"Some Come from Hurley, Some Come From Rhine, Some pop fresh from a pot cheese mine.

Thursday 

   April 28,  1938

Dear Carl,

Next week Kingston will hold an exhibit of John Vanderlyn’s paintings. Local legend has it that Aaron Burr saw his paintings on a Kingston blacksmith shop and took Vanderlyn as his protégée.  He went to Paris on Burr's money and besides  learning to paint he perhaps learned to drink what one writer calls the "ardent"  in my neck of the woods. After,  I think four years,  he returned.  He did  Burr and  such things as a picture of Versailles. Also some kind of a  vast panorama.  He never married "because he had no money for that kind of thing"  as Mrs.  Westbrook of the State House  says.  He drank a  great deal and in 1852 when he  died in hi s   studio here in Kingston he was drunk and had his palette in his hand.  He never had any money and legend says be died in poverty.  His Father’s name,   I believe was  Peter Vanderlyn and the Vanderlyns were a family  of painters.  Was born in Kingston in 1776. Coykendall  (may be wrong spelling)  a member of one of the old families is  going to  do  a biography  of him for the  exhibit. Burr used to visit a family here   in Kingston.
You   said to remind you   that  in Poughkeepsie  one is awakened early in the morning by the cries  of  the fish venders going through the streets. A man holding shad in each hand I believe one cow and one buck cries: "fresh shad,  fresh Hudson river shad.”  Also remember that  Sue Verplanck said that Grace Whittimore Newlin, whose Mother was Louisa de Windt   said “Why  the de Windts built the dock that the Verplancks  landed on.”
If you   haven't already found out about this  fellow Hines I understand that he wrote several books telling of walks along the Hudson. My landlady loved them and   has none.  She liked some of the stories so much that she took notes from the books when she was able to borrow them.
Hurley is a town near here. The cheese mines of Hurley were famous at one time but it merely meant that good pot cheese came from there. A guy from Hurley was called a “Pot Cheeser.” A piece of guttural verse ran like this:  

Some come  from Hurley.
Some from the Rhine.
Some pop fresh from a pot cheese mine.

I presume you have seen Palisades  of the Hudson,  Arthur C. Mack 1909. I noticed in that Legends thing on  the  Hudson that an Englishman lecturing around here in 1850 or so said that  an American looking at the  Thames  said   "Why  the ditches  that  run through our farms are bigger than this.” Funny the English stillsquawk about Americans talking big but today it’s our skyscrapers.

I presume you have the Times geological story on the Hudson dated July  11, 1937.

BRICKS. Out at the Hutton Bricks yards I talked with a guy named Tierny who is s in the office.  Also   some bookkeeper or treasurer. Around 1900 the Hutton Co. had 400 men making forty million bricks and today 130 men make the  same number..  You will perhaps remember that this aspect  of  a cause  of technological un¬employment   impressed Howard Scott,   the Technocrat very much.  in the old days the clays bricks were  dried in  the sun before going into the kiln. Brick workers are called “Brick Yarders.” The German and Irish immigrants received employment  in the yards  around 1830 says Tierny. He thinks the famine has something to do with the Irish coming across. A few French-Canadians come down. The came the Hungarians and Polish. Today most of the Brick Yarders are Italian and negroes. Nick Lamersdorft, the foreman of the yard, has been there 56 years, is, I believe, German. He calls himself Nick Lemister. He seems to have a kind of local accent. Suppose from being around the Irish who seem to have the better jobs. It was around the end of the 19th Century that carloads of negroes were imported from the south to work in the brickyards. Bricks are transported today much as they were a hundred years ago. They pile them up on barges about 350 thousand to a half million on a barge. Then a tug hauled not more than five barges to New York. The price of bricks used to be about five or six dollars a thousand (despite the fact that more labor was needed.) and from around 1923 to 26 it as high as $25 a  thousand.   Today it is about 9  to 12.50 a thousand. They make only common brick around here and they used the term Hudson River brick but claim not special advantages. It is interesting that no building substitute has been found much better. Kingston however is called  a frame town and never took advantage of the fact  that they could lave saved money by buying their bricks at  the yard. Kingston felt  the slightest sign of a  building boom and these days Kingston excited about the new Metropolitan Life housing project that will millions of bricks.   The  same   is true regarding cement, stone  and such industries as you saw in the Press articles.
When you see the machinery for making bricks, the machines that mix clay, press them in the moulds and feed them to the drying cages you can see the reduction in the cost of labor. They get the clay from deposits along the Rondout Creek (part of the creek along there is full of abandoned barges tugs etc result of the deepening of the Hudson partly). They use lime from around here (there used to be tremendous lime operations along there you can still see the remains) to make the brick stiffer, some coal or coke (it used to brought from Penn via the old Canal) some sand and a metallic ore color it that came from Ogdensburg, New York. When they molded the bricks they used to dry them in the sun but during freezing weather they couldn't. Now they give them six or seven hours artificial drying which makes possible year round operation. They use hay for insulation. Then they pile the dried bricks into kiln about 1 and a half million and leave a place for building fires every twenty feet or so. It’s in the shape of a rectangle and the fires are operated from both sides of the rectangle. In the old days they used wood and it must have been terribly difficult. Now they use oil. It takes about 12 days to bake them and the heat around 1500 F. The supervisors who watch the fires work in 12-hour shifts during that time. When they are finally cooled they used little wheelbarrows to pile them onto the barges. The bricks at the top and middle of the kiln are the best. The ones near the fire are brittle and break easily and they throw many bricks away including the broken ones. You see them using bricks chips to fill in dumps. Some yard pile the bricks so that machinery can slip in and get a bunch of the pile and load them. Derricks have curious grabbers that grab about 1500 bricks at a time. I believe that should be 100,000 bricks to a barge. Brickmaking used to be a seasonal labor business and in the winter during freezing weather the same labor went to work ice. Folks drove from miles around to the banks of the Hudson in sleighs to work cutting ice. There used to be tremendous icehouses. As a of fact I remember that Hudson river steamboat Captain John E. Frazer said he used to take insurance men from Home Insurance Company (father used to be with it) on tours of inspection of the ice houses. I believe they invested their money in them or merely insured them against fire. Artificial ice and the contamination of the Hudson killed the ice business. The Newark Lime and Cement Co. was the big company on the Rondout Creek. Coal came through the Hudson Canal from Scranton. Teams of four horses brought blue stone to the banks. One envisions great movement and activity. Smoke pouring from tall chimneys and money being spent freely on liquor etc