Digitized Newsletters Series – Historical Articles
Each Friday this summer, the Putnam History Museum is excited to share an assortment of articles from our collection of newly digitized newsletters. These newsletters are a fantastic local history resource, assembled by dedicated museum volunteers, local historians, and community members. These articles are not only useful historic narratives, but also provide us with a glimpse of the important historical talking points of the era in which they were written, commemorating anniversaries, important dates and people, and community events.
A special thank you to our team of PHM Summer Interns for transcribing these articles!
Check out our other “PHM From Home” Series here:
– Vintage Postcard Tour through the Hudson Highlands
– Museum Moment of Zen
– Museum Alphabet Series
– Historical Coloring Pages for Children & Adults
Ninth Feature: “Reviving a 200-Year-Old Piano from Cold Spring,” Fall 1992.
Eighth Feature: “Washington’s watch-chain’ held the river,” Spring 2000.
Seventh Feature: “Reminiscences: A Lady in Orange” by Tinky Frazier, Fall 1996.
Sixth Feature: “Beverly Robinson, Arnold’s Loyal Host,” Autumn 2000.
Fifth Feature: “Memories of My Life as a Small Boy,” Foundry Castings, Fall 1994.
Fourth Feature: “Parrott and the gun
that gave us Cold Spring.”
Foundry Casting, Spring 2001.
GPNEG0301-Glass-Plate Negative, PHM Collection.
Without the West Point Foundry there would have been no Cold Spring. The Foundry produced a vast array of cast-iron objects, including the nation’s first locomotives, huge aqueduct pipes and decorative objects for the home. It also became the country’s largest heavy-weapons manufacturer of its time. With a work force that reached more than 400, it triggered the growth of what had, for a century, been a riverside trading and watering stop. Two men were responsible for this development: Gouverneur Kemble, the entrepreneur who created the Foundry in 1818, and Robert P. Parrott, who perfected the Parrott gun in 1860, the most successful rifled field piece of its era.
The Museum enjoyed a slide-and-lecture presentation March 25 by Maj. George Sarabia, an assistant professor of military history at the U.S. Military Academy, who told a large audience about Parrott and his gun. – A rifled cannon that has spirals cut inside the barrel that impart a spin on the shell, which in turn is not the traditional cannon ball but a bullet-shaped projectile. The result, backed by a greater powder charge at its iron-banded breech, is a faster, longer-range shot.
Parrott’s guns ranged from a three-inch bore diameter for the 10-pounder (the weight of the shell) to 10-inch 300-pounders. While Parrott didn’t invent the rifled gun, he was the first to perfect its mass production as a reliable weapon, just in time for the Civil War. The Foundry turned out more than 2,500 cannon for the conflict.
Parrott was born in New Hampshire and graduated third in his class at West Point in 1824. An artillery lieutenant, he taught for five years at the Academy and then became an ordnance inspector at the West Point Foundry. In 1840, Parrott married the boss’s sister, Mary Kemble. He eventually became a part owner of the Foundry. Parrott died in Cold Spring in 1877 at the age of 73.
Third Feature: “Sport a Century Ago:
Horse Racing on the Hudson by the Cold Spring Recorder, 1893.”
Foundry Casting, Spring 1993.
From the PHM Glass Plate Negative Collection
Now that the bitterest winter in a while is behind us, we take pleasure in reprinting the following article from the Cold Spring Recorder of 1893:
The sport nearest and dearest to the men in the vicinity around 1893 was horse trotting on ice, when the frozen surface of the Hudson River offered a course for speeding that few horse owners could resist.
On those occasions it frequently happened that a horse without a racing pedigree could develop great speed. As proof of this, we state the horse Bob. For many years Bob had been engaged in the occupation of pulling a grocer’s wagon.
Last Friday, after Bob carted out the last bar of soap and seven pounds of sugar, Mr. Dalzells (nicknamed Lucky) drove the old horse down the river as far as the Garrison tunnel to watch the trotting. While looking on in a disinterested way, he was bantered by Livery-man Bailey, driving behind Benjamin, to try a heat. Lucky consented to so. In the race that followed Bob distinguished himself.
The following day Lucky again appeared on the course driving Bob. He raced three blue bloods, winning each race. In great excitement, six more races were held. The last race was in competition with Flyer, supposed to be the greatest racer in Garrison. At the finish, it was Bob in the front. With the air of a conqueror, Lucky dropped his reins across the dashboard and, looking back, triumphantly exclaimed, “Boys, give me a shove!”
Second Feature: “Davenport Bible,” Foundry Casting, Fall 1991.
~His Book~
Born ye: 11th Day of April 1750.
A Present made to him by
his Grand Father Thomas
Devenport the 25th Day of
August 1759.
Who departed this Life
ye: 30th: Day of December 1759.
~Aged 77 Years.~
The 1750 Davenport Bible was presented to the Society by Mr. Robert Davenport of Madison, Wisconsin on Saturday, August 10 at the Museum. About 50 to 60 members of the various branches of the Davenport family were there.
Names like Huestis, Warren, Merrit, Rathjen, Allen, Champlin, Nelson, and Mekeel were the local Davenports there. People came from Illinois, Wisconsin, Newburgh, Shrub Oak, and Highmount, NY, Madison, Hasbrouck Heights, and Franklin Lakes, NJ. The families who attended the presentation were then guests of the Society at the Annual Picnic, which followed on the grounds of the Malcolm Gordon School in Garrison.
