Poughkeepsie, N.Y
April 12, 1928
Dear Carl,
This morning went down to the river docks and chewed the fat with some of the old time fishermen who were there either just coming in or drying and stowing their nets. Any day this week you care to come up you can go out with any of half dozen of these men. They seem to want to show off their knowledge of the business. I will pass on what dope I got later in this memo. But I think I had better bring up what I have got so far to date. Last night when I finished which was 8pm I was too tired to begin the first memo.
I called on Mrs. Fred Lovejoy yesterday whom Mayor Spratt said had an ancestor who was a Hudson River whaler. The ancestors name was Alexander Fox and he owned property in Poughkeepsie and came from Connecticut. He was not a whaler but Mr. Fred Lovejoy sent me to a boat builder named George Buckhout. I finally found Buckhout down at the Poughkeepsie Yacht Club. He has built some very nice boats but recently sold his boat-building place next to the yacht club to a relative of Jake Ruppert. He hangs around down there. He had a grandfather who was a whaler but out of Warren. Massachusetts. His name was Jacob Emery Buckhout and he sailed on the Brutus in 1854. He used to tell stories about going in swimming with the girls on the Sandwich Isles who wore nothing but a smile. However, didn’t press him for any stories as Jacob was not a Hudson River whaler. Buckhout sent me on to Mrs. Elsie Davis of the Poughkeepsie Savings Bank who, I discovered, much to my delight, had done all the work on whaling in Poughkeepsie.
She is quite a remarkable woman. Has read all your stuff and has been gathering your kind of stuff on her own for years out of sheer love of good stories and for setting down what really happened. A lot of what she found she put in a little house organ for the bank and I am sending on a copy to you. I got quite a few items from talking to her yesterday (Monday) but first I'll give a couple of highlights on whaling in Poughkeepsie.
Newburgh and Hudson took it up first and some Poughkeepsie people had a few shares in it. Then there was a movement to have Poughkeepsie get in on the business. The Poughkeepsie Whaling Co was organized and incorporated April 20, 1832. One of the organizers was Matthew Vassar who founded Vassar College. Another company was organized April 30 1833, just a year later. Some of the ships of the Poughkeepsie Whaling Co. were the Vermont, the Siroc and the Elbe. The Dutchess Co has had a fleet of six or seven ships some of the names were the Newark, the NP Tallmadge (named for a charter member of the co), and the New England. Skilled whaling help was imported from New Bedford among them James Marble. Mrs. Davis says there was a mutiny on the Vermont. You will note that New York papers carried items that Captain Norton died on Charles Island where he had been left badly injured. The date is April 29 1835. If you are going through any New York papers (the Evening Post seems to have carried some stuff about Poughkeepsie) you may find further details. Mrs. Davis has still been unable to get any logs or records at all on this mutiny or any of the other voyages.
Miss Raymond, whom Nik[1] introduced me to at Vassar, has been a great help. (Nik took me to lunch). She showed we some documents which showed the sale of one-sixteenth part of the Vermont for the sum of $562.50 on June 10, 1837. Apparently, that was the way they financed the purchase of a ship. Conklin was one of the charter members and organizers of the company. Miss Raymond also showed me an insurance policy for the buildings, cooper, and ship’s materials of the Dutchess Whaling Co. The date was 1843. It was assigned to the Mutual Safety Insurance Co. in Nov. of 1843 as security for a loan. The days of whaling in Poughkeepsie were drawing to a close. The New York Post said around Nov. 10, 1838 that speculators in whaling in Poughkeepsie had all but ruined the town. The Poughkeepsie Eagle as you will see in the copies of items in the bank house organ, didn’t like the Post suggesting that all wasn’t well. I can’t figure out why Constant Norton was listed as the Master in the deed, which was made two years after his reported death in 1835.
Miss Raymond helped me go into details of Matthew Vassar’s whaling activities. We find Foster Rhea Dulles, in the book Lowered Boats: A Chronicle of American Whaling, saying:
“Among the owners of the New England and the other vessels of the Dutchess Whaling Co. (She’s wrong; it was the Poughkeepsie Whaling Co.) was a prosperous brewer named Matthew Vassar. The profits of his whaling venture, it is interesting to note, helped to swell the fortune he was able to leave to Vassar Female College as an expression of his belief that ‘women, having received from her Creator the same intellectual constitution as man, has the same right to intellectual development.[2] Whaling from Poughkeepsie did not, however, survive the increasing difficulties the industry encountered after 1840. There had been a number of successful voyages and in 1843 three of the whaling company’s seven vessels brought back 1,770 barrels of sperm oil, 5,700 barrels of whale oil and 57,000 pounds of whalebone. But this was almost the end. Poughkeepsie found it necessary to sell its fleet, as had Hudson and Newburgh and this unusual chapter in whaling’s history came to a close.”
