourth Street is the white marble Stewart palace.
The ancestor of the Astor family, John Jacob Astor, accumulated the
largest fortune known in this country before the Civil War, his
estates representing the early growth of New York, and the wealth
coming from the advancing value of land as the city expanded. He was a
poor German peasant-boy who came from the village of Waldorf, near
Heidelberg, to London, and worked there prior to 1783, making musical
instruments for his brother. In that year, at the age of about twenty,
he sailed for America with $500 worth of instruments, meeting a
furrier on the ship, who suggested that he trade the instruments for
American furs. This he did in New York, and returning to London, sold
the furs at a large profit. Coming back to New York, he established a
fur-trade with England, and built ships for his business. He
prospered, and at the beginning of the nineteenth century was worth
$250,000. Then he began buying land and houses in New York, built many
buildings, and was so shrewd in real-estate investments that they
often increased a hundredfold. He was liberal and charitable, and
dying in 1848, his estate, then the largest in the country, was
estimated at $25,000,000. His chief public benefaction was the Astor
Library, which his son, William B. Astor, also aided, so that besides
the buildings it has an endowment of about $1,800,000. The great Astor
estates, now represented by the fourth generation, are estimated at
over $200,000,000.
The splendid palace at the northwest corner of Fifth Avenue and
Thirty-fourth Street was built by Alexander T. Stewart when at the
height of his fame as the leading New York merchant. Intended to
eclipse anything then known in New York, he expended $3,000,000 upon
the building and its decoration, so that this house outshone all other
New York residences until the Vanderbilt palaces were erected farther
out Fifth Avenue. Its latest occupant has been the Manhattan Club.
Stewart's fortune was accumulated through the facilities at New York
for successful trading, though much of his wealth was afterwards
invested in large buildings in profitable business localities, and
notably in great hotels. Stewart, like Astor, began his career with
almost nothing, but at a later period. He was born at Belfast,
Ireland, in 1802, studied at Trinity College, Dublin, but before
taking his degree migrated to New York as a teacher in 1818. He got
into the dry-goods trade in a small way near the City Hall Park, and
his business grew until he acquired all the adjacent buildings, and
put up the store at Chambers Street, and afterwards the retail store
farther up Broadway. Enlarging in every direction, his business became
the greatest in the country, with branches in the leading cities. He
was an extensive importer, and owned various factories making the
fabrics he sold. His business methods were profitable but unpopular,
involving the remorseless crushing of rivals, so that he had few
friends and many enemies. Yet he was charitable, sending a shipload of
provisions to relieve the Irish famine in 1846, and he made large
public gifts to aid suffering. When he died he was building on Fourth
Avenue an enormous structure intended as a "Home for Working Girls,"
on which $1,400,000 were expended. It was opened soon after his
death, but with such stringent regulations that a rebellion soon arose
among the intended beneficiaries, and it had to be closed. There was a
shrewd suspicion that the difficulty came by design, for the building
was soon reopened as a hotel. Stewart had scarcely moved into his
marble palace when he died, his body being put temporarily into a
vault in the churchyard of old "St. Mark's Church in the Bowerie,"
awaiting removal to the magnificent mausoleum preparing for it at
Garden City, Long Island. Then came the horrible news that the corpse
had been stolen to avenge business tyranny. The childless widow lived
in gloomy grandeur in the palace until her death, rarely seeing
visitors, and having watchmen pacing the sidewalk at all hours.
Stewart left no direct descendants, and his great business has gone,
like his estate, to strangers.
THE VANDERBILTS.
The construction of the white marble Stewart palace was the first
serious innovation made upon the rich brownstone fronts of Fifth
Avenue, the possession of which was a necessary adjunct to social
standing in New York before the Civil War. The material, quarried
generally in Connecticut, was in such extensive use that it gave a
distinctive coloring to New York, its sombreness and uniformity of
architecture making most of the residential streets corridors of
gloom. For years, as a local authority described it, "our new houses
and blocks were all turned out from the same moulds, and apparently
congealed from the same coffee-colored liquid." The builders, since
the war, have made large inroads with other materials, thus giving
more individuality to the finer buildings of later construction. To
the eastward, Fourth Avenue is tunnelled for several blocks under
Murray Hill, to carry street railways up to the Grand Central Station
at Forty-second Street, the open spaces above, giving the tunnel light
and air, being surrounded by pleasant little parks, so that the
widened street, called Park Avenue, is an attractive residential
region, the view being closed to the northward by the louvre domes of
the Vanderbilt railway station.
Continuing out Fifth Avenue, the "Old Brick Church" of the
Presbyterians, built solid and substantial, with a tall spire, stands
about on the most elevated portion of Murray Hill, the congregation
dating from 1767. A short distance beyond, at Thirty-ninth Street, is
the finest club-house in New York, the elaborate brick and brownstone
Union League Club, its spacious windows disclosing the luxurious
apartments within. Just above is the historic Vanderbilt house, where
the old Commodore lived--a wide, brownstone dwelling, having alongside
a carriage entrance into a small courtyard. The Vanderbilt fortunes,
the greatest accumulated, represent the financially expansive
facilities of modern New York as manipulated by corporation
management and the Stock Exchange. Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt,
born on Staten Island in 1794, in 1817, at the age of twenty-three,
owned a few small vessels, and estimated his wealth at $9000. He
became a steamboat captain, and went into the transportation business
between New York and Philadelphia, afterwards broadening his
operations, and in 1848 owning most of the profitable steamboat lines
leading from New York. When the California emigration fever began, he
started ocean steamers in connection with the transit across the
Isthmus of Panama. This business grew, and at the height of his
steamship career the Commodore owned sixty-six vessels. The finest,
named the Vanderbilt, which cost him $800,000, he gave the Government
for a war vessel, to chase the rebel privateers. As American
vessel-owning became unprofitable, he determined to abandon it and
devote himself to railway management, having already bought largely of
railway stocks. When he thus changed, he estimated his fortune at
$40,000,000. He got control of various railroads leading east, north
and west from New York, buying the shares at low prices, his excellent
methods improving their earning powers, so that their value greatly
enhanced. The greatest of these corporations was the New York Central
and Hudson River Railroad. When the Commodore died his estate was
estimated at $75,000,000, left almost wholly to his son William H.
Vanderbilt. When the latter died it had reached $200,000,000,
bequeathed chiefly to his two eldest sons, Cornelius, who died in
1899, and William K. Vanderbilt. The family are now housed in a row of
palaces farther out the avenue near Central Park, and there are
fabulous estimates of their colossal fortunes, which are the greatest
in America, and probably in the world.
Upon the west side of Fifth Avenue the New York Public Library is
being erected on the site of the old Croton Reservoir, which occupied
the summit of Murray Hill, and behind it is the pretty little Bryant
Park, extending to Sixth Avenue. This Library comes from the
consolidation of the Astor and Lenox Libraries, augmented by the
Samuel J. Tilden Trust Fund, amounting to about $2,500,000. North of
this, Forty-second Street crosses the city, having the Grand Central
Station of the Vanderbilt lines opposite Fourth Avenue, the only
railway station in New York, though other roads are expecting to come
in by tunnels under the rivers. At Forty-third Street and Fifth Avenue
is the finest American synagogue, the Jewish Temple Emanu-El, a
magnificent specimen of Saracenic architecture, the interior being
rich in Oriental decoration. Creeping plants tastefully overrun the
lower portions of its two great towers. There are numerous fine
churches on this portion of the avenue, two of which are rather more
famous than the others. When the old Dutch Governor Peter Minuit
bought Manhattan Island from the Indians, he founded an orthodox Dutch
church in 1628. This church is now a costly brownstone structure in
Decorated Gothic at the corner of Forty-eighth Street, having a
crocketed spire two hundred and seventy feet high. Its inscription
tells us it is the "Collegiate Reformed Protestant Dutch Church of the
City of New York, organized under Peter Minuit, Director General of
the New Netherlands, in 1628, chartered by William, King of England,
1696." The present church was built in 1872. Occupying the entire
block at Fiftieth Street is the magnificent white marble Roman
Catholic Cathedral of St. Patrick, in Decorated Gothic, with two
spires rising three hundred and thirty-two feet. This noble church
much resembles the great Cathedral at Cologne, particularly in the
interior. Behind it, fronting on Madison Avenue, is the Archbishop's
white marble residence, and adjacent is the old building of Columbia
College, the original King's College of New York, founded in 1754 by a
fund started from the proceeds of various lotteries, which then raised
$17,215. It now has new buildings elsewhere.
In the neighborhood of these churches there must not be overlooked, in
this part of Fifth Avenue, the residence of Helen Gould, a
square-built house with an elaborate portico, at the corner of
Fifty-seventh Street. This was originally the home of one of the most
extraordinary men ever developed in New York--Jay Gould. He was an
orphan boy in Northeastern Pennsylvania, who became a clerk in a
country store, a surveyor and map-maker, and finally was employed in a
tannery, and to sell its leather first took him to New York. Finally
he removed there, and soon became a leading Wall Street stock
operator. Nobody ever made such daring ventures; he became the "great
bear" on the market, wrecking, pulling down, ruining; controlling
newspapers, courts, legislatures, and being even accused of trying to
bribe a President. Then, as he acquired wealth, he became an extensive
investor in railways and telegraphs, and died, leaving a fortune
estimated at $80,000,000. He is buried in a magnificent mausoleum, a
miniature of the Pantheon, in Woodlawn Cemetery, in the northern
suburbs, and his daughter Helen is trying, by her beneficent
charities, to make the best use she can of the share of the money she
inherited. Westward from Fifty-first Street are the famous Vanderbilt
palaces where most of the sons and daughters of William H. Vanderbilt
reside, five grand residences which cost $15,000,000 to build and
furnish. Standing among them is the Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church,
said to be the largest and wealthiest in the world of this
denomination, where the late pastor, Dr. John Hall, is described as
preaching to $250,000,000 every Sunday. This is the most splendid
portion of Fifth Avenue, with grand residences all about, and as
Central Park is approached, there are also enormous apartment-houses
and huge hotels. The avenue reaches the Park at Fifty-ninth Street,
and for two miles its grand buildings face that attractive
pleasure-ground. At Seventieth Street is the Lenox Library, the
benefaction of James Lenox, and at Eighty-second Street the
Metropolitan Museum of Art, containing some of the finest collections
in the world, and patterned largely after the British Museum. Its
treasures of art and science, antiquities and museums, are valued at
$9,000,000, and it has an elaborate building fronting on Fifth Avenue,
within the Park.
CENTRAL PARK.
New York is very proud of its great pleasure-ground, the Central Park,
upon which has been lavished all that art and money could accomplish.
This Park is a parallelogram in the centre of Manhattan Island, a
half-mile wide and two and a half miles long, covering eight hundred
and forty-three acres, though nearly one-fourth of this space is
occupied by the Croton water reservoirs. The original surface was
either marsh or rock, very rough, and with topography generally the
reverse of that needed for a park. It took prodigious labor and an
enormous outlay to overcome the difficulties, but skillful engineering
and landscape gardening have made the most of the unsightly surface,
so that it has become one of the handsomest parks in the world, its
beauties increasing as the growing trees mature. Entering at the
"Scholar's Gate" from Fifth Avenue, the road within the Park leads by
a gently winding course past vista views and pretty lakes to the Mall,
or general promenade. Here, on pleasant days, thousands gather to
listen to the music. To the westward are broad green surfaces giving a
tranquil landscape, and looking northward through the avenue of elms
upon the Mall, a little gray stone tower called the Observatory closes
the view far away over another pretty lake. At the end of the Mall a
terrace is crossed bordering this lake, the ground sloping to its
edges. Here a fountain plashes on one side, and on the other is the
concert ground, overlooked by the Pergola, a shaded Gallery. Across
the lake, on the Observatory side, is the Ramble, a rocky,
forest-covered slope with paths winding through it, and on the highest
point a massive Belvedere. There are a menagerie and an aviary, and
the children have playgrounds and varied amusements. Beyond this
enchanting region the road winds past statues and ever-changing
beauties of garden and landscape, and comes out in a space alongside
the smaller reservoir, where stands Cleopatra's Needle, brought from
Egypt and set up near the Museum of Art. Then the road passes
alongside the larger reservoir, with barely enough room to get through
between it and Fifth Avenue, though both are admirably masked. The
northern portion of the Park has greater natural attractions and less
ornamentation, the land ascending to a fine lookout on the western
side, where there is a grand view over the Harlem River, displaying
the tall arches of the "High Bridge" bringing the Croton Aqueduct
across, and the tower alongside, which makes a high level reservoir.
The expanding city, however, is extending its buildings over large
surfaces north and west of the Park.
One Hundred and Tenth Street is the northern boundary of Central Park.
Upon the western side of the Park, in Manhattan Square, is being
gradually constructed the American Museum of Natural History, with
elaborate buildings and collections already exceeding $3,000,000 in
value. Near the northwestern corner of the Park, extending to One
Hundred and Twenty-third Street, is the long and narrow Morningside
Park, a high elevation held by massive retaining walls on the
hill-slope, and ascended by flights of steps. Morningside Avenue, its
western boundary, has at One Hundred and Twelfth Street what will be
the largest ecclesiastical edifice in the United States, the new
Episcopal Cathedral of St. John the Divine, of which the corner-stone
was laid in 1892, and building slowly progresses. The splendid St.
Luke's Hospital adjoins to the northward, while to the northwest, on
an elevated site overlooking the Hudson River, are the fine new
buildings of Columbia College in an enclosure of about twenty acres.
This great University has buildings and collections valued at
$7,000,000, an endowment of $12,000,000, and is attended by about two
thousand students. Farther westward, upon the high ground at the edge
of the Hudson River, stretches the stately Riverside Park for about
three miles, making a magnificent drive, along which many handsome
residences are being constructed. Near its northern end is the tomb of
General Grant, a white granite mausoleum ninety feet square and
surmounted by a cupola, which was finished in 1897 and cost $600,000.
The interior arrangement is like Napoleon's tomb in Paris, the body,
contained in a red porphyry sarcophagus, being placed in an open crypt
below the centre of the dome. Beyond Central Park, the broad public
roads known as the Boulevards traverse the island northward, and many
elaborate structures are being erected along them.
SPUYTEN DUYVEL AND CROTON.
The Spuyten Duyvel Creek, the strait connecting the Harlem with the
Hudson, winds through a deeply-cut gorge around the northern end of
Manhattan and makes it an island. Knickerbocker, the veracious
historian of early Dutch New York, tells how it got its name. Old
Governor Stuyvesant, he says, had a wonderful trumpeter, Anthony von
Corlaer, who persisted in swimming across during a violent storm, and
lost his life. Thus of it, Knickerbocker writes: "The wind was high,
the elements were in an uproar, and no Charon could be found to ferry
the adventurous sounder of brass across the water. For a short
time he vapored like an impatient ghost upon the brink, and then,
bethinking himself of the urgency of his errand (to arouse the people
to arms), he took a hearty embrace of his stone bottle, swore most
valorously that he would swim across in spite of the devil--_en spyt
den duyvel_--and daringly plunged into the stream. Luckless Anthony!
Scarcely had he buffeted half-way over when he was observed to
struggle violently, as if battling with the spirit of the waters.
Instinctively he put his trumpet to his mouth, and giving a vehement
blast, sank forever to the bottom. The clangor of his trumpet, like
that of the ivory horn of the renowned Paladin Orlando, when expiring
on the glorious field of Roncesvalles, rang far and wide through the
country, alarming the neighbors around, who hurried in amazement to
the spot. There, an old Dutch burgher, famed for his veracity, and who
had been a witness to the fact, related to them the melancholy affair,
with the fearful addition (to which I am slow in giving belief) that
he saw the Duyvel, in the shape of a huge moss-bunker (a species of
inferior fish), seize the sturdy Anthony by the leg and drag him
beneath the waves. Certain it is, the place, with the adjoining
promontory which projects into the Hudson, has been called _Spyt den
Duyvel_ ever since."
[Illustration: _Grant's Tomb, New York_]
The narrow and elevated northern prolongation of Manhattan is the
picturesque district of Washington Heights. Here is the attractive
Trinity Church Cemetery, laid out on the battlefield of Harlem
Heights, a hotly contested Revolutionary conflict, fought on September
16, 1776, and some distance northward, on the highest point of the
island, elevated two hundred and sixty feet above the Hudson River,
there are still seen the remains of Fort Washington, which was bravely
but unsuccessfully defended against British attacks in the following
November, and had to be abandoned. Across the Harlem River is the
ancient suburb of Morrisania. Here was Washington's headquarters
during those conflicts, and here lived Lewis Morris, one of the
signers of the Declaration of Independence, and his half-brother,
Gouverneur Morris, a noted New York statesman, who bore a striking
resemblance to General Washington. The historic old house at
Morrisania was afterwards acquired by Madame Jumel, and when Aaron
Burr, in his old age and poverty, met this wealthy widow, he courted
and married her in 1833, he being then seventy-eight years old. Here
they lived for a brief period "during the days of his octogenarian
love," as the annalist has it, but soon quarrelled and separated. The
house is now preserved as a Revolutionary Museum. Not far away was the
Grange, the home of Alexander Hamilton, who planted there a group of
thirteen trees named after the thirteen original States of the Union,
in which all flourished, as we are credibly informed, excepting the
"South Carolina tree," which persisted in growing up very crooked.
Upon the top of Washington Heights and the precipitous slopes of the
Spuyten Duyvel and Harlem there are many fine villas, and down in the
bottom of the gorge the New York Central Railroad seeks its route out
to the Hudson River bank. The historic old King's Bridge spans the
Harlem, deep down in the valley, while all along the river is the fine
new drive, the "Speedway," upon which the New Yorkers display the
qualities of their fastest horses.
The splendid Washington Bridge, built of steel at a cost of
$2,700,000, carries one of the Boulevards across the Harlem at a
height of one hundred and fifty feet; but the great landmark is the
High Bridge which brings the Croton Aqueduct over, its tall granite
piers and graceful arches displaying singular beauty from every point
of view. This aqueduct is forty miles long, and has been well
described as "a structure worthy of the Roman Empire." It originally
cost $12,500,000, subsequent improvements absorbing millions more. The
Croton River, coming down through Westchester County, falls into the
Hudson about twenty-five miles above the city, and its headwaters are
dammed, making artificial lakes gathering the supply. The Aqueduct was
finished in 1842, and, going through tunnels and rock-cuttings, has a
cross-section of about fifty-four feet and an inclination of one foot
to the mile, or thirty-three feet in the distance to the Harlem River.
About one hundred and fifteen millions of gallons go through it daily,
moving at the rate of a mile and a half per hour. Three huge pipes
carry the water across the High Bridge at one hundred and sixteen feet
elevation. There are eight arches in the river crossing, their
openings being eighty feet wide and one hundred feet high, to allow
the passage of vessels, and seven narrower arches of fifty feet span
on the banks. At the New York end of this picturesque bridge is the
tall tower, rising two hundred and sixty-five feet, which has water
pumped into its surmounting tank to supply the highest parts of the
island. New York, however, long since outgrew the capacity of this
famous aqueduct, so that a new one of much greater size was tunnelled
underground and finished in 1890, which is fourteen feet high, and
bored at an average depth of one hundred and fifty feet below the
surface, and is carried three hundred feet under the Harlem River bed,
its estimated daily capacity being three hundred millions of gallons.
The receiving reservoirs in Central Park hold over a thousand millions
of gallons. An imposing gate-house at One Hundred and Thirty-fifth
Street admits this supply into the northern city mains. The great
Quaker Bridge dam across the Croton is two hundred and seventy-seven
feet high and thirteen hundred and fifty feet long, making the most
enormous artificial reservoir in the world, holding forty thousand
millions of gallons. It has cost New York over $70,000,000 to thus
insure an ample water supply, free of all risk from drought.
THE BRONX AND THE NEW PARKS.
Across Harlem River, to the north and east, is the attractive region
of the Bronx, much of the surface being yet in its primitive condition
as maintained in the old estates that have come down from the early
days of the Knickerbockers. Here are being laid out several new and
large parks. Van Cortlandt Park, near the Hudson, about four miles
north of the High Bridge, covers about eleven hundred acres, Pelham
Bay Park, on the shore of Long Island Sound, nine miles from the
Harlem, seventeen hundred and fifty acres, and the Bronx Park, between
them, six hundred and fifty acres. These three great pleasure-grounds
are being gradually developed, and the plan is to connect them with
magnificent tree-lined avenues six hundred feet wide. The western
verge of Van Cortlandt Park finely overlooks the Hudson, and it is
intended largely for military uses, with parade-grounds and
rifle-ranges. It has an attractive lake; and the quaint old mansion
where lived the Van Cortlandts, whose successive generations owned the
estate, built in 1748, is preserved as a Museum of Colonial Relics. To
the eastward, a shallow and almost aimless little stream, flowing
from above White Plains down to Long Island Sound, with many pools
and rapids, and occasionally broadening into mirror-like lakes, was
long the eastern boundary of New York City. This is the Bronx River,
coming through a green, well-watered and shaded valley, a half to
three-quarters of a mile wide, and a considerable part of this
bewitching region makes the Bronx Park,
"Where gentle Bronx, clear, winding, flows
The shadowy banks between;
Where blossomed bell or wilding rose
Adorns the brightest green."
The wildness and seclusion of this place, its natural charms and
romantic character, make one almost believe that New York cannot
possibly be near such an attractive wilderness. Nature seems to have
especially designed it for a park, and art cannot improve it. Huge
rocks and giant trees flourish here, among them the Delancey pine, one
hundred and fifty feet high and straight as an arrow, standing in a
prominent position and having a huge branch reaching upward upon one
side, with interlacing boughs, making it appear not unlike a gigantic
harp. The Delanceys once owned the place. A "balanced boulder" is
nearby, weighing hundreds of tons, yet very easily rocked. The Bronx
in one portion flows deep down between high, rocky walls, where the
thin-armed white birches wave their slender limbs a hundred feet above
the water. Here was an early home of the Lorillards, now a Museum and
large Botanical Garden. Here are also the grounds of the New York
Zoological Society, the animals roaming in extensive enclosures, where
they are placed, as far as possible, in their native surroundings.
The peninsula of Throgg's Neck is the northern headland at the
entrance of East River into Long Island Sound. Beyond this, the waters
deeply indent the New York shore, and there is thrust out the green
peninsula of Pelham Neck. This is some distance beyond the Bronx.
Eastchester Bay is on the southern side of the neck; Pelham Bay beyond
it; and immediately in front City Island, reached by a long
drawbridge. To the north is Hunter's Island, connected by another
bridge. Hunter's Island and more than two square miles of the hills
and meadows adjacent on the mainland make the new park of Pelham Bay.
Various old mansions scattered over this domain were the homes of the
Hunters, Lorillards and other prominent families. The island belonged
to many generations of Hunters, and near the bridge a large gateway
has "Hunter's Island" carved on one of the marble gate-posts. Years
ago another wealthy man bought the island, and these words offending
him, he brought a marble-mason out from New York, who chiselled them
off, and carved instead the words "Higgins's Island." But after
Higgins had his day and was gathered unto his fathers, the next owner,
revering rather the antiquity of the place, had "Higgins" eliminated
and "Hunter's Island" restored, though the gate-post became quite thin
under this treatment. On the western edge of Pelham Bay Park is
Hutchinson's River, flowing down into Eastchester Bay, and recalling
the days of the Salem witchcraft. Poor Anne Hutchinson fled here to
escape burning as a witch, and on City Island built a hut on a little
cape still called Anne Hook. She lived there peacefully for a year,
harming nobody and declining every invitation to stir from her humble
abode. One day a young girl went to visit Anne, but found the hut in
ashes, and before the door lay the poor woman, where she had been
tomahawked and scalped by the Indians. No one has built a house on
Anne Hook since, and many have been the tales told of ghostly Indian
revels on bleak and rainy nights around the site of the burning hut.
On the mainland were Indian villages, and here have been found relics,
and in 1899 there was exhumed the skeleton of an Indian warrior.
EAST RIVER AND HELL GATE.
The Harlem River, flowing into the East River, divides Manhattan from
Ward's Island, and this, with Randall's Island to the north and
Blackwell's Island to the south, forms the group of "East River
Islands" upon which are the penal and charitable institutions of the
great city. The chief of these are on Blackwell's Island, a long,
narrow strip stretching nearly two miles in the centre of East River,
and barely more than two hundred yards wide. It covers one hundred and
twenty acres, and has the penitentiary, almshouses, workhouses and
hospitals, the spacious buildings being of granite quarried there by
the convicts. Over on the New York City shore is the extensive
Bellevue Hospital. In cases of vagrancy and minor crimes, the offender
is said to be "sent up to the Island." Ward's Island has a surface of
two hundred acres, and here are the Lunatic Asylum and Emigrant
Hospital. Randall's Island has the institutions for children and
idiots, while upon Hart's Island, out in Long Island Sound, are
industrial schools and the pauper cemetery. The buildings are all upon
a most elaborate scale, and it costs over $2,000,000 for their annual
maintenance. A steamboat ride along East River, with these extensive
establishments and their well-kept grounds passing in review, is a
most interesting suburban excursion.
The Long Island shore to the southward of Ward's Island is thrust out
in a way that curves and contracts the East River passage, which,
turning eastward just below where the Harlem River comes in, goes
through the famous Hell Gate to reach the Sound. Formerly, the swift
tidal currents boiled and eddied through this dangerous pass,
Hallett's Point, jutting out from Long Island, narrowing the channel,
and Pot Rock, Flood Rock, the Gridiron and other reefs making
navigation perilous. Many were the wrecks here, and frequent
ineffective efforts were made to improve the passage. The Government
finally undertook the work in 1866 under a comprehensive plan
projected by General Newton. His first task was the removal of the
Hallett's Point reef, a mass of rock projecting three hundred feet
into the stream and throwing the whole tidal current coming in from
the Sound against the great opposing rock called the Gridiron. He
first sunk a shaft upon the Point and excavated the inland side so
that it made a perpendicular wall which was curved around, and
designed for the future edge of the river. From the shaft, tunnels
were bored into the reef under the river in radiating directions,
being connected by concentric galleries. The design was to remove as
much rock as possible without letting the water in from overhead, and
then to blow the rocky roof and supporting columns into fragments and
remove them at leisure. This work began in 1869, the shaft being sunk
thirty-two feet below mean low water and the tunnels drilled out,
inclining downward under the river. In 1876 the task was finished, and
thousands of separate dynamite blasts had been placed in the roof and
supporting columns, ready for the explosion on Sunday, September 24th.
This being the greatest artificial explosion ever attempted, there was
much trepidation shown in New York for fear of the shock, while
everywhere the keenest interest was taken in the result. The blast was
entirely successful, being discharged by General Newton's little
child, who touched the electric key. The calculation had been so
accurately made that the great reef was pulverized, and the fragments
fell into the spaces excavated beneath without causing more than a
slight tremor in the adjacent region. By a similar system and more
extensive work, Flood Rock was afterwards removed from mid-channel,
the second great blast reducing it to fragments, being discharged in
October, 1885. The terrors of Hell Gate are gone, though the tide
still flows swiftly through the strait.
THE BROOKLYN BRIDGE.
The growth of population on Long Island has caused various new bridges
and tunnels to be projected for crossing East River. One new bridge is
to cross at Blackwell's Island, with a pier on the island. Another now
nearly completed, and estimated to cost $10,000,000, crosses from
Grand Street to Broadway in Brooklyn. The Long Island Railroad is
arranging to bore a tunnel under East River, to be operated by
electricity, to bring its trains into New York. The East River being
the locality for most of the foreign shipping, the bridges are at high
elevations, the great Brooklyn Bridge, which crosses from City Hall
Park, being one hundred and thirty-five feet above the water. Its
massive piers are among the tallest structures about New York, rising
two hundred and sixty-eight feet. This, the largest suspension bridge
in the world, was begun in 1870 and opened for traffic in 1885. The
piers stand upon caissons sunk into the rocky bed of the river, which
is forty-five feet below the surface on the Brooklyn side and ninety
feet below on the New York side. Their towers carry four sixteen-inch
wire cables that sustain the bridge, which is built eighty-five feet
wide, giving ample accommodation for two railways, two wagon roads
also carrying electric cars, and a wide raised footway in the centre.
The bridge cost nearly $15,000,000, the distance between the piers is
about sixteen hundred feet, and its entire length between the
anchorages of the cables is three thousand four hundred and
seventy-five feet. The cable anchorages are enormous masses, each
containing about thirty-five thousand cubic yards of solid masonry.
The whole length of the bridge and its elaborate approaches is
considerably over a mile. Its projector was John A. Roebling, who died
during the early work, and its builder, his son Washington Roebling,
who caught the dreaded "caisson disease" while superintending labor
under water, and for years afterward an invalid, watched the progress
of the later work from his chamber window on Brooklyn Heights nearby.
