Monday, November 21, 2011
How New York Became ‘The Big Apple’
HISTORY
All cities eventually acquire nicknames. Chicago
New Orleans has been dubbed ”The Big Easy,” thanks to its relaxed lifestyle and its willingness to look the other way at the shenanigans of citizens and visitors..
Less easy to fathom or trace is the origin of "The Big Apple" as a nickname for New York
"Kansas is apt to see in New York New York is merely one of the fruits of that great tree whose roots go down in the Mississippi Valley Kansas ] inclines to think that the big apple [New York
Martin, founder in 1883 of the satirical magazine Life and its first editor, was no stuffy literary bluenose. Casting a disapproving eye on the prohibition of alcohol after the First World War, he remarked nostalgically about spiritus frumenti: "Wisely used, it makes dinner parties livelier, public dinners more tolerable, wedding guests more blithe and life in general pleasanter."
Whether Martin's bookish and metaphorical use of 'big apple' reflected its usage in vernacular speech is unknown. Word maven and columnist William Safire considered it the initial use of the term, but the Random House Dictionary of American Slang calls the usage "metaphorical or perhaps proverbial, rather than a concrete example of the later slang term."
Horse Racing Connections
The next appearance of the term “Big Apple” was in 1921 in the pages of the New York Morning Telegraph, then the preeminent New York
"J.P. Smith, with Tippety Witchet and others of the L.T. Bauer string, is scheduled to start for 'the big apple' tomorrow after a most prosperous Spring campaign at Bowie and Havre de Grace."
The phrase obviously had wide enough currency among racing fans to be understood by his readers.
Born in Saratoga Springs , N.Y.
In his Morning Telegraph column dated Feb. 18, 1924, headed "Around the Big Apple," Fitz Gerald told this story:
"The Big Apple. The dream of every lad that ever threw a leg over a thoroughbred and the goal of all horsemen. There's only one Big Apple. That's New York
"Two dusky stable hands were leading a pair of thoroughbreds around the 'cooling rings' of adjoining stables at the Fair Grounds in New Orleans
“'Where y'all goin' from here?' queried one.
“'From here we're headed for the Big Apple,’ proudly replied the other.
"'Well, you'd better fatten up them skinners or all you'll get from the apple is the core,' was the quick rejoinder."
Fitz Gerald's reference to the "dusky" stable hands raises the possibility that the term has its roots in African-American culture. Support for this is found in the Chicago Defender, a nationally circulated African-American newspaper. “Ragtime” Billy Tucker, a vaudeville/ragtime performer and writer for the paper, used "big apple" to refer to New York
“I trust your trip to 'the big apple' (New York
Tucker had earlier used "big apple" in a Defender story dated May 15, 1920, but referring to a different city, Los Angeles
John J. Fitz Gerald became the turf editor of the Morning Telegraph in 1925, at 32 the youngest in that job. The following year, he felt obliged to explain the origin of the Big Apple term again, with a few slight variations. In the Morning Telegraph, Dec. 1, 1926, he told essentially the same story:
"So many people have asked the writer about the derivation of his phrase 'the big apple' that he is forced to make another explanation. A number of years back, when racing a few horses at the Fair Grounds with Jake Byer, he was watching a couple of stable hands cool out a pair of 'hots' in a circle outside the stable.
"A boy from the adjoining barn called over, 'Where you shipping after the meeting?' To this one of the lads replied. 'Why, we ain't no bull-ring stable, we's goin' to 'the big apple.'
"The reply was bright and snappy. 'Boy, I don't know what you're goin' to that apple with those hides for. All you'll get is the rind.'"
By 1927, Walter Winchell, a notorious borrower of words and phrases for his gossip column, picked up and unabashedly used the expression. A year later New York American columnist O.O. McIntyre used it in his column, "New York Day by Day."
In 1935, the Big Apple night club opened in Harlem at West 135th Street and Seventh Avenue . A plaque on the building marks the spot. The expression was then common among Negro musicians. By 1937 a song and a dance style called the Big Apple were briefly popular.
In 1940, Fit Gerald quit the Morning Telegraph to do public relations for various racetracks, including the Garden State Racetrack and the Atlantic City Race Course in New Jersey as well as the Tropical Park Race Track in Miami, Florida. He was the editor of the Daily Sports Bulletin in his later years.
Death and Belated Recognition
Shortly after his 70th birthday, John Joseph Fitz Gerald died on March 17, 1963, in the seedy midtown Hotel Bryant New York City
In 1971, "The Big Apple" was officially promoted as a nickname for New York City New York City
Not until Rudolph Giuliani’s first term as mayor did John J. Fitz Gerald receive indirect recognition for his part in the coinage of the term Big Apple. On May 3, 1997, the 76th anniversary of the expression's first use in print by Fitz Gerald, a sign reading “Big Apple Corner” was added to a lamppost at the southwest corner of 54th Street and Broadway, near site of the hotel in which he lived for many years.
The event received little advance publicity, and it rained so heavily during the ceremony only one person witnessed the unveiling. He was a Fitz Gerald enthusiast named Barry Popik, a New York City New Orleans
Labels: Big Apple, New York City
Monday, June 22, 2009
The Old Croton Aqueduct: An Engineering Marvel
LOWER HUDSON VALLEY
Seen from the air, the Old Croton Aqueduct gives the impression that a giant mole had tunneled its way south from the Croton River to New York City, throwing up the slight bulge that is the telltale sign of the animal's passage through a lawn. Now a public right of way, the aqueduct was purchased by New York State from New York City's Bureau of Water Supply in 1968. Listed on both the New York State and the National Registers of Historic Places in 1974, most of it is open for walking and cycling.
This elongated but little-used state park extends all the way to the heart of New York City. In its northern reaches, it closely parallels the Hudson River. Comparatively straight and somewhat narrow as parks go, it sometimes follows city streets and highways; at other times it traverses meadows and wooded areas. It was built with a singleness of purpose: to carry water to a thirsty, disease-ridden, fire-threatened city more than a century and a half ago. In selecting its route, engineers were mindful that the water coursing through it would be impelled only by gravity. The total drop between Croton and Manhattan is 43.63 feet, or 13-1/4 inches per mile.
The aqueduct starts near the New Croton Dam, makes its way to Ossining, crossing Quaker Bridge Road twice. In Crotonville, it traverses the Indian Brook Culvert, which allows the stream of that name to pass under the aqueduct embankment. Before reaching Main Street in Ossining, it crosses the famous Double Arch Aqueduct Bridge. It runs parallel to Main Street and then across Nelson Park. It crosses Route 9 once again to Scarborough Road and back again before passing behind the Old Dutch Church in Sleepy Hollow.