We looked in Matthew Vassar’s Autobiography and letters but found no mention of the whaling business. Presumably his interest was largely one of investment.
Before going on with whaling data, I will mention that Matthew Vassar had some dealings with your friend A.J. Downing.[3] In Vassar College and its Founder by Benson J Lossing we read:
“The late A.J. Downing, the eminent rural architect and landscape-gardener was called to explore it (Springside, Vassar’s Estate), suggest a plan of avenues for walks and drives, and a design for a porter’s lodge. William C. Jones, and Engineer of the Hudson River Railroad Co. made correct topographies … Laborers were employed in the ruder tasks of preparing the grounds for the more skillful workman who, in time, wrought out the beautiful creation of Nature and Art, the Springside of today … from the design of Mr. Downing, a porter’s lodge, a cottage, barn, carriage house, ice house and diary room granary, an aviary for wild and domestic fowls, apiary, a spacious conservatory and neat gardener’s cottage, and a log cabin in the more prosaic portions of the domain, where meadows and fields of grain may be seen, were erected.”
Downing thought enough of the carriage house and stable “in the Rustic Pointed Style” to include it in the Fourth of Edition of his Cottage Residences, John Wiley, 1860, pages 186-7, Design XV.
There are some whaling implements at the Kimlin Cider Mill on Swift's Hill, which were thrown out of the museum at Poughkeepsie and taken in by the old guy there. I’m going up to see them and maybe get a picture or so Kimlin is supposed to be able to give me some Hudson River dope. Hope to get to see him today.
The buildings that housed the whaling business down by the river are no more. Buckhout didn't have any recollection of hearing any stories about whaling. It didn't make much of an impression on anyone. Mrs. Davis says she is sure that a lot of farm boys came to Poughkeepsie and shipped out just for the adventure. She says the mutiny was probably because they boys found they didn't like the business so well and wanted to come home. It must have been difficult for the boats if they cane back here in the winter as the river was frozen for a few months out of the year. Incidentally, ice boating used to be a great sport on the Hudson but it has passed (like so many of the things we are looking into) because the river is kept open by icebreakers all winter as far as Albany. Most of the sailing of small boats on the river around Poughkeepsie seems to be not much. Buckhout says the folks seem to go in for speedboats more these days. He has built several hulls for speedboats. He remembers the whaling wharf at Poughkeepsie. But it has since passed on. I believe dismantled. The whaling was started here because some--New Bedford people thought whaling ports should be located more inland in case of attack. I believe New Bedford had been subject to some attack (according to Silas Hinckley[4] whom I just talked to now). The New Bedford whaling people went up the sound to Connecticut but were rebuffed. The Hudson River people thought it good idea and there must have been some loose capital floating around. Anyway the three towns went in for it, as I said. I imagine one of the reasons it failed was bad management. After all they had to hire all their skilled workers from New Bedford. Probably the New Bedford captains wanted plenty large salaries from coming over to the Hudson.
Will do a whaling job on Hudson and Newburgh when I get there. That's about all I have been able to get except what you will get in the house organ. Mrs. Davis has exhausted (as you will see) the newspapers in Poughkeepsie for the period. She asked groups and people she knew to look in their attics for logs or anything of the voyages but nothing has turned up as yet.