The bridge has carried an enormous traffic, taxing its capacity to the
utmost, and its passengers average over a million a week. The view
from its raised footway is one of the most superb sights of New York,
disclosing both cities, and the extensive wharves and commerce of
East River, the Navy Yard just above, and for miles over the
surrounding region and down through the harbor to the distant blue
hills of Staten Island.
THE CITY OF CHURCHES.
The Borough of Brooklyn, which has grown from the overflow of New
York, whose people are said to go over there "chiefly to sleep or be
buried," is popularly known as the "City of Churches." A large portion
of the working population of the metropolis, as well as the merchants
and business men, make it their home and dormitory, while there are
beautiful cemeteries in the suburbs peopled largely by dead New
Yorkers. Greenwood, overlooking New York harbor from Gowanus Heights
in South Brooklyn, is regarded as one of the finest American
cemeteries. In no other city can be found such an aggregation of
churches, developed in a past generation, and under the ministry of a
regiment of distinguished clergymen, then led by Beecher and Storrs,
so that the popular title was well bestowed. Brooklyn is entirely the
growth of the nineteenth century, a growth due to the inability of New
York to spread, excepting far northward. It stretches several miles
along East River and three or four miles inland, and grows rapidly.
When the century began, however, it was hard work to find three
thousand people there, and, strangely enough, they had to cross over
to New York to go to church. Just about the time old Peter Minuit was
buying Manhattan from the Indians, a band of Walloons first settled in
Brooklyn. Their descendants drove cows across East River to Governor's
Island to graze, the Buttermilk Channel between them being then
shallow enough for fording, though it is now scoured out deep enough
to float the largest vessels, the docks located where the cows then
crossed now accommodating an enormous commerce. At first a little
ferry from Fulton Street to Peck Slip, New York, accommodated the
straggling village, and it has grown into more than a dozen steam
ferries of the largest capacity, which (besides the bridge) will carry
daily a half-million people across at one cent apiece, this fleet of
packet-boats being the greatest transporters of humanity in the world.
The Indians called the region around Wallabout Bay, and Gowanus
Mercychawick, meaning "the sandy place." When the Walloons came along,
they began settling on the shores of the bay, which they called
Waal-bogt, afterwards gradually changed to its present name of
Wallabout. In 1646 the town was organized by Governor Kieft as
Breuckelen, he appointing Jan Eversen Bout and Huyck Aertsen as
"schepens" or superintendents to preserve the peace and regulate the
community. During the Revolution the British prison-ships were moored
in the Wallabout, and it is estimated that eleven thousand five
hundred Americans, chiefly seamen, died upon them, the shores of the
bay being full of dead men's bones, which the tides for many years
washed out from the sand. In 1808 these bones were finally collected
and put in a vault near the Navy Yard, which had been established on
the bay. This is the chief naval station of the United States,
covering about eighty-eight acres, including all the available space.
There is attached a large naval hospital, while between the two is the
immense Wallabout Market, covering forty-five acres, the largest in
Brooklyn, its buildings being brick structures in the old Dutch style.
Fulton Street is the chief highway of Brooklyn, beginning almost under
the shadow of the great Bridge. It is a broad and attractive street,
stretching six miles to the eastern edge of the city, and about one
mile from the river it passes the various city buildings, including
the Post-office, Court-house and Borough Hall, all handsome
structures. In front of the Borough Hall is a fine statue of
Brooklyn's most famous clergyman, Henry Ward Beecher. From Fulton
Street radiate several of the highways leading into the fashionable
residential quarter,--Brooklyn or Columbia Heights,--overlooking East
River, where the tree-bordered streets are lined with costly and
attractive dwellings. Here in Orange Street, in a very quiet spot, is
Brooklyn's most noted edifice, a plain, wide, unornamented brick
building, with the inscription, "Plymouth Church, 1849." Here preached
for nearly forty years, until he died in 1887, Beecher, the great
Puritan, whose family was so noted. His father, Lyman Beecher, like
the son, fought slavery and intemperance in Boston, Litchfield and
Cincinnati, and was an impressive pulpit orator. The old man was
eccentric, however, and after being wrought up by the excitement of
preaching, is said to have gone home and let himself down by playing
on the fiddle and dancing a double-shuffle in the parlor. He had
thirteen children, nearly all famous, and has been described as "the
father of more brains than any other man in America." Four sons were
clergymen and two daughters noted authoresses. Henry Ward, who ruled
Brooklyn, and Harriet, who wrote _Uncle Tom's Cabin_, were among the
great leaders of the anti-slavery movement.
Clinton Street leaves Fulton a little beyond Orange, and passes
southward through Brooklyn Heights, being the chief street of the
fashionable district. Embowered in trees, handsome churches and
residences border it, and Pierrepont, Remsen, Montague and other noted
streets extend at right angles from it to the edge of the bluff, where
the Heights fall sharply off to the river. Here, at seventy feet
elevation, and overlooking the lower level of buildings and piers at
the water's edge, are the terraces where the finest residences are
located, having a magnificent outlook upon the harbor and New York
City beyond. The ships land their cargoes within almost a stone's
throw of the palaces. In this district there are several large
apartment-houses and various clubs, a statue of Alexander Hamilton
adorning the front of the Hamilton Club at Remsen and Clinton Streets.
Upon Remsen Street is another noted building, the Congregational
"Church of the Pilgrims," a spacious graystone edifice with towers,
its most prominent tower and spire being a commanding landmark for
vessels sailing up New York Bay. There is let into the outer wall of
this church, about six feet above the pavement, a small piece of the
original "Plymouth Rock" whereon the Pilgrims in 1620 landed in
Massachusetts Bay--a dark, rough-hewn fragment, projecting with
irregular surface a few inches from the wall. As an author, lecturer
and preacher, the veteran pastor for over a half-century, Dr. Richard
Salter Storrs, acquired wide renown. Upon Clinton Street is the
elegant Pointed Gothic brownstone St. Ann's Episcopal Church, famous
for its choir, and on Montague Street the Holy Trinity Church, its
spire rising two hundred and seventy-five feet. But almost everywhere
are churches, there being about five hundred in Brooklyn. The noted
Pratt Institute is one of the best known charities of the city,
founded and endowed by Charles Pratt, an oil prince, as a technical
school, its spacious and well-equipped buildings caring for
thirty-four hundred students. The object of this noble institution is
"to promote manual and industrial education, and to inculcate habits
of industry and thrift."
GREENWOOD CEMETERY AND PROSPECT PARK.
A border of tombs almost surrounds Brooklyn, for in the suburbs are
the great cemeteries which are the burial-places of both cities. In
lovely situations upon the surrounding hills are Greenwood, Cypress
Hills, Evergreen, Holy Cross, Calvary, Mount Olivet, The Citizens'
Union, Washington and other cemeteries, occupying many hundreds of
acres. Of these, the noted Greenwood is the chief, covering some four
hundred acres on Gowanus Heights, south of the city. This is a high
ridge dividing Brooklyn from the lowlands on the south side of Long
Island, and it has elevations giving charming views. The route to it
crosses various railroads leading to Coney Island, which is the
ultimate objective point of most Brooklyn lines of transit. A neat
lawn-bordered road leads up to the magnificent cemetery entrance on
Fifth Avenue, an elaborate and much ornamental brownstone structure
rising into a central pinnacle over a hundred feet high. This entrance
covers two fine gateways, with representations of Gospel scenes, the
principal being the Raising of Lazarus and the Resurrection. The
grounds display great beauty, the ridgy, rounded hills spreading in
all directions, the surface being an alternation of hills and vales,
vaults terracing the hillsides, with elaborate mausoleums above and
frequent little lakes nestling in the pleasant valleys. Vast sums have
been expended on some of the grander tombs, which are upon a scale of
great magnificence. The attractive rural names of the walks and
avenues, the delicious flowers and foliage, the balmy air, the lakes,
valleys and points of beautiful outlook giving grand views over New
York Bay and the surrounding country, make Greenwood a park as well as
a cemetery, and it is generally admitted to be without a peer. Many
costly pantheons and chapels cover the remains of well-known people,
and one mausoleum is a large marble church. A three-sided monument of
peculiar construction standing on a knoll marks the resting-place of
Samuel F. B. Morse, the telegrapher. Horace Greeley's tomb has his
bust in bronze on a pedestal. A colossal statue surmounts the grave of
the great De Witt Clinton, the Governor of New York who built the Erie
Canal and thus secured the commercial supremacy of the city. The
romantic career of Lola Montez ended in Greenwood. Commodore Garrison,
who was at one time Vanderbilt's rival in steamship management, is
interred in a mosque. The tomb of the Steinways is a large granite
building. A magnificent marble canopy crowns the Scribner tomb, having
beneath it an angel of mercy. There is an appropriate monument to
Roger Williams. Here are also buried Elias Howe, the inventor of the
sewing-machine, Peter Cooper, Henry Ward Beecher, James Gordon
Bennett, Henry George and others of fame. The Firemen, the Pilots and
the New York Volunteers all have grand monuments, the statue sentinels
of the latter overlooking the bay. Among these magnificent sepulchres,
probably the most magnificent is that of Charlotte Canda, an heiress,
who died in early youth, her fortune being expended upon her tomb.
There is a high lookout upon the eastern border of this attractive
place, where the flat land at the base of the ridge spreads for miles
away to the sea. The Coney Island hotels, by the ocean side, are dim
in the distance, and far over the water the Navesink Highlands close
the view beyond Sandy Hook. The many railroads leading to Coney Island
can be traced out, as on a map, across the level land. Over on the
western side of the cemetery is another lookout, having a broad view
of Brooklyn and the harbor, extending to the hills of Staten Island
and the distant Jersey lowlands beyond. This is the verge of Gowanus
Heights, with the busy commerce of the port spread at its base. It is
this magnificent scene which the marble sentinels overlook who are
guarding the Volunteers' Monument erected by the city of New York.
Between Greenwood Cemetery and Prospect Park there are various
railways, all going to Coney Island, and also the Ocean Parkway,
leading thither, a splendid boulevard, two hundred feet wide, and
planted with six rows of trees, being flanked on either side by a
broad cycle-path. It is laid in a straight line from the southwestern
corner of the Park for three miles to the great seaside resort.
Prospect Park covers nearly a square mile on an elevated ridge on the
edge of Brooklyn, and it has great natural attractions which did not
need much change to improve the landscape, while the fine old trees
that have been there for centuries are in magnificent maturity. Its
woods and meadows, winding roads, lakes and views, combine many
charms. On Lookout Hill, rising two hundred feet, the most commanding
point, with a view almost entirely around the compass, there is a
monument on the slope in memory of the Maryland troops who fell in the
Revolutionary battle of Long Island, fought in August, 1776, on these
heights. The Park is ornamented with several statues, including one of
Abraham Lincoln, and there is a bust of John Howard Payne, the author
of _Home, Sweet Home_. It has an extensive lake, a deer preserve,
children's playgrounds, and a concert grove and promenade. The main
entrance is a fine elliptical plaza with a splendid fountain, and
adorned by a Memorial Arch to the Soldiers and Sailors of the Civil
War, and a statue of James Stranahan, a venerable citizen of Brooklyn,
foremost in all its good works, who died in 1898. The Brooklyn
Institute, an academy of art and science with a large membership, has
a large building in the Park.
CONEY ISLAND.
Pretty much all routes through Brooklyn, as already indicated, lead to
Coney Island, the barren strip of white sand, clinging to the southern
edge of Long Island, about ten miles from New York, which is the
objective point of the populace when in sweltering summer weather they
crave a breath of sea air. The antiquarians of the island insist that
it was the earliest portion of these adjacent coasts discovered, and
tell how Verrazani came along about 1529 and found this sand-strip,
and how Hudson, nearly a century later, held conferences with the
Indians on the island. But however that may be, its wonderful
development as a summer resort has only come since the Civil War. It
has a hard and gently-sloping beach facing the Atlantic, and can be so
easily and cheaply reached, by so many routes on land and water, that
it is no wonder, on hot afternoons and holidays, the people of New
York and Brooklyn go down there by the hundreds of thousands. Coney
Island is about five miles long, and from a quarter-mile to a mile in
width, being separated from the adjacent low-lying mainland only by a
little crooked creek and some lagoons. It has two bays deeply indented
behind it, Gravesend Bay on the west and Sheepshead Bay on the east.
The name is derived from Cooney Island, meaning the "Rabbit Island,"
rabbits having been the chief inhabitants in earlier days. The Coney
Island season of about a hundred days, from June until September, is
an almost uninterrupted festival, and nothing can exceed the jollity
on these beaches, when a hot summer sun drives the people down to the
shore to seek relief and have a good time. They spread over the miles
of sand-strip, with scores of bands of music of varying merit in full
blast, minstrel shows, miniature theatres, Punch and Judy,
merry-go-rounds and carrousels, big snakes, fat women, giant, dwarf,
midget and pugilistic exhibitions, shooting-galleries, concerts,
circuses, fortune-tellers, swings, toboggan slides, scenic railways,
and myriads of other attractions; lakes of beer on tap, with ample
liquids of greater strength; and everywhere a good-humoured crowd,
sight-seeing and enjoying themselves, eating, drinking, and very
numerously consuming the great Coney Island delicacy, "clam-chowder."
To the clam, which is universal and popular, the visitors pay special
tribute. This famous bivalve is the _Mya Arenaria_ of the New England
coast, said to have been for years the chief food of the Pilgrim
fathers. Being found in abundance in all the neighboring waters, it is
served in every style, according to taste. As the Coney Island "Song
of the Clam" has it:
"Who better than I? in chowder or pie,
Baked, roasted, raw or fried?
I hold the key to society,
And am always welcome inside."
The long and narrow Coney Island sand-strip may be divided into four
distinctive sections--a succession of villages chiefly composed of
restaurants, lodging-houses and hotels, built along the edge of the
beach, and usually on a single road behind it. In the past generation
the rougher classes best knew its western end or Norton's Point, a
resort of long standing. The middle of the island is a locality of
higher grade--West Brighton Beach. Here great iron piers project into
the ocean, being availed of for steamboat landings, restaurants and
amusement places, while beneath are bathing establishments.
Electricity and fireworks are used extensively to add to the
attractions, and there is also a tall Observatory. The broad Ocean
Parkway, coming down from Prospect Park and Brooklyn, terminates at
West Brighton Beach. East of this is a partially vacant, semi-marshy
space, beyond which is Brighton Beach, there being a roadway and
elevated railroad connecting them. Brighton is the third section, and
about a half-mile farther east is the fourth and most exclusive
section--Manhattan Beach. Here are the more elaborate and costly Coney
Island hotels. In all this district the power of the ocean is shown in
the effect of great storms, which wash away roads, railways and
buildings, and shift enormous amounts of the sands from one locality,
piling them up in front of another. Huge hotels have had to be moved,
in some cases bodily, a thousand feet back inland from the ocean
front, to save them, and immense bulkheads constructed for protection;
but sometimes the waves play havoc with these. Very much of the money
spent by the visitors has to be devoted to saving the place and
preventing the wreck of the great buildings. But this does not worry
the visitors so much as it does the landlords. On a hot day the vast
crowds arriving on the trains are poured into the hotels, and swarm
out upon the grounds fronting them, where the bands play. Here the
orchestras give concerts to enormous audiences. The piazzas are filled
with supper-parties, the music amphitheatres are crowded, and
thousands saunter over the lawns. As evening advances, the blaze of
electric illumination and brilliancy of fireworks are added, and the
music, bustling crowds and general hilarity give the air of a splendid
festival. The bathing establishments are crowded, and many go into the
surf under the brilliant illumination. Not a tree will grow, so that
the view over the sea is unobstructed, and out in front is the pathway
of ocean commerce into New York harbor, with the twinkling, guiding
lights of Sandy Hook and its attendant lightships beyond. What a
guardian to the mariner is the lighthouse:
"'Tis like a patient, faithful soul
That, having reached its saintly goal,
And seeing others far astray
In storms of darkness and dismay,
Shines out o'er life's tempestuous sea,
A beacon to some sheltered lee,--
The haven of eternity."
The tall Observatory, on its airy steel framework, rises three hundred
feet to overlook the wonderful scene. When the top is reached, the
first impression made is by the dissonant clangor of the many bands of
music below, heard with singular clearness and much more intensity of
sound than on the ground. This discord ascends from all sorts of
structures, generally having flat pitch-and-gravel roofs, forming a
variegated carpet far below. Coney Island stretches along the ocean's
edge, with the lines of foaming surf slowly rolling in. To the
eastward, at Brighton and Manhattan Beaches, it bends backward like a
bow, with semicircular indentations where the sea has made its
inroads. To the westward, the curve of the beach is reversed, and the
extreme point of the island ends in a knob having a distinctive hook
bent back on the northern side. Behind the long and narrow strip of
sand there are patches of grass, and much marsh and meadow, spreading
away to the northward, and meandering through the marsh can be traced
the crooked little tidal creek and series of lagoons separating Coney
from the mainland. Far away northward runs the broad tree-bordered
Ocean Parkway, with the hills of Prospect Park and the tombs and
foliage of Greenwood Cemetery hiding Brooklyn, and closing the view at
the distant horizon. Various railways stretch in the same direction,
some crossing the bogs on extended trestle-bridges. Many carriages are
moving and thousands of people walking about in the streets and open
spaces beneath us, while upon the ocean side the piers extend out in
front, with their steamboats sailing to or from the Narrows to the
northward, around the knob and hook at Norton's Point. Far south over
the water are the distant Navesink Highlands behind Sandy Hook and the
low adjacent New Jersey Coast, gradually blending into the Staten
Island hills to the westward. Around from the south to the east is the
broad and limitless expanse of ocean, where, in the words of Heinrich
Heine:
"The cloudlets are lazily sailing
O'er the blue Atlantic sea."
Far to the eastward, seen across the broad Jamaica Bay, are more low
sandy beaches, each with its popular resort, though all pale before
the crowning glories of Coney Island. There is Rockaway, with its iron
pier and railway connecting with the mainland to the northeast, also
Arverne and Edgemere, the distant cottage-studded Long Beach, and the
hazy sand-beaches of Far Rockaway. And as we gaze over this wondrous
scene down by the water side, the freshening wind gives a pleasant
foretaste of old ocean, and recalls the invocation of Barry Cornwall:
"The sea! the sea! the open sea!
The blue, the fresh, the ever free!
Without a mark, without a bound,
It runneth the earth's wide regions round.
"I'm on the sea! I'm on the sea!
I am where I would ever be,
With the blue above, and the blue below,
And silence wheresoe'er I go.
"I never was on the dull tame shore,
But I loved the great sea more and more."
THE ENVIRONMENT OF LONG ISLAND SOUND.
IX.
THE ENVIRONMENT OF LONG ISLAND SOUND.
The Isle of Nassau -- Captain Adraien Blok -- Roodt Eylandt --
Block Island -- Great South Bay -- Great South Beach -- Jamaica
Bay -- Hempstead Bay -- Fire Island and its Lighthouse --
Shinnecock -- Quogue-East Hampton -- Lyman Beecher -- John
Howard Payne -- Garden City -- Jericho -- Elias Hicks --
Flushing Bay -- Throgg's Neck -- Willett's Point -- Little Neck
Bay -- Great Neck -- Sands Point -- Harbor Hill -- William
Cullen Bryant -- Oyster Bay -- Lloyds' Neck -- Nathan Hale --
Ronkonkoma Lake -- The Wampum Makers -- Mamaroneck -- Byram
River -- The Wooden-Nutmeg State -- Brother Jonathan --
Greenwich -- Old Put's Hill -- Stamford -- Colonel Abraham
Davenport -- The Dark Day -- Norwalk -- Sasco Swamp --
Fairfield -- Pequannock River -- Bridgeport -- Phineas T.
Barnum -- Joyce Heth -- General Tom Thumb -- Jenny Lind -- Old
Stratford -- Milford -- New Haven -- Quinnepiack -- John
Davenport -- Yale College -- Killingworth -- Elihu Yale --
Steamboat Fulton -- East and West Rocks -- The Regicides --
Wallingford -- James Hillhouse -- Savin Rock -- Saybrook Point
-- Guilford -- Connecticut River -- The Sachem's Head --
Thimble Islands -- Saybrook Platform -- Old Saybrook -- Thames
River -- New London -- Groton -- Silas Deane -- Fort Hill --
Pequot Hill -- Defeat of the Pequots -- Pawcatuck -- Stonington
-- Watch Hill Point -- Westerly -- Orient Point -- Plum Island
-- Plum Gut -- Shelter Island -- The Gull Islands -- The Horse
Race -- Fisher's Island -- Gardiner's Island -- Lyon Gardiner
-- Captain Kidd and his Buried Treasures -- Sag Harbor --
Montauk Indians -- Money Pond -- Fort Pond Bay -- Montauk Point
and its Lighthouse -- Ultima Thule -- Isle of Manisees -- Block
Islanders -- Whittier -- Palatine Wreck.
THE ISLE OF NASSAU.
The first white man who sailed upon Long Island Sound was the bluff
old Dutch navigator, Captain Adraien Blok. Desirous of adventure and
spoil, he built upon the shore of the Battery, in 1614, the first ship
ever constructed at New York, a blunt-pointed Dutch sloop-yacht of
sixteen tons, which he named the "Onrest." The four little huts he had
upon the shore to house his builders and crew were among the first
structures of the early Manhattan colony. Fitting her out, he braved
the terrors of the Hell Gate passage and started on a voyage of
discovery on Long Island Sound, which he explored throughout. He found
the mouth of the principal river of New England, the Connecticut, and
coasting around Point Judith, entered Narragansett Bay, and cast
anchor before an island with such conspicuously red-clay shores that
he called it Roodt Eylandt, or the Red Island, on which Newport now
stands. Then he ventured out to sea and found the bluff shores of
Block Island, to which he gave his own name. Sated with exploration
and loaded with spoil exchanged with the Indians, he then returned to
New York and told of his wonderful adventures. His was the first
vessel, manned by white men, known to have sailed upon the
"Mediterranean of America," as Long Island Sound is popularly called.
This grand inland sea is generally from twenty to thirty miles wide,
and is enclosed by Long Island, the ancient Isle of Nassau of the
Dutch, stretching for one hundred and thirty miles eastward from New
York harbor, and being likened to a fish lying upon the water. It has
a generally bluff northern shore along the Sound, and the southern
coast, which is low and level almost to the eastern extremity, lies
nearly due east and west, the island finally breaking into a chain of
narrow peninsulas and islands facing the rising sun. The southern
border is a continuous line of broad lagoons, separated from the
Atlantic by long and narrow sand-bars. The chief lagoon is the Great
South Bay, eighty miles long, fronted by the curious formation of the
Great South Beach, stretching its entire length, and from one to five
miles wide. Upon the outer beaches, and within the lagoons, are a
succession of noted seashore resorts. Eastward, beyond Jamaica Bay and
Rockaway, is Long Beach, and behind it Hempstead Bay. Then come Jones'
Beach and Oak Island, with Massapequa, Amityville and Lindenhurst
behind them. Then we are at Babylon and Bayshore, with the Great South
Bay fronted by Fire Island, and beyond it the long sand-strip of the
Great South Beach. The famous lighthouse of Fire Island, the guiding
beacon to New York, one hundred and sixty-eight feet high, is flanked
by summer hotels, and its flashing electric light of twenty-three
million candlepower is the most powerful on the Atlantic Coast. The
Great South Bay spreads far eastward past Patchogue to Moriches, and
then comes Quogue and the Hamptons, where the level land rises into
the Shinnecock hills. At the eastern extremity are Amagansett and
Montauk. It is a long coast, fringed with lights to point the
mariner's way into New York harbor.
They tell us that when the "Onrest" came into the Sound there were
thirteen tribes of Indians on Long Island, and that it was the mint
for the aborigines, these tribes being the great makers of wampum, the
Indian money, for which its beaches and bays furnished the materials.
The Montauks, on the eastern end, were the most formidable, and were
usually carrying on wars with the Pequots, across the Sound in New
England. Out on Shinnecock Neck is the reservation where live the
small remnant of the Shinnecock tribe, there being barely a hundred of
them, each family in a little house on a little farm it tills. Around
Jamaica Bay once lived the Jameko tribe, all now disappeared. At
quaintly named Quogue, Daniel Webster used to go fishing and bathing.
The hill tops of the Hamptons have perched upon them the picturesque
old Dutch windmills which are so attractive to the artists, and at
East Hampton still stands the venerable gabled house where lived Lyman
Beecher in his earlier ministry, and where his elder children,
Catharine and Edward Beecher, were born. Here also passed his boyhood,
before he began wandering over the earth, the author of _Home, Sweet
Home_, John Howard Payne, his father being the village schoolmaster.
Payne's quaint little shingled cottage is East Hampton's most sacred
memorial. The inhabitants of East Hampton are so much in love with
their healthy home, which dates from 1648, that on its two hundred and
fiftieth anniversary, celebrated in 1898, the announcement was made
that they "like East Hampton in a thick fog better than any other
place in full sunshine." Eastward from Jamaica, in the western centre
of Long Island, are Creedmoor, the noted rifle range, Hempstead, where
the New York troops were mobilized in 1898 for the Spanish War, and
Garden City, the model suburban town laid out by Alexander T. Stewart,
containing a handsome Episcopal Cathedral. Not far away is Hicksville,
and to the northward the ancient town of Jericho. This was a tract
bought from the Indians by Robert, the brother of Roger Williams, in
1650, which afterwards became a place of Quaker settlement, and here
lived and preached for sixty years the famous Elias Hicks, the founder
of one of the Quaker sects. He was an opponent of war and of slavery,
and rode all over the country as a missionary preacher.
THE NORTHERN LONG ISLAND SHORE.
The steamboat entering Long Island Sound from New York, after passing
Hell Gate and crossing Flushing Bay, emerges from the strait of East
River between Throgg's Neck and Whitestone. Upon the end of Throgg's
Neck, the jutting point has the graystone ramparts and surmounting
earthworks of its ancient guardian, Fort Schuyler. Thrust forward from
the Long Island shore, as if to meet it, is the protruding headland of
Willett's Point, the Government torpedo station. Here also is an old
stone fort down by the waterside, with the extensive ramparts of a
modern fort on the bluff above. These are the defensive works
commanding the approach to New York from Long Island Sound. In the
neighboring havens are favorite anchorages for yachts. Beyond are the
expansive waters of the Sound, and far off southward, thrust into the
land, are the deep recesses of Little Neck Bay, made famous by its
clams, and protected to the eastward by the curiously bifurcated
peninsula of Great Neck. The northern Long Island shore is very
irregular, and rises into hills. Bold peninsulas and deep bays form
it, the surface being corrugated into hillocks and valleys, and
penetrated by narrow, shallow harbors. The waves of the Sound have
eroded the shores into steep and often precipitous bluffs of gravel,
sometimes rising a hundred feet above the water, where narrow beaches,
strewn with boulders, border them. At Sands Point is a great peninsula
protruding in high sandy bluffs, and behind it is the highest mountain
on Long Island, Harbor Hill, rising three hundred and fifty feet above
the village of Roslyn, at the head of the deeply indented
Hempstead Harbor, where lived at his home of Cedarmere, for many
years, William Cullen Bryant, who now sleeps in the little cemetery.
[Illustration: _William Cullen Bryant at "Cedarhurst," Roslyn_]
Oyster Bay is deeply indented into the land to the eastward,
surrounded by villas and attractive homes, and beyond protrudes the
broad, high headland of Lloyds' Neck. This was strongly fortified by
the British in the Revolution, and King William IV., then the youthful
Duke of Clarence, was at one time an officer of the garrison. It was
attacked and captured by the Americans who came over from Connecticut
in 1779, the garrison being taken prisoners. Subsequently the British
again took possession, and the French from Newport attacked them in
1781, but were repulsed. The hero of Oyster Bay is Captain Nathan Hale
of Connecticut, whose statue stands in New York City Hall Park. He had
been sent by Washington in 1776, across the Sound, to examine the
British defenses of Brooklyn, and, returning, was captured by some
Tories at Oyster Bay, and the next day hanged in New York as a spy.
Though but twenty-one years old, he met his fate bravely, saying: "I
only regret that I have but one life to give for my country." The
British destroyed his farewell letters, the provost-marshal saying
"that the rebels should not know they had a man in their army who
could die with so much firmness." Oyster Bay was bought in 1653 from
the Matinecock Indians by a Pilgrim colony from Sandwich,
Massachusetts, and a treaty made at Hartford established it as the
boundary between the Dutch of New York and the English of New England.