The aqueduct brings walkers close to some of Westchester's architectural gems: In Tarrytown, financier Jay Gould's Gothic Revival mansion, Lyndhurst; in Irvington, Washington Irving's home, "Sunnyside," the Armour-Stiner domed octagonal house, and Nevis, the mansion built by Col. James A. Hamilton and named for the island in the West Indies where his father, Alexander Hamilton, was born; in Hastings-on-Hudson on Aqueduct Lane, the former studio of Russian-born French sculptor Jacques Lipchitz.
More than a few hardy walkers have hiked the entire length of the Old Croton Aqueduct, 26 miles of which are within the present boundaries of Westchester County. Walking the aqueduct is one way to appreciate this engineering marvel of the nineteenth century. Although some of its features are concealed in the earth, many can be discerned by observant walkers.
Building the Aqueduct
Chief Engineer John B. Jervis organized the construction of the aqueduct into four 10-mile-long divisions, each under the supervision of a resident engineer, and 96 subdivisions. called "sections." Jervis's annual salary was $5,000; his assistant, Horatio Allen, earned $3,500 a year. Resident engineers made between $1,500 and $1,800. The pay of the Irish laborers who built the aqueduct ranged between 75 cents and a dollar a day.
The major portion of the aqueduct was constructed by the cut-and-fill method in which a trench was dug, the aqueduct was built, and the earth was backfilled over it. The decision to enclose the aqueduct completely with ramparts of earth was made to protect it from the weather and contamination by ground water.
The following are the specifications of the aqueduct, taken from an official report: "The foundation is stone, upon which is laid a bed of concrete, composed of broken granite and hydraulic cement; the side walls are of hammered stone, laid up with cement; the floor is composed of an inverted arch of hard brick, eight inches thick; the lining of the side walls and the upper roof arch are of the same thickness and materials, all laid with hydraulic lime mortar. No common mortar is permitted in the whole structure."
Hydraulic cement has the advantage that the more it is exposed to water, the harder it gets. Maximum interior dimensions were 8 feet 5-1/2 inches high and 7 feet 8 inches wide--larger than any aqueducts constructed previously in Europe.
The Old Croton Dam
Simultaneous with the construction of the aqueduct, work was begun in January of 1838 on a dam in the valley of the Croton River, a huge earthen embankment about 250 feet long and 65 feet high. It was 250 feet wide at the base, tapering upwards to 55 feet wide at the top. The narrow spillway portion of the dam over which a sheet of water flowed was the only part that was constructed of stone. In times of heavy rain, it was assumed that the outflowing water would measure no more than 4 to 6 feet deep.
After the first season of construction, 2,445 feet of aqueduct had been completed and 635 feet of tunnels had been dug. At the end of the second year, 11.2 miles of the aqueduct had been completed. By January of 1841, about 32 miles, or two-thirds of the aqueduct had been constructed. The Croton Dam was nearly finished, a massive masonry arch bridge had been built at Sing Sing (Ossining) and twelve tunnels with a total length of 4,406 feet had been dug.
Ventilators and Waste Weirs
Thirty-three cylindrical stone ventilator shafts were erected to keep the aqueduct at atmospheric pressure. In the northern part of the aqueduct these were located about a mile apart; some no longer stand. Eleven ventilators had access doors to allow for inspection of the aqueduct. Ventilator No. 8 can be seen near the Park School in Ossining.
To allow water to be drained from the aqueduct if the level rose above a certain height, six waste weirs with hand-controlled gates and waste outlets were constructed. These also provided ventilation and access. A waste weir can be seen just before Snowden Avenue at the northern end of the Double Arch Bridge in Ossining. Contracts were let for the construction of six residences for the keepers of the waste weirs. One of these, built in 1845, survives at Dobbs Ferry, along with its maintenance barn.
Inverted Siphons
As almost everyone knows, water in a U-shaped pipe will ascend to the same height on each side. Such a device is called an inverted siphon. To avoid having to use large embankments or viaduct bridges, an inverted siphon of cast iron pipes three feet in diameter crossed the deep Manhattan Valley at 125th Street in New York City. To increase the flow, the elevation at the exit was three feet lower than at the entrance.
Embankments and Culverts
To avoid crossing wide valleys on bridges or viaducts with the possibility of frost damage, large embankments were built. The aqueduct was buried at the top of these below the frost line. At the bottom, an arched culvert faced with cut stone allowed a stream or road (or both) to pass through. Buttresses and wing walls were built at each end of the culvert to lead water away; even streambeds were lined with stone. Parapet walls were constructed across the tops of culverts to hold back the earthen embankments above them.
In all, 114 culverts were constructed, ranging from spans of 1-1/2 feet to 25 feet, to permit streams or roads to pass through embankments. The total length of all culverts on the aqueduct was 7,959 feet.
Embankments may be viewed where the aqueduct crosses roads, such as Station Road in Irvington, Quarry Road in Hastings-on-Hudson and Nepperhan Avenue in Yonkers. A very large embankment some 1,900 feet in length carried the aqueduct across the broad Clendenning Valley in Manhattan between 95th and 102nd Streets. The latter proved to be such an impediment to crosstown traffic that it was removed in the 1870s and replaced by undergound piping.
This elongated but little-used state park extends all the way to the heart of New York City. In its northern reaches, it closely parallels the Hudson River. Comparatively straight and somewhat narrow as parks go, it sometimes follows city streets and highways; at other times it traverses meadows and wooded areas. It was built with a singleness of purpose: to carry water to a thirsty, disease-ridden, fire-threatened city more than a century and a half ago. In selecting its route, engineers were mindful that the water coursing through it would be impelled only by gravity. The total drop between Croton and Manhattan is 43.63 feet, or 13-1/4 inches per mile.
The aqueduct starts near the New Croton Dam, makes its way to Ossining, crossing Quaker Bridge Road twice. In Crotonville, it traverses the Indian Brook Culvert, which allows the stream of that name to pass under the aqueduct embankment. Before reaching Main Street in Ossining, it crosses the famous Double Arch Aqueduct Bridge. It runs parallel to Main Street and then across Nelson Park. It crosses Route 9 once again to Scarborough Road and back again before passing behind the Old Dutch Church in Sleepy Hollow.
The aqueduct brings walkers close to some of Westchester's architectural gems: In Tarrytown, financier Jay Gould's Gothic Revival mansion, Lyndhurst; in Irvington, Washington Irving's home, "Sunnyside," the Armour-Stiner domed octagonal house, and Nevis, the mansion built by Col. James A. Hamilton and named for the island in the West Indies where his father, Alexander Hamilton, was born; in Hastings-on-Hudson on Aqueduct Lane, the former studio of Russian-born French sculptor Jacques Lipchitz.