To get back to shad fishing. A guy named Torrens who fishes out of the Dutton Lumber Co. yards (there's a story in their getting lumber from Seattle in the present day). He draws a little and writes fishing pieces and wants to do anything he can for us. His name is Torrens . You can go out with him or one of the more folksy natives. He told me about "plugging.” While we were talking one of the fishermen said; "The next time it happens I'm going to give it to him. I pretended we was friends today and said how-de-do but the next time I'm going to shoot.....over his head of course…but he's going to get a good scare.” Torrens said the fishermen lay their nets in front of each other some times and it's called plugging. There's a guy across the river whose house you can see from Poughkeepsie who is famous as a shad fisherman. The house looks interesting and he's fished for 40 years. Will get him. The danger in shad fishing is the big ships. The nets are kept 25 feet below the surface of the water so that ordinarily the ships pass over them, but if the ship hits a buoy, the propeller winds up the net and it's good bye fifty bucks which is, it seems, about what a good net costs. Foreign substances get in the net and fish they don't want. Silas Hinckley says to the old days the fisheries used to catch sturgeon and they threw them back, caviar and all and sturgeon was called Albany Beef? Why? He don’t know. Today I noticed they caught a couple of mackerel. When they catch carp they put them in tanks on the railroad and sell them to the Jews, “because there’s something in the Jew’s religion that makes him want things alive.”
Now I have not got any good stories on either shad fishing or whaling but only some background. Will look out for anecdotes. But I have a few leads and stories I picked up in the past two days, which I herewith pass on.
No names in this one. The guy who told it to Mrs. Davis never would tell her. When the Revolution came the die-hard Tories had to flee Poughkeepsie. Some of them went to Nova Scotia where they founded prosperous communities. One farmer was fleeing and he went to a neighbor and said: "I am turning over my farm to you while I am gone. You will care for it and when the trouble and strife are over I will return. You can keep whatever you make on the place." Ten years or so he returned. He knocked on the door of his house. The neighbor answered the door and said what do you want. The man said "Why neighbor, I've come for my farm. Don't you remember me ?" "I do not," said the neighbor. "Get off the place.” Then the old Tory uttered a terrible curse on the house forever, and ever since then that house has had trouble murder, violence, suicide and death. Mrs. Davis is trying to find out the names. Next to the Poughkeepsie Yacht Club is a lonely brick house rather lovely in a way. I noticed a curious half buried brick oval beside it. I learned it was the old Tower house. Years ago before the Civil War old man Tower set up a blast furnace. He sold pig iron and grew rich . During the Civil War he got $120 a ton for his pig iron. He was nouveau rich I guess. He moved from the beautiful aid brick house and into town. Later when he grew even richer he built a place further up on the Hudson in the Downing tradition I believe. His houses symbolized his rise in wealth. Then all the blast furnaces seem to stop working gradually and we come to an old guy who lived at the turn of the century. He had a yacht and was apparently a typical rich man's son. He had a yacht and was traveler and great deal at Newport etc. He took up with a telephone girl and when his wife would ask for the carriage and horses they were away being shod or something the servants said. Finally she began to hear tales. She telephoned him one day to find out when and if he was coming home. She learned something or other presumably he wasn't coning so she went into her son's room and when he rose from the bed to greet her she shot him dead and then turned the pistol on herself.
It is the greatest of the scandals in Poughkeepsie and called the great tragedy. Hinckley believes that “shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations” is very true up around here. Do you think the Tower family really could be a symbol of the rise and fall of an industrial Hudson River family. Want any more on that if I can find it?
Odds and ends. Mrs. Davis says Miss Reynolds says she has seen 47 ways of spelling Poughkeepsie in the old records. The Guggenheims took to changing their name sometimes in years past to Cookingham. Result much confusion in county records. A Captain Vaughn came marauding along the Hudson. The Gill Family made ready to flee. I believe he was a Tory captain. Aunt Dina (colored) had her baking in the oven. She would not leave all her baking.
She insisted on staying. When they came. The soldiers or marauders smelled the good things in the oven and Aunt Dina made a deal with them that she’d a feed them with the good things if they’d not burn and destroy the house. They didn’t. When the Gill family sold the place a few years ago they made provision for the family cemetery to be moved to a regular cemetery. One of the Gill family requested that the remains of Aunt Dinna be placed beside that of the Gill ancestors.[5] Mrs. Davis verified this story writing to some relatives of the Gills in the West •
There is said to be a glass tomb you can look into at Sands Point. Will check.
Delafield Street was beautiful in its day. There are restrictions or were which made the houses stand back 60 feet from the road so as to maintain a clear vista to the Hudson. Apparently there were alternating periods of appreciation and ignoring of the Hudson. Mrs. Davis speaks of the gingerbread architecture as Mansard architecture. She doesn’t know what the word means nor do I.