To the eastward are Huntingdon, Setauket and Port Jefferson, popular
resorts, and inland are Jerusalem and Islip, the latter settled and
named in the seventeenth century by emigrants from old Islip,
Oxfordshire, England. Here is the famous Ronkonkoma Lake, so named by
the Indians from the white sand of its shores. It is a pretty sheet of
fresh water among the forests, about a mile in diameter, of great
depth, and has neither inlet nor outlet, though its surface level
regularly rises and falls every four years. Here lived the chief
wampum makers, the Secatogue and Patchogue tribes. Their wampum mainly
consisted of the thick blue part of clam shells, ground into the form
of bugle beads, and strung upon cards a foot long.
ENTERING NEW ENGLAND.
Coming out of New York on the northern shore of Long Island Sound, the
land is found to be profusely sprinkled with outcropping rocks, a
development so universal that to one place the Indians gave the name
of Mamaroneck, meaning "the place of rolling-stones." These rocks are
gathered into piles for fences, which cross the surface in all
directions, and it requires serious effort to till the stony land.
About twenty-five miles from New York is the Byram River, the
Connecticut boundary, the old saying being that New England stretches
"from Quoddy Head to Byram River." This original Yankee land, though
the smallest section of the United States, has made the deepest
impress upon the American character. They have not enjoyed the
agricultural advantages of other sections, the bleak climate, poor
soil and lavish distribution of rocks and sterility making farming
hard work with meagre results, so that the chief Yankee energy has
been devoted to the development of manufactures, literature, commerce
and the fisheries; this wonderful race who have had to practically
live by their wits having admirably succeeded. Crossing Byram River
brings us into the "Land of Steady Habits," Connecticut, the
"Wooden-Nutmeg State," the special home of "Yankee Notions," which
gave the country the original personation of "Brother Jonathan" in
Governor Jonathan Trumbull, who was so useful to General Washington.
Consulting him in many emergencies, Washington was wont to remark,
"Let us hear what Brother Jonathan says," a phrase finally popularly
adopted by making him the national impersonation.
Connecticut has the great Puritan College of the country--Yale--ruled
by the Congregationalists. It has varied manufactures, to which its
abundant water-powers contribute, and in which nearly all its people
are engaged, its methods being largely the inventions of its own
sons, of whom three are prominent--Eli Whitney of the cotton-gin,
Samuel Colt of the revolver, and Charles Goodyear of india-rubber
fame. When De Tocqueville was in America, he was much impressed by the
development of the inventive genius, education and political force of
the State, which he described as a little yellow spot on the map, and
at a dinner he proposed a toast, saying, in his quaint, broken
English: "And now for my grand sentiment: Connect-de-coot--de leetle
yellow spot dat make de clock-peddler, de school-master and de
Senator; de first give you time, de second tell you what to do with
him, and de third make your law and civilization." Connecticut gets
more patents proportionately than any other State, one to eight
hundred inhabitants being annually granted; it makes clocks for all
the world, and leads in india-rubber and elastic goods, in hardware
and myriads of "Yankee notions," besides being well in the front for
sewing-machines, arms and war material. It is named after the chief
New England river, and its rugged surface is diversified by long
ridges of hills and deep valleys, running generally from north to
south, being the prolongation of mountain ranges and intervales that
are beyond the northern border. The picturesque Housatonic comes from
the Massachusetts Berkshire hills down through the western counties;
the centre is crossed by the Connecticut Valley, which has great
fertility and beautiful scenery, while in the eastern section the
Quinnebaug River makes a deep valley, and, flowing into the Thames,
seeks the Sound at New London. These many hills make many streams, all
having water-powers, around which cluster numerous busy factories.
The southwestern town of Connecticut is Greenwich, and in front
Greenwich Point is thrust out into the Sound, while, as the Yankee
land is entered by railway, on a high hill stands the Puritan outpost,
seen from afar--a stately graystone Congregational Church with its
tall spire. The ancient Greenwich village was built on the hillside at
Horse Neck, and it was here, in 1779, that General Putnam swiftly
galloped down the rude rocky stairway leading from the old church, to
get away from the British dragoons, on what has since been known as
"Old Put's Hill," and they were too much astonished either to chase or
shoot him. Beyond is Stamford, a busy factory town, where lived in the
eighteenth century Colonel Abraham Davenport, described as "a man of
stern integrity and generous benevolence." He was a legislator, and
when, on May 19, 1780, the memorable "Dark Day" came in New England,
some one, fearing it was the day of judgment, proposed that the House
adjourn. Davenport opposed it, saying, "The day of judgment is either
approaching, or it is not; if it is, I choose to be found doing my
duty; I wish therefore that candles may be brought." This scene has
been immortalized by Whittier. The town of Norwalk is beyond, another
nest of busy mills, spreading upward on the hill-slopes from the
Sound. The original settlers bought from the Indians in 1640 a tract
extending "one day's north walk" from the Sound, and hence the name.
Fine oysters are gathered in the spacious bay, and the people make
shoes and hats, locks and door-knobs. On the lowlands to the eastward
the Pequot Indian nation, once ruling all this part of New England,
the name meaning "the destroyers," was finally overpowered in 1637 by
the Colonial troops in the Sasco Swamp, now a cultivated farm, with
almost the only highly fertile land seen in the immediate region. Most
of the Pequots were captured and sold as slaves in the West Indies.
Beyond is tranquil Fairfield, embowered in trees and introduced by a
rubber-factory, its green-bordered streets lined with cottages, and
church-spires rising among the groves, while along the shore it has
the finest beach on Long Island Sound.
BRIDGEPORT, OLD STRATFORD AND MILFORD.
Pequannock, the "dark river" of the Indians, flows out of the hills to
an inlet of the Sound, where the enormous mills of the active city of
Bridgeport have gathered a population of over fifty thousand people,
in a hive containing some of the world's greatest establishments for
constructing sewing-machines and firearms, building carriages, and
making cutlery, corsets and soaps, while other goods also occupy
attention. The grand Seaside Park esplanade overlooks the harbor, and
towards the north the city stretches up the slopes into Golden Hill,
named from its glittering mica deposits, where magnificent streets
display splendid buildings. When the Pequots were exterminated in
1637, colonists founded this town, gradually crowding the Paugusset
Indians, who owned the land, into a small reservation on Golden Hill.
The great establishments to-day are the Wheeler and Wilson and Howe
Sewing-Machine Works, Sharp's Rifle Factory and the Union Metallic
Cartridge Company; and Bridgeport is also the headquarters of the
chief American circus. The stately and high-towered mansion of
Waldemere fronts the park, and was the home of Bridgeport's best-known
townsman, the veteran showman, Phineas T. Barnum. Born in Connecticut,
at Bethel, in 1810, he died at Bridgeport in 1891. He first developed
the financial advantages of amusing the public, and possibly
humbugging them on a grand scale, and by working upon his oft-quoted
theory that "the people liked to be humbugged," twice amassed a large
fortune. In early life he wandered over the country earning a
precarious livelihood in various occupations, and in Philadelphia in
1834 began his career as a showman. He bought for $1000 a colored
slave-woman, Joyce Heth, represented to be the nurse of George
Washington and one hundred and sixty-one years old. From her
exhibition his receipts reached $1500 a week, and she died the next
year. In 1842 he began exhibiting Charles S. Stratton, "General Tom
Thumb," a native of Bridgeport, born in 1832, whose size and growth
were as usual until his seventh month, when he had a stature of
twenty-eight inches, and ceased to grow. Barnum exhibited him in the
United States, France and England, and attracted world-wide notoriety.
Barnum started the American fashion of paying extravagant sums to
opera-singers, in 1849 engaging Jenny Lind to sing at one hundred and
fifty concerts in America for $1000 a night, the gross receipts of a
nine months' tour being $712,000. He subsequently had his fortune
swept away through endorsing $1,000,000 notes for a manufacturing
establishment that went down in the panic of 1857. His fortunes were
revived, however; he had museums in the leading cities, and in his
later life had the "Greatest Show on Earth," which set out every
spring from Bridgeport. Tom Thumb in 1863 married Lavinia Warren of
Middleboro', Massachusetts, a dwarf like himself, and he died in 1882.
To the eastward a short distance, and in sharp contrast with active
Bridgeport, is quiet old Stratford, with Stratford Point protruding in
front into the Sound, at the entrance of the stately and placid
Housatonic, which comes down through the meadowland just beyond the
village. Here there are neither watering-place hotel nor busy factory
to disturb the ancient order of things, encumber the greensward, or
encroach upon the sleepy and comfortable houses, where one may dream
away in the twilight, under the shade of grand trees that are even
older than the town. Stratford is much the same now as when settled by
a Puritan colony from Massachusetts in 1639, the leader and pastor
being Adam Blackman, whom Cotton Mather called "a Nazarite purer than
snow and whiter than milk." Across the patches of marshland, adjoining
the Housatonic, is Milford, its half-mile-long stretch of village
green neatly enclosed, and its houses upon the bank of the silvery
Wap-o-wang, back of which spread the wide streets lined by rows of
overarching elms. A colony from Milford in England settled here in
1639 and soon crowded the Indians off the land, establishing the
primitive church, which was the usual beginning of New England
settlements. Then, true to the American instinct, they proceeded to
hold a convention, the result being the adoption of the following
platform:
_Voted_, That the earth is the Lord's and the fulness thereof.
_Voted_, That the earth is given to the saints.
_Voted_, That we are the saints.
They had a good deal of trouble afterwards, both with the Dutch from
New York and the Indians, but the saints ultimately possessed the
earth in peace, and their successors are now making straw hats for
the country.
THE CITY OF ELMS.
The city of New Haven, the most populous in Connecticut, having a
hundred thousand people, is built upon a plain, surrounded by hills,
at the head of a deep bay extending several miles northward from Long
Island Sound. The magnificent elms, arching over the streets and the
Public Green, and grandly rising in stately rows, make the earliest
and the deepest impression upon the visitor. In one of his most
eloquent passages, Henry Ward Beecher said that the elms of New
England are as much a part of her beauty as the columns of the
Parthenon were the glory of its architecture. The grand foliage-arched
avenues of New Haven are unsurpassed elsewhere, so that they are the
crowning glory as well as the constant care of the townsfolk. Among
the finest is the avenue separating the Yale College grounds from the
Public Green--a magnificent Gothic aisle of the richest
foliage-covered interlacing boughs. The Indian name for the region
round about New Haven was Quinnepiack, and the placid Quinnepiack
River, coming from the northward, flows through a deep valley past the
towering East Rock into the harbor. Old John Davenport was the leader
and first pastor of the infant colony that settled here. He was a
powerful Anglican parish pastor of London who had joined the Puritans,
and in 1637 was forced to leave for New England with many of his
people. They spent a year in Boston, but in April, 1638, sailed around
Cape Cod to the Sound, and landed at Quinnepiack, where they laid out
a town plan with nine squares for buildings, surrounding a large
central square, the Public Green. At the foundation, Davenport
delivered a most impressive sermon from the text, "Wisdom hath builded
her house; she hath hewn out her seven pillars;" and from this came
the original scheme of government for the colony by the seven leading
church members, who were known as the "seven pillars." The colony got
on well with the Indians, who revered Davenport, calling him "so big
study man." They bought the whole tract of one hundred and thirty
square miles from the Indians for thirteen coats. At first, however,
they did not prosper, their trading ventures proving unfortunate, and
they determined to abandon the place and remove elsewhere, selecting
Jamaica, and afterwards Galloway in Ireland. The ship carrying their
prospectors to Ireland sailed in January, 1647, but was never heard
from afterwards, save when, as the legend has it, "the spectre of the
ship sailed into the harbor in the teeth of a head-wind, and when in
full view of the anxious people, it slowly melted into thin air and
vanished." Then they decided to remain, and getting on better, in 1665
united their plantation with that of Connecticut at Hartford, under
the condition that each should be a capital, a compact observed until
1874, when Hartford was made the sole capital. The British in July,
1779, attacked and partly burnt and plundered the town, the Americans
galling them by desultory attacks as they passed through the streets.
They captured Rev. Naphtali Daggett, President of Yale College, musket
in hand, and with repeated bayonet-thrusts forced him to guide them.
When he was wearied and sore from wounds they asked, "Will you fight
again?" He sturdily answered, "I rather believe I shall if I have an
opportunity." Being forced to pray for the King, he did it thus: "O
Lord, bless thy servant King George, and grant him wisdom, for thou
knowest, O Lord, he needs it."
The great fame of New Haven comes from Yale College, having two
hundred and fifty instructors and over twenty-five hundred students,
the orthodox Congregational University of New England, which for two
centuries has exerted a most advantageous and widely diffused
influence upon the American intellectual character, and around it and
its multitude of buildings of every kind clusters the town. In the
year 1700 ten clergymen planned to have a college in the colony of
Connecticut, and for the purpose contributed as many books as they
could spare for its library. In 1701 it was chartered, and began in a
very small way at Saybrook, at the mouth of Connecticut River, during
the first year having only one student. The pastor of the adjacent
village of Killingworth was placed in charge, and for several years
the students went there to him, though the commencements were held at
Saybrook, and in 1707 the college was located at Saybrook.
Subsequently, for a more convenient location, it was removed to New
Haven, the first commencement being held there in 1718, and its first
building being named Yale College, in honor of Elihu Yale, a native of
the town, born in 1648, who went abroad, and afterwards became
Governor of the East India Company. He made at different times gifts
of books and money amounting to about five hundred pounds sterling,
the benefactions being of greater value because of their timeliness.
His name was afterwards adopted in the incorporation of the
university. Timothy Dwight and Theodore D. Woolsey were perhaps the
greatest Presidents of Yale, and among its graduates were Jonathan
Edwards, Eli Whitney, Samuel F. B. Morse, Benjamin Silliman, Noah
Webster, John C. Calhoun, J. Fenimore Cooper, James Kent, William M.
Evarts, John Pierpont and Samuel J. Tilden. The College buildings are
of various ages and styles of architecture, the original ones being
the plain "Old Brick Row" on College Street, northwest of the Public
Green, behind which what was formerly a large open space has been
gradually covered with more modern structures. The line of ancient
buildings facing the Green has a venerable and scholarly aspect,
stretching broadly across the greensward, fronted by noble elms
arranged in quadruple lines along the street. One of these houses,
Connecticut Hall, was built with money raised by a lottery, and from
the proceeds of a French prize-ship in the colonial wars, when
Connecticut aided the King by equipping a frigate. There are on the
campus statues of the first rector, Abraham Pierson, President Woolsey
and Professor Silliman. Various elaborate buildings are also upon
adjacent grounds, such as the Peabody Museum, the Sheffield Scientific
School, of four halls; the Divinity Halls, Observatory, Laboratory and
Gymnasium, while the entrance to the campus from the Public Green is
by an imposing tower-gateway known as Phelps Hall. The Peabody Museum
has one of the best natural-history collections in the country, and
the College Library approximates three hundred thousand volumes.
Besides the Academic Department, Yale has schools of Science, Law,
Medicine, Theology and the Fine Arts, and its properties and
endowments exceed $10,000,000, the grounds occupying nine acres.
NEW HAVEN ATTRACTIONS.
But New Haven is much more than Yale College. It is a great hive of
industry, manufacturing all kinds of "Yankee notions," with
agricultural machinery, corsets, scales, organs, pianos, carriages,
hardware and other things, and it has a large commerce along the
coast and with the West Indies. It was to New Haven that the first
steamboat navigating Long Island Sound went from New York in March,
1815, the Fulton, which occupied eleven hours in going there, and
fifteen hours in returning two days later, being delayed by fog,
subsequently, however, making the trip in less time. This boat was
constructed by Robert Fulton, and carried a figure-head of him on her
bow. She was one hundred and thirty-four feet long, and of three
hundred and twenty-seven tons, built with a keel like a ship, having a
sloop bow, and being rigged with one mast and sails to accelerate her
speed. She was managed by Elihu S. Bunker, and her ability to pass
through Hell Gate against a tide running six miles an hour was
regarded as one of the marvels of that time. The New York _Evening
Post_ of March 25, 1815, describing her, said, "We have been assured
that this establishment has cost $90,000, and we believe it may with
truth be affirmed that there is not in the whole world such
accommodations afloat as the Fulton affords. Indeed, it is hardly
possible to conceive that anything of the kind can exceed her in
elegance and convenience." Many were the races she had with the
"packet-sloops" that plied on the Sound and often beat her, when the
wind was fair.
There are tastefully adorned suburbs surrounding New Haven, where the
hills afford charming prospects. The two great attractions, however,
are the bold and impressive promontories known as the East and West
Rocks, which are high buttresses of trap rock, lifting themselves from
the plain on each side of the town in magnificent opposition, and
rising four hundred feet. The geologists say they were driven up
through the other strata, and some people think these grim precipices
in remote ages may have sentinelled the outflow of the Connecticut
River, between their broad and solid bases, to the Sound. Each
tremendous cliff is the termination of a long mountain range coming
down from the far North. The Green Mountain prolongation, stretching
through ridges southward from Vermont, is represented in the West
Rock, while the East Rock terminates the Mount Tom range, through
which the Connecticut River breaks its passage in Massachusetts, and
part of which rises a thousand feet in the "Blue Hills of
Southington," which are the most elevated portion of Connecticut. Thus
projected out upon the plain, almost to Long Island Sound, the summits
of these two huge rocks afford grand views. In the Judge's Cave, a
small cleft in a group of boulders on the West Rock, the three
regicides, Goffe, Whalley and Dixwell were in hiding for some time in
1661, and the three streets leading out to this rock from the city are
named after them. It is recorded that a man living about a mile away
took them food until one night a catamount looked in on them, and
"blazed his eyes in such a frightful manner as greatly to terrify
them." Dixwell's bones repose upon the Public Green at the back of the
"Centre Church," which stands in the row of three churches occupying
the middle of the Green that was the graveyard of colonial New Haven,
and Whalley is buried nearby.
There is a grand approach to the East Rock, which is elevated high
above the marshy valley of Mill River, winding about its base, and
upon the topmost crag is a noble monument reared to the soldiers who
fell in the Civil War. The whole surface of the East Rock is a park,
and upon the face of the cliff the perpendicular strata of
reddish-brown trap stand bolt upright. From this elevated outpost
there is a charming view over the town spreading upon the flat plain,
and the little harbor stretching down to the Sound; and beyond, across
the silvery waters, can be traced the hazy hills of Long Island,
twenty-five miles away. Two little crooked rivers come out of the deep
valleys on either side of the great rock, winding through the town to
the harbor, while all about, the country is dotted with flourishing
villages. Among them is Wallingford, to which the railway leads
northeast amid meadows and brickyards until it reaches the high hill,
whose church-towers watch over the population, largely composed of
plated-ware makers. When this town was founded, John Davenport came
out from New Haven and preached the initial sermon from the
appropriate text, "My beloved hath a vineyard on a very fruitful
hill."
Hillhouse Avenue, a broad and beautiful elm-shaded street bordered by
fine mansions, leads out to the "Sachem's Wood," which was the home of
the Hillhouses, of whom James Hillhouse was the great Connecticut
Senator after the Revolution. His remains repose in the old Grove
Street Burying-Ground, where rest many other famous men of the
Academic City, among them Timothy Dwight, Lyman Beecher, Samuel F. B.
Morse, Benjamin Silliman, Elbridge Gerry, Roger Sherman, of whom
Jefferson wrote that he "never said a foolish thing in his life," Eli
Whitney, and Noah Webster, who, before he compiled his famous
dictionary, had published the "Elementary Spelling Book," which had a
sale of fifty millions of copies. The New Haven City Hall, fronting
the Green, is one of the finest municipal buildings in New England.
The three churches occupying the centre of the Green are the North,
the Centre, and Trinity churches, the first two Congregationalist and
the last Episcopal, the row presenting a curiously quaint and ancient
appearance. The favorite resort of the people of New Haven is Savin
Rock, a promontory four miles away, pushing a rocky front to the Sound
at the end of a long sandy beach, and having a good view, being
located westward from the harbor entrance.
OLD SAYBROOK.
The Connecticut River flows into Long Island Sound thirty-three miles
east of New Haven at Saybrook Point. Between is the venerable village
of Guilford, where Fitz Greene Halleck was born, and where the three
regicides were also for some time hidden. Out in front is the bold and
picturesque Sachem's Head, which got its name from a tragedy of the
Pequot War in 1637. The Mohican chief Uncas pursued a Pequot warrior
out on this point, and shooting him, put his head in the fork of an
oak tree, where it remained many years. The group of Thimble Islands
are off shore, having been repeatedly dug over by deluded individuals
searching for the buried treasures of Captain Kidd. Saybrook Point was
the place of earliest settlement in Connecticut. The first English
patent for lands on these coasts was granted to Lord Saye and Seal and
Lord Brooke, and the colony was given their double name. The original
settlement was planned with great care, as it was expected to become
the home of noted men, and a fort was built on an isolated hill at the
river's mouth. According to the British historian, it was to Saybrook
that Cromwell, Pym, Hampden and Haselrig, with their party of
malcontents, intended to emigrate when they were stopped by the order
of King Charles I. Had this migration been made, it might have greatly
changed the subsequent momentous events in England ending with the
execution of that king. A little westward of the old colonial fort
guarding the river entrance, a public square was laid out, where,
according to the town plan, their houses were to have been built. The
first Yale College at Saybrook was a narrow one-story house eighty
feet long, and looking much like a ropewalk, which was afterwards
removed, with the college, to New Haven. Its founders were pious men,
who in 1708 drew up the celebrated "Saybrook Platform," with a
declaration that "the churches must have a public profession of faith,
agreeable to which the instruction of the college shall be conducted."
The ancient fort at Saybrook, built by Plymouth people in 1635, stood
upon a steep and solitary knoll near the Connecticut River, which in
1872 was carried off bodily by a railroad to make embankments across
the adjacent lowlands. The earliest governor of the colony came out in
1636, Colonel Fenwick, afterwards one of the regicide judges. Old
Saybrook is now a quiet village, chiefly spread along one handsome
wide street, canopied over by the arching branches of its stately
elms, under which the distant vista view looks almost like a scene
through a veritable foliage tunnel. The broad Connecticut flows in
front, back and forth with the tide from the Sound, its restfulness in
keeping with the ancient town, as yet uninvaded by business bustle or
manufacturing energy. The Saybrook fort repelled the Pequots in 1637;
and afterwards, in the Connecticut boundary disputes with the Dutch at
New York, the latter, according to the veracious chronicler, marched
against it "brimful of wrath and cabbage," but seeing it would be
stoutly defended, he adds that "they thought best to desist before
attacking." The British captured it in 1814, and ascending the river
in a sudden raid, destroyed a large number of vessels.
THE THAMES TO THE PAWCATUCK.
The river Thames, coming down out of the hills and receiving the
Quinnebaug, flows into the Sound twenty miles east of the Connecticut,
and here is the pleasant city of New London, with about fifteen
thousand people. Thus the early settlers renewed in the New England
colony the names of old London and Father Thames, replacing the
original Indian titles of Pequot for the town and Mohegan for the
river. New London is built on a hillside, famous for comfortable old
mansions and noble trees on the hilly streets, running down the
declivity to the harbor, in the upper part of which is a navy yard. On
either side of the harbor entrance are the gray walls and grassy
mounds of the ancient defensive works, Forts Griswold and Trumbull,
which got their chief scars during the Revolution. The most sacred New
London memory is of Nathan Hale, who lived there, his little house
being preserved as a relic. The Thames is a fine estuary, and upon it
are sailed the great Yale and Harvard boat-races. New London was the
headquarters of the Connecticut navy during the Revolution, a fleet of
twenty-six vessels. After Arnold's treason, he came in September,
1780, with ships and a large force of troops, captured Fort Trumbull
and burnt the town. Afterwards they attacked Fort Griswold across the
river, losing large numbers in storming it, and when the garrison had
surrendered they were massacred. A fine granite Obelisk contains the
names of the slain, and bears the inscription: "Zebulon and Naphtali
were a people that jeoparded their lives till death in the high places
of the Lord." The people of New London go down to the Sound for
recreation and clam-bakes, the wide-spreading beaches having numerous
hotels and summer cottages. All this region in the early times was the
home of the Niantic Indians, a clan of the Narragansetts, their sachem
being Ninigret, the brother of Canonicus and uncle of Miantonomoh,
whose names are preserved in powerful American warships.
Beyond the Thames is Groton, known as the home of Silas Deane, the
early American diplomatist, a hilly township, with little good soil.
On its verge are Fort Hill, where Sassacus, the sachem of the Pequots,
had his royal fortress, and Mystic, with the popular resort of Mystic
Island just off shore. To the northward of Mystic is Pequot Hill,
where Colonel Mason attacked that tribe in May, 1637. He had marched
out of Rhode Island with ninety English and over four hundred Mohicans
and Narragansetts under the sachems Uncas and Miantonomoh, but when
they arrived at the Pequot stronghold, the Indian allies were afraid
to attack and drew off. Nothing daunted, Mason and his colonial
soldiers prepared to do the work alone, and as a preliminary knelt
down in prayer. At the sight of this, another sachem, Wequash, who had
been their guide, was amazed and asked an explanation, and when he
understood it, became so impressed that he was converted, afterwards
preaching throughout New England. Mason and his men assaulted the
stronghold in the darkness, and got inside the palisades, but being
overwhelmed by the superior numbers, fell back after setting fire to
the wigwams. The fire compelled the Pequots to flee, and then the
English and friendly Indians surrounded the hill and shot down the
fugitives, there being six hundred Pequots shot or burnt, this being
the death-blow to the tribe. Old Cotton Mather, who recorded it,
wrote: "It was a fearful sight to see them frying in the fire, and the
streams of blood quenching the same, and horrible was the stink and
scent thereof; but the victory seemed a sweet sacrifice, and they gave
the praise thereof to God." Sassacus, from Fort Hill, sent
reinforcements, but they were too late, although they harassed Mason's
retreat, and Sassacus was soon forced also to flee, the remnant of the
Pequot tribe being killed or captured in Sasco Swamp.
This region was Pawcatuck, and its chief town now is Stonington, built
on a fine harbor, near the Rhode Island boundary, which is protected
by the protruding arm of Watch Hill Point, the whole coast thereabout
being filled with summer hotels and cottages. Stonington is on a
narrow rocky peninsula, and of this town, in the early part of the
nineteenth century, President Dwight of Yale College wrote, referring
to its reputation, that "Stonington and all its vicinity suffers in
religion from the nearness of Rhode Island." The place was bombarded
for three days, in 1814, by a British fleet, but all attempts to land
were successfully repulsed. Watch Hill Point is a high bold
promontory, with sand beaches stretching both ways and hooking around
westward so as to enclose Stonington harbor. To the eastward is
Westerly on the Pawcatuck River, noted for its fine granite quarries
and textile factories.
EASTERN LONG ISLAND.
From the Long Island shore, opposite the mouth of Connecticut River,
there protrudes northeastward an elongated and almost bisected
peninsula, ending in Orient Point. The eastern end of Long Island
divides into two arms, this being the northern one, having at its
outer extremity Plum Island, the passage between being the famous
"Plum Gut," a short cut occasionally taken by cunning yachtsmen racing
around Long Island. Orient Point was originally the "Oyster Pond
Point," its name having been modernized, and Plum Island, covering
more than a square mile, is said to have been bought from the Indians
by the first colonists in 1667 for a hundred fish-hooks and a barrel
of biscuit. A succession of islands stretches out from it over
northeastward towards the Rhode Island shore, and these guard the
entrance to the Sound. The southern arm of Long Island extends much
farther eastward than the northern one, and ends in Montauk Point.
Enclosed between these branching peninsulas is Shelter Island, thus
appropriately named from its well protected harbors. It is a delicious
island, about four by six miles in extent, picturesque and irregular
in outline, having cliffs and promontories dropping off into tiny
coves and bays with little beaches, their shores rich with the
attractions that shells and sea mosses give. In the interior are
rolling hills and fresh-water ponds. Out in front on either hand are
the blue waters of Peconic and Gardiner's Bays, with the broad
Atlantic beyond. This island was the home of the Manhasset Indians,
and that was its early name. To its hospitable shores fled some of the
persecuted Quakers of New England, when driven out by the Puritans,
the settlement being made as early as 1652. The records tell that in
the eighteenth century George Whitefield came and preached here with
such fervor and success that he was constrained to ask, "And is
Shelter Island become a Patmos?" It is in a delightful location, and
from the breezy hill-tops which have a grand outlook over the azure
waters there can be seen a vision
"----of islands that together lie
As quietly as spots of sky
Amongst the evening clouds."