A few more notes from the PHM Special Collections Library & Archive about the Bible and Thomas Davenport (Grand Father):
“The Bible, printed in Edinburgh, Scotland in 1715, was brought into the area when the first settler, Thomas Davenport, built a home here in 1729. A boulder on Main Street marks the site of his pioneer log house. Probably the first Bible to reach Cold Spring, it has been treasured in the Davenport family for 241 years.
The Davenports deem that this Bible, containing priceless historic records, should be in Cold Spring. Although no one in the village presently bears the surname Davenport, the descendants of Thomas’ 12 children are among the Hustis, Nelson, Mekeel, and Warren families.” (From the Putnam County News, July 3, 1991.)
—
Thomas Davenport, referred to hereinafter as the Pioneer, was born 1682 and died Dec. 30, 1759. At a date (unknown) between 1714 and 1732 he located in the South Precinct of Dutchess County in that part now known as Philipstown, Putnam County, New York. There he became a tenant of Adolph Philipse, and as far as is known, the first to make a permanent settlement on the waterfront of the Highland Patent.
The location of his house was on the slope of the present Main Street, Cold Spring, a short distance west of the Methodist Church and near the Fountain Head spring which furnished this pioneer and his family with water.
The extent of his leasehold is not known. Certainly, it embraced all the land between Bull Hill and Indian Brook. Lambert’s map of Water Lot No. 2 made in 1769, after the partition of the patent among the grandnieces and one grandnephew of Adolph Philipse, shows the leaseholds of Thomas and William Davenport, sons of the pioneer Thomas Davenport, extending from Bull Hill to the north shore of Indian Brook. Davenport was buried in a vale, a short distance from his home, as were members of his immediate family, in unmarked graves. Here, too, lie many of his descendants. This “God’s Acre” later became the village burying ground. The Old Cold Spring Cemetery is located north of the Town Hall of Philipstown, adjoining the grounds of the Haldane Central School District.
The name of Thomas Davenport first appears among the freeholders of Dutchess County in 1710. In 1745, he was appointed one of the commissioners to lay out highways in the South Precinct. He continued to serve as commissioner up to and including the year 1749 and is designated in the record as Captain Thomas Davenport. His original signature, wherein ever seen, is always Davenport. Some off his descendants used the name Devenport, and this is seen in family records and on tombstones. In later times the name usually appears as Davenport.
First Feature: “150 years ago, the railroad first rolled into Philipstown,” Foundry Casting, Spring 1999.
This year is the 150th anniversary of the coming of the train to Philipstown.
The railroad came through over the summer of 1849, pushing up from Manhattan as part of a stretch of steel that would link New York City to Albany and then eventually to Chicago. A century later it would turn rural Putnam and adjacent counties into bedroom communities for bustling Manhattan.
But when the first scheduled trains of the New York & Hudson River Railroad–as it was first called–arrived in October 1849, Cold Spring–like many riverfront communities–did not bestir itself to welcome the coming of the locomotive. [By 1853, it was called the New York Central Railroad, consolidating several existing railroad companies.] There is no record of a parade, band, speeches or even a small knot of people at the foot of Main Street waving to mark the occasion.
The first terminus was Poughkeepsie, which today marks the end of the commuter section of the railroad. When the first train arrived there on December 12, there were, according to the local newspaper, no celebrations arranged, although, it said, “if anyone feels anxious to get up a little excitement, they are invited to be present at 3 o’clock this afternoon.”
Completing this section of the famed “water-level route” from New York City to the north and west was not a golden spike event. (It would be 20 years before that spike was driven to connect the first trans-continental railroad at Promontory Point, Utah, in 1860.) But 1,500 miles of track had criss-crossed the nation before the rails came along the east bank of the Hudson from Manhattan to Greenbush between 1847 and 1851. Greenbush was the line’s northern terminus, south of Albany.
Except for a group of investors, not too many were interested or wanted the new railroad. It threatened the thriving passenger and freight boats on the river and their ancillary services on the shore. Environmentalists of the day lamented the desecration of natural beauty and mountain scenery by the noise and belching smokestacks of the locomotives. Landed gentry along the route (James Audubon, Washington Irving) screamed about losing some of their spacious riverfront lawns and views. But some felt better when financially compensated.
When the tracks reached Tarrytown, for example, Irving expressed his unhappiness about the disturbance to his nest, “Sunnyside.” It was Cold Spring’s Gouverneur Kemble, a director of the NY & HRR (and, of course, founder of the West Point Foundry), who smoothed Irving’s ruffled feathers and persuaded him not to stand in the way of progress.
Despite having to scrounge for venture capital, the political delays, the engineering challenges and construction problems of building on the edge of the water (and also including two major tunnels through rock at Breakneck Ridge and Anthony’s Nose), the tracks reached a point above Peekskill by mid 1849. Two years later, on October 1,1851, the first train made the entire run from Manhattan to Greenbush. After that, life in the Hudson Valley changed. Commerce, once centered around the open- water months of the Hudson River now flourished year round. Stage coaches lost their long-distance passengers and became feeder cabs to the railroad. Taverns, no longer wayside inns, now served the locals. Drovers did not have to walk animals to market. The animals now were freight on the railroad.
It was a new non-stop commerce of speed. A fast express could make the trip between New York City and Albany in about four hours at the cost of $2.50. A passenger ticket from Manhattan to Cold Spring was 75 cents. The traffic was heavy enough to warrant six trains a day each way. Today more than 60 trains a day pass through Cold Spring and Garrison. Two thirds of them are commuter runs, the rest Amtrak expresses–with a few ghostly freights slipping by in the night.
—Minette Gunther