More than a few hardy walkers have hiked the entire length of the Old Croton Aqueduct, 26 miles of which are within the present boundaries of Westchester County. Walking the aqueduct is one way to appreciate this engineering marvel of the nineteenth century. Although some of its features are concealed in the earth, many can be discerned by observant walkers.
Building the Aqueduct
Chief Engineer John B. Jervis organized the construction of the aqueduct into four 10-mile-long divisions, each under the supervision of a resident engineer, and 96 subdivisions. called "sections." Jervis's annual salary was $5,000; his assistant, Horatio Allen, earned $3,500 a year. Resident engineers made between $1,500 and $1,800. The pay of the Irish laborers who built the aqueduct ranged between 75 cents and a dollar a day.
The major portion of the aqueduct was constructed by the cut-and-fill method in which a trench was dug, the aqueduct was built, and the earth was backfilled over it. The decision to enclose the aqueduct completely with ramparts of earth was made to protect it from the weather and contamination by ground water.
The following are the specifications of the aqueduct, taken from an official report: "The foundation is stone, upon which is laid a bed of concrete, composed of broken granite and hydraulic cement; the side walls are of hammered stone, laid up with cement; the floor is composed of an inverted arch of hard brick, eight inches thick; the lining of the side walls and the upper roof arch are of the same thickness and materials, all laid with hydraulic lime mortar. No common mortar is permitted in the whole structure."
Hydraulic cement has the advantage that the more it is exposed to water, the harder it gets. Maximum interior dimensions were 8 feet 5-1/2 inches high and 7 feet 8 inches wide--larger than any aqueducts constructed previously in Europe.
The Old Croton Dam
Simultaneous with the construction of the aqueduct, work was begun in January of 1838 on a dam in the valley of the Croton River, a huge earthen embankment about 250 feet long and 65 feet high. It was 250 feet wide at the base, tapering upwards to 55 feet wide at the top. The narrow spillway portion of the dam over which a sheet of water flowed was the only part that was constructed of stone. In times of heavy rain, it was assumed that the outflowing water would measure no more than 4 to 6 feet deep.
After the first season of construction, 2,445 feet of aqueduct had been completed and 635 feet of tunnels had been dug. At the end of the second year, 11.2 miles of the aqueduct had been completed. By January of 1841, about 32 miles, or two-thirds of the aqueduct had been constructed. The Croton Dam was nearly finished, a massive masonry arch bridge had been built at Sing Sing (Ossining) and twelve tunnels with a total length of 4,406 feet had been dug.
Ventilators and Waste Weirs
Thirty-three cylindrical stone ventilator shafts were erected to keep the aqueduct at atmospheric pressure. In the northern part of the aqueduct these were located about a mile apart; some no longer stand. Eleven ventilators had access doors to allow for inspection of the aqueduct. Ventilator No. 8 can be seen near the Park School in Ossining.
To allow water to be drained from the aqueduct if the level rose above a certain height, six waste weirs with hand-controlled gates and waste outlets were constructed. These also provided ventilation and access. A waste weir can be seen just before Snowden Avenue at the northern end of the Double Arch Bridge in Ossining. Contracts were let for the construction of six residences for the keepers of the waste weirs. One of these, built in 1845, survives at Dobbs Ferry, along with its maintenance barn.
Inverted Siphons
As almost everyone knows, water in a U-shaped pipe will ascend to the same height on each side. Such a device is called an inverted siphon. To avoid having to use large embankments or viaduct bridges, an inverted siphon of cast iron pipes three feet in diameter crossed the deep Manhattan Valley at 125th Street in New York City. To increase the flow, the elevation at the exit was three feet lower than at the entrance.
Embankments and Culverts
To avoid crossing wide valleys on bridges or viaducts with the possibility of frost damage, large embankments were built. The aqueduct was buried at the top of these below the frost line. At the bottom, an arched culvert faced with cut stone allowed a stream or road (or both) to pass through. Buttresses and wing walls were built at each end of the culvert to lead water away; even streambeds were lined with stone. Parapet walls were constructed across the tops of culverts to hold back the earthen embankments above them.
In all, 114 culverts were constructed, ranging from spans of 1-1/2 feet to 25 feet, to permit streams or roads to pass through embankments. The total length of all culverts on the aqueduct was 7,959 feet.
Embankments may be viewed where the aqueduct crosses roads, such as Station Road in Irvington, Quarry Road in Hastings-on-Hudson and Nepperhan Avenue in Yonkers. A very large embankment some 1,900 feet in length carried the aqueduct across the broad Clendenning Valley in Manhattan between 95th and 102nd Streets. The latter proved to be such an impediment to crosstown traffic that it was removed in the 1870s and replaced by undergound piping.
Tunnels
Whenever a hill or a ridge lay in the path of the aqueduct, a tunnel was dug. Sixteen tunnels lie along the route of the aqueduct, varying in length from 160 to 1,263 feet, with a total length of 6,841 feet. When tunnels were drilled through solid rock, the roof was not lined. The walls and floor, however, were constructed in the same manner as the aqueduct. This identical profile provided the same flow characteristics throughout the length of the aqueduct as far as the Harlem River.
Tunnels on the aqueduct are located near Quaker Bridge in Croton-on-Hudson, just before the Double Arch Bridge in Ossining, under Cedar Street in Dobbs Ferry, and in Yonkers where the aqueduct turns east to cross into the Saw Mill River Valley.
Meanwhile, Back at the Dam
Friday, January 8, 1841, was a black day for the Croton aqueduct project. A thaw had set in earlier, melting the 18 inches of snow that blanketed the surrounding hills. A heavy rain had also fallen for two days. Behind the nearly finished dam, the water rose at the alarming rate of one foot an hour.
It soon became obvious that the dam's masonry spillway was entirely too small to handle such a volume of water. The reservoir began to pour over the earthen walls that linked the spillway to the north bank of the Croton River. Sensing impending disaster, Alfred Brayton, the young son of one of the dam contractors, heroically rode off to warn residents farther downstream. His errand of mercy was made more difficult because some of the bridges had already been carried away.