It is said that in London in St Ethel Berga’s Chapel there is a stained glass window of Henry Hudson discovering the Hudson. Prayers were offered in this Chapel for the welfare of the voyage before it took place. I thought Hudson was Dutch.[6] Why London ?
Do we want the story of Andrew Jackson Davis, the seer of Poughkeepsie? He had quite a following and influence.
The Mary Powell, a passenger boat, seemed to have excited the love and admiration of the Hudson River folk and great sadness was felt at her passing. She was considered a “Lucky boat” and happiness and good fortune seeded to have followed her with her beautiful lines all her long life. She went out of commission recently.
One of the things that is supposed to have brought wealthy New Yorkers along the Hudson with their fine estate was the yellow fever scare in 1830. How will we cheek this?
One of Henry Hudson’s sailors is supposed to be buried I believe around Fishkill. Lovers Leap, which is near the Hinckley place may have a story behind it. Will check.
Back to shad; Here are some ways of cooking. You bleed them by cutting em in the back of the neck. Lay on brown paper and season with salt and pepper. Wipe off water etc with a cloth. Then fry in olive oil until a golden brown.. Fry the roe in olive oil but only if it is not broken open “because otherwise you will think all hell is broken loose.”
Baked Shad. Empty the belly and fill with vinegar. Sew it up in belly and then bake until golden brown. The vinegar is supposed to melt the bones. True? I don’t know/ The dressing is made with bread, onions, chopped celery and parsley.. Shad is bringing 40 cents a pound in New York these days.
The sailor of Hendrick Hudson, I just see by my notes, is buried below Dr. Slocum’s sanitarium Craig House at Beacon. Am to check Spy Hill It dovetails with what I know about Enoch Crosby.
New York was the last state to ratify the Union and Poughkeepsie supposed to be the first capital of New York. Beacon Hill is so named because
of the light and signals on it. Lafayette spent a winter at Brinkerhoff in the old manor house. Was ill. The Society of Cincinnati was founded at Beacon.
This sounds like it may be interesting. There is a Doodle town at Stony Point so named after Yankee Doodle. Am to check George Briggs Buchanan. He also has some story about their knocking over a statue. Sounds like it may be some Gay Nineties prank.
It looks like a chapter on Hudson River Sport is to be indicated or have you thought of it? Silas Hinckley says the ice boating was something grand. Poughkeepsie was the champions. There was a great deal of rowing in shells. Still is some. The IMB Ward Brothers were famous. Jim Reynolds of 130 South Hamilton is a nut on sport on the Hudson and knows all the history etc of the various sports on the Hudson.
Miss Raymond says there was a period when she was a girl at Vassar when it was the thing to take night rides on the Hudson in boats. They rented some sort of steamboats. You get back to the alternating periods of appreciating and ignoring the river.
One of the old industries here in Poughkeepsie was the dye wood industry. Woods were brought, I believe from South America and dyes made from them. The Innis[7] family grew rich on the business. There is an Innis street here. Yes, it is the family of the painter[8] of the landscapes (yes?) probably their money gave him the leisure to become a painter Rhinebeck has the oldest hotel in America so the story goes. At Rhinebeck they floated logs down the river and there are some branding irons for branding the logs. To see a Mr. Winny there.
Have you looked at the log of Robert Jouet, first mate on the Hendriek Hudson who kept a log? There is some of it in Mrs. Davis’ house organ.
That's the odds and ends. You will notice I have Jotted done everything almost as it came on my notes. Now I haven one story on this memo and I think is the nuts. Hope you do.
Baroness Fredericka Riedesel and her little children were the wife and children of a Hessian officer. They whole bunch of Hessians were captured at Saratoga, I believe, a few thousand of them. They were all marched to Boston where it was thought provision would be made for them to be shipped back to Hesse in Germany. The little Riedesel family were piled into a cart and taken along. Plans didn't materialize as planned in Boston and it was figured to be cheaper to quarter them for the winter in Virginia. They went down the Hudson Valley crossed over at Fishkill and were reviewed somewhere by General Washington who bowed graciously to them. They entertained Lafayette at dinner and he was glad to get a good home cooked dinner according to the Baroness. It seem she wrote her memoirs when she got back home where she was received with a great ovations. And it has been translated into English date 1867. Looks to me like the whole story is there all set and it ties in easy with the Hudson Valley because they traveled along these parts. The Baron also wrote his memoirs but it’s not nearly so good. The book is here so if you can't get it in the Public Library I will do a Job but as I understand it you want me to do more leg work because you can do the library hunting easier. Yes?