The array of islands guarding the entrance to the Sound beyond Plum
Island begins with Great Gull and Little Gull Islands, the latter
marking the edge of the "Horse Race," as the rapid tidal current in
and out of the Sound between Little Gull and Fisher's Island is
called. This Race is off the mouth of the Thames River, beyond which
is Fisher's Island, nearer the Connecticut shore, an island nine miles
long, and forming a sort of barrier protecting the Thames entrance
from the ocean storms. This elongated island, covering about twelve
square miles, was originally "Ye Governour's Farme of Fyscher's
Island," owned by Governor John Winthrop of Connecticut, to whom it
was granted in 1668, remaining in his family for two centuries, when a
wealthy New Yorker bought it for a stock-farm. The adjacent waters are
now a favorite locality for United States naval evolutions. To the
eastward of Shelter Island, and lying in front of Gardiner's Bay, is
Gardiner's Island, covering about six square miles, and having a long
protruding northern point stretching up towards Plum Island. This
island was the Indian Monchonock, and Lyon Gardiner, the first
Englishman who settled anywhere in the State of New York, came along
in 1639, and bought it from them for some rum and blankets, a gun and
a large black dog, and his descendants have since been the owners. He
was a veteran of Cromwell's wars, and always had the confidence of the
Indians. Gardiner's Island was a favorite resort of the noted
freebooter Captain Kidd, and while thousands of people at many places
have at various times searched for his buried treasures, this is the
only place that anything was ever found. Kidd was the son of a
Scottish clergyman, became a mariner, and was sent from New York in an
armed vessel to chase the pirates off the coast. Succeeding admirably,
he was placed at the head of a new ship, the "Adventure," with one
hundred and fifty men, and sent to chastise the freebooters in the
East Indies. But after rounding the Cape of Good Hope and entering the
Indian Ocean he turned pirate himself, crossing the Indian and Pacific
Oceans, rounding Cape Horn, sailing up the Atlantic, and sweeping the
West Indies. In two years he circumnavigated the world, became the
most famous pirate in history, and landed at Gardiner's Island,
burying his treasures. He was afterwards captured in Boston and sent
to London, where he was hanged in 1701 on a charge of murder. The Earl
of Bellamont, Governor of Massachusetts, took from Kidd part of his
plunder, and learning the hiding-place on Gardiner's Island, had the
locality dug up, recovering gold, silver, jewels and merchandise,
valued at $70,000. Kidd's exploits are commemorated in a song which is
of world-wide renown, thus beginning:
"I'll sing you a song that you'll wonder to hear,
Of a freebooter, lucky and bold--
Of old Captain Kidd--of the man without fear,
How himself to the devil he sold.
"His ship was a trim one as ever did swim,
His comrades were hearty and brave,--
Twelve pistols he carried, that freebooter grim,
And he fearlessly ploughed the wild wave."
To the southward of Shelter Island, on the southern peninsula of Long
Island, is the well-protected roadstead of Sag Harbor, formerly a
famous whaling port, but most of its maritime glory has departed.
Massachusetts fishermen first settled the place, and it had at one
time a fleet of over forty whale ships, earning $1,000,000 a year; but
the California gold-hunting fever in 1849-50 is said to have diverted
its mariners and began the paralysis of this industry, which
subsequently died out almost everywhere. It has about two thousand
people, and its admirable situation has made it an attractive summer
resort, while it is also developing some manufactures. On the
peninsula to the southward are perched various old-time windmills,
with their broad gyrating sails, in the wide-spreading land of the
Hamptons. Far to the eastward the peninsula stretches out to Montauk
Point, the end of Long Island. Here is the reservation of the remnant
of the Montauk Indians, their name meaning the "Fort Country," as they
were the most powerful tribe on the island, and made some defenses in
their hilly region. The Sachem Wyandance who was at their head when
the white men came, in the seventeenth century, was wise and
sagacious, and became their firm ally, fighting the Pequots and their
other enemies. In all the adjacent waters vast numbers of menhaden are
caught. Here was located the camp, in 1898, where the American troops
returning from the torrid heats and malaria of the Cuban-Spanish war
recuperated, over thirty thousand men being cared for previously to
discharge. Captain Kidd was at one time around here also, and is
supposed to have sunk bags of treasure in one of the little lakes,
which has since been called Money Pond, but none was ever found there.
Fort Pond Bay, a spacious harbor on the northern side of Montauk
Point, has been often suggested as a haven for transatlantic steamers,
being safe and commodious. The plan suggested is to bring the
passengers by fast railway trains from New York. Out on the eastern
rocky buttress of Montauk Point is the tall white lighthouse tower,
containing a most powerful Fresnel light, the gift of the French
Government, visible for twenty miles at sea, its intense white light
varied by occasional flashes. This is the guiding beacon of the
eastern extremity of Long Island, and the solid buttress on which it
stands Mrs Sigourney calls--
"Ultima Thule of this ancient isle,
Against whose breast the everlasting surge,
Long travelling on and ominous of wrath,
Forever beats."
THE ISLE OF MANISEES.
Fifteen miles northeast of Montauk Point, out in the ocean, is Block
Island, lying midway between the extremity of Long Island and Point
Judith, on the western side of the entrance to Narragansett Bay. It is
about eight miles long, with a prominent white light for a beacon on
each end, north and south, and is a curious isolated place amid the
rolling waves of the Atlantic. Its balmy climate and equable
temperature have made it a favorite summer resort, being popularly
called the "Bermuda of the North," while some of its admirers say it
is destined to become the American Isle of Wight. It was known to the
Indians as Manisees, the "Isle of the Little God," and when the whites
first came, its aboriginal people were great wampum makers. The
Puritans campaigned on the island, defeating the Indians, and in 1638
they sent sixty feet of wampum to Boston for tribute, but the English
did not permanently settle there till 1661. It is an elongated island,
with high bold shores, abrupt hills, narrow valleys and sundry ponds,
one, the "Great Salt Pond," near its centre, being of considerable
size. The surface, however, is entirely destitute of trees, and the
only harbor is behind the protecting refuge of a breakwater, built
some time ago by the Government. As the ocean waves are always
buffeting and washing away the shores, its ultimate total
disappearance is predicted, but this impending fate is said not to
seriously alarm the inhabitants, who are, by the way, almost all
Baptists. Until recently, so little was actually known of these Block
Island folk, who were nearly all born there, and relatives, that a
strong belief was prevalent on the adjacent mainland that the genuine
native Block Islanders had only one eye apiece. They are strange and
antiquated, and many of the old people have never been off the island.
Some of them recall as a wonderful journey taken years ago, in early
youth, how they ventured so far away from home as to sail "across to
the Continent," as they call the remainder of the United States. They
gather sea-weed, which brings them quite a revenue, and dig peat,
which is largely used for fuel. Their little stone-walled fields,
ancient windmills and lily-strewn ponds are picturesque, and their
ancestors are buried in the ancient burying-ground, which visitors
find interesting, and then climb Beacon Hill to get a view that is
unique in being an almost complete circle of the sea. This attractive
place, swept by ocean breezes, is the eastern outpost of Long Island,
and no better idea of it has ever been given than by Whittier's poem
on the Palatine wreck, opening by describing Block Island:
"Leagues north, as fly the gull and auk,
Point Judith watches with eye of hawk;
Leagues south, thy beacon flames, Montauk!
"Lonely and wind-shorn, wood-forsaken,
With never a tree for Spring to waken,
For tryst of lovers or farewells taken,
"Circled by waters that never freeze,
Beaten by billow and swept by breeze,
Lieth the island of Manisees,
"Set at the mouth of the Sound to hold
The coast lights up on its turret old,
Yellow with moss and sea-fog mould.
"Dreary the land when gust and sleet
At its doors and windows howl and beat,
And Winter laughs at its fires of peat!
"But in summer-time, when pool and pond,
Held in the laps of valleys fond,
Are blue as the glimpses of sea beyond;
"When the hills are sweet with brier-rose,
And, hid in the warm, soft dells, unclose
Flowers the mainland rarely knows;
"When boats to their morning fishing go,
And, held to the wind and slanting low,
Whitening and darkening, the small sails show,--
"Then is that lonely island fair;
And the pale health-seeker findeth there
The wine of life in its pleasant air.
"No greener valleys the sun invite,
On smoother beaches no sea-birds light,
No blue waves shatter to foam more white!"
ASCENDING THE HUDSON RIVER.
X.
ASCENDING THE HUDSON RIVER.
Hudson River Scenery -- Fort Washington -- Fort Lee -- The
Palisades -- Piermont -- Greenwood Lake -- Tuxedo Lake -- Font
Hill -- Yonkers -- Philipse Manor -- Mary Philipse -- Hastings
-- Dobbs's Ferry -- Tappan Zee -- The Flying Dutchman --
Tarrytown -- André and Arnold -- Tappan -- Irvington --
Sunnyside -- Washington Irving -- The Sleepy Hollow -- Ichabod
Crane -- Point-no-Point -- Rockland Lake -- Sing-Sing -- Croton
Point -- Haverstraw Bay -- Stony Point -- Treason Hill --
Verplanck's Point -- The Highlands -- The Donderberg and its
Goblin -- Peekskill -- Anthony's Nose -- Iona Island -- West
Point -- Forts Clinton and Montgomery -- Sugar Loaf Mountain --
Buttermilk Falls -- Constitution Island -- Susan Warner --
General Kosciusko -- Beverly House -- Arnold's Treason -- Old
Cro' Nest -- Flirtation Walk -- The Storm King -- Mount Taurus
-- Joseph Rodman Drake -- The Culprit Fay -- Cornwall --
Fishkill -- Newburg Bay -- Newburg and Washington's
Headquarters -- Ural Knapp -- The Tower of Victory -- Enoch
Crosby, the Spy -- The Devil's Dance Chamber -- The Long Reach
-- Poughkeepsie -- Lakes Mohonk and Minnewaska -- Vassar
College -- Crom Elbow -- Rondout -- Kingston -- Esopus --
Rhinebeck and Rhinecliff -- Ellerslie -- Rokeby -- Wilderscliff
-- Montgomery Place -- Plattekill Clove -- Saugerties --
Livingston Manor -- Clermont -- Chancellor Livingston --
Fulton's First Steamboat -- Catskill Mountains -- Natty Bumppo
-- Rip Van Winkle -- Slide Mountain -- Kaaterskill Clove --
Kaaterskill Falls -- Haines's Falls -- The Big Indian -- City
of Hudson -- The Dutch -- New Lebanon -- The Shakers -- Mother
Ann Lee -- Kinderhook -- Stuyvesant Landing -- Martin Van Buren
-- Schodack -- The Mohicans -- Beeren Island -- The Overslaugh
-- The Patroons -- The Van Rensselaers -- The Anti-Rent War --
Albany -- New York State Capitol -- Albany Medical College --
Calvin Edson -- Albany Academy -- Prof. Joseph Henry -- Dudley
Observatory -- Van Rensselaer Mansion -- Vanderheyden Palace --
Lydius House -- Balthazar Lydius -- Anneke Jans Bogardus --
Albany Regency -- Schuyler Mansion -- Erie Canal Basin -- Troy
-- The Monitor -- Mohawk River -- Stillwater -- Schuylerville
-- Burgoyne's Defeat -- General Fraser's Death -- Round Lake --
Ballston Spa -- Saratoga Lake and Town -- High Rock Spring --
Sir William Johnson -- Saratoga Hotels -- Saratoga Springs --
Congress Spring -- Hathorn Spring -- Mount McGregor -- Fort
Edward -- Israel Putnam -- Jenny McCrea -- Baker's Falls --
Sandy Hill -- Quackenboss' Adventure -- Glen's Falls -- Last of
the Mohicans -- Hawkeye -- Sources of the Hudson -- The
Adirondack Wilderness -- Hendrick Spring -- The Tear of the
Clouds -- Indian Pass -- Tahawas, the Sky-Piercer -- Schroon
Lake -- The Battenkill.
THE HUDSON RIVER SCENERY.
The noble Hudson is one of the most admired of American rivers. It
does not possess the vine-clad slopes and ruined castles and quaint
old towns of the Rhine, but it is a greater river in its breadth and
volume and the commerce it carries. It has scenery fully as attractive
in the Palisades and Highlands, the Helderbergs and Catskills, and on
a scale of far more grandeur, while the infinite variety of its shores
and villas and the many flourishing river towns are to most observers
more pleasing. A journey along the Hudson presents ever varying
pictures of rural beauty, in mountain, landscape, field and village;
at times almost indescribably grand, and again entrancing in the
autumn's gorgeous coloring of the forest-clad slopes, and the
brilliant picture under our clear American skies. George William
Curtis, voicing the opinion of most of our countrymen, is
enthusiastic about the Hudson, saying: "The Danube has in part
glimpses of such grandeur, the Elbe sometimes has such delicately
pencilled effects, but no European river is so lordly in its bearing,
none flows in such state to the sea. Of all our rivers that I know,
the Hudson with this grandeur has the most exquisite episodes. Its
morning and evening reaches are like the lakes of a dream." The Hudson
may not have as many weird and elfish legends as so many historic
centuries and the mythical preceding era have gathered upon the annals
of the Rhine, but its beauties, tragedies and folklore have been a
favorite theme, and the romantic and poetic fancies of Irving, Drake
and Cooper, with many others, have given it plenty of fascinating
literature and picturesque incident. Oliver Wendell Holmes thus sings
the praises of the Hudson:
"I wandered afar from the land of my birth,
I saw the old rivers renowned upon Earth;
But fancy still painted that wide-flowing stream,
With the many-hued pencil of infancy's dream.
"I saw the green banks of the castle-crowned Rhine,
Where the grapes drink the moonlight and change into wine,
I stood by the Avon, whose waves, as they glide,
Still whisper his glory who sleeps by their side.
"But my heart would still yearn for the sound of the waves,
That sing as they flow by my forefathers' graves;
If manhood yet honors my cheek with a tear,
I care not who sees it--nor blush for it here.
"In love to the deep-bosomed stream of the West,
I fling this loose blossom to float on its breast;
Nor let the dear love of its children grow cold,
Till the channel is dry where its waters have rolled."
THE PALISADES.
In ascending the Hudson from New York, there are passed on either hand
the heights which were covered in early Revolutionary days with the
defenses of New York, Fort Washington and Fort Lee, but beyond the
names no trace of either fort remains. The British captured both in
the latter part of 1776, and afterwards held them. Fort Lee is now a
favorite picnic ground. Above it rises the great wall of the
Palisades, the wonderful formation built up of columned trap rock that
extends along the western river bank for twenty miles up to Piermont,
this rocky buttress making the northern limit of New Jersey on the
Hudson River. Occasionally a patch of trees grows upon the tops or
sides of the Palisades, while the broken rocks and _débris_ that have
fallen down make a sloping surface from about half-way up their height
to the water's edge. These columns rise in varying heights from three
to five hundred feet. This grand escarpment of the Palisades is a
giant wall along the river bank, sometimes cut down by deep and narrow
ravines, through which the people behind them get brief peeps at the
picturesque stream far below. Their general surface makes a sort of
long and narrow table-land, barely a half-mile to a mile wide,
dividing the Hudson from the valley of the Hackensack to the westward,
the top being usually quite level, and in most cases having a growth
of trees. These desolate-looking Palisades are a barrier dividing two
sections of country seeming in sharp contrast. To the westward, the
inhabitants lead simple pastoral lives in a region of farm land and
dairies. To the eastward, the opposite shore of the Hudson is a
succession of villas and fashionable summer resorts, whither the New
York people come out, seeking a little rest and freshness after the
season's dissipation. From the tops of the Palisades are admirable
views both east and west, displaying some of the finest sunrises and
sunsets seen along the great river. Extensive blasting operations, to
get the building-stone and paving material for which they form
valuable quarries, are marring the beauty of the Palisades, but legal
arrangements are maturing for their preservation. Their highest
elevation, the Indian Head, not far above Fort Lee, rising five
hundred and ten feet, has been ruined by these blasts, which at times
will break off many thousand tons of rock at a single explosion.
[Illustration: _Palisades of the Hudson_]
The rocky buttress of Piermont, the termination of the Palisades on
the Hudson, gets its name from a pier, a mile long, which is extended
from the shore at the foot of the mountain out to deep water, and a
branch of the Erie railway terminates here. This line runs inland
northwestward through a fine country. Over there is Greenwood Lake,
known as the "miniature Lake George," a beautiful river-like body of
water, ten miles long and a mile wide, almost entirely enclosed in the
mountains, and presenting extremely picturesque scenery. This lake is
at a thousand feet elevation, with clear and deep spring water, and in
the neighborhood are the smaller but as charming Lakes Wawayanda,
Macopin and Sterling. The long look over mountain and vale causing an
expression of surprise in broken English from an Indian gazing upon
the attractive prospect, is said to have named the first of these
pretty little lakes;--"Away, way, yonder," he said, but it sounded
like "Wa-wa-yanda," and the name has since clung to it. Not far away,
among these mountains, is Tuxedo Lake, the fashionable resort of the
Tuxedo Park Association, also reached by the Erie railway. This club
of wealthy New Yorkers has made a paradise among the Allegheny
foothills, with game-preserves, golf-links, club-house, and many
cottages for the members.
Above Spuyten Duyvel Creek the western Hudson River shore presents the
monotonous front of these Palisades, stretching for miles apparently
without a sign of active life; but the eastern bank is a far different
picture of undulating hills, with gentle slopes to the water's edge,
and covered in every eligible position with an endless variety of
villas, presenting every phase of artistic taste and the development
of abundant wealth. These summer homes upon the Hudson are among the
crowning glories of the ever-changing river scene. Here is the famous
Font Hill, now the Convent of Mount St. Vincent. In 1850 the tragedian
Edwin Forrest built it for his home, a mediæval graystone castle, with
moat and drawbridge and six battlemented towers; but he held it only a
few years, when he quarrelled with his wife, and sold the estate for
$100,000 to the Sisters of Charity of the Order of St. Vincent de Paul
for their Mother House, which had to remove from the site of Central
Park in New York. The cross now surmounts the tallest castle tower,
and it is surrounded by noble trees which have grown higher than the
turrets, while on the hill behind, and almost overshadowing the little
castle, is a huge red-brick convent building. Lawns slope down to the
shore, and there are superb river views, with the grand wall of the
Palisades rising high in front.
Yonkers is seventeen miles above New York, a galaxy of castellated and
ornamental mansions fringing the town about, upon the amphitheatre of
hills surrounding the flat depression on which it is mainly built. The
little Neperhan or Sawmill River pours down a series of rapids through
it before reaching the Hudson, with factories bordering the banks,
while the great Vanderbilt railway, the New York Central, with a
half-dozen sets of rails, runs along the front of the town. Here are
now forty thousand people, in sharp contrast with the time when
Hendrick Hudson, exploring the river, anchored in front of the little
Indian village of Napperhamok, or the "Rapid Water." Curiosity brought
them out in canoes to examine his ship, the "Half Moon," and he bought
oysters and beans, saying he found them "a loving people who attained
great age." The Dutch early bought land from these Indians for a
settlement, and it became the domain of Patroon Vanderdonck, who set
the town going under the name of Yonk-heer, or the "young master,"
meaning the heir of the family. Then the English came along and it
became the "Philipse Manor," the old stone manor house built in 1682
being the antiquarian attraction, and used now as a sort of City Hall,
a Soldiers' Monument standing in front. This was a manor of
twenty-four thousand acres stretching along the river from Spuyten
Duyvel up to the Croton. The third of the English lords of the manor
was Fredericke Philipse, who was a shrewd aristocrat, and during the
Revolution tried the difficult political game of a neutral, desirous
of keeping on the winning side. But neither party trusted him, and
although Washington had been his guest in the famous old manor house,
yet he was attainted of treason by the State of New York, his great
manor confiscated, cut up into small tracts and sold. The romance of
Yonkers is the love story of his daughter, Mary Philipse, the "belle
of the Hudson Valley." Tradition tells of her as the first love of
Washington, but he wooed in vain, and she married another. Cooper made
her the heroine of his novel _The Spy_.
The lands of this manor are among the most prized locations on the
Hudson. Magnificent estates cover the sloping eastern bank, with
hundreds of villas of all kinds and styles, fortunes being expended
upon their elaborate decoration. Highly ornamental grounds upon the
hillsides and terraces surround costly houses, built to reproduce
palaces, churches, castles, baronial halls and old manors, with some
sombre buildings not unlike tombs. There is every conceivable
structure the florid imagination of an architect can fashion into a
dwelling, some being of great size. They show up prettily among the
trees, and some are thrust out upon crags almost overhanging the
river, others nestle far back in clefts, and still others are set high
upon the slopes. Amid the grand display is the villa-environed and
exclusive town of Hastings-on-the-Hudson; and a mile above, and still
in the gilded colony, is the village of Dobbs's Ferry. It got its name
from the venerable John Dobbs, a Swede, who came over from the
Delaware River to run the ferry during the Revolution. Not long ago
some of the modern aristocrats of the place got ashamed of their old
Dobbs heritage and sought to change the name to Paulding. Then came a
sharp controversy, fanned into fever heat by the sensational warriors
of the New York newspapers. Soon, however, the Pauldingites
surrendered, old Dobbs was vindicated, and Dobbs's Ferry the place
remains. It was here in the Livingston Mansion, in 1783, that Generals
Washington, Carleton and Clinton met to finally settle the terms of
English recognition of American independence. Two miles above is
Irvington, with more elaborate villas. This favored region of the
Hudson is the choicest abiding-place of the New York multi-millionaires,
and a newspaper scribe on one occasion counted in the space of six
miles above Hastings the rural homes of sixty-three men whose
aggregate wealth was estimated at more than $500,000,000. The single
million fellow no longer cuts a figure in such a galaxy. On an
eminence near Irvington stood the country house of the wealthiest of
them, loftily situated, a white stone building with a tall tower,
having very attractive surroundings. This was the Paulding Manor of
Lyndehurst, the home of Jay Gould.
THE TAPPEN ZEE.
Over opposite, the grand terminating buttress of the Palisades,
Piermont, compresses the river channel, the rocks then receding, so
that to the northward it broadens into the beautiful lake of the
Tappan Zee. Here is the boundary dividing New Jersey from New York,
and the long ridge, retiring from the river, stretches inland some
miles, encircles the town of Nyack, and comes back to the river some
distance above in an abrupt elevated cliff known as Point-no-Point.
This lake is over four miles wide, and is the scene of the legend of
"The Flying Dutchman of the Tappan Zee." Irving tells us that often in
the still twilight of a summer evening, when the sea would be as
glass, and the opposite hills threw their shadows half across it, a
low sound would be heard, as of the steady vigorous pull of oars,
though no boat could be seen. Some said it was a whale-boat of the
ancient water-guard, sunk by the British ships during the war, but now
permitted to haunt its old cruising-grounds. But the prevalent opinion
connected it with the awful fate of "Rambout Van Dam of graceless
memory." He was a roystering Dutchman of Spuyten Duyvel, who in a time
long past navigated his boat alone one Saturday the whole length of
the Tappan Zee to attend a quilting-party at Kakiat, on the western
shore. Here he danced until midnight, when he started home. He was
warned it was the verge of Sunday morning, but he went off, swearing
he would not land until he reached Spuyten Duyvel, if it took him a
month of Sundays. He was never seen afterwards, but may still be
heard, plying his oars, being "the Flying Dutchman of the Tappan Zee,
doomed to ply between Kakiat and Spuyten Duyvel until the day of
judgment." There is also another legend of a stout, round, Dutch-built
vessel of the olden time, with high bow and stern, sailing up New York
harbor in the teeth of wind and tide. She never returned down the
Hudson, but the Dutch skippers plying the river often saw her,
sometimes along the Palisades, or off Croton Point, or in the
Highlands, but never above them. Sometimes it was by the lightning
flashes of a storm upon a pitchy night, and giving glimpses of her
careering across the Tappan Zee or the wide waste of Haverstraw Bay.
Sometimes on quiet moonlight nights she would lie under a high bluff
in the Highlands, all in deep shadow, excepting her topsails
glittering in the moonbeams. She appeared always just before or after
or during unruly weather, and all the skippers knew her as the "Storm
Ship." Some maintained this phantom was the "Flying Dutchman," come
from the Cape of Good Hope into more tranquil waters. Others held it
to be Hendrick Hudson and the shadowy crew of the "Half Moon" sailing
to their revels in the Catskills. We are told by Irving that "she
still haunts the Highlands and cruises about Point-no-Point. People
living along the river insist they sometimes see her in summer
moonlight, and that in a deep still midnight they have heard the chant
of her crew as if heaving the lead."
Tappan Village, naming the Tappan Zee, is some distance back from
Piermont. Over on the eastern bank, nearly opposite Nyack, is
Tarrytown, the "Torwen-Dorp" or "Wheat-Town" of the ancient Dutch,
which has gradually changed to the present name. The genial Irving,
never at a loss for a reason for the names of places along the river,
tells how the good housewives named it Tarrytown because of their
spouses' propensity to linger in the village tavern on market days. It
is now one of the most elegant places on the Hudson, notable for its
splendid villas. The attractive region about the Tappan Zee is full of
Revolutionary memories, and particularly of the great historic tragedy
made by the treason of Arnold and the capture of André. Major John
André, at the age of twenty-nine, in 1780, was Adjutant General of the
British Army, then commanded by Sir Henry Clinton in New York. On
September 20th André came to Dobbs's Ferry to meet Arnold, with whom
he had been in secret correspondence in reference to the surrender of
West Point, where Arnold commanded. The next night he met Arnold at
Stony Point, just below the Highlands, and started back with Arnold's
passport and documents enabling the British to so direct an attack
upon West Point as to capture it. These papers were in Arnold's
handwriting, and at his suggestion André concealed them between the
soles of his feet and his stockings. André tried to make his way down
the eastern side of the Hudson to New York in disguise, taking the
Tarrytown road, through what was then known as the "neutral ground,"
which was overrun by marauders from both armies. When within a
half-mile of Tarrytown, at a little stream since called André's
Brook, he was captured by Paulding, Williams and Van Wert, three
American scouts, whom he mistook for his own partisans, and they
searched him and found the treasonable papers. Rejecting all bribes,
they took him across the Hudson to Tappan, then the American army
headquarters, where he was condemned and hanged as a spy on October
2d. The old house wherein he was imprisoned still stands in Tappan,
and his remains were interred there until 1821, when they were
conveyed to Westminster Abbey, London.
THE HOME OF WASHINGTON IRVING.
Near Irvington is Sunnyside, long the home of the famous and genial
Washington Irving. In the early days this house was built by a cynical
Dutch councillor named Wolfert Acker, who inscribed over the door,
"Lust in Rust,"--meaning "pleasure in quiet,"--whence the English
called it "Wolfert's Roost." As the Spanish Escurial had been modelled
after the famous gridiron of the blessed Saint Lawrence, so this loyal
councillor is said to have modelled his house after the cocked hat of
the doughty Dutch Governor, Peter the Headstrong. The old house with
its quaint Dutch gables became in time the castle of Baltus Van
Tassel, and being held by Jacob Van Tassel, an active American
partisan during the Revolution, the British sacked and burned it. The
eastern front is overrun by ivy given Irving by Sir Walter Scott at
Abbotsford, and originally from Melrose Abbey. The great author lived
here from 1846 until his death in 1859, and his pen has immortalized
the neighborhood. Nearby is the sequestered vale of Slaeperigh Haven,
famed in the "Legend of the Sleepy Hollow." Not far from Tarrytown, he
writes, there is a little valley, or rather a lap of land among high
hills, one of the quietest places in the whole world. A small brook
glides through it with just murmur enough to lull one to repose; and
the occasional whistle of a quail or tapping of a woodpecker is almost
the only sound that ever breaks in upon the uniform tranquility. At
the opening of this hollow, by the side of a winding lane, stands the
ancient Dutch church, which is the oldest religious house in New York
State. It is a curious little building with a diminutive spire
enclosing a bell with the inscription, "Si . Deus . Pro . Nobis .
Contra . Nos . 1685"--If God for us, who against us. It was built of
bricks brought out from Holland, and in the ancient and mossy
graveyard, almost under the shadow of the old church, Irving is
buried. He lies upon a beautiful sunny slope, whence one can look into
the Sleepy Hollow, and also far over the lovely Tappan Zee and its
pleasant surroundings, a spot he selected for his tomb. Longfellow
thus sweetly sings of this modest grave:
"Here lies the gentle humorist, who died
In the bright Indian Summer of his fame
A simple stone, with but a date and name,
Marks his secluded resting place, beside
The river that he loved and glorified.
Here in the autumn of his days he came,
But the dry leaves of his life were all aflame
With tints that brightened and were multiplied.
How sweet a life was his; how sweet a death!
Living, to wing with mirth the weary hours,
Or with romantic tales the heart to cheer;
Dying, to leave a memory like the breath
Of summer, full of sunshine and of showers,
A grief and gladness in the atmosphere."