Eventually, the water reached a height of fifteen feet above the spillway. At 4:30 in the morning, the earthen embankment failed, unleashing a torrent of water, mud, rocks and debris consisting of uprooted trees, small buildings and the remains of Pines Bridge that had been literally lifted off its footings by the rising waters. Three lives, one at the dam and two at Bailey's wire mill, were lost in the tremendous deluge that washed out every bridge across the Croton River, three mills and five or six houses. The cost to the city for property damage was about $75,000. So much mud and debris was carried downstream, however, that the mouth of the Croton River, formerly navigable by schooners and sloops as far as Underhill's gristmill at Quaker Bridge, became silted up and shallow.
The Rebuilt Old Croton Dam
because the severity of the storm was unprecedented, John B. Jervis managed to retain his job. Loss of the dam was a bitter lesson, but he profited from it. The new dam was redesigned on a radically different plan and rebuilt for $60,000. Constructed this time entirely of stone, with a rubble core and cut granite facing, it had a height of 57 feet; the spillway to carry off the overflowing water stretched almost the full width of the dam.
Jervis was acutely conscious of the scouring power of swiftly rushing water now and designed the masonry face of the new dam so that any overflow would be carried over it safely. In cross-section it was a gentle S-shaped ogee curve that eased the water over the top of the dam and down its face, discharging it horizontally into a backwater pool created by a secondary rock-and-timber cribbed apron, thus slowing it down.
Completed in 1842, the rebuilt Old Croton Dam was the first large masonry dam constructed in the United States and became the model for municipal water system dams in the United States for many years. Its site is three miles to the north of the present Cornell Dam, or New Croton Dam. At periods of extremely low water, the outlines of the intact Old Croton Dam can be seen. Interestingly, the submerged Old Croton Dam and its gatehouse and sluiceway (at its southern end near where the original inlet to the Croton Aqueduct was located) are listed on the National Register of Historic Places as an underwater archeological site.
Aqueduct Bridges
Several bridges were built to carry the aqueduct over existing streets and roads. The most impressive of these is the so-called Double Arch Bridge in Ossining. Spanning the Sing Sing Kill in a north-south direction, the original arch is 88 feet long and 76 feet high, yielding a structure of striking boldness.
In the 1860's, a second arch was added through the larger arch in an east-west direction to carry Broadway across the same watercourse. The twin arches present an arresting architectural composition that is one of the conversation pieces of the Old Croton Aqueduct.
Up until 1924, a massive aqueduct arch to the south of Scarborough spanned the Albany Post Road (Route 9) and gave the hamlet of Archville its name. It was removed by court order and replaced by an unobtrusive underground inverted siphon after the comparatively narrow opening of the arch that spanned the road became a traffic hazard. After an absence of 74 years, in 1998 a rustproof COR-TEN steel footbridge replaced the former arch. Stone embankments that connected to either side of the original arch can still be seen along Route 9 about a quarter-mile north of the intersection with Route 117. This is the only location along the entire length of the aqueduct where the original right-of-way has been modified.
Whenever a hill or a ridge lay in the path of the aqueduct, a tunnel was dug. Sixteen tunnels lie along the route of the aqueduct, varying in length from 160 to 1,263 feet, with a total length of 6,841 feet. When tunnels were drilled through solid rock, the roof was not lined. The walls and floor, however, were constructed in the same manner as the aqueduct. This identical profile provided the same flow characteristics throughout the length of the aqueduct as far as the Harlem River.
Tunnels on the aqueduct are located near Quaker Bridge in Croton-on-Hudson, just before the Double Arch Bridge in Ossining, under Cedar Street in Dobbs Ferry, and in Yonkers where the aqueduct turns east to cross into the Saw Mill River Valley.
Meanwhile, Back at the Dam
Friday, January 8, 1841, was a black day for the Croton aqueduct project. A thaw had set in earlier, melting the 18 inches of snow that blanketed the surrounding hills. A heavy rain had also fallen for two days. Behind the nearly finished dam, the water rose at the alarming rate of one foot an hour.
It soon became obvious that the dam's masonry spillway was entirely too small to handle such a volume of water. The reservoir began to pour over the earthen walls that linked the spillway to the north bank of the Croton River. Sensing impending disaster, Alfred Brayton, the young son of one of the dam contractors, heroically rode off to warn residents farther downstream. His errand of mercy was made more difficult because some of the bridges had already been carried away.
Eventually, the water reached a height of fifteen feet above the spillway. At 4:30 in the morning, the earthen embankment failed, unleashing a torrent of water, mud, rocks and debris consisting of uprooted trees, small buildings and the remains of Pines Bridge that had been literally lifted off its footings by the rising waters. Three lives, one at the dam and two at Bailey's wire mill, were lost in the tremendous deluge that washed out every bridge across the Croton River, three mills and five or six houses. The cost to the city for property damage was about $75,000. So much mud and debris was carried downstream, however, that the mouth of the Croton River, formerly navigable by schooners and sloops as far as Underhill's gristmill at Quaker Bridge, became silted up and shallow.
The Rebuilt Old Croton Dam
because the severity of the storm was unprecedented, John B. Jervis managed to retain his job. Loss of the dam was a bitter lesson, but he profited from it. The new dam was redesigned on a radically different plan and rebuilt for $60,000. Constructed this time entirely of stone, with a rubble core and cut granite facing, it had a height of 57 feet; the spillway to carry off the overflowing water stretched almost the full width of the dam.
Jervis was acutely conscious of the scouring power of swiftly rushing water now and designed the masonry face of the new dam so that any overflow would be carried over it safely. In cross-section it was a gentle S-shaped ogee curve that eased the water over the top of the dam and down its face, discharging it horizontally into a backwater pool created by a secondary rock-and-timber cribbed apron, thus slowing it down.
Completed in 1842, the rebuilt Old Croton Dam was the first large masonry dam constructed in the United States and became the model for municipal water system dams in the United States for many years. Its site is three miles to the north of the present Cornell Dam, or New Croton Dam. At periods of extremely low water, the outlines of the intact Old Croton Dam can be seen. Interestingly, the submerged Old Croton Dam and its gatehouse and sluiceway (at its southern end near where the original inlet to the Croton Aqueduct was located) are listed on the National Register of Historic Places as an underwater archeological site.
Aqueduct Bridges
Several bridges were built to carry the aqueduct over existing streets and roads. The most impressive of these is the so-called Double Arch Bridge in Ossining. Spanning the Sing Sing Kill in a north-south direction, the original arch is 88 feet long and 76 feet high, yielding a structure of striking boldness.
In the 1860's, a second arch was added through the larger arch in an east-west direction to carry Broadway across the same watercourse. The twin arches present an arresting architectural composition that is one of the conversation pieces of the Old Croton Aqueduct.
Up until 1924, a massive aqueduct arch to the south of Scarborough spanned the Albany Post Road (Route 9) and gave the hamlet of Archville its name. It was removed by court order and replaced by an unobtrusive underground inverted siphon after the comparatively narrow opening of the arch that spanned the road became a traffic hazard. After an absence of 74 years, in 1998 a rustproof COR-TEN steel footbridge replaced the former arch. Stone embankments that connected to either side of the original arch can still be seen along Route 9 about a quarter-mile north of the intersection with Route 117. This is the only location along the entire length of the aqueduct where the original right-of-way has been modified.
How to get Croton water across the Harlem River became a political football. Some wanted a tunnel under the river, estimated to cost $636,738--but tunneling technology was in its infancy at the time, and the uncertainty of pursuing this option led to its rejection. This left a bridge as the only recourse, with the Water Commission, engineers and the public split between a low bridge and a high bridge. Speculators and lobbyists for area landowners wanted a truly imposing structure. Jervis favored a low bridge, which would have been simpler, faster, and cheaper to construct. The estimate for a high bridge was $836,623. A low bridge would have been cheaper than either of the other two crossings. When concerns were raised in the State Legislature that a low bridge would obstruct boat passage along the Harlem River to the Hudson River, a high bridge was ultimately chosen.
In June of 1839, after two years of haggling, the Water Commission agreed on a high bridge. The contract for the bridge was awarded to a consortium of contractors, Timothy Ferell, Samuel Roberts, Arnold Mason and George Law. Three of these were already contractors on other sections of the aqueduct.
Reminiscent of classical aqueducts, the bridge Javis designed, aided by James Renwick, Jr. (who would later design St. Patrick's Cathedral), was 1,450 feet long with 15 arches 100 feet above the river. Eight of its fifteen arches were anchored in the river itself, with the remaining seven standing on the land. The river arches were 80 feet ide and 150 feet thigh. The seven land arches were fifty feet wide; one was on the steep Manhattan shore and 6 were on the upward-sloping Westchester (now the borough of the Bronx) side of the river.
Reminiscent of classical aqueducts, the bridge Javis designed, aided by James Renwick, Jr. (who would later design St. Patrick's Cathedral), was 1,450 feet long with 15 arches 100 feet above the river. Eight of its fifteen arches were anchored in the river itself, with the remaining seven standing on the land. The river arches were 80 feet ide and 150 feet thigh. The seven land arches were fifty feet wide; one was on the steep Manhattan shore and 6 were on the upward-sloping Westchester (now the borough of the Bronx) side of the river.
The river bottom proved to be a mix of mud, hard sand and boulders over the underlying bedrock. To support the graceful arches of the bridge, clusters of oak piles had to be driven into the river bed to support five of the eight piers. The Croton water was carried across the bridge in an inverted siphon of twin 48-inch pipes, covered for protection from the elements by five feet of earth. To increase pressure and flow, the exit on the Manhattan side was placed two feet lower than the entrance.
After its completion in 1848, the High Bridge and its picturesque arches quickly became a popular romantic subject for paintings by artists of the Hudson River School. Unfortunately, the bridge lost much of its classical look in the twentieth century when five of the arches resting on the river bed were removed and replaced by a soaring steel span that offered no impediment to busy ship traffic. The opening ceremonies for the new bridge were held on Oct. 27, 1928.
Today, the grand old aqueduct itself remains remarkably unchanged, a unique legacy somnolently waiting for a later generation to discover it and explore it. And the best way to do this is afoot. Readers interested in walking the aqueduct will find useful a large-format pamphlet entitled A Walker's Guide to the Old Croton Aqueduct, published by and obtainable from the N.Y. State Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation, Taconic Region, Staatsburg, NY 12580 (914/889-4100). It is also available in most Westchester public libraries. A free trail map can be obtained by sending a stamped and self-addressed envelope to Old Croton Trailway State Park, 15 Walnut Street, Dobbs Ferry, NY 10522 (914/693-5259).
Today, the grand old aqueduct itself remains remarkably unchanged, a unique legacy somnolently waiting for a later generation to discover it and explore it. And the best way to do this is afoot. Readers interested in walking the aqueduct will find useful a large-format pamphlet entitled A Walker's Guide to the Old Croton Aqueduct, published by and obtainable from the N.Y. State Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation, Taconic Region, Staatsburg, NY 12580 (914/889-4100). It is also available in most Westchester public libraries. A free trail map can be obtained by sending a stamped and self-addressed envelope to Old Croton Trailway State Park, 15 Walnut Street, Dobbs Ferry, NY 10522 (914/693-5259).
Editor’s Note: This is the third in a four-part series of articles about the building of the Old Croton Aqueduct. The previously published articles in this series can be found at:
http://notorc.blogspot.com/2009/04/how-disease-and-fire-led-to-building-of.html
http://notorc.blogspot.com/2009/04/no-irish-need-apply-culture-clashes.html
http://notorc.blogspot.com/2009/04/how-disease-and-fire-led-to-building-of.html
http://notorc.blogspot.com/2009/04/no-irish-need-apply-culture-clashes.html
Labels: Croton Water, Lower Hudson Valley, New York City, Old Croton Aqueduct
Monday, April 13, 2009
'No Irish Need Apply.' The Clash of Cultures Along the Old Croton Aqueduct
LOWER HUDSON VALLEY
Long before the first shovelful of dirt was turned, it was obvious that the Croton Aqueduct faced massive problems. The land along the Croton and Hudson Rivers through which it would pass was already well settled. With the breakup of the manors of Cortlandt, Philipsburgh and Fordham after the Revolution, many tenant families purchased the properties they farmed. After the War of 1812, wealthy merchants and speculators from New York City bought up much of the remaining desirable land along the Hudson and built large mansions.
By the mid-1830's, some 200 landowners along the route of the 41-mile-long aqueduct and on the site of the future Croton Reservoir would have to be compensated and, in some cases, moved. One impediment to the start of construction was the requirement to ascertain the names of all persons holding title to land along its right of way and for one of the aqueduct engineers to visit each person.
"Some of them are not at home when called on; others are a mile or two away from their residences; and many who are seen want time to make up their minds as to the amount of compensation they are to receive." So wrote Maj. David B. Douglass, chief engineer of the Croton Aqueduct, a hero of the War of 1812, and former professor of engineering at West Point. Legally, work could not begin on any land that had not been appraised or purchased. Slow moving and cautious, Douglass--on the job for little more than a year--was replaced in 1836 by self-taught engineer John B. Jervis, who would see the project through to completion.