A friend of Carrie Chapman Catt's[9] told teachers here that she understood that the reason whaling was brought up here in the Hudson was that the barnacles were easier to get off in fresh water... Sounds like bunk to me. The protection story in an inland port sounds more reasonable. What do you think of getting a local paper to do a little feature story deploring the lack of old whaling logs ? You could give out such a story when you come up for the shad fishing.
Note the feature story on shad fishing. Probably an annual feature story for local papers
Rhoda Hinckley thinks that the story of General Kosciuszko who fortified West Point and was a charming Polish gentleman would be worth your while. President MacCracken is very much interested in details of the General’s stay here.
I seem to gather material much faster than I can get in down in memo form. But so far I have gone ahead on the theory that it would, be better to get what I've got down before it gets hazy in my memory. What do you think?
Also I have gone on the theory that what I can send you already in print is so much velvet and that I should not stop much to assimilate it as you can look it over any time. Yes? Or no?
Am sending along the Legends of the Shawangunks[10] (pronounced shon-gum) as you see. Philip H Smith again. It’s supposed to be a valuable book so please keep it. Funny thing an old lady in Sherman asked me if I wanted it. I was not sure what its significance was. But the Shon-gum region is just across the river here and certainly in your alley. What little I looked into it seemed like the nuts. Tom Quick[11] must be a good border hero. But I must warn you the story of catching the Indians with the split log was also told about Miles Standish. Catherine du Bois seemed like a good yarn. However you can see for yourself.
No luck on showboats. Most people think they didn’t exist.
Note the dope on Hudson River pirates in the second to last page of the house organ for Oct 1937. Is the Captain Kidd story true? I think all in all that I better play up to Mrs. Davis as she seems to have an almost inexhaustible supply of stuff and I believe a lot of it she does not even know she has. But what she has set down seems good to me at that.
Its way past ten and I think I'll call this off. This is the first memo and very rough and just dashed off. I wanted to get it down and you can ask for more on any of the stuff that hits you.
Am sending along the Shongum stuff. You know the region is right across the river here, I read some of it. Please save it as the book is valuable I’m told. I’ll tell you later how I got it. Accident. Came across it in Sherman.[12]
See the clipping on the shad fishing in Poughkeepsie. I guess it’s a regular feature story every spring.
It’s 10 pm now and I’m getting tired and will try and get this off. Will telephone you Wednesday night at 7:30 pm. Tell Alice not to answer the phone at 7:30 pm if only she is there as I will make station to station and then, if Carl you are not there, I won’t have to pay.
[1] Nikander Strelsky, Ukrainian nobleman, friend of the Carmer’s, was a Vassar Professor and became part of Hudson Valley folklore in Carmer’s “The Swans of Olivebridge.”
[2] Croswell Bowen was a frequent visitor to Vassar College before and after he attended Yale University.
[3] Carmer was very interested in A.J.Downing, the subject of the chapter “Hudson River Aesthete,” and the doomed hero of “The Fatal Hudson Steamboat Race,” in Carmer’s The Hudson.
[4] Silas Hinckley seems to have come from a line of Lake Champlain steamer captains, and may have himself been a river boat captain.
[5] “Dina Gill was an eighteenth century African American slave owned by Theophilus Anthony. According to local legend, she was left behind to guard the house when the Gill family fled the approaching British troops in the year 1777, and she singlehandedly managed to save the house by bribing the troops with a good home-cooked meal.”
[6] Henry Hudson was English, but sailed for the Dutch West Indies Company.
[7] Active in the latter three-quarters of the 19th Century, the Innis Dye Works is located on Water Street next to the Metro-North Hudson Railroad Line.
[8] George Inness, landscape painter and Swedenborgian, actually came from a family of Newburgh grocers.
[9] Carrie Chapman Catt, internationally recognized leader of the woman’s suffrage movement, and founder of the League of Women Voters.
[11] Tom Quick, “Indian Slayer” of the Delaware.
[12] Croswell Bowen had purchased a small farm, Hidden Hollow, in Sherman, CT, just across the border from Quaker Hill and Pawling, NY.
Copyright 2010 Estate of Croswell Bowen
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