Only a short distance from the church is the old bridge made famous in
the legend describing the escapade of the schoolmaster, Ichabod Crane,
with his "soft and foolish heart toward the sex." In his love he had a
rival in the stalwart and muscular Brom Bones. The legend tells us
that Ichabod taught the Dutch urchins of these parts, and at the same
time paid court to old farmer Van Tassel's daughter, the fair Katrina.
Brom Bones, otherwise Brom Van Brunt, determined to drive him away.
One dismal night Ichabod left the Van Tassel mansion in very low
spirits. In the hush of midnight he could hear the watchdog bark,
distant and vague, from the far opposite shore of the Hudson. Irving
tells us a belief existed in a spectre--the Headless Horseman of
Sleepy Hollow--supposed to be the spirit of a Hessian trooper whose
head had been carried off by a cannon-ball. Nearing the old church,
this horrid ghost appeared in pursuit of Ichabod, who was bestride an
inflexible old horse called Gunpowder. The terrified schoolmaster made
all haste to reach the bridge, having passed which, he would be beyond
the power of his pursuer. He spurred Gunpowder forward, but looking
back, beheld the spectre close behind him, and in the very act of
hurling its horrid head at him. The crash came; Ichabod rolled to the
ground; the spectre and Gunpowder rushed past him in a whirlwind. Next
day, we are told, a shattered pumpkin was found in the road, and not
long afterwards Brom Bones led Katrina to the altar, but the luckless
Ichabod was never heard of again.
In the hills behind Point-no-Point, on the western verge of the Tappan
Zee, at one hundred and sixty feet elevation, is Rockland Lake, a
crystal sheet of water which gives New York much of its ice supply,
the blocks being sent from the top of the hill on a long slide to the
barges that carry it down the river. As they glide along, they look in
the distance, under the sunlight, like a string of diamonds. Hook
Mountain, separating the lake from the river, is over six hundred feet
high, and out of the lake flows the Hackensack River behind the
Palisades, through the Jersey meadows to Newark Bay. Just above
Tarrytown, on the eastern shore, is Sing-Sing Village, on a pretty
slope, the name coming from the Indian Ossining, meaning "a stony
place." Here, just back from the shore, is the famous Sing-Sing
Prison, the long, low tiers of white stone buildings having the
railway tunnelled through them, and the pleasant village rising on the
hillside behind. The convicts built their own prison many years ago,
with stone hewn out of an adjacent marble ridge, called Mount
Pleasant. Just above, the long forest-covered projection of Teller's
or Croton Point, thrust for two miles, or more than half-way across
the broad river, from the eastern bank, makes the northern boundary of
the Tappan Zee. The West Shore railway, which has come up through the
Hackensack Valley from Jersey City, emerges high on the western hills
and runs gradually down to the river bank, so that the Hudson above
has a railway on either shore. Alongside the Point, the Croton River
flows in, the Reservoir being about six miles up that stream. It was
off Teller's Point the British sloop "Vulture" anchored, when she
brought André up from New York for his interview with Arnold.
ENTERING THE HIGHLANDS.
Beyond Teller's Point is another broadened expanse of the Hudson,
Haverstraw Bay, spreading in parts five miles wide, its western shore
lined with brickmaking establishments, lime-kilns and the factories
which break up the stone quarried in the neighboring hills into
Belgian blocks for New York street paving. Far in front, over the
spacious bay, looms up the distant range of Hudson River Highlands, an
outcrop of the great Kittatinny ridge, stretching broadly across the
country, a part of the same deep blue-gray mountain wall we have
already penetrated farther south. Its changing hues and appearance, as
approached, remind of Campbell's couplet in the _Pleasures of Hope_:
"'Tis distance lends enchantment to the view,
And robes the mountain in its azure hue."
High Torn, just behind the bank below Haverstraw, rises over eight
hundred feet, while above is Stony Point, the outcrop of a long line
of limestone hills stretching into the river. Between it and the town,
standing on a little eminence not far from the shore, was the frame
house of Smith the Tory, known as the "Treason House," where André and
Arnold had their clandestine meeting to arrange the surrender of West
Point, this eminence now being known as "Treason Hill." Across the
ferry to Verplanck's Point, on the opposite shore, André went when the
meeting was over, and started on his fateful journey down to
Tarrytown. The two Points suddenly narrow the Hudson, above Treason
Hill, to a half-mile width, and they make the northern boundary of
Haverstraw Bay. This is a region filled with Revolutionary memories.
These Points commanded the southern river entrance to the Highlands,
and behind them, back of the western shore, rises the buttress of the
Kittatinny and the outpost of the pass, the massive Donderberg
Mountain, eleven hundred feet high. The eastern Point was part of the
Van Cortlandt manor, whose heiress, Gertrude, married Philip
Verplanck, for whom it was named. Forts were built on both Points to
control the river, and the British surprised and captured both of them
in June, 1779, giving Washington much annoyance; but General Wayne, in
July, by one of the most brilliant movements of the war, surprised and
recaptured Stony Point. On the site of the old fort, and built of some
of its materials, is now a little lighthouse guiding the river
navigation. Over on the opposite shore, behind Verplanck's Point,
Baron Steuben drilled the Revolutionary soldiers. This region now is
chiefly devoted to the peaceful occupations of burning lime and making
bricks.
The Hudson bends towards the northeast along the base of the towering
Donderberg,--the Thunder Mountain,--the limestone quarries cut into
its cliffs looking much like an old-time fortress. The narrow river
contracted in the pass always has gusty winds blowing over it, and
this was a weird region in the ancient Dutch _régime_, many a tale of
woe and wonder being told by the skippers who sailed that way. Irving
records how they used to "talk of a little bulbous-bottomed Dutch
goblin in trunk-hose and sugar-loaf hat, with a speaking-trumpet in
his hand, which they say keeps the Donder-Berg." He declares "they
have heard him in stormy weather, in the midst of the turmoil, giving
orders in Low Dutch for the piping up of a fresh gust of wind, or the
rattling off of another thunder-clap; that sometimes he had been seen
surrounded by a crew of little imps, in broad breeches and short
doublets, tumbling head over heels in the rack and mist, and playing a
thousand gambols in the air, or buzzing like a swarm of flies about
Anthony's Nose; and that at such times the hurry-scurry of the storm
was always greatest." The genial historian supports this statement by
testimony. "Skipper Daniel Ouslesticker of Fish Kill, who was never
known to tell a lie," declared that in a severe squall he saw the
goblin "seated astride of his bowsprit, riding the sloop ashore full
butt against Anthony's Nose," but that he was happily exorcised by
"Dominie Van Geisen of Esopus, who happened to be on board, and who
sang the song of Saint Nicholas, whereupon the goblin threw himself up
in the air like a ball, and went off in a whirlwind, carrying away
with him the nightcap of the Dominie's wife, which was discovered the
next Sunday morning hanging on the weathercock of Esopus Church
steeple, at least forty miles off." Such misadventures occurring, the
skippers for a long time did not venture past the Donderberg without
lowering their peaks in homage, "and it was observed that all such as
paid this tribute of respect were suffered to pass unmolested."
The Hudson River Highlands in some peaks rise nearly sixteen hundred
feet. The river, coming from the north, breaks through them in a
series of short bends, making narrow reaches, and in the fifteen miles
required for the passage presents some of the most attractive American
scenery. Beyond Verplanck's Point is the town of Peekskill, with the
mountain range trending far away to the northeast, the river flowing
along its base, and from the view ahead seeming to come from the
lowlands beyond Peekskill. It was not strange, therefore, that in the
early seventeenth century one of the Dutch skippers who braved the
goblin of the Donderberg, in his explorations should have sailed his
sloop up there, got into a shallow creek, and run aground. This was
the misfortune of the honest Dutch mariner Jan Peek; but he made the
best of it, and seeing that the soil of the valley was fertile,
settled there, and the creek became Peek's Kill, and thus named the
town. The rich Canopus Valley is to the northeastward, and the
mountains blend so well that the sharp right-angled bend the river
makes into the Highlands is completely hidden.
ANTHONY'S NOSE.
Thus rise, high over the valley, "the rough turrets of the Highland
towers." The Indians believed this mountain region was created by the
mighty spirit Manetho, to protect his favorite abodes from the
unhallowed eyes of mortals. Their tradition was that the vast
mountains of rock were raised before the Hudson poured its waters
through them, and within them was a prison where the omnipotent
Manetho confined rebellious spirits. Here, bound by adamantine chains,
jammed in rifted pines, or crushed under ponderous crags, they groaned
for ages. At length the mighty Hudson burst open their prison-house,
rolling its overwhelming tide triumphantly through the stupendous
ruins. Entering the pass, it really seems as if the Hudson River
channel ought to run up where Jan Peek went, but instead it goes
sharply around the ponderous base of the Donderberg Mountain. This is
a very narrow gateway, where the swift tidal current makes the "Race,"
and in an instant the contracted passage is opened between the
Donderberg on the left and Anthony's Nose on the right, entering this
beautiful Highland district, which Chateaubriand has likened to "a
large bouquet tied at its base with azure ribbon." As the narrow
strait is traversed, Iona Island, tree-clad and attractive, appears
ahead, and the winds usually blow a lively gale, buffeted from one
mountain side to the other. The tide runs swiftly around the base of
Anthony's Nose, and the romantic Brocken Kill pours down his sloping
side, while through the jutting point of the Nose the railway has
pierced a tunnel, making on either side a veritable nostril. The huge
tree-covered mountain rises grandly to the clouds, while just over the
tunnel at the point, a mass of protruding rocks and timber makes a
first-class pimple to ornament the Nose. This is one of the prominent
Highland peaks, rising over twelve hundred feet, and is said by some
to have been named from a fancied resemblance to the nose of the great
St. Anthony, the Egyptian monk of the third century.
Irving, however, has given us the more popular tradition that it was
named in memory of luckless Anthony the Trumpeter, who met his fate at
Spuyten Duyvel. The veracious historian Knickerbocker writes: "It must
be known that the nose of Anthony the Trumpeter was of a very lusty
size, strutting boldly from his countenance like a mountain of
Golconda, being sumptuously bedecked with rubies and other precious
stones--the true regalia of a king of good fellows--which jolly
Bacchus grants to all who bouse it heartily at the flagon. Now, thus
it happened, that bright and early in the morning the good Anthony,
having washed his burly visage, was leaning over the quarter railing
of the galley, contemplating it in the glossy wave below. Just at this
moment, the illustrious sun, breaking in all his splendor from behind
a high bluff of the Highlands, did dart one of his most potent beams
full upon the nose of the sounder of brass, the reflection of which
shot straightway down hissing hot into the water and killed a mighty
sturgeon that was sporting beside the vessel. This huge monster, being
with infinite labor hoisted on board, furnished a luxurious repast to
all the crew, being accounted of excellent flavor, except about the
wound, where it smacked a little of brimstone, and this, on my
veracity, was the first time that ever sturgeon was eaten in these
parts by Christian people. When this astonishing miracle became known
to Peter Stuyvesant, and he tasted of the unknown fish, he, as may
well be supposed, marvelled exceedingly, and as a monument thereof, he
gave the name of 'Anthony's Nose' to a stout promontory in the
neighborhood, and it has continued to be called 'Anthony's Nose' ever
since that time."
WEST POINT.
The most famous locality in the Highlands is West Point. "In this
beautiful place," wrote Charles Dickens, "the fairest among the fair
and lovely Highlands of the North River; shut in by deep green heights
and ruined forts, and looking down upon the distant town of Newburg,
along a glittering path of sunlit water, with here and there a skiff,
whose white sail often bends on some new tack as sudden flaws of wind
come down upon her from the gullies in the hills, hemmed in besides,
all around, with memories of Washington and events of the
Revolutionary war: is the Military School of America." Opposite
Anthony's Nose, Montgomery Creek flows in, its mouth broadened into a
little bay. Upon the high rocks at the entrance, on either side, stood
the great defenders of the lower Highlands during the early
Revolution, Forts Clinton and Montgomery, considered impregnable
then, and to bar the river passage a ponderous iron chain on timber
floats was stretched across the channel to Anthony's Nose. The
Continental Congress spent $250,000 on these obstructions, but the
British in 1777 surprised and captured the forts, destroyed the chain
and burnt the gunboats guarding it. This was a great victory, but
barren of results, for Burgoyne's surrender soon afterwards compelled
them to abandon this region and retire down towards New York. There
are traces of the forts, and a flagstaff on the hill north of the
creek marks the site of Fort Montgomery. Just above, on the eastern
bank, is the charming and symmetrical cone of the Sugar Loaf Mountain,
with several smaller companions, and the vista views along the river,
and through some of the deep valleys between these mountains, are
magnificent. The little town of Garrison's fringes the shore, the
school of the Sisters of St. Francis, formerly a popular hotel, is
perched high on the cliff on the western bank; while in front the dome
of the West Point Library and the barracks rise in view upon the Point
itself, which stretches completely across the view, its extremity
hidden by the jutting headlands of the eastern bank. Here comes down
in rainy weather the frothy current of the beautiful Buttermilk Falls,
for a hundred feet over the rocks into the river, and the West Shore
Railroad, winding along the edge of the cliffs, cuts or goes through
their extended points, and finally darts into a long tunnel bored
right under the West Point Academy.
The Hudson River, some distance above, bends sharply around the little
lighthouse on the end of West Point, its extremity being a moderately
sloping rock covered with cedars, the reef going deep down into the
water, while on its highest part is a monument to General Kosciusko,
who had much to do with constructing the original military works. The
flat and elevated surface, some distance inland, plainly visible both
from up and down the river, is the Parade Ground, the Academic
buildings being constructed around it, while behind them on higher
ground is the dome-crowned library. The surface of West Point is not
so high as the surrounding mountains, but its advanced position
completely commands the river approach both ways, and hence its
military importance. Along the water's edge at the Point the rocks are
worn smooth, it is said, by so many cadets sitting there in the summer
time. Just above is the cove, where they swim and practice at
pontoon-bridge building, and back of this cove is the artillery
ground, the guns being fired at the huge side of old Cro' Nest
Mountain to the northward. Gee's Point is also above, and from its
extremity was extended the second big chain across to Constitution
Island, used during the later years of the Revolution, to obstruct the
passage, also buoyed on timber floats; some of its huge links being
still preserved. Constitution Island was long the home of Susan
Warner, the authoress, who died in 1885, and her grave is in West
Point Cemetery. Her _Hills of the Shatemuc_ is full of Hudson River
scenes, but her best-known book was _The Wide, Wide World_, published
in 1850.
The military post and academy of West Point is about fifty miles north
of New York, the Government domain covering twenty-four hundred acres.
The buildings stand on a plain of one hundred and sixty acres,
elevated one hundred and fifty-seven feet above the river, with
mountains all around, rising in some cases fifteen hundred feet, the
highest being old Cro' Nest. South of the Academy, on a commanding
hill six hundred feet high, are the ruins of Fort Putnam, the chief
work during the Revolution. When that war began in 1775 it was ordered
that the passes of the Hudson through the Highlands should be
fortified, and Fort Constitution was built on the opposite island. As
the higher adjacent hills commanded it, this work was soon abandoned,
and three years later West Point was selected and fortified, with Fort
Clinton at the Point, and several other formidable works, becoming the
"American Gibraltar," the second massive chain being then extended
across to the island as an additional protection. It was considered
the most important post in the country, and at the time of Arnold's
treason in September, 1780, was garrisoned by over three thousand men,
and had one hundred and eighteen cannon in the various works. After
peace came, the military defenses fell into ruin; but Washington
repeatedly recommended that a military school be established at West
Point, and in 1802 it was authorized by Congress, going into operation
in 1812. The earthworks of the original Fort Clinton on the point,
built by the youthful engineer Thaddeus Kosciusko in 1778, have been
restored, and are carefully preserved. This young officer, descended
from a noble Polish family, had not completed his studies in the
military school of Warsaw when he eloped with a girl of high rank. The
enraged father pursued and captured them, and the youthful lover was
compelled either to slay the father or abandon the daughter. He chose
the latter, and going to Paris met Dr. Franklin, who soon filled him
with a desire to help the struggling Americans, and he came over and
entered the army as an engineer in 1776. He served with distinction
throughout the war, was made a General, and publicly thanked by
Congress. He fought afterwards in the Polish Revolution, and retiring
to Switzerland, died in 1817. He is buried in the Cathedral Church of
Cracow, and near that city a mound one hundred and fifty feet high has
been raised to his memory, earth being brought from every battlefield
in Poland. The Kosciusko monument of marble was erected in memory of
the noble Pole in an angle of Fort Clinton at West Point in 1829.
ARNOLD'S TREASON.
West Point itself saw no fighting, the great event of its early
history being Benedict Arnold's treason. Across the river from the
Point, and under the shadow of Sugar Loaf Mountain, is Beverly Cove,
with a little wharf, where then stood Beverly House, previously the
home of a prominent loyalist, Colonel Beverly Robinson of Virginia.
Dr. Dwight, afterwards President of Yale College, was Chaplain of a
Connecticut regiment at West Point in 1778, and he then climbed the
Sugar Loaf, describing its view over the Highlands as "majestic,
solemn, wild and melancholy." Arnold, when he plotted for the
surrender of the post with André at Treason Hill, below the Highlands,
agreed to the treason for $50,000 gold and a Brigadier General's
commission in the British army. Believing the plot was working
prosperously, Arnold, after the interview, had crossed from the Point
over to Beverly House, his headquarters, and three days afterwards
breakfasted there on September 24, 1780. Hamilton and Lafayette
arrived early that morning and met him, announcing that Washington was
at the ferry below and would soon join them. While at the table,
Arnold received a letter from an officer down the river with the
startling intelligence, "Major André of the British army is a prisoner
in my custody." Arnold is said to have acted with wonderful coolness
in the presence of his distinguished company, and although evidence
of his own guilt might at any moment have arrived, he thoroughly
concealed his emotions. Ordering a horse prepared, on the plea that
his presence was needed "over the river," he left the table and went
up stairs to his wife. He briefly told her they must part, perhaps
forever, as his life depended on speedily reaching the British lines.
The poor young wife, a bride of less than two years, was
horror-stricken, and swooning, sank senseless upon the floor. Arnold
dare not summon assistance, but kissed their sleeping infant, and
mounting his horse galloped down to the wharf. Here he jumped into his
six-oared barge, ordering them to row him swiftly down the Hudson,
strengthening their energies by a promised reward of two gallons of
rum. The oarsmen worked with a will, not knowing where they were
going, and were astonished when he got below the Highlands to find him
guiding them to the British sloop "Vulture." They were kept aboard as
prisoners by Arnold's orders, and saw him greeted as a friend by their
enemies. Even Sir Henry Clinton, when they arrived in New York,
despised this meanness and ordered their liberation.
Washington arrived at Beverly House soon after Arnold had left, being
anxious to see him, but could not find him. The General took a hasty
breakfast and crossed over the river to West Point seeking him, but
having no suspicions. He was disappointed at not finding Arnold
there, and talking to Colonel Lamb, commanding Fort Clinton, the
latter told him he had not heard from Arnold for two days.
Washington's suspicions began to awaken, and crossing back to Beverly
House, he was met by Hamilton, with the papers found upon André,
revealing Arnold's guilt. He summoned Lafayette and Knox for counsel,
and the deepest sorrow evidently stirred Washington's bosom as he
asked them the memorable question, "Whom can we trust now?" But soon
the condition of the deserted wife, who was frantic with grief and
apprehension, aroused his liveliest sympathy. Describing the scene,
Hamilton wrote: "The General went up to see her. She upbraided him
with being in a plot to murder her child, for she was quite beside
herself. One moment she raved; another she melted into tears.
Sometimes she pressed her infant to her bosom and lamented its fate,
occasioned by the imprudence of its father, in a manner that would
have moved insensibility itself." Washington did all in his power to
soothe her, believing her innocent of previous knowledge of her
husband's guilt. After Arnold had got safely aboard the "Vulture," he
wrote to Washington, imploring protection for his wife and child,
saying: "She is as good and innocent as an angel, and as incapable of
doing wrong." Ample protection was afforded, and they were sent safely
to her friends. She was Miss Shippen of Philadelphia, and only
eighteen years old when Arnold, then the Military Governor of
Philadelphia, married her in 1778, his second wife. The infant, James
Robertson Arnold, afterwards became a distinguished officer in the
British army, serving with credit in different parts of the world, and
rising to the rank of Lieutenant General, dying in London in 1854.
Benedict Arnold was made a Major General by the British, and was given
a considerable sum of money; but his life was unhappy, as he was
shunned and often insulted, and sinking into obscurity, he died in
London in 1801. His treason was deliberately plotted, investigation
showing he had been over a year in correspondence with the enemy, and
had sought the command at West Point, given him in August, 1780, in
order to compass its surrender.
OLD CRO' NEST AND THE STORM KING.
The dark pile of old Cro' Nest, guarding the northern side of West
Point, rises fourteen hundred and eighteen feet, one of the noblest
mountains of the Highlands. Beyond it, the Storm King and Mount Taurus
are the northern portals of the pass, with Pollopell's Island, rocky
and tree-clad, lying in the river between, and farther on the distant
hazy shores enclosing Newburg Bay. These buttresses of the northern
entrance solidly rise as protectors of the pass into the valley:
"Mountains that like giants stand
To sentinel enchanted land."
On the northern side of the promontory making the Point, upon a little
level plain above the cliffs, overlooking the river, and almost under
the shadow of old Cro' Nest, is the West Point Cemetery. Here is
buried General Winfield Scott. Upon the Parade Ground is the Battle
Monument, erected in 1894, a column seventy-eight feet high,
surmounted by a statue of Victory. Down along the most beautiful part
of the shore at the Point, and leading to Kosciusko's Garden, a
favorite resort of the Polish officer, is the secluded path which
generations of impulsive young cadets have known as the "Flirtation
Walk." Beginning at the roadway, high on the bluff, overlooking the
river, it winds with devious turns down the declivity, and after
curving around the promontory near the water's edge, sweeps grandly up
the incline again. This trysting-path leads under a lacework of
foliage, giving it pleasant and meditative gloom even when the sun
shines brightly. Over across the river is the village of Cold Spring,
having both above and below the shores rising steeply, and hung upon
the edge is the pretty Church of St. Mary's, with its columned portico
and surmounting belfry. Nearby the railway running along the shore
pierces a tunnel through a rugged protruding rock. Here is the Cold
Spring foundry that makes cannon for the army. Almost under the Parade
Ground on the northern side is the Siege Battery, where the guns in
time of artillery practice carry on a noisy and reverberating
warfare across the Cove against the dark and towering side of old Cro'
Nest. This grand mountain, the target for the youthful gunners,
inspired the muse of George P. Morris, the lyric poet of the
Highlands, whose delightful home was at Undercliff, across the river
above, at the foot of Mount Taurus. His eyes perpetually feasted upon
the view of this peak, and thus he described it:
"Where Hudson's wave o'er silvery sands
Winds through the hills afar,
Old Cro' Nest like a monarch stands
Crowned with a single star."
[Illustration: _Up the Hudson from the Water Battery, West Point_]
The northern portal of the Highlands is guarded on either hand by the
Storm King, rising fifteen hundred and twenty-nine feet, and Mount
Taurus, fifteen hundred and eighty-six feet. There are also a galaxy
of attendant peaks. Beyond Mount Taurus is Breakneck Hill, rising
nearly twelve hundred feet, with a chain of mountains stretching far
to the northeast, among them the Old Beacon and the towering Grand
Sachem, sixteen hundred and eighty feet high. The Storm King was the
old Boter-Berg of the early Dutch, thus named because, to their
matter-of-fact minds, the mountain resembled nothing so much as a huge
lump of butter. Similarly, the eastern portal of the pass was Bull
Mountain originally, but has since been more classically transformed
into Mount Taurus. The ancient Knickerbocker legend records how the
primitive inhabitants chased a wild bull around this mountain to the
peak beyond it, where he fell and broke his neck, thus naming both of
them, though Breakneck Hill yet awaits a more classic transformation.
The geologists tell us that in early ages, like the Minisink of the
Delaware, the region north of the Highlands adjacent to the Hudson
Valley was a vast lake, extending back to Lake Champlain, which still
remains as a fragment of the inland sea, following the melting of the
great glacier. To get a southern outlet, the river broke through the
mountain barrier and formed the winding and romantic Highland Pass.
There is a grand outlook from the summit of the Storm King over this
valley to the northward. The river expands into the beautiful Newburg
Bay, its most perfect land-locked harbor, and its course can be traced
through the "Long Reach" for more than twenty miles, a broad, straight
stream between the pleasant banks, up to Crom Elbow, the "Krom
Elleboge" of the original Dutch colonists. Villages dot the shores,
and fertile fields stretch up on either hand, while hung in mid air,
far away across the water, is the distant, slender, spider-like span
of the high railway bridge at Poughkeepsie, the route by the "back
door" into New England, which has gone through such serious throes of
reconstruction. Upon the left hand the Catskills, and upon the right
hand the Berkshire Hills of Western Massachusetts, bound the distant
horizon. Behind, and to the southward, the river can be traced as it
winds through the Highlands down to Anthony's Nose, while nearer, one
can look into the depression on top of the adjoining mountain, within
a surrounding amphitheatre of peaks that makes the striking
resemblance giving the significant name to the old Cro' Nest.
THE CULPRIT FAY.
Between the Storm King and old Cro' Nest is the deep and beautiful
Vale of Tempe, with wild ravines furrowed through it, forming channels
for clear mountain streams, and the trees conceal many a delicious
dell. In this picturesque nook among the mountains is laid the scene
of Joseph Rodman Drake's charming poem of "The Culprit Fay":
"'Tis the middle watch of a summer's night,
The earth is dark but the heavens are bright;
Naught is seen in the vault on high
But the moon and the stars and the cloudless sky,
And the flood which rolls its milky hue,
A river of light on the welkin blue.
The moon looks down on old Cro' Nest,
She mellows the shades on his shaggy breast,
And seems his huge gray form to throw
In a silver cone on the wave below;
His sides are broken by spots of shade,
By the walnut bough and the cedar made,
And through their clustering branches dark
Glimmers and dies the fire-fly's spark,
Like starry twinkles that momently break
Through the rifts of the gathering tempest's rack."
The story is told that Drake, then about twenty-one years of age, and
James Fenimore Cooper and Fitz-Greene Halleck, who were his close
friends, in August, 1816, were strolling through these Highlands. His
companions got into a discussion, holding that our American rivers
gave no such rare opportunities for poetic fancy as the streams of
older lands. Drake disputed this, and, to prove the contrary, composed
within three days this exquisite poem, which has largely made his
fame. It is a simple yet interesting story. The fairies living in this
beautiful valley are called together at midnight to punish one who has
broken his vow, and they sentence him to a difficult penance, with all
the evil spirits of air and water opposing. The genius of the poet
interweaves the poem with every natural attraction the locality
affords. Thus are the fairies summoned to the dance:
"Ouphe and goblin! imp and sprite!
Elf of eve and starry fay!
Ye that love the moon's soft light,
Hither, hither, wend your way.
Twine ye in a jocund ring;
Sing and trip it merrily;
Hand to hand and wing to wing,
Round the wild witch-hazel tree."
These Cro' Nest fairies are a dainty race. Owlet's eyes are their
lanterns; they repose in cobweb hammocks swung on tufted spears of
grass and rocked by midsummer night zephyrs; some lie on beds of
lichen, with pillows of the breast-plumes of the humming-bird; others
nestle in the purple shade of the four-o'clock, or in rock-niches
lined with dazzling mica. Velvet-like mushrooms are their tables,
where they quaff the dew from the buttercup. Their king's throne is of
spicewood and sassafras, supported on tortoise-shell pillars and
draped with crimson tulip-leaves. The "culprit" himself, however, in
his beautiful outfit and quaint adventures, gives the best imagery of
the poem. At the opening of his journey, chagrined and fatigued, he
captures a spotted toad for a steed, and bridles her with silk-weed
twist, spurring her onward with an osier whip. Arriving at the water's
edge, he plunges in, but leeches, fish and other watery foes drive him
back with bruised limbs. The use of cobweb lint and the balsam dews of
sorrel and henbane relieve his wounds, and being refreshed by the
juices of calamus, he embarks in a mussel-shell boat, painted
brilliantly without and tinged with pearl within. He gathers a
colen-bell for a cup, and sculls into the middle of the stream,
laughing at the foes who chatter and grin in the water. There he sits
in the moonlight, until a sturgeon, coming by, leaps glistening into
the silvery light; and then, like a liliputian Mercury, balancing upon
one foot, he lifts the flowery cup and catches the sparkling drop that
washes the stain from his wing. He returns to the shore, having sweet
nymphs grasping the sides of the boat with their tiny hands and
urging it onward. The next enterprise of the "culprit" is more
knightly. He is arrayed as a fairy cavalier, in acorn helmet, plumed
with thistle-down, corselet made of a bee's nest, and cloak of
butterfly wings. His shield is a lady-bug's shell; his lance a
wasp-sting; his spurs of cockle-seed; his bow of vine-twig strung with
corn-silk; and his arrows, nettle-shafts. He mounts a fire-fly steed,
and waving a blade of blue grass, speeds upward to catch a flying
meteor's spark. Again the spirits of evil are let loose, those of air
being as bad as those of water. A sylphid queen tries to enchant him
with her beauty and kindness; she toys with the butterfly cloak as he
tells the dangers he has passed. But he never forgets the object of
his pilgrimage, and triumphing over the foes of air, he is escorted
with honor by the sylph's lovely retinue; his career is resumed, his
flame-wood lamp rekindled, and before a streak of dawn is proclaimed
in the eastern sky by the sentry elf, the "Culprit Fay" has made his
full penance and been welcomed back to all his original glory. Drake
died at the early age of twenty-five, a victim of consumption, and his
grave is beside the little river Bronx in New York. To his memory his
friend Halleck wrote the noted poem, thus beginning:
"Green be the turf above thee,
Friend of my better days!