Hostility Widespread
Westchester residents fought the aqueduct at every turn. When the state legislature met for its 1836 session, it was besieged with demands that the powers of the water commissioners granted in 1834 be reduced. An act was passed directing that land taken for the aqueduct and not used for that purpose be returned to its original owners. It also stipulated that necessary fences, culverts and overpasses would be built.
In 1837, spurred by Theodorus C. Van Wyck--the same unrelenting foe of the Croton project who had distributed handbills during the 1835 vote--angry Westchester citizens again petitioned the legislature. They attacked the Croton Aqueduct for unconstitutionally extending the boundaries of New York City and "invading the historic manor of Cortlandt and County of Westchester." Landowners demanded that the 1835 act be repealed because it deprived them of their property without their consent and against their will. Unfortunately for them, the state had the legal right to claim private lands for public works.
Compounding the delay, as the first construction contracts were about to be signed, the financial panic of 1837 erupted. Although required by law to make payments in specie (hard coinage), New York banks decided to resort to using paper money. This completely demoralized money markets. In that year alone 618 banks failed, and the ensuing depression lasted about seven years. Although bids had been received on 23 sections of the aqueduct, bids on ten sections were deemed to be too high. The city's tightened purse strings allowed contracts to be let only on 13, totaling $921,698. With 86 sections yet to be bid on, it was obvious that the total cost of the Croton Aqueduct would exceed the $5 million estimate.
Hostility toward the aqueduct took many forms. Surveying parties were denied access to some properties under threat of suits for trespass. Surveyors were subjected to abusive language or even assaulted. Stakes hammered into the ground to mark site boundaries mysteriously disappeared. Landowners attempted to extract every bit of compensation they could by any means. Opportunistic speculators bought up farmland along the route of the aqueduct, divided it into village lots, and tried to convince aqueduct appraisers of their inflated values.
Landowners vs. Laborers
Once construction began, many claimed they had suffered grievous injury because of theft by construction workers of fruits, vegetables, timber and tools. Affidavits were presented alleging extensive damages. One stated, "A residence near this aqueduct is extremely unpleasant, by reason of the noises, riots, and drunken revels of the said laborers." Moreover, it was "unsafe and imprudent for a respectable female to walk on, or near, or along where said aqueduct is constructing." To counter these, other affidavits were offered from farmers who indicated they had never lost any property or heard of women being insulted, claiming, "so far as their observation extends, the laborers are a civil people."
The "laborers" in question were workers, mostly recent immigrants from Ireland who had been engaged to build the aqueduct. Unlike new arrivals from Germany and Scandinavia who sought farmland, the Irish--although chiefly from rural areas--tended to cluster in Eastern seaboard cities where they sought work as laborers or servants. Usually penniless on arrival and not easily assimilated into a Protestant, industrialized, urban culture, the Irish found housing only in the worst slums. The stereotype of the hard-drinking, brawling Irish Paddy took hold early. In Eastern cities, it was not unusual for advertisements in newspapers to state bluntly, "No Irish need apply."
During the 1830's, the Irish comprised 44 percent of all immigrants. “From Ireland there comes yearly a great rabble, who because of their tendency to drunkenness, their fighting and their knavery, make themselves commonly hated," one observer wrote. “A respectable Irishman hardly dares acknowledge his nationality.” Yet they were ambitious, hardworking, energetic--and aggressively patriotic, as the large numbers who later served in Irish regiments during the Civil War attested. Thirty-eight Union regiments had the word "Irish" in their names. .
A people accustomed to dealing with rent collectors and oppressive landlords, they knew the advantages of organization and took to city politics with skill and enthusiasm. No immigrant group made its influence felt in political life quicker or more effectively than the Irish.
Prejudice Rears Its Ugly Head
"It is a fact," declared Samuel F.B. Morse, professor of painting and sculpture at N.Y.U. and inventor of the telegraph, "that an unaccountable disposition to riotous conduct has manifested itself within a few years when exciting topics are publicly discussed, wholly at variance with the former peaceful, deliberative character of our people." Morse, the author of two books that fanned the fires of nativism, was deeply suspicious of Catholic motives in the United States, saw Catholic enterprise as propaganda for a return to monarchy.
In his Foreign Conspiracy Against the Liberties of the United States, first published in 1835, Morse wrote: “Surely American Protestants, freemen, have discernment enough to discover beneath them the cloven foot of this subtle foreign heresy. They will see that Popery is now, what it has ever been, a system of the darkest political intrigue and despotism, cloaking itself to avoid attack under the sacred name of religion. They will be deeply impressed with the truth, that Popery is a political as well as a religious system; that in this respect it differs totally from all other sects, from all other forms of religion in the country.”
Washington Irving also echoed the xenophobia. In an 1840 letter to the editor of Knickerbocker Magazine in New York City, he described how a camp of Irish laborers near Sleepy Hollow had been beset by the headless apparitions associated with the place and aroused by “strangers of an unknown tongue.” These ghostly specters intimidated the workers, and kept them from walking past the haunted Dutch church to nearby whiskey mills, so that “the paddys will not any longer venture out of their shantys at night.” Irving warned that if the harrying continued, the aqueduct workers, tired of being cut off from their whisky, might “entirely abandon the goblin regions of Sleepy Hollow, and the completion of the Croton Waterworks be seriously retarded."
As part of their contract with the city, aqueduct contractors had agreed not to "give or sell any ardent spirits to their workmen," or to permit any such spirits to be given or sold, or even brought upon the line. Despite all efforts to keep liquor away from aqueduct laborers, the water commissioners noted that "the love of lucre has induced certain individuals, regardless of the injury inflicted on others, to open places of resort for the laborers, where this enemy of man may be obtained, in any quantity, for money." A few unscrupulous Westchester farmers even turned their homes into taverns where aqueduct workers could imbibe "a drop of the creature." Conniving local magistrates collaborated in this practice by granting licenses.
The Irish also brought with them their sectarian secret organizations. Among these were the pro-Catholic ribbon societies, so-called because members wore a green ribbon. Traditional Irish factionalism erupted on the aqueduct in April of 1838, with a battle between men from County Cork in southwest Ireland, and those from Fermanagh in northern Ireland. Many were injured, and one man was killed. A resident engineer's report casually dismissed the incident: "The affair that resulted in the death of one of the overseers on Section 10 appears to have been nothing more than one of the usual Irish fighting frolics."
Property owners continued to complain about the depredations of aqueduct laborers. Presenting a bill of $3,012 for his losses in 1840, Joshua Purdy wrote: "I have made it for damages actually sustained and have not taken into consideration the inconvenience, trouble and anxiety of having between three & four hundred Irishmen upon my own farm and within a few rods of my dwelling house--for of that no calculation could be formed or any calculation made--of this I do not now nor shall not hereafter make any charge. But I can assure you it is no pleasant thing to have huts or shantees as they are called stuck up within a few rods of my dwelling and peopled with the lowest and most filthy of mankind, children nearly naked before your eyes, and that of your family."
Some idea of the inflation of land prices caused by claims and protracted negotiations may be gleaned from the following statistics: Originally estimated at $36,000, the 813 acres of land bought for the Croton Aqueduct actually cost the city $165,786. Land for the reservoir created by the Croton Dam, estimated at $28,500, set the city back $91,412.
Strikes Spread
The widespread unemployment resulting from the 1837 financial panic allowed wages to be kept low for the thousands of workers from the construction trades and the hordes of recently arrived Irish immigrants who found work on the aqueduct. Resentment over low wages and strict work rules led to violent strikes--"turn-outs" in official reports--took place during the building of the aqueduct. At the outset, laborers earned 75 cents a day. In the spring of 1838, when contractors offered them 81-1/4 cents a day, they demanded more. The laborers laid down their tools and marched "in a tumultuous manner" along the route of the aqueduct from Croton Dam to Sing Sing (Ossining). Along the way, they forced other aqueduct workers to join them until the protesters numbered several hundred. Local magistrates broke up their demonstration. After another strike in July of 1838, contractors raised wages to a dollar a day, and this rate was maintained during the summer of 1839. During the shorter days of winter, however, wages were cut back to 75 cents. In April of 1840, laborers again demanded a dollar a day, but contractors insisted on retaining the 75-cent rate.
By the spring of 1840 the aqueduct reached the northern edge of the city. Former mayor Philip Hone, the indefatigable diarist upon whom we are dependent for much of our knowledge of the life and times of the period, recorded:” There has been a flare-up amongst the Irish laborers on the Croton Aqueduct occasioned by the contractors reducing their wages from $1 to 75 cents/day. Large numbers turned out and marched from Westchester to Harlem, prevented others from working, and committed some acts of violence upon the workers."
This strike caused a worried Mayor Isaac Varian to try to intimidate the rebellious workers by calling out and leading three troops of aging mounted militia of the 27th Regiment of the National Guard. “The dogs barked, the boys shouted, the men laughed, the ladies smiled, and the men looked silly,” reported James Gordon Bennett’s Morning Herald. The part-time soldiers patrolled the line of the aqueduct as far as the Harlem River, but the Irish instinct to see life in a comic light prevailed. After meeting with good-natured heckling from the strikers, the cavalry troopers retreated. Because the depression caused by the financial panic of 1837 was still being felt, the laborers had to settle for 75 cents a day.
In spite of many handicaps, the Croton Aqueduct was completed in 1842 and brought an abundant daily supply of 90 million gallons of water to New York City. By the early 1880’s the Croton water, even after being supplemented by 20 million gallons of Bronx River water, had become inadequate for the city’s needs. A New Croton Aqueduct was authorized in 1883. Begun in 1885, it came partially on line in 1891 and was fully completed in 1893. The new system expanded the carrying capacity by 300 million gallons of water daily.
More Than Water
The Old Croton Aqueduct did more than carry water. Indirectly, it brought Roman Catholicism to the lower Hudson Valley. In cities, immigrants from Ireland tended to cluster around existing Catholic churches. Workers on the Croton Aqueduct, however, had no access to houses of worship. Missionary priests, notably Father James Cummiskey traveling from Sing Sing (Ossining), ministered to their needs in makeshift accommodations all along the aqueduct line.. Informal services in sheds and private homes provided the seedbed for the establishment of Westchester County's first Roman Catholic parishes in Yonkers, Dobbs Ferry, Beekmantown (later North Tarrytown, now Sleepy Hollow), and Sing Sing.
As it turned out, the thousands of Irish who labored to build the Old Croton Aqueduct were only the vanguard of the millions who would flee the Emerald Isle because of the Great Famine. Between 1845 and 1855, some 1,500,000 persons would leave Ireland for the United States. Paradoxically, the Irish influx was exactly what a growing America needed and what this country did not have: a laboring class with little choice but to accept the jobs that were offered. Fortunately, jobs such as digging canals and building aqueducts and railroads were many.
Pick-and-shovel work was new to America, and few Americans wanted to do it. As a result, successive waves of Irish were welcomed to the cities, where their labor met the need for better streets, sewers and new housing, all the while suffering terrible hardships doing the roughest, most dangerous work without complaint. The Irish hod carrier and bricklayer became the butt of many a vaudeville joke. With time, however, prejudices eventually faded, as the brawn and mechanical skills of the Irish made their adopted country an industrial giant and the envy of the world.
Long before the first shovelful of dirt was turned, it was obvious that the Croton Aqueduct faced massive problems. The land along the Croton and Hudson Rivers through which it would pass was already well settled. With the breakup of the manors of Cortlandt, Philipsburgh and Fordham after the Revolution, many tenant families purchased the properties they farmed. After the War of 1812, wealthy merchants and speculators from New York City bought up much of the remaining desirable land along the Hudson and built large mansions.
By the mid-1830's, some 200 landowners along the route of the 41-mile-long aqueduct and on the site of the future Croton Reservoir would have to be compensated and, in some cases, moved. One impediment to the start of construction was the requirement to ascertain the names of all persons holding title to land along its right of way and for one of the aqueduct engineers to visit each person.
"Some of them are not at home when called on; others are a mile or two away from their residences; and many who are seen want time to make up their minds as to the amount of compensation they are to receive." So wrote Maj. David B. Douglass, chief engineer of the Croton Aqueduct, a hero of the War of 1812, and former professor of engineering at West Point. Legally, work could not begin on any land that had not been appraised or purchased. Slow moving and cautious, Douglass--on the job for little more than a year--was replaced in 1836 by self-taught engineer John B. Jervis, who would see the project through to completion.
Hostility Widespread
Westchester residents fought the aqueduct at every turn. When the state legislature met for its 1836 session, it was besieged with demands that the powers of the water commissioners granted in 1834 be reduced. An act was passed directing that land taken for the aqueduct and not used for that purpose be returned to its original owners. It also stipulated that necessary fences, culverts and overpasses would be built.
In 1837, spurred by Theodorus C. Van Wyck--the same unrelenting foe of the Croton project who had distributed handbills during the 1835 vote--angry Westchester citizens again petitioned the legislature. They attacked the Croton Aqueduct for unconstitutionally extending the boundaries of New York City and "invading the historic manor of Cortlandt and County of Westchester." Landowners demanded that the 1835 act be repealed because it deprived them of their property without their consent and against their will. Unfortunately for them, the state had the legal right to claim private lands for public works.
Compounding the delay, as the first construction contracts were about to be signed, the financial panic of 1837 erupted. Although required by law to make payments in specie (hard coinage), New York banks decided to resort to using paper money. This completely demoralized money markets. In that year alone 618 banks failed, and the ensuing depression lasted about seven years. Although bids had been received on 23 sections of the aqueduct, bids on ten sections were deemed to be too high. The city's tightened purse strings allowed contracts to be let only on 13, totaling $921,698. With 86 sections yet to be bid on, it was obvious that the total cost of the Croton Aqueduct would exceed the $5 million estimate.
Hostility toward the aqueduct took many forms. Surveying parties were denied access to some properties under threat of suits for trespass. Surveyors were subjected to abusive language or even assaulted. Stakes hammered into the ground to mark site boundaries mysteriously disappeared. Landowners attempted to extract every bit of compensation they could by any means. Opportunistic speculators bought up farmland along the route of the aqueduct, divided it into village lots, and tried to convince aqueduct appraisers of their inflated values.
Landowners vs. Laborers
Once construction began, many claimed they had suffered grievous injury because of theft by construction workers of fruits, vegetables, timber and tools. Affidavits were presented alleging extensive damages. One stated, "A residence near this aqueduct is extremely unpleasant, by reason of the noises, riots, and drunken revels of the said laborers." Moreover, it was "unsafe and imprudent for a respectable female to walk on, or near, or along where said aqueduct is constructing." To counter these, other affidavits were offered from farmers who indicated they had never lost any property or heard of women being insulted, claiming, "so far as their observation extends, the laborers are a civil people."
The "laborers" in question were workers, mostly recent immigrants from Ireland who had been engaged to build the aqueduct. Unlike new arrivals from Germany and Scandinavia who sought farmland, the Irish--although chiefly from rural areas--tended to cluster in Eastern seaboard cities where they sought work as laborers or servants. Usually penniless on arrival and not easily assimilated into a Protestant, industrialized, urban culture, the Irish found housing only in the worst slums. The stereotype of the hard-drinking, brawling Irish Paddy took hold early. In Eastern cities, it was not unusual for advertisements in newspapers to state bluntly, "No Irish need apply."
During the 1830's, the Irish comprised 44 percent of all immigrants. “From Ireland there comes yearly a great rabble, who because of their tendency to drunkenness, their fighting and their knavery, make themselves commonly hated," one observer wrote. “A respectable Irishman hardly dares acknowledge his nationality.” Yet they were ambitious, hardworking, energetic--and aggressively patriotic, as the large numbers who later served in Irish regiments during the Civil War attested. Thirty-eight Union regiments had the word "Irish" in their names. .
A people accustomed to dealing with rent collectors and oppressive landlords, they knew the advantages of organization and took to city politics with skill and enthusiasm. No immigrant group made its influence felt in political life quicker or more effectively than the Irish.
Prejudice Rears Its Ugly Head
"It is a fact," declared Samuel F.B. Morse, professor of painting and sculpture at N.Y.U. and inventor of the telegraph, "that an unaccountable disposition to riotous conduct has manifested itself within a few years when exciting topics are publicly discussed, wholly at variance with the former peaceful, deliberative character of our people." Morse, the author of two books that fanned the fires of nativism, was deeply suspicious of Catholic motives in the United States, saw Catholic enterprise as propaganda for a return to monarchy.
In his Foreign Conspiracy Against the Liberties of the United States, first published in 1835, Morse wrote: “Surely American Protestants, freemen, have discernment enough to discover beneath them the cloven foot of this subtle foreign heresy. They will see that Popery is now, what it has ever been, a system of the darkest political intrigue and despotism, cloaking itself to avoid attack under the sacred name of religion. They will be deeply impressed with the truth, that Popery is a political as well as a religious system; that in this respect it differs totally from all other sects, from all other forms of religion in the country.”
Washington Irving also echoed the xenophobia. In an 1840 letter to the editor of Knickerbocker Magazine in New York City, he described how a camp of Irish laborers near Sleepy Hollow had been beset by the headless apparitions associated with the place and aroused by “strangers of an unknown tongue.” These ghostly specters intimidated the workers, and kept them from walking past the haunted Dutch church to nearby whiskey mills, so that “the paddys will not any longer venture out of their shantys at night.” Irving warned that if the harrying continued, the aqueduct workers, tired of being cut off from their whisky, might “entirely abandon the goblin regions of Sleepy Hollow, and the completion of the Croton Waterworks be seriously retarded."
As part of their contract with the city, aqueduct contractors had agreed not to "give or sell any ardent spirits to their workmen," or to permit any such spirits to be given or sold, or even brought upon the line. Despite all efforts to keep liquor away from aqueduct laborers, the water commissioners noted that "the love of lucre has induced certain individuals, regardless of the injury inflicted on others, to open places of resort for the laborers, where this enemy of man may be obtained, in any quantity, for money." A few unscrupulous Westchester farmers even turned their homes into taverns where aqueduct workers could imbibe "a drop of the creature." Conniving local magistrates collaborated in this practice by granting licenses.
The Irish also brought with them their sectarian secret organizations. Among these were the pro-Catholic ribbon societies, so-called because members wore a green ribbon. Traditional Irish factionalism erupted on the aqueduct in April of 1838, with a battle between men from County Cork in southwest Ireland, and those from Fermanagh in northern Ireland. Many were injured, and one man was killed. A resident engineer's report casually dismissed the incident: "The affair that resulted in the death of one of the overseers on Section 10 appears to have been nothing more than one of the usual Irish fighting frolics."
Property owners continued to complain about the depredations of aqueduct laborers. Presenting a bill of $3,012 for his losses in 1840, Joshua Purdy wrote: "I have made it for damages actually sustained and have not taken into consideration the inconvenience, trouble and anxiety of having between three & four hundred Irishmen upon my own farm and within a few rods of my dwelling house--for of that no calculation could be formed or any calculation made--of this I do not now nor shall not hereafter make any charge. But I can assure you it is no pleasant thing to have huts or shantees as they are called stuck up within a few rods of my dwelling and peopled with the lowest and most filthy of mankind, children nearly naked before your eyes, and that of your family."
Some idea of the inflation of land prices caused by claims and protracted negotiations may be gleaned from the following statistics: Originally estimated at $36,000, the 813 acres of land bought for the Croton Aqueduct actually cost the city $165,786. Land for the reservoir created by