None knew thee but to love thee,
Nor named thee but to praise."
NEWBURG BAY.
Emerging from the Highlands, the gentle slopes of the town of Cornwall
are under the shadow of the Storm King, while the mountain range
stretches off to the northeast, with Fishkill village in front, and
the Revolutionary signal station of the Old Beacon standing up
prominently behind. These mountains were the Indian Matteawan, the
"Council of Good Fur." The same name was given the stream draining
their sides until the Dutch called it Vis Kill, or Fish Creek, and
hence its present name and that of the village. The shores of Newburg
Bay seem low, as they are dwarfed by the mountains, and on the western
slope an elevated bench of table-land in terraces stretches back to
the distant hills. The town of Newburg, which has about twenty-five
thousand people, spreads up these terraces, and in front there are
storehouses, mills and railway terminals. When Hendrick Hudson sailed
his ship "Half Moon" through the Highlands, he was attracted by the
site of Newburg, and wrote: "It is as beautiful a land as one can
tread upon; a very pleasant place to build a town on." A tribe of the
Minsis who had a village known as the Quassaic, meaning "the Place of
the Rock," then occupied it, and would not for a half-century permit a
settlement. They were driven away, however, and a colony of Lutherans
from the Palatinate came here and founded the "Palatine Parish of
Quassaic." They did not flourish, and ultimately some Scots arrived
from the Tay, and seeing quite a resemblance to their old home, named
the place Newborough. Its most distinguished citizen has probably been
General John E. Wool, born here in 1788. At the southern end of this
pleasant town, a short distance back from the river, is its chief
celebrity, a low, old-fashioned graystone building, appearing to be
almost all roof, from which tall chimneys rise. There is a broad lawn
and flagstaff in front, and a grove for the background. This is the
historic house, maintained by New York State as a relic, which was
General Washington's headquarters during the closing campaign of the
Revolution. It was built by Jonathan Hasbrouck, a Huguenot, in 1750,
and is also known as the Hasbrouck House. In its centre is a large
hall, having a huge fireplace on one side, and containing seven doors,
but only one window. This was Washington's reception hall, and here he
dined with his guests. At the foot of the flagstaff on the lawn is
buried the last survivor of Washington's Life Guard, Ural Knapp, who
died in 1856 at the age of ninety-seven. This Guard, organized in
Boston in 1776, continued as his bodyguard throughout the war, and was
selected from all the regiments of the army. Knapp was its sergeant,
and at his last public appearance at a banquet in Newburg, the old man
made a brief address, concluding with an invitation to the entire
company to attend his funeral; four months later they did so.
The "Tower of Victory" is a fine monument, built on the grounds by the
Government, and surmounted by a statue of Washington in the act of
sheathing his sword. A bronze tablet with the figure of Peace
announces that it was erected "in commemoration of the disbandment,
under proclamation of the Continental Congress of October 18, 1783, of
the armies by whose patriotic and military virtue our National
independence and sovereignty was established." It was at Newburg that
Washington was offered the title of King by the officers of the army,
but declined it. Over at Fishkill is the old Verplanck House, with its
quaint dormer windows, which was the headquarters of Baron Steuben,
and here, upon the disbandment of the army, was held the meeting of
the officers at which was formed the Society of the Cincinnati,
Washington being its first president. The mountainous region east and
south and the "neutral ground" were the haunts of Enoch Crosby of
Massachusetts, the American spy of the Revolution, whose exploits all
about this locality Fenimore Cooper wove into his novel _The Spy, a
Tale of the Neutral Ground_, which made the novelist's earliest fame.
The ancient Wheaton House, around which much of the tale centred, is
still there. The Murderer's Creek comes down to the Hudson through
Newburg,--an attractive stream which deserved a better name, but did
not get it until N. P. Willis, who lived at Cornwall, and who
converted the Dutch "Butter Hill" into the Storm King, and "Bull Hill"
into Mount Taurus, tried his persuasive powers at Newburg and got this
stream softened into the pleasant Indian name of Moodna. The
neighborhood of Newburg is famous from a scientific standpoint for the
finding of the remains of mastodons. One was unearthed there in 1899,
making the eleventh found in Orange County, New York, during the past
century, some of them being among the finest specimens extant.
At the head of Newburg Bay, on the western shore, is a rocky platform
down by the waterside, known as the "Devil's Dance Chamber." When the
"Half Moon" came up the river and anchored for the night, this broad
flat rock, now almost hidden by cedars, was the scene of a wild
midnight revel of the Indians, with all the accessories of song and
dance, fire and war-paint, at which the Dutch sailors marvelled
exceedingly, calling it the "Duyvel's Dans-Kamer." Here the warlike
Minsis of the Quassaic, before going on hunting expeditions or the
warpath, would paint themselves grotesquely and dance around a fire
with horrible contortions, singing and yelling under direction of the
soothsayers or "medicine men." They believed, if this was kept up long
enough, the evil spirit would appear, either as a wild beast or a
harmless animal; if the former, it foreboded ill-fortune and the
expedition was abandoned, while the latter was a good omen. These
hideous performances afterwards scared old Governor Peter Stuyvesant,
according to the veracious Knickerbocker, when he sailed up the river,
for the historian says, "Even now I have it on the point of my pen to
relate how his crew was most horribly frightened, on going on shore
above the Highlands, by a gang of merry, roystering devils, frisking
and curvetting on a huge flat rock projecting into the river, and
which is called the Duyvel's Dans-Kamer to this very day."
POUGHKEEPSIE AND VASSAR.
The Hudson River's "Long Reach" stretches many miles almost due
northward, and on it is Poughkeepsie, with thirty thousand population,
midway between New York and Albany. Near here lived stout Theophilus
Anthony the blacksmith, who forged the great chains stretched across
the Hudson in the Highlands, for which the British burnt his house and
carried him a captive down to the New York prison-ships. Here, at
Locust Grove, a foliage-covered rocky point protruding into the river,
was long the home of Professor Samuel F. B. Morse, the inventor of the
electric telegraph. Poughkeepsie spreads broadly upon its group of
gentle hills, with the great railway-bridge crossing high overhead,
elevated two hundred feet above the water, and nearly a mile and a
half long. The Poughkeepsie streets, lined with fine elms, maples and
acacias, rise upon the sloping banks to a height above the bridge
level, the town being environed by rocky buttresses. The Indians named
the place Apo-keep-sinck, or the "pleasant and safe harbor," and in it
they housed their canoes. From this was gradually evolved the present
name, through a variety of spellings, of which no less than forty-two
different styles are found in the old records of the town. The "safe
harbor" of the Indians was between two protruding rocky bluffs, and is
now filled with wharves. The rapid Winnakee Brook leaps into it, a
stream which the Dutch called the Fall Kill. The northern bordering
bluff was their Slange Klippe, or the "Adder Cliff," infested with
venomous serpents, and the other is the "Call Rock." Tradition tells
that once a band of Mohican warriors who had made a foray into New
England brought here some Pequot captives, among them a young chief
who was tied to a tree for a sacrifice, when a shriek startled them,
and a girl, leaping from the thicket, implored his life. She also was
a captive Pequot and his affianced. As the captors debated, the
warwhoop was suddenly sounded by hostile Hurons, and they seized their
arms for defense. The maiden released her lover, but in the conflict
they were separated, and a Huron carried her off. The young chief was
almost inconsolable, but he pursued them beyond the river, and
conceived a daring plan for rescue. He entered the Huron camp
disguised as a wizard, found the maiden ill, and her Huron captor
implored the wizard to save her life. This he essayed to do, she
recognized him, and eluding the Huron vigilance, they escaped at
nightfall. They made their way to the Hudson, paddled over in a canoe,
and though pursued, he brought her into the "safe harbor," concealed
her, and then, by the aid of the friendly Indians he found there, beat
off the Hurons.
The Dutch often sailed by, and cast longing eyes upon this spot, so
favorable for a settlement, but it was nearly a century after Hudson's
exploration when the venerable yet venturesome Baltus Van Kleek
concluded it was about time to take possession. He landed in the
harbor, became the lord of the manor, and in 1705 built near the
Winnakee Brook a stout fortress-dwelling, which stood until recently.
It was loop-holed for musketry, and in it the New York Legislature met
for two sessions during the Revolution. Out in front was the "Call
Rock," where old Baltus and his friends used to stand and hail the
passing Dutch sloops when they wanted to get the news or journey upon
the river. The New York State Convention met at Poughkeepsie in 1788,
and ratified the Federal Constitution by the small majority of three,
after a protracted debate. From its many elevations, this leading city
of the Hudson Valley has a superb outlook, only limited by the
Catskills far to the northwest, the Highlands down the river, and the
dark-blue Shawangunk ridge off to the westward, where the attractive
lakes Mohonk and Minnewaska, the former at twelve hundred and the
latter at eighteen hundred feet elevation, nestle high among the
mountain peaks, overshadowed by the bold summits of Paltz Point and
Sky Top. Here flows deep in the valley the pretty Wallkill, out to the
Rondout and the Hudson, giving the railroad a route into the mountain
fastness.
About two miles back from the river, and behind the city, is Vassar
College, the foremost educational institution for women in the world.
The splendid buildings stand in grounds covering two hundred acres,
attractively laid out, and the main building, modelled after the
Tuileries, with high surmounting dome, is five hundred feet long. From
Sunset Hill, their highest eminence, there is a panorama of the Hudson
for forty miles. This college was the gift of Matthew Vassar, a
wealthy Poughkeepsie merchant and brewer, of English birth, who
desired to make it the most complete foundation of its kind, and gave
and bequeathed $1,000,000 besides the land, there being over $400,000
expended upon the buildings. His nephews have since made large
additional gifts. Here is provided a complete mathematical, classical
and English education for several hundred female students. Its main
building is the chief structure of Poughkeepsie. There are art
galleries, a museum, library and observatory. The museum of American
birds is the most complete existing, there is a fine gallery of
water-colors, and a collection of ancient weapons and armor, including
the halberd of King Francis I. The founder, having an ample fortune
and no children, devoted the closing years of his life to this
beneficent work, the college being begun in 1861 and opened in 1865.
He labored assiduously at its development and died at his post of
duty. Three years after the opening, when attending the annual meeting
of the trustees, while reading his address, he was suddenly stricken
with death.
CROM ELBOW TO KINGSTON.
Upon the Hudson River's "Long Reach" is the favorite locality of the
winter "ice-boat races," this exhilarating sport in boats on runners
speeding over the ice, before the wind, being much enjoyed. A few
miles above Poughkeepsie the reach comes to an abrupt termination, in
the bent and narrow pass, where the cliffs compress the channel and
form the crooked strait known as the Crom Elbow, the Dutch and English
words having the same meaning. Above, the western shore for a long
distance is lined with apple orchards and vineyards, while the eastern
bank for over thirty miles is a succession of villas interspersed with
hamlets. Moving northward, the noble Catskill range comes into full
view, gradually changing from distant gray to nearer blue, and then to
green with the closer approach. Along the river for many miles, where
these magnificent mountains give such a grand front outlook, there are
a series of old Knickerbocker estates, many occupied by the
descendants of the early settlers. Here was the princely home of the
late William B. Dinsmore of Adams Express Company, a business begun in
1840 with two men, a wheelbarrow and a boy, Dinsmore being one of the
men and the late John Hoey of Long Branch the boy. Dinsmore built his
gorgeous palace on the Hudson--and died. On the western shore is
Pell's great apple orchard, shipping the fruit from twenty-five
thousand trees all over the world. Some distance above, the Rondout
Creek comes out through a deep gorge, having the twin cities of
Rondout and Kingston nestling among its bordering hills. They have
together over twenty-five thousand people. This was the outlet of the
abandoned Delaware and Hudson Canal. Kingston Point, the mouth of the
creek, was the place of earliest Dutch settlement in this part of New
York, where they called it Wittwyck, or the "Wild Indian Town," and
for defense built a redoubt, whence come the name of Rondout.
The historic city of Kingston spreads back to Esopus Creek, a short
distance inland, and was the Esopus town of colonial times, the name
coming from the Indian dwellers here, meaning "the river." The old
"Senate House" of Kingston, built in 1676, was the first meeting-place
of the New York Legislature, and it now contains a collection of Dutch
and other relics. The Esopus Indians broke up the original
settlements with a terrible massacre, but Huguenot refugees came and
re-peopled the place, and during the Revolution Esopus was such a
"nest of rebels" that when the British came along in 1777 they burnt
it. This punishment was inflicted because it was made the capital and
the first New York State Constitution had been framed here during the
preceding February. The tale is told that the British landing to burn
the town scared a party of Dutch laborers, who briskly scampered off.
One of them stepped on a hay-rake, and the handle flying up gave him a
sharp rap on the head. Being frightened more than hurt, and sure that
a Britisher closely pursued him, he fell on his knees, and imploringly
exclaimed, "Mein Gott, I give up; hooray for King Shorge!" Kingston is
a great producer of flagstones and manufactory of Rosendale cements,
made from a fine-grained, hard, dark-blue stone, which is broken,
burnt in kilns with coal, ground, and then prepared for market. Mixed
with clean sharp sand, this cement becomes in time entirely impervious
to water, and has all the strength of the best natural building
stones.
GREAT HISTORIC ESTATES.
The solid old German burgher William Beckman came over from his native
Rhine in 1647, and went sailing up the Hudson, his Fatherland memories
being delighted at the sight of a noble hill on the eastern bank,
opposite Rondout Creek. He settled there, building a house, and behind
the hill started the town of Rhinebeck, a combination of his own name
and that of his native river. This well-known Rhinecliff stands up
alongside the Hudson, much like a vine-clad slope bordering the great
German river, and is adorned with the ancient Beckman House, a stone
structure built for a fort and dwelling. Famous estates surround
Rhinebeck. Here is Ellerslie, the summer home of Levi P. Morton,
formerly Vice-President, fronting the river for a long distance. The
Astor estate of Rokeby, which was the home of William B. Astor and his
son William Astor, is north of Rhinebeck, the house, surmounted by a
tower, standing in a spacious park about a mile back from the river.
Rokeby was a noted place in Revolutionary days, the home of General
Armstrong, whose daughter married the elder Astor. Here is the
Fleetwood estate, with its old house, built in 1700, having the
"cannon-room" in front, with a port-hole facing the river. Here are
Wilderstein and Grasmere, the home of the Livingston descendants, also
Wildercliff, built by Rev. Freeborn Garrettson, one of the founders of
the Methodist Church in America, its name signifying the "wild
Indian's cliff." Garrettson was educated in Maryland for the Church of
England. As a matter of conscience he afterwards espoused the cause of
the Methodists, then in their infancy, entered their ministry, freed
his slaves, and preached the gospel of Methodism everywhere,
declaring his firm faith in a special Providence, and often proving it
in his own person. Once a mob seized him and was taking him to jail,
when a sudden and overpowering flash of lightning dispersed them, and
he was left unmolested. In 1788 he came to New York in missionary
work, and was made Presiding Elder of the district between Long Island
Sound and Lake Champlain. Coming to Clermont, among his converts was
the sister of Chancellor Livingston, and he married her in 1793,
shortly afterwards building his house at Wildercliff. This was long a
home for Methodist clergymen, his daughter continuing his hospitality.
Another historic estate, just above Rokeby, is Montgomery Place, the
home of another Livingston, the widow of General Montgomery, who was
in the colonial attack upon Quebec, by Wolfe, and afterwards, in the
early days of the Revolution, led a forlorn hope against Quebec, and
perished as Wolfe had before him. His young widow lived here a
half-century, and her brother's descendants now possess it.
Krueger's Island, on the eastern shore, discloses in a grove a
picturesque ruin, with broken arches, specially imported from Italy by
a former owner of the island to give it a flavor of antiquity. The
Catskills now rise in grander view, the Plattekill Clove comes down
out of them, and Esopus Creek from the south flows into the Hudson.
The Dutch called this Zaeger's Kill, which time corrupted into
Saugerties, a pleasant factory village built behind the flats at the
creek's mouth, and having the Catskills for a splendid background.
Opposite, on the eastern bank, is Tivoli, and near here is located the
parent estate of these historic homes. Robert Livingston came from
Scotland to America in 1672 and married a member of the Schuyler
family, who was the widow of a Van Rensselaer. He was a patrician of
high degree, of the family of the Earls of Linlithgow, and seeking a
home in the American wilderness, settled on the Hudson. He first lived
at Albany, and being Secretary to the Indian Commissioners, he
acquired extensive tracts of land fronting the river, which afterwards
became the basis of great wealth. In 1710 these lands were
consolidated under one English patent, giving him a princely domain of
one hundred and sixty-two thousand acres for an "annual rent of
twenty-eight shillings, lawful money of New York," equalling about
$3.50. This "Livingston Manor" gave him a seat in the Colonial
Legislature, and he built his manor-house upon a grassy point along
the Hudson River bank, at the mouth of "Roeleffe Jansen's Kill,"
flowing in a few miles north of Tivoli. The greater part of the manor
descended to his son Robert, who built a finer mansion there, known as
"Old Clermont," which the British burnt during the Revolution. In this
house was born the grandson, the famous Chancellor of New York, Robert
R. Livingston, who had so much to do with guiding the course of the
State in that momentous era. He built the present Clermont mansion on
the river bank above Tivoli. It is on a bluff shore, a grand estate
surrounding it, and sloping gradually up to the hill-tops stretching
to the horizon behind. This estate extended back originally to the
Berkshire hills. The full glory of the Catskills is spread out in
panorama before this noted mansion, with the distant hotels perched on
the mountain tops.
Chancellor Livingston was sent Minister to France, and when he
returned he brought over merino sheep, introducing them into this
country. His great honor as a man of science comes from his connection
with Fulton's steamboat experiments. He met Fulton in Paris, and was
closely connected with the first steamboat on the Hudson, which in
fact could not have been built without his aid. By the help of
Livingston's money, Fulton in 1807 built this steamboat in New York,
naming her the "Clermont" in his honor. The experiment was publicly
derided as "Fulton's Folly," but he persevered and succeeded. The
"Clermont" was one hundred feet long, twelve feet beam and seven feet
depth. In September, 1807, she made the first successful experimental
trip from New York to Albany in thirty-six hours, charging the
passengers $7.50 fare. She afterwards made regular trips, and on
October 5, 1807, the _Albany Gazette_ announced: "Mr. Fulton's new
steamboat left New York on the 2d, at ten o'clock A.M., against a
strong tide, very rough water, and a violent gale from the north. She
made a headway against the most sanguine expectations and without
being rocked by the waves." Chancellor Livingston in Jefferson's
Administration negotiated the cession of Louisiana by France to the
United States, and ripe with honors, he died at Clermont in 1813.
THE CATSKILL MOUNTAINS.
Opposite these great estates, the Catskill Mountains rise in all their
glory, spreading across the western horizon at a distance of eight to
ten miles from the Hudson River. They stretch for about fifteen miles,
and the range covers some five hundred square miles. The most
prominent peaks in the view are Round Top and the High Peak, rising
thirty-seven hundred and thirty-eight hundred feet, and in front of
them, on lower elevations, are the summer hotels that have such superb
views over the Hudson River valley. The town of Catskill on the
river--a flourishing settlement of five thousand people--is the usual
point of entrance, and from it a railway extends back to the bases of
the mountains. An inclined plane railway over a mile long then ascends
the face of the range, sixteen hundred feet high, to the hotels. This
"Otis Elevating Railway," which accomplishes its journey in about ten
minutes, is said to be the greatest inclined road in the world. The
Indians knew these grand peaks as the Onti Ora, or "Mountains of the
Sky," thus named because in some conditions of the atmosphere they
appear like a heavy cumulus cloud hanging above the horizon. The weird
Indian tradition was that among these mountains was held the treasury
of storms and sunshine for the Hudson, presided over by the spirit of
an old Indian squaw who dwelt within the range. She kept the day and
the night imprisoned, letting out one at a time, and made new moons
every month and hung them up in the sky, for they first appeared among
these mountains, and then she cut up the old moons into stars. The
great Manitou also employed her to manufacture thunder and clouds for
the valley. Sometimes she wove the clouds out of cobwebs, gossamers
and morning dew, and sent them off, flake by flake, floating in the
air, to give light summer showers. Sometimes she would blow up black
thunder-storms and send down drenching rains to swell the streams and
sweep everything away. All these storms coming from the west appeared
to originate in the mountains. The Indians also told of the imps that
haunted their dells, luring the hunters to places of peril. When the
Dutch colonists came along, they sent expeditions into the mountains,
searching for gold and silver, but chiefly found wildcats, causing
them to be named the Kaatsbergs, and from this their present title has
come to be, in time, the Kaatskills or the Catskills.
These attractive mountains are a group of the Alleghenies, having
spurs extending northwest and west, at right angles to the general
trend of the range, thus giving them quite a different form from that
usual in the Allegheny ridges. They assume also more of the abrupt and
rocky character of the Alpine peaks, and instead of the usual folds or
fragments of arches commonly seen elsewhere, the Catskill crags are
masses of piled-up strata in the original horizontal position. They
have a most precipitous declivity facing the east towards the river
valley. Deep ravines, which the Dutch called "Cloves," are cut into
them by the mountain torrents, descending in places in beautiful
cascades, sometimes for hundreds of feet. This aggregation of rocky
cliffs and rounded peaks, and the intersecting gorges and smiling
verdant valleys, have become a great resort for the summer
pleasure-seeker, with myriads of hotels and boarding-places, where it
is said that eighty to a hundred thousand people will go in the
season. Their eastern verge is drained by the Hudson, while the many
brooks and kills flowing out to the westward are gathered into the two
branches that form the Delaware River.
From their eastern front, where the huge hotels, built at twenty-four
hundred feet elevation, are anchored by ponderous chain cables to keep
them from being overthrown by the wind, there is an unrivalled view
over the valley. The Hudson River stretches a silvery streak across
the picture, and can be traced nearly a hundred miles from West Point
up to Albany. Its distant diminutive steamboats slowly move, and like
a shining thread, as the western sun strikes the car-windows and is
reflected, a railway train glides along the bank ten miles away, seen
so well, and yet so small. The perpendicular mountain wall brings the
valley almost beneath one's feet, the buildings looking like
children's toy houses, the trees like dwarfed bushes, and the fields,
with their alternating green and brown colors, contrasting as the
spaces on a chess-board. Wagons crawl like little ants upon the narrow
mud-colored lines representing roads. The broad valley, though its
surface is rugged and has high hills surmounted by patches of
woodland, is so far below that it appears from above as a flat floor.
Thus it stretches off to the river, with a sparkling pond here and
there, and extending beyond to the eastern horizon the view is
enclosed by the dark-blue Berkshire hills in Massachusetts, forty
miles away. Behind them, on favored days, rise like a misty haze, off
to the northeast, the White Mountains of New Hampshire. It was in this
region that James Fenimore Cooper located the "Leather Stocking
Tales," for his home at Cooperstown was on the Catskills' western
verge. Natty Bumppo climbed up the mountain to get this wonderful
view. "What see you when you get there?" asked Edward. "Creation,"
said Natty, sweeping one hand around him in a circle, "all creation,
lad," and then he continued, "If being the best part of a mile in the
air, and having men's farms at your feet, with rivers looking like
ribands, and mountains bigger than the 'Vision' seeming to be
haystacks of green grass under you, give any satisfaction to a man, I
can recommend the spot."
RIP VAN WINKLE AND THE KAATERSKILL.
These Catskill Mountains were purchased from the Indians on July 8,
1678, by a company of Dutch and English gentlemen, who took their
title at a solemn conclave held at the Stadt Huis in Albany, where the
Indian chief Mahak-Neminea attended with six representatives of his
tribe. The Indians seem to have soon disappeared, and the region for a
century or more remained mythical and almost unexplored, thus
contributing to the many fairy tales that have got mixed up with its
history. It was among these wonderful mountains that Washington Irving
was thus enabled to discover Rip Van Winkle. Down on the mountain
side, upon the margin of a deep dark glen leading up from Catskill
Village, stands Rip Van Winkle's ancient little cabin. It is within
the vast amphitheatre where Hendrick Hudson's ghostly crew held their
revels and beguiled him to drink from the flagon which put him into
his sleep of twenty years. It was a curious revel, for with the
gravest faces, and in mysterious silence, they rolled their nine-pin
balls, which echoed along the mountains like rumbling peals of
thunder. The huge cliffs overhanging the dark glen were evidently put
there for just such a ghostly scene, and even now the old denizens of
the Catskills are said to never hear a summer thunder-storm
reverberating among these mountains without concluding that the Dutch
ship's company from the "Half Moon" are again playing at their game of
nine-pins. There is still pointed out the slab of rock on which Rip
took his long sleep, and until recently there is said to have lived in
the old cabin an alleged "Van Winkle" who made a pretence to be a
descendant of the original Rip, and dispensed to the weary traveller
liquids fully as sulphurous as those in the flagon of the ghostly
crew. Among these mountains originated many of the quaint Dutch
legends that have got so interwoven into the early history of New York
that it is hard to separate the fact from the fiction.
It was not until 1823 that the first summer hotel was built in the
Catskills, a rude little structure standing where is now the Mountain
House, near the summit of the inclined plane railway. The highest peak
of the range is Slide Mountain, in the western Catskills, at the head
of the Big Indian Valley, rising forty-two hundred and five feet. A
large portion of this mountain, including the crest, is a New York
State reservation, and from its top six States are in view. These
Catskill peaks are built up of huge and jagged piles of crags and
broken stone, through which the torrents have carved the "Cloves." The
stratified rocks are easily split into layers, and they furnish the
towns along the Hudson with much of the flagging used for footwalks.
Enormous boulders, some as big as a house, are liberally strewn about,
where they were dropped by the great glacier. Among the grandest of
the gorges, which the torrents have cleft, is the Kaaterskill Clove,
its stream, after various windings, finally flowing eastward towards
the Hudson. As the name Kaatskill comes from the cat, so the
Kaaterskill is regarded as derived from an animal of most complete
feline development, the "gentleman cat." The steep borders of this
Kaaterskill Clove, a wonderful canyon, down in the bottom of which ice
and snow remain during the summer, furnish many points of remarkable
outlook, giving a startling realization of the vast scale of these
mountains. The stream bubbles far below, heard but not seen, and the
mountain peaks above are occasionally obscured by passing clouds.
Adjoining this canyon is an immense gorge carved out of the hills,
into which pours the majestic Kaaterskill Falls, plunging down an
abyss of two hundred and sixty feet in two leaps, respectively of one
hundred and eighty and eighty feet. The stream is dammed above the
cataract, so that in times of drouth the water may be retained and the
falls thus be exhibited at intervals by turning on the water, as is
the case with various cataracts in Switzerland. Few waterfalls have
had more praises sung than this ribbon of spray, which was a favorite
both of Cooper and Bryant. An inscription on the rock at the foot
preserves the memory of a faithful dog, who once jumped down to follow
a stone, because he thought it his master's bidding.
The unique description of the Kaaterskill Falls by Cooper's Leather
Stocking is interesting. He says, "The water comes crooking and
winding among the rocks, first so slow that a trout might swim in it,
and then starting and running just like any creature that wanted to
make a far spring, till it gets to where the mountain divides like the
cleft hoof of a deer, leaving a deep hollow for the brook to tumble
into. The first pitch is nigh two hundred feet, and the water looks
like flakes of driven snow afore it touches the bottom; and then the
stream gathers itself together again for a new start, and may be
flutters over fifty feet of flat rock before it falls for another
hundred, where it jumps about from shelf to shelf, first turning this
a-way, and then turning that a-way, striving to get out of the hollow,
till it finally comes to the plain. To my judgment, it's the best
piece of work I've met with in the woods, and none know how often the
hand of God is seen in the wilderness but them that rove it for a
man's life." William Cullen Bryant thus sings the praises of the
Kaaterskill Falls:
"'Midst greens and shades the Kaaterskill leaps
From cliffs where the wood-flower clings;
All summer he moistens his verdant steeps
With the sweet, light spray of the mountain springs;
And he shakes the woods on the mountain side,
When they drip with the rains of autumn tide.
"But when in the forest bare and old,
The blast of December calls,
He builds, in the star-light clear and cold,
A palace of ice where his torrent falls,
With turret, and arch, and fret-work fair,
And pillars blue as the summer air."
At the head of the Kaaterskill Clove are Haines's Falls in a
picturesque environment, the stream making two main leaps of one
hundred and fifty and eighty feet, and other plunges lower down,
descending in all four hundred and seventy-five feet, within the
distance of a quarter of a mile. The water here is also dammed to make
a better exhibition. A main railway route into the Catskills is from
Kingston up the valley of Esopus Creek, gradually ascending to its
sources in the southwestern part of the range. This leads past the
highest peak, Slide Mountain, past Shandaken or "the rapid water," and
up the Big Indian Valley, at the head of which the summit is crossed
between the waters of the Hudson and the Delaware. The "Big Indian"
whose memory is thus preserved was Winnisook, a savage seven feet
high. He fell in love with a white maiden of the lowlands, who,
however, married one Joe Bundy instead, but got along so unhappily
that she finally ran away to her dusky lover. Winnisook on one
occasion came down to the lowlands with his tribe on a cattle-stealing
expedition, and Joe Bundy shot and mortally wounded him, saying, "The
best way to civilize the yellow serpent is to let daylight into his
black heart." The Big Indian was afterwards found dead standing
upright in the hollow of a large pine tree. The inconsolable maiden,
overwhelmed with grief, is said to have spent the rest of her life
near Winnisook's grave, while the stump of the pine was preserved
until the railroad came along and covered it with an embankment. The
whole Catskill region is full of charming places, and the vast summer
crowds who visit it never tire of the bracing atmosphere, and the
magnificent and ever-changing panorama of cloud and sunshine and
diversified landscape, exhibited from its magnificent mountain tops.
"'Tis here the eastern sunbeams gild
The hills which rise on either hand;
Till showers of purple mist are spilled
In glittering dewdrops o'er the land."
THE DUTCH AND THE SHAKERS.
When Hendrick Hudson came up the river he found sand-bars above the
Catskills, and anchored his "Half Moon" near Mount Merino, at what is
now the head of ship navigation upon the Hudson, one hundred and
fifteen miles from New York. Just beyond, a high plateau sloping to
the shore is covered by the city of Hudson, having a green island in
front, and over opposite the little town of Athens, with a lighthouse
in midstream between them. Hudson has ten thousand people, a
picturesque city sloping up Prospect Hill, which rises five hundred
feet for a noble background, and it once had more ships and commerce
than the city of New York. A colony of thrifty Quakers from New
England started the settlement, which had many fishermen and whalers,
and a large fleet of ships sailing to Europe and the Indies, fifteen
loaded vessels having cleared from its wharves in a single day. But
Napoleon's wars swept away its fleet and commerce, and the last ship
was sold in 1845, so that its commercial greatness is only a
tradition; although it has become a seat of considerable manufactures.
Its most noted citizen was General Worth, a hero of the Mexican War,
whose monument stands on Fifth Avenue, New York. Both sides of the
river here are inhabited by the Dutch, and in fact theirs is the
universal language of the Hudson from Kingston up to Albany. These
Dutch of New York have given the country some notable men, among them
General Philip Schuyler, Colonel Van Rensselaer, General Stryker and
others of the Revolution, and President Martin Van Buren. They view
with pardonable pride the important share they have had in founding
and building up the Empire State, and Rev. Dr. Henry A. Van Dyke has
poetically and ingeniously described the "Typical Dutchmen" of New
York:
"They sailed from the shores of the Zuyder Zee
Across the stormy ocean,
To build for the world a new country
According to their notion:
A land where thought should be free as air
And speech be free as water;
Where man to man should be just and fair,
And Law be Liberty's daughter.
"When the English fleet sailed up the bay,
The small Dutch town was taken;
But the Dutchmen there had come to stay;
Their hold was never shaken.
They could keep right on, and work and wait
For the freedom of the nation;
And we claim to-day that New York State
Is built on a Dutch foundation."
From the Taghkanic range of the Berkshire hills, behind Hudson City, a
pretty stream comes down in many falls and cascades to the river just
northward, whose charming valley was known among the Dutch as "Het
Klauver Rack," or the "Clover Reach," modernized since, however, into
the Claverack Creek. The Columbia Springs are in this valley, and
farther on is Kinderhook Village, while back on the hills at a
thousand feet elevation above the river, most picturesquely located,
are the Lebanon Springs. Here is the noted Shaker settlement of New
Lebanon, founded by "Mother Ann" in the eighteenth century. The sect
has been declining in recent years, however. This is the governing
Shaker community, and it has been well said, of these celibates, that
"by frugality and industry they give us many useful things, but they
do not produce what the Republic most needs--men and women." They
cultivate large tracts of land, produce and sell quantities of herbs,
seeds and botanic medicines, and make baskets, brooms and sieves. Ann
Lee was the wife of a blacksmith in Manchester, England, and had been
the mother of several children. She had what she claimed as Divine
revelations, and was confined in a lunatic asylum for reviling
matrimony. Being released in 1770, she founded the new sect,
announcing, "I am Ann, the Word," and to escape further persecution
migrated to New York, where she was made its spiritual head.
Converting many, she established at New Lebanon the capital of the
Shaker world, which has been called "the rural Vatican which claims a
more despotic sway over the mind of man than ever the Roman Pontiff
assumed." She claimed her Divine revelation to be that she was the
female manifestation of Christ upon earth, the male manifestation
having been Jesus, and the Deity being considered a duality, composed
of both sexes. The Shakers call themselves the "United Society of
Believers in Christ's Second Appearing." They have entire community of
property, believe idleness to be sinful, and everyone able to work is
employed. In worshipping they "exercise both soul and body," singing
and dancing, and at times of fervent excitement making, with
regularity and perfect rhythm, rapid bodily evolutions. In these they
form in circles around a band of singers, to whose music they "go
forth in the dances of them that make merry." Since the death of
"Mother Ann" the Shaker community has been ruled by what is known as
the "Holy Lead," composed of the first and second elders and
elderesses. A peculiar tenet is that persons may join the sect after
death, and among these posthumous members are Washington, Lafayette,
Pocahontas, Napoleon and Tamerlane; and they hold that woman is
supreme over mankind. Near the village and among the Berkshire hills,
just over the border in Massachusetts, is their "Mount Sinai," where,
according to the tradition, the Shakers hunted Satan throughout a long
summer night, finally killing and burying him. They tell us that
Washington and Lafayette still keep guard over his grave, mounted on
white horses, and can be seen on summer nights by any of the truly
faithful who may pass that way.
The village of Kinderhook is in the Claverack Valley, and out in front
on the Hudson is its port, Stuyvesant Landing, where the testy old
Governor, Peter Stuyvesant the "Headstrong," made his landing when he
came up the river to attack the great Patroon, Killian Van Rensselaer.
Hendrick Hudson is said to have first named Kinderhook, or "Children's
Point," because he saw here a crowd of Indian children watching his
vessel. On the Lindenwold estate at Kinderhook, embowered in linden
trees, lived for many years President Martin Van Buren, a descendant
of the early Dutch settlers, and the shrewdest New York politician of
his time. Over on the western bank is the Chaney Tinker Lighthouse,
mounted on a crag a hundred feet high, and the distant horizon is
bounded by the Helderbergs, a long range of peaks, lower, however,
than the Catskills. Above, at Schodack Landing on the eastern shore,
was the seat of the council-fire of the Mohicans, called by the French
the _Loups_ or Wolves. The word "Is-cho-da" in their language means
the "fireplace," and from this has come the name. When Hudson ascended
the river, he found the Mohicans occupying its shores for a hundred
miles above Rondout Creek, but the race dwindled, until it became the
handful to whom the noted Jonathan Edwards ministered in the
eighteenth century, at Stockbridge, Massachusetts. Hudson passed a day
with them at Schodack, was treated hospitably, and wrote that their
land was "the finest for cultivation he ever set foot on." Two
centuries later, Cooper lamented the _Last of the Mohicans_.
THE LAND OF THE PATROONS.
We have now come to the high and rocky Bear or Beeren Island, which in
New York's early days was the southern boundary on the river of the
domain of the great Patroon, Killian Van Rensselaer. It marks the
limit of two counties on either bank, Greene and Columbia below,
joining Albany and Rensselaer above. Here stood the proud castle of
Rensselaerstein, cannoned and fortified, where the Patroon's agent,
the bold and doughty Nicolas Kroon, compelled all the Dutch sloops
coming up from New Amsterdam to dip their colors in token of his
sovereignty, and pay tribute for the privilege of entering the sacred
domain. We are told that all passing craft yielded homage excepting
two large whales, which in 1647 swam by and went up to the Mohawk,
greatly terrifying the honest Albany burghers. Above the island, the
Normanskill and other streams come down from the Helderbergs, making
the shoals of the "Overslaugh," which the Government has improved by
an extensive dyke system to deepen the river channel up to Albany.
There are long and narrow alluvial islands on these flats, among which
tows of Erie Canal barges thread their careful way; and ahead, the
city of Albany comes into view with its bridges in front, and the
grand new Capitol building elevated high on the hill above the town,
its red-topped pyramidal roofs seen from afar.
We are now at the domain of the great Patroon, the region around
Albany and Troy. When Hudson anchored his ship below the shoals, he
came with five of his sailors up to Albany in a row-boat and examined
the location. The result was that from his report Albany was actually
settled, five years later, in 1614, by the "United Nieu Nederlandts
Company," who built a trading-post, thus making Albany, after
Jamestown in Virginia, the oldest European settlement in the original
thirteen colonies. The post was located on an island just below the
city, near which the Normanskill flowed out through the forest on the
western bank--the Indian Tawasentha, or "place of many dead." This
island was called the "Kasteel," and in the "castle" a garrison of
about a dozen Dutchmen conducted a profitable fur-trade with the
Mohicans. Ultimately a freshet drove them to the mainland and they
built a fort at the mouth of the Normanskill, and in 1623 a stockade
was constructed above, at Albany, named Fort Orange in honor of the
Prince of the Netherlands. In 1629 colonists were sent out from
Holland, and the patroon system established. The Dutch West India
Company made arrangements for extensively colonizing the New
Netherlands, and passed a charter of exemptions and privileges to
encourage patroons (or patrons) to make settlements. Every patroon
establishing a colony was to have there within four years, as
permanent residents, at least fifty persons, over fifteen years of
age, of whom one-fourth were to arrive the first year. A director of
the company, Killian Van Rensselaer, a pearl merchant of Amsterdam,
was granted a patroonship, and got the officials at Fort Orange to buy
extensive tracts from the Indians. He thus, with three others,
acquired a manor extending twenty-four miles along the Hudson, from
Beeren Island up to the Mohawk River, and this manor, which
afterwards became the sole property of his family, was subsequently
enlarged to extend twenty-four miles back from the Hudson in both
directions, and contained over seven hundred thousand acres. The
Patroon was a feudal lord, possessing absolute title to the soil, with
power to administer civil and criminal justice, and enjoying other
rights that reduced his colonists to a condition little better than
serfs. His son Johannes inherited this patroonship from Killian, and
it went by entail through five generations, when the United States
laws barred further succession. The last Patroon, General Stephen Van
Rensselaer, died in 1839, and his son Stephen, the sixth of the line,
still styled by courtesy "the Patroon," died in 1868, aged eighty
years. The original settlement of Fort Orange in the manor of
Rensselaerwyck, as it was called, became a centre of the fur-trade,
and a town quickly grew around the fort, which the English, upon their
occupation in 1664, named Albany.
THE ANTI-RENT WAR.
As population increased on the adjacent lands, they began taking
leases from the Patroon, paying rent for their farms, and this
produced one of the bitterest conflicts known in American politics,
the New York "Anti-Rent War." After the Revolution the inhabitants
increased rapidly, and General Stephen Van Rensselaer, then the
Patroon, leased farms in perpetuity, upon the nominal consideration
for eight years of "a peppercorn a year," and at the expiration of
this time these leases drew a rent estimated at six per cent. interest
on the land value, about $5 per acre, payable in the produce of the
soil, fowls, and days' service with wagons and horses, the latter
designed to secure road-making. When the old General died in 1839, the
entail being abolished, he divided the manor between his two sons,
Stephen getting Albany County on the west bank, and William,
Rensselaer County on the east bank, including Troy. He had been a
lenient landlord, but the tenants became anxious, especially about
what was known as the "quarter sales clause" in their leases, giving
the landlord the right to claim one-fourth the purchase money whenever
the land passed by purchase, this condition being really inserted to
prevent alienation, as it did not become operative when the land was
sold or descended to one of the original tenant's family. The tenants
proposed that the landlord should sell the reservations, releasing
them from the rentals and making them owners in fee, but this was
declined. The tenants then employed counsel, who advised that the
landlord's right was absolute, but suggested, while there was no legal
remedy, that it would be good policy to make the rent collections so
difficult, the landlord would be willing to come to terms; that they
band together and give each other notice of the approach of bailiffs,
so the service of legal process would be troublesome. William H.
Seward, Governor of New York, espoused their cause, and to this
advice, he being a candidate for re-election in 1840, he added the
recommendation that the "anti-renters" should organize and send to the
Legislature men who would hold the balance of power between the great
parties, thus forcing the passage of laws relieving them.
Then began the "anti-rent" conflicts convulsing New York politics for
years. They formed an active and powerful political party, and created
other organizations, disguised as Indians, who attacked the law
officers. These supposed red men killed a man at Grafton in Rensselaer
County, and all legal efforts failed to discover the culprits. Other
similar manors existed in different parts of New York State where
payment of rents of much the same character was resisted, and these
regions also were excited. Outbreaks continued several years, until in
1845 Governor Silas Wright issued a proclamation declaring Delaware
County, on the western verge of the Catskills, in a state of
insurrection. This caused additional trouble, but the "anti-renters"
disposed of Wright by defeating him for re-election in 1846, and he
died soon afterwards. They elected their own candidate for Governor,
John Young, who pardoned out of jail nearly everybody imprisoned for
"anti-rent" crimes. The disputes finally got into the courts, and the
Van Rensselaers, fatigued with the controversy, sold all their rights
to a Colonel Church. He was sustained by legal decisions, and then
adopted a compromising policy, which quieted the agitation. He
released the rentals and gave fee-simple titles, so that at least
three-fourths of the old manor became without rental. His method of
compromise was based on a scale: for a farm of one hundred and sixty
acres where the annual rent was twenty-two and one-half bushels of
wheat, four fat fowls and one day's service, the value was fixed at
$26, being six per cent. interest on $433, and by paying this the
tenant got his fee-simple title. Thus the harassing conflict which
frequently required troops to be called out at Albany and elsewhere
was finally adjusted.
THE CITY OF ALBANY.
Albany, the New York State Capital, has over one hundred thousand
people. The city rises from the strip of level land along the river
bank, in a series of terraces, to a height of nearly two hundred feet,
the top being surmounted by the Capitol Building in a spacious park,
back of which the surface extends westward in a sandy, almost level
plain. The city spreads broadly along the river, where there are
wharves, foundries, railway stations, mills, storehouses and lumber
yards. Deep ravines are scarred into the hill behind them, and rows of
fine old Knickerbocker houses line the hilly streets, with
frequent church towers and spires rising above them. The main
street, just back from the river, is Broadway, of varying width, but
of the first commercial importance. At right angles to it, leading up
the hill, is State Street, a noble avenue, one hundred and fifty feet
wide, the front approach to the Capitol. This is the finest building
in New York State, was thirty years in construction, and has cost
$25,000,000. It is a quadrangle three hundred feet wide and four
hundred feet deep, with an unfinished central tower, intended to be
three hundred feet high, and Louvre pavilion towers at the angles. It
is built in the French Renaissance, of a light-colored granite,
pleasantly contrasting with the red-tiled roofs. Few of the
pretentious buildings of the world occupy a more commanding situation,
standing aloft like the Capitol at Washington, and, seen from afar, a
complete old-time French chateau. Mr. E. A. Freeman has written of it,
"If anyone had come up to me and told me in French, old or new, that
the new Capitol was 'Le Chateau de Monseigneur le duc d'Albanie,' I
could almost have believed him." Its architecture combines features
adapted from the Louvre and Hotel de Ville of Paris and the Lyons
Maison de Commerce. It stands in Capitol Square, a park of about eight
acres, of which it covers three acres. The finest halls are the Senate
and Assembly Chambers, to which grand stairways lead, and the interior
is decorated with rich carvings, rare marbles and emblematic
frescoes. The New York State Library, of nearly two hundred thousand
volumes, is in the building. Upon the six dormer windows opening in
the interior court are emblazoned the heraldic insignia of six noted
families distinguished in New York history--Stuyvesant, Schuyler,
Livingston, Jay, Clinton and Tompkins.
[Illustration: _The State Capitol, Albany, N. Y._]
Southward from the Capitol Square is the spacious and comfortable
Executive Mansion, with an extensive lawn, on Eagle Street. On the
same street, to the northeast of the Square, is the City Hall, a fine
Gothic building with an elaborate bell tower. Also on Eagle Street is
the Albany Medical College, having one of the finest Medical Museums
in the country. Among its curios is the embalmed body of Calvin Edson,
the "walking skeleton." This curious man came to Albany in 1830, being
then forty-two years old and five feet two inches high, yet weighing
only sixty pounds. He exhibited himself, and appeared in a play as
_Jeremiah Thin_. He had a good appetite, but the more he ate the
thinner he grew, until in 1833, the food ceasing to nourish him, he
literally starved to death amid plenty, and when the end came, weighed
but forty-five pounds. His widow sold his body to the college, and he
now stands in a glass case, preserved with the skin on, labelled "No.
1," and excepting discoloration is said to appear not very different
from when living. On the northern side of the Square is the Albany
Academy, one of the chief city schools, where Professor Joseph Henry
was for several years an instructor, and noted as the place where he
first demonstrated the theory of the magnetic telegraph by ringing a
bell by an electric spark transmitted through a mile of wire strung
around the room. The Dudley Astronomical Observatory is a small but
imposing building upon an eminence overlooking the Hudson, having a
munificent endowment begun by Mrs. Blandina Dudley in memory of her
husband, a wealthy Albany merchant. A charming spot is Washington
Park, westward from the Capitol, an enclosure of eighty-one acres,
surrounded by ornamental villas, with magnificent views and most
tastefully arranged. Part of this Park is land given the city by King
James II.
INTERESTING BUILDINGS.
The most noted old Albany building is at the northern end of Broadway,
in grounds extending to the river, and surrounded by fine trees, the
ancient Van Rensselaer Mansion, commonly called the "Patroon's,"--a
broad house with porch and wide central hall. This occupies the site
of the first mansion, which was covered with a roof of reeds. Over on
the opposite side of the river at Greenbush, the "Greene Bosch" or
"pine woods" of the original settlers, is the Patroon's other
residence, built of bricks from Holland, by the second Patroon
Johannes. Port-holes were cut in the walls for the musketeers, it
having been a fort in the Indian forays. The family burial-ground
adjoins the mansion. State Street, at the corner of Pearl, which is
parallel with Broadway, is the most interesting historic locality of
ancient Albany. Here stood that elaborate dwelling of the
Knickerbockers, regarded as the best specimen of old Dutch
architecture in New York State, the "Vanderheyden Palace," an
extensive building with two tall gables facing the street. One of the
old burghers, Johannes Beekman, built it in 1725, and during the
Revolution Jacob Vanderheyden of Troy bought it, and lived there many
years in the almost regal state of the Dutch aristocracy. Washington
Irving tells of it in the story of Dolph Heyliger, in _Bracebridge
Hall_, as the residence of "Herr Anthony Vanderheyden," and when
Irving transformed Van Tassel's old farmhouse into his villa at
Sunnyside he made a gable in imitation of one of these, and also
captured the old weather-vane of the "Palace"--a horse going at full
speed--to mount on top of it. Upon the opposite corner was the quaint
"Lydius House," the home of Rev. John Lydius, the owner of a great
manor at Fort Edward, farther up the Hudson, and in front of it stood
the crooked elm, giving the locality the name of the "Old Elm Tree
Corner." This tree is said to have been planted by Philip Livingston,
a signer of the Declaration of Independence, who lived in an adjoining
house. The "Lydius House" had been built as a parsonage for the
clergyman sent out to the old Dutch church, Rev. Gideon Schaats, the
bricks, tiles, iron and woodwork, together with the church bell and
pulpit, all coming from Holland in 1657, in the same ship. During many
years its only occupant was Balthazar Lydius, an eccentric bachelor, a
tall, spare, morose and irritable Dutchman, fond of bottle and pipe,
and having a round bullet head thinly sprinkled with white hair. He
gloried in his celibacy until the infirmities of age came upon him,
when it is said he gave a pint of gin for an Indian squaw, called her
his wife, and they lived contentedly together until he died. This was
the oldest brick building in the United States; its partitions were
made of mahogany and the exposed beams were richly carved.
The antique pulpit, which came across in the ship with the materials
of the "Lydius House," has done duty from then until now in various
Dutch churches of Albany. It is of carved oak, octagonal in form. The
original church stood in the middle of State Street, a low building
with a tall pyramidal roof and little steeple, since removed to widen
the street. The church gallery was quite low, while the huge stove
warming the building was put upon a platform so high that the sexton
had to step on it from the gallery when he wanted to kindle the fire.
The astute Albany philosophers of those days believed heat descended
from above. The bell-rope hung from the little steeple down into the
centre of the church, and here, at eight o'clock at night, was rung
the "suppawn bell," a signal to the obedient people to eat their
"suppawn" or hasty pudding, and go to bed. Albany in the olden time
had a quaint aspect because of the predominance of steep-roofed
houses, with their terraced gables, but many of them have given way
for modern improvements. Upon State Street, at the corner of James,
lived in one of these the famous Anneke Jans Bogardus, who died there
in 1663, the owner of the lands in New York city now partly held by
Trinity Church, which her heirs have acquired so much notoriety in
trying to recover. A bank now occupies the site. Albany has had some
interesting history. In 1754 the Congress met here which was the first
colonial organization, and finally developed into the Continental
Congress. Seven colonies, north of Maryland, sent twenty-five
Commissioners, who made a treaty with the Iroquois, the Indian league
of the "Six Nations." Afterwards, under the guidance of Benjamin
Franklin, a plan was adopted for a union of the colonies, its
provisions being much similar to the United States Constitution of
1787. Thus the germ of the American Union was first developed at
Albany. Her influences have been powerful in politics. For many years
the "Albany Regency" controlled the old Democratic party, this name
having been given by Thurlow Weed, then editor of the _Albany Evening
Journal_, to a junta of politicians usually assembling there, headed
by Martin Van Buren. Subsequently, another combination at Albany was
potential in ruling the Whigs and in controlling the Republican
party--the political firm of "Seward, Weed and Greeley." Albany
manoeuvres managed to control the preliminaries that twice made
Grover Cleveland President; and in both parties the Albany political
"patroons" are still industriously at work.
Among the finest Albany buildings is the magnificent new Episcopal
Cathedral of All Saints, an English Gothic structure, as yet
incomplete, which will be one of the most beautiful churches in
America. In the southern part of the city is the Schuyler Mansion,
built in 1760, a brick house with a broad front, having a closed
octagonal porch over the doorway and spacious apartments; its lawns in
the olden time reaching to the Hudson, where now the city is densely
built. Peter Schuyler was the first Mayor of Albany, and his
descendant, General Philip Schuyler of the Revolution, occupied a
large space in New York history. In this house Alexander Hamilton was
married to Elizabeth Schuyler, and a subsequent owner, Mrs. McIntosh,
was made the wife of Millard Fillmore, President of the United States.
General Schuyler and his family always dispensed a princely
hospitality in this mansion. In 1781, towards the close of the
Revolution, it was the scene of a stirring event. The British,
discovering that Schuyler was at home, tried to capture him. The house
was then distant from the small town and surrounded by forests. A
party of Canadians and Indians prowled for several days in the woods,
and capturing a laborer, learnt that the General was in the house with
a bodyguard of six men. The laborer escaped afterwards and notified
the General. Upon a sultry day in August, when three of the guards
were asleep in the basement and the other three lying on the grass in
front of the house, a servant announced that a stranger at the back
gate wished to speak with the General. The errand being apprehended,
the doors and windows were barred, the family collected up stairs, and
the General hastened to his bedchamber for his arms. From the window
he saw the place surrounded by armed men, and fired a pistol to arouse
the guards on the grass and alarm the town. At this moment the enemy
burst open the doors, when Mrs. Schuyler suddenly discovered she had
left her infant in the cradle in the hall below. She rushed to the
rescue, but the General stopped her. One of her daughters then quickly
ran down stairs, and carried the infant up in safety. An Indian who
had entered hurled a tomahawk, as she rushed up the stairs, which cut
her dress within a few inches of the baby's head, and striking the
hand-rail made a deep scar. As she ran up stairs, the Tory commander,
thinking her a servant, called out, "Wench, where is your master?"
With great presence of mind she quickly replied, "Gone to alarm the
town." General Schuyler heard her, and taking advantage, threw up a
window, crying out loudly, as if to a multitude, "Come on, my brave
fellows, surround the house and secure the villains!" The marauders,
who were then plundering the plate in the dining-room, becoming
frightened, beat a hasty retreat, taking prisoners the three guards
who were in the house. The brave daughter, who made the gallant
rescue, afterwards became the wife of the last Patroon Van Rensselaer,
while the infant she saved lived until 1857, and was Schuyler's last
surviving child, Mrs. Catharine Cochran of Oswego, New York. General
Schuyler is buried in the beautiful Albany Rural Cemetery, north of
the city, and nearby is Palmer's famous figure of the "Angel at the
Sepulchre." Here is also the tomb of President Chester A. Arthur, who
died in 1886.
THE MODERN TROY.
Travelling northward along the Hudson, the broad basin where the Erie
Canal comes out to the river is passed, being shielded by a pier
eighty feet wide and nearly a mile long. Here is the vast storehouse
for Canadian and Adirondack lumber brought by the canals, a leading
Albany industry, there being ten miles of dockage within this basin
for the lumber barges. The Erie Canal from the west, and also the
Champlain Canal from the north, here have their outlets into the
Hudson. Both sides of the river are lined with villages between Albany
and Troy--there being Greenbush, East Albany, Bath, Troy and West
Troy, and beyond, Lansingburgh and Waterford at the confluence of the
Mohawk. This series of cities and towns stretching for ten miles along
the shores, with intervals of farm land, have an aggregate population
exceeding three hundred thousand, with large manufactures and
commerce. There are extensive iron mills on the river and upon Green
Island in front of Troy, where General Gates had the camp for his
Revolutionary army which fought Burgoyne at Saratoga. Upon the western
bank is the Watervliet Arsenal, where the government manufactures army
supplies, an enclosure of over a hundred acres. Troy is a fringe of
city extending along the eastern bank and up the steep ridge behind,
crowned by the imposing Byzantine buildings and spires of St. Joseph's
Theological Seminary. This high ridge, bordering the alluvial flat on
which the modern Troy is built, thoroughly carries out the Grecian
idea which was adopted to supersede the original Dutch name of
Vanderheyden which was given the town. From the northeast Mount
Olympus and from the east Mount Ida frown upon Troy, and this modern
Mount Ida does not hesitate at times to hurl down Jove's thunderbolts
in the form of destructive landslips. Derick Vanderheyden leased this
estate from the Patroon in 1720, and it slept in Dutch peacefulness
until after the Revolution, when in 1789 it had twelve dwellings and
the freeholders adopted the present name. Just before this, Jacob
Vanderheyden had removed to Albany to occupy his "Palace." The opening
of the Erie Canal gave Troy great prosperity. It has fine water-power,
and thus became a busy manufacturing centre. Here are the great Albany
and Rensselaer Iron Works, which were famous makers of armor plates
and cannon in the Civil War, and the Berdan Horseshoe Mill, the
largest in the country, which has the biggest water-wheel, eighty feet
in diameter, turned by one of the kills coming down from the mountain
behind the town. It was here that John Ericsson built the little
"Monitor" ironclad which defeated the "Merrimac" at Fortress Monroe in
1862. There are also great textile mills and a vast laundry. Its
famous Polytechnic Institute is an endowment of the last Patroon,
Stephen Van Rensselaer, who was Troy's steady benefactor.
THE DEFEAT OF BURGOYNE.
The Mohawk, its principal tributary, flows into the Hudson just above
Troy, and each, being a mountain torrent, has brought down large
alluvial deposits making extensive flats between the hills, so that
their junction is marked by fertile islands and low shores, backed by
picturesque ridges bordering broad valleys. Here are Green Island,
Adam's Island and Van Schaick's Island, making an extensive delta. The
Mohawk, after flowing from central New York nearly one hundred and
forty miles in a rich agricultural section, pours down the falls at
Cohoes, and enters the Hudson through four separate channels formed by
these islands. The Mohawk Valley is largely a pastoral region, its
dairies and cheeses having much fame, and in the lower valley
hop-growing and broom-making are important industries, chiefly
controlled by the Shakers. At one of their settlements, about six
miles northwest of Albany, their foundress, "Mother Ann," who died in
1784, is buried. The Hudson flows to its confluence with the Mohawk,
with generally rapid current, bordered by rich plains, as it is
ascended to Stillwater, and thirteen miles beyond, to Schuylerville,
where Fish Creek comes in, the outlet of Saratoga Lake.
Here is a region of great historic interest, for through it marched
Sir John Burgoyne's army in 1777 to disastrous defeat. At and above
Stillwater, and Bemis's Heights beyond, was the scene of his closing
conflict, while Schuylerville stands upon the site of his camp at the
time of his final surrender. General Schuyler, from whom the village
is named, was then the owner of the entire domain of Saratoga.
Burgoyne had come south from Canada to meet another British force
thought to be advancing up the Hudson from New York, the design being
to cut the rebellious colonies in two and defeat them in detail. The
rebels hung upon Burgoyne's flanks, and at Bennington, Vermont,
Stark's bold movement in August captured a large force of Hessians.
Schuyler sent Arnold up the Mohawk, who cut off another detachment
under St. Leger, who had come over from Oswego, intending to make a
detour to Albany. In September, Burgoyne came to Saratoga, and had his
first contest south of the springs, with the Americans under Gates.
Afterwards, each army encamped within cannon-shot of the other until
October 7th, Burgoyne all the while hoping for some diversion from the
lower Hudson. The British camp was on the river below Schuylerville,
and on that day they marched out to give battle, Burgoyne's chief
lieutenant, General Fraser, directing the movements. Fraser was in
full uniform, mounted upon an iron-gray steed, and became a most
conspicuous object. Colonel Morgan, who had a force of Virginia
sharpshooters, perceived this, and calling a number of his best men
around him, pointed to the British right wing, which was making a
victorious advance under Fraser's inspiration, and said: "That gallant
officer is General Fraser; I admire and honor him, but it is necessary
he should die; victory for the enemy depends on him; take your
stations in that clump of bushes and do your duty." Within five
minutes afterwards he was mortally wounded. His aid, recognizing that
he was a conspicuous mark, had just observed: "Would it not be prudent
for you to retire from this place?" and he had scarcely got the reply
out of his mouth, "My duty forbids me to fly from danger," when he was
shot. He survived throughout the night, and asked to be buried in a
redoubt he had built on a hill near the Hudson. He died next day, and
at sunset a funeral procession moved towards the redoubt. The
Americans saw it, and, ignorant of what it meant, cannonaded, but
desisted on learning the mournful object; and then a single cannon,
fired at intervals, reverberated along the Hudson; an American
minute-gun in memory of a brave soldier.
Fraser's fall caused the British defeat, and they afterwards abandoned
guns and baggage trains and retreated north to Schuylerville.
Burgoyne's provisions gave out, many auxiliaries deserted him, the
camp was incessantly cannonaded, and finally, with his forces reduced
below six thousand men, on October 17th, he surrendered. It was said
at the time, in the British Parliament, that the campaign thus ended
"had left the country stripped of nearly every evidence of civilized
occupation," and in its result it was declared to be "one of the
fifteen decisive battles of the world." There were six members of
Parliament among the captive officers, and Burgoyne gave up forty-two
brass cannon. His army was held in captivity nearly five years, till
the end of the war, at first near Boston, and later in Virginia. This
victory was the turning-point of the Revolution. Among its results
were, an appreciation of twenty per cent. in Continental money; the
bold stand of Lord Chatham and Edmund Burke in Parliament, denouncing
the method of conducting the war; the sending of cheering words to
the struggling colonies by Spain, Holland, Russia and the Vatican; and
the paving of the way for France to acknowledge the independence of
the United States--all the result, under Providence, of Fraser's
indiscreet devotion to duty. In the neighborhood is the great
Methodist camp-meeting ground of Round Lake, and farther on Ballston
Spa, where the Kayaderosseras Creek winds through a beautifully shaded
valley and flows into Saratoga Lake. In the early part of the
nineteenth century this was the greatest watering-place in America,
its waters being chemically similar to those of Saratoga. Its Sans
Souci Hotel, opened in 1804, was then the grandest in the country, and
here were hatched most of the political schemes of the days of
Presidents Madison, Monroe and Jackson, the "Albany Regency" in its
palmiest days flourishing throughout the summer time on its lawns and
porches. But much of Ballston's glory has departed, eclipsed by the
newer radiance of its great neighbor, six miles away. The Saratoga
Lake is three miles east of Ballston, an oval-shaped lake eight miles
long, from which Fish Creek meanders off to the Hudson at
Schuylerville. As the fishes thus ascended from the river into the
lake, the Indians named it Saraghoga, or "the place of the herrings."
SARATOGA.
The famous watering-place, Saratoga, is a comparatively small town
upon a level and somewhat barren plateau. A short distance north of
Saratoga Lake, with a boulevard and electric road connecting them, is
the shallow valley wherein are the famous mineral springs. Their
virtues were long known to the Iroquois, and when the renowned French
explorer Jacques Cartier ascended the St. Lawrence in 1535, searching
for the "northwest passage," the Indians on the river bank told him
about these springs and their wonderful cures. The Mohawks, who had
these waters in their special keeping, regarded them with veneration.
In August, 1767, their great English friend and adopted sachem, Sir
William Johnson, who is said to have been the father of a hundred
children, was suffering from re-opened wounds received in battle, and
the tribe held a solemn council and determined to take him to this
"medicine spring of the Great Spirit." They carried him on a litter
many miles to the "High Rock Spring," and he was the first white man
who saw it. His strength was regained in four days, and he wrote
General Schuyler, "I have just returned from a most amazing spring
which almost effected my cure." This spring, coming out of its conical
rock reservoir, much like a diminutive geyser, and then called the
"Round Rock Spring," was the first one known. There were occasional
visitors during the Revolution, and the cutting of a road some time
afterwards from the Mohawk through the forests to reach it, opened the
place to the public. To-day, Saratoga is an aggregation of some of
the greatest hotels in the world, with many smaller ones and numerous
cottages. There is a permanent population of about twelve thousand,
often swollen to fifty thousand in August and September, the "season."
A shallow valley contains most of the springs, around which the town
clusters, with extensive suburbs of wooden houses, groves and gardens.
The valley is crossed by the chief street, Broadway, a magnificent
avenue, one hundred and fifty feet wide, with spacious sidewalks
shaded by rows of grand old elms and, in the centre of the settlement,
bordered by enormous hotels. The greatest of these is the famous Grand
Union, a vast structure of iron and brick, fronting eight hundred feet
on Broadway, and having over two thousand beds, the largest
watering-place hotel in the world. A garden and park are enclosed by
its spacious wings, and here fountains plash and bands play, while the
visitors promenade or sit and gossip upon the extensive piazzas. Its
front piazza, spreading along Broadway, is eight hundred feet long and
three stories high. Its dining-hall is two hundred and seventy-five
feet long and sixty feet wide, the largest in existence, and seats
seventeen hundred people at table. The United States Hotel, north of
the Grand Union, and Congress Hall, across Broadway, are also enormous
caravansaries, and in busy times these three hotels will accommodate
over six thousand guests, the cost of running each of them for one
day being $7500 to $10,000. Everything in these gigantic hotels is
arranged upon a scale of splendor and immensity almost requiring a
railway train to take the visitor about them.
Many of the twenty-eight mineral springs of Saratoga border Broadway
or are near it, and the most noted, the "Congress" and the "Hathorn,"
are on either side of Congress Hall, thus being easy of access. The
geologists say these springs rise from a line of "fault," which brings
the slaty formations of the Hudson River against the sandstones and
limestones that are above. They are generally muriated saline springs
of about 50° temperature, the Congress Spring having about the
strength of Kissingen Racoczy, but a milder taste, while the Hathorn
Spring, its great rival, contains more chloride of sodium and iron.
Some of the springs are chalybeate, others sulphurous or iodinous, and
all are highly charged with carbonic acid gas. The Saratoga Seltzer
resembles the seltzer of Germany, and the Geyser Spring is so highly
charged that when drawn from a faucet it foams like soda water. The
waters are both tonic and cathartic. The "High Rock Spring" bubbles up
through an aperture in a conical rock composed of calcareous tufa,
which has been formed by the deposits from the waters. This rock is
four feet high, with a rounded top, in the centre of which is a
circular opening a foot in diameter. The depth of the spring from the
present top of the rock is thirty-two feet. The waters used to
overflow occasionally and increase the size of the rock by the
deposits, but a tree was blown down and cracked the rock, since which
the waters will only rise to about six inches below the top. A pagoda
covers it, beneath which water is ladled out to the thirsty. The
Congress Spring is in a tasteful park, having this and the Columbian
Spring under an elaborate pavilion. This Congress Spring was found by
a hunting party who went through the valley in 1792, and named it in
honor of a member of Congress who was with them. To this park go the
crowds in the morning before breakfast to drink the waters, which are
freely furnished either cold or hot, and music plays while the people
drink glass after glass. Each pint of Congress water contains about
seventy-five grains of mineral constituents and forty-nine cubic
inches of carbonic acid gas. It is cathartic and alterative. The
Columbian Spring has much more iron, and is a tonic and diuretic. The
Hathorn Spring is in a large building adjoining Broadway, and was
found when digging for the foundations of a new house. It is a
powerful cathartic, containing nearly ninety-four grains of mineral
constituents and forty-seven cubic inches of carbonic acid gas in each
pint, and it is also a tonic and diuretic. The chief medicinal
rivalries of Saratoga have been based upon the respective merits of
the Congress and Hathorn waters, and great controversy has at times
been thus inspired.
There are other noted springs--the Hamilton, a mild cathartic; the
Putnam, chalybeate, and having a bathing establishment; the Pavilion,
a cathartic; the United States, a mild, agreeable tonic; and the
Seltzer, rising through a tube several feet high, over the rim of
which it flows, a sparkling and invigorating drink. The Empire closely
resembles Congress water; the Red Spring is charged with much iron;
and the Saratoga "A" Spring is a mild cathartic. Then there are the
Saratoga Vichy, Saratoga Kissingen, Carlsbad, Magnetic, Imperial,
Royal, Star, Excelsior, Eureka, White Sulphur and Geyser Springs, most
of them in the outskirts. The Geyser spouts twenty-five feet high, is
deliciously cold, and exhilarates like champagne. The Glacier Spring
nearby was found by sinking an artesian well three hundred feet; its
waters spout high above the tube, and are powerfully cathartic. There
are six spouting springs, the Geyser being the best known; but of all
the springs of Saratoga, the waters of barely a half-dozen are much
used. The Congress, Empire and Hathorn Springs send their bottled
waters all over the world. The springs are all wonderfully clear and
sparkling, most of the waters pleasant to drink, and it is such a
Saratoga fashion to go about imbibing and tasting these waters of
rival virtues, that the visitors sometimes get into a plethoric
condition that becomes uncomfortable if not dangerous. But the springs
are not the chief attraction of Saratoga, and in fact the veteran
visitors do not partake of them at all, but freely confess that they
come not to drink the waters, but to see the life and be "in the
swim," for in the season the crowd at Saratoga, unlike anywhere else,
includes the leaders of all sets. The proximity of the Adirondacks
gives the bracing ozone of mountain air, and in the cosmopolitan
throng is generally included the best the country can show of fashion
and wealth. It is a great place for holding all kinds of conventions,
and many are the political, corporation and stock-jobbing schemes
hatched on the great hotel piazzas. It is also famous for dresses and
diamonds, and wonderful is the elaborateness of millinery, gowns and
jewels. The glitter of diamonds dazzles at every turn as they sparkle
under the brilliant electric lights illuminating the evening scene. It
was said not long ago, in a description of Saratoga, that if the Grand
Union Hotel should ever perish in the height of the season, with all
it contains, the future explorer who might delve in its ruins would
come upon the rarest diamond mine the world ever knew.
Upon Saratoga Lake is the famous restaurant where "Saratoga chips"
were invented and are served, this route being a favorite drive for
the people who attend the numerous conventions, for whose use an
elaborate Convention Hall has been erected on Broadway, seating five
thousand persons. On the western shore of the lake, just where the
Kayaderosseras River flows in from Ballston, is pointed out the
battlefield on which the legend says that in the days of the warlike
Mohawks and fierce Mohicans they had a deadly combat, a thousand
warriors being engaged, when suddenly the Great Spirit sent a
miraculous white dove over the lake and battlefield, having such an
effect that the conflict ceased, their tomahawks fell useless at their
feet, and they smoked the calumet of peace. To the northward of
Saratoga is the extensive Woodlawn Park, the home of the late Judge
Henry Hilton. Ten miles northward is Mount McGregor, rising twelve
hundred feet and giving a magnificent view. It was here that General
Grant was taken in his last illness in 1885, and the cottage in which
he died is now the property of New York State and open to the public.
FORT EDWARD.
The upper Hudson River has various falls providing good water-power,
which are largely availed of by paper-mills. The famous Fort Edward,
one of these noted paper-making towns, is but a short distance from
Saratoga. The railroad, leading from Saratoga and the south to Lake
Champlain and the north, here crosses the Hudson in a region of great
historic interest. This was the beginning of the portage in early
times between the river and the lake, the railway route following the
ancient Indian trail. The two waters are actually connected by the
Champlain Canal, and, curiously enough, this makes New England an
island, thus realizing the belief of the original explorers. Rev.
Robert Cushman, who preached the first sermon before the Massachusetts
Pilgrims at Plymouth in 1621, afterwards published it with an
introduction describing New England, in which he says: "So far as we
can find, it is an island, and near about the quantity of England,
being cut out from the mainland in America, as England is from the
main of Europe, by a great arm of the sea (Hudson's River) which
entereth in forty degrees and runneth up northwest and by west, and
goeth out either into the South Sea (Pacific Ocean) or else into the
Bay of Canada (Gulf of St. Lawrence)." There can still be seen at Fort
Edward traces of the ramparts of the old fort commanding the portage,
which was held and fought for in the eighteenth century. Originally a
noble domain around it of one thousand square miles was granted to
"our loving subject, the Reverend Godfridius Dellius, Minister of the
Gospell att our city of Albany," for "the annual rent of one Raccoon
Skin." The old gentleman, however, fell from grace, and the domain was
taken away from him and the New York Legislature suspended him from
the ministry for "deluding the Mohawk Indians, and illegal and
surreptitious obtaining of said grant." Then it went to his successor,
Rev. John Lydius, who lived in the quaint "Lydius House" in Albany.
The first fort was built soon after Lydius took possession, and in
1744 he established a fur-trading station. A military road was then
constructed from Saratoga to Whitehall on Lake Champlain, here
crossing the river, and it was commanded by three forts, one at this
crossing. The French destroyed the first fort, but Sir William Johnson
made a successful expedition into the Lake Champlain district in 1755,
and built here the strong post of Fort Edward. It was an important
work during the whole French and Indian War, lasting seven years, and
it was here that Lord Amherst organized the army which conquered
Canada in 1759.
At Fort Edward first appeared as a British soldier one of the greatest
heroes of the Revolution, Israel Putnam. He had joined Sir William
Johnson's expedition as captain in a Connecticut regiment. He
performed here a daring exploit; the wooden barracks had caught fire
and the garrison vainly tried to subdue the flames, which approached
the powder magazine, and the danger was frightful. The water-gate was
opened, and the soldiers in line passed buckets of water up from the
river, when Putnam mounted the roof of the next building to the
magazine and threw the water on the fire. The commander, fearing for
his life, ordered him to desist, but he would not leave until he felt
the roof giving away. Then he got alongside the magazine, its timbers
already charred, and hurled bucket after bucket upon it, with final
success, the magazine being saved and an explosion prevented. The fire
was quenched, but the burnt and blistered hero was for a month a
sufferer in the hospital. Putnam had an adventure at the rapids a few
miles below Fort Edward, where he was out with a scouting party, and
being alongside the bank alone in his boat, was surprised by the
Indians. He could not cross the river above the rapids quickly enough
to elude their muskets, and the only escape was down the cataract.
Without hesitation, to the astonishment of the savages, his boat shot
directly down the foaming, whirling current, amid eddies and over
rugged rocks, and in a few moments he had escaped them, and was
floating on the tranquil river below. Believing him to be protected by
the Great Spirit, they dared not follow. Shortly afterwards, returning
from a scout on Lake Champlain, Putnam's party was surprised, and the
Indians captured and bound him to a tree. While thus situated, a
battle between his friends and the enemy raged for an hour around the
tree, he being under the hottest fire, but he was unscathed. The
Indians were beaten and had to retreat, but they took their captive
along, determined to have vengeance by roasting him alive. He was
again tied to a tree, and the fire had been kindled and was blazing
when the French commander, Molang, discovered and rescued him. Thus
was Putnam seasoned for his great work in the Revolution.
The tragic murder of poor Jenny McCrea is also associated with Fort
Edward. This post in the Revolution was held in 1777 by an American
garrison, who retired before the advance of Burgoyne's army
southward. Jenny McCrea, the graceful and winning daughter of a
Presbyterian clergyman, who was betrothed to an officer in Burgoyne's
army, was visiting a widow lady at Fort Edward. In order to secure
Indian co-operation, Burgoyne had offered bounties for prisoners and
scalps, at the same time forbidding the killing of unarmed persons. He
found it difficult, however, to restrain the savages, who went about
in small bodies seeking captives, and one of these parties, prowling
around Fort Edward, entered the house where Jenny was staying and
carried off Jenny and her friend. An alarm was given, and troops sent
after them. The Indians had caught two horses, on one of which Jenny
was mounted, when the pursuers assailed them with a volley of bullets.
The Indians were unhurt, but the fair captive was mortally wounded and
fell, and, as tradition relates, expired at the foot of a huge pine
tree, which remained a memorial of the tragedy for nearly a century.
The savages thus lost their prisoner, but they quickly scalped her,
and taking her long black tresses, bathed in blood, to Burgoyne's
camp, they claimed reward. They were accused of her murder, but denied
it, and the horrid tale, magnified by repetition, caused the greatest
indignation. General Gates issued an address, charging Burgoyne with
hiring savages to scalp Europeans and their descendants, and
describing Jenny as having been "dressed to meet her promised
husband, but met her murderers." For this crime, it was added,
Burgoyne had "paid the price of blood." Poor Jenny's murder, with
Burgoyne's defeat, was employed most effectively by the opposition in
the British House of Commons, Chatham and Burke eloquently denouncing
the barbarity and merciless cruelties of his unfortunate campaign. Her
lover declined longer to stay in Burgoyne's army, but retired to
Canada, living there till old age. Jenny's remains are interred in the
beautiful cemetery overlooking the Hudson above Fort Edward, marked by
a monument recording her murder by a band of Indians at the age of
seventeen, and reciting that the memorial was erected "To record one
of the most thrilling incidents in the annals of the American
Revolution; to do justice to the fame of the gallant British officer
to whom she was affianced; and as a simple tribute to the memory of
the departed." This gentle maiden's sacrifice was of priceless value
in producing the revulsion of sentiment in Europe that had so much to
do with the final success of the Revolution.
BAKER'S FALLS AND GLEN'S FALLS.
In coming to Fort Edward, the Hudson River sweeps around a grand curve
from the west towards the south, much of its course over cascades and
down rapids that are lined with mills. In a mile it descends eighty
feet, these rapids being known as Baker's Falls, and just above is the
village of Sandy Hill, having in its centre a pleasant elm-shaded
green. Here was enacted a tragedy, in some respects rivalling the tale
of Pocahontas. A party of sixteen, carrying supplies to Lake George,
was surprised and captured by Indians, and taken to the trunk of a
fallen tree on the spot where is now the village green, bound by
hickory withes and seated in a row. The savages then began at the end
of the row and tomahawked them one after another until only two
remained, Lieutenant McGinnis commanding the party and a young
teamster named Quackenboss. The tomahawk was brandished over the
former, when he threw himself backward and tried to break his bonds. A
dozen tomahawks instantly gleamed over him, and lying on his back he
defended himself with his heels, but he was soon hacked to death.
Quackenboss alone remained, and the deadly hatchet was raised over his
head, when suddenly the arm of the savage was seized by a squaw, who
cried, "You shall not kill him; he no fighter; he my dog." They spared
him to become a beast of burden. Staggering under a pack of plunder
almost too heavy to carry, they marched him towards Canada, the
Indians bearing his companions' scalps as trophies. They sailed along
Lake Champlain in canoes, and at the first Indian village at which
they halted he was compelled to "run the gauntlet." He ran between
rows of savages armed with heavy clubs, who beat him, an ordeal in
which he was severely injured. The Indian woman, however, took him to
her wigwam, bound up his wounds, and carefully nursed him until he
recovered. He was ultimately ransomed, obtaining employment in
Montreal. Finally returning to his home, he lived to a ripe old age,
telling of his adventures until he died in 1820.
Following the curving Hudson River bank around to the westward,
another series of rapids and cascades is ascended to the thriving
manufacturing town of Glen's Falls. This magnificent cataract pours
through a wild ravine having over seventy feet descent, the water
flowing upon rough masses of black marble composing the rocky terraces
the stream has broken down. The Mohicans had significant names for
this famous cataract. One was Kayandorossa, meaning the "long deep
hole," applied to the ravine; and another, Che-pon-tuc, or "hard
climbing; a difficult place to get around." Along the north side of
the ravine, upon a beautiful plain, is the manufacturing settlement of
about ten thousand people, who use the admirable water-power and get
the black marble out of adjacent quarries. Vast numbers of logs coming
down the Hudson are gathered in a boom above the town, and sawmills
cut them into lumber. Paper-mills cluster about the falls, and
marble-saws work up the black rocks. In the centre of the ravine,
above the falls, a cavern is hewn where a rocky islet makes a rude
abutment for a bridge pier. Father Jogues, who came over from Lake
George in 1645, was the first white man who saw this attractive
region, and he wrote that the Indians then called the Hudson
"Oi-o-gue" or "the beautiful river," while the Hollanders, settled on
it farther down, had named it the "river Van Maurice." When the Dutch
made their first explorations they found that the lower Mohawk and the
upper valley of the Hudson, with the country northward extending into
the Adirondacks, was the home of the Mohicans, an Algonquin tribe, and
always at war with the Mohawks, their western neighbors higher up that
valley. It was thought probable that with a view of securing
assistance in this inveterate feud, the Mohicans received the Dutch
settlers so amicably and gave them lands.
James Fenimore Cooper located around Glen's Falls the scene of his
novel, the _Last of the Mohicans_, in which _Hawkeye_, looking out of
the cavern in the ravine, gives his admirable description of the
cataract as it appeared in the French and Indian War, before the
millwright had come along to disturb the scenery. "Ay," he said,
"there are the falls on two sides of us, and the river above and
below. If you had daylight it would be worth the trouble to step up on
the height of this rock and look at the perversity of the water. It
falls by no rule at all; sometimes it leaps, sometimes it tumbles;
there it skips; here it shoots; in one place 'tis as white as snow,
and in another 'tis as green as grass; hereabouts it pitches into deep
hollows that rumble and quake the 'arth, and thereaway it ripples and
sings like a brook, fashioning whirlpools and gullies in the old stone
as if 'twere no harder than trodden clay. The whole design of the
river seems disconnected. First it runs smoothly as if meaning to go
down the descent as things were ordered; then it angles about and
faces the shores; nor are there places wanting where it looks
backward, as if unwilling to leave the wilderness to mingle with the
salt!"
SOURCES OF THE HUDSON.
The noble Hudson River, which we have ascended to Glen's Falls, flows
out of the great Adirondack wilderness of Northern New York, the
headwaters draining its extensive southern declivity. Among these
virgin Adirondack woods and mountains, near the Long Lake, is the
remote source of the western branch of the Hudson, the "Hendrick
Spring." Surrounded by forest and swamp, this cool and shallow pool,
about five feet in diameter, fringed by delicate ferns, and overhung
with vines and shrubbery, is the beginning of the great river, and
named in honor of its discoverer and first explorer:
"Far up in the dim mountain glade,
Wrapped in the myst'ry of its shade,
On a cold rock, a dewdrop fell,
And slumbered in its stony shell,
Till brewed within its rocky bed,
There trickled out a silver thread,
A little, shy, lost waterling,
That marks the cradled mountain spring."
The Hendrick Spring is within a half-mile of Long Lake and upon the
same summit, the latter discharging its waters northward into the St.
Lawrence. The little stream from this source gathers force, and flows
through a chain of brooks and ponds to the lovely Catlin Lake. High
peaks environ them, and their swelling waters make much of the river
on coming to the confluence with the northern branch of the Hudson at
the outlet of Harris Lake. Here there blooms, all about, the splendid
cardinal plant, its showy flower glowing like a flame.
The most elevated fountain head of the Hudson is upon the northern
branch. Within the inmost recesses of the mountain wilderness, in a
ravine between two of the highest peaks, the river has its spring
nearest the sky, known as "The Tear of the Clouds," a lofty pool,
adjacent to one of the noted Adirondack portages, the Indian Pass, at
about forty-three hundred feet elevation above the sea. From this pool
the water flows out through the Feldspar Brook into the Opalescent
River, which does not go far before it tumbles down the picturesque
cascade of the Hanging Spear, leaping fifty feet into a narrow abyss
between perpendicular walls, and emerging among a mass of huge
boulders. All these rocks, like the greater part of the Aganus-chion,
or Black Mountains, as the Indians often called the Adirondacks, are
composed largely of the labradorite or opalescent feldspar, which
fills the stream-bed with beautiful pebbles of blue or green or gold,
many of them having all the colors. Thus glittering with the splendors
of its rich coloring under the sunlight, the Opalescent River falls
into Sandford Lake. A visitor to the Indian Pass says the explorers
entered the rocky gorge between the steep slopes of Mount McIntyre and
the cliffs of Wallface Mountain to the westward. Clambering high above
the bottom of the canyon, they could see the famous Indian Pass
between these mountains in all its wild grandeur. Before them rose a
perpendicular cliff nearly twelve hundred feet from base to summit,
its face being apparently as raw as if only just cleft. Above sloped
Mount McIntyre, still more lofty than the cliff of Wallface, and in
the gorge between lay piles of rocks, grand in dimensions and awful in
aspect, as if hurled there by some terrible convulsion. Through these
came the little stream going to the Hudson, bubbling along from its
source close by a fountain of the Ausable. In spring freshets their
waters commingle, part finding their way to the ocean at New York and
part at Newfoundland.
Still another spring of clear cold water is a source of the Hudson,
sending down the mountain side a vigorous rivulet, falling into the
Opalescent. This fountain bubbles from a mass of loose rocks, some
weighing a thousand tons apiece, about a hundred feet from the summit
of the noble Mount Marcy, which the Indians called Tahawus, the
"Sky-piercer." From these sources among the Adirondacks flows the
most important river of New York, uniting the waters of myriads of
lakes and springs to form the noble stream which is picturesque and
attractive throughout the whole of its course of three hundred miles
to the sea. The main branches of the upper Hudson unite almost under
the shadow of Tahawus, and flowing a tortuous course, it receives the
outlet of Schroon Lake, the largest in the Adirondacks, covering about
twenty square miles, the junction-point being but a short distance
west of Lake George. Then flowing southward and turning eastward, it
emerges from the mountain wilderness, and in about a hundred miles
reaches its great cataract at Glen's Falls. Sweeping around the grand
bend below, and tumbling down Baker's Falls, past Fort Edward and the
rapids of Fort Miller, it receives the largest tributary from the
eastward, the Battenkill, a rapid shallow stream flowing from the
Green Mountains of Vermont. Thence its course is southward, every mile
from the wilderness to the sea being replete with historic and scenic
attractions:
"Queen of all lovely rivers, lustrous queen
Of flowing waters in our sweet new lands,
Rippling through sunlight to the ocean sands,
Within a smiling valley, and between
Romantic shores of silvery summer green;
Memorial of wild days and savage bands,
Singing the patient deeds of patriot hands,
Crooning of golden glorious years foreseen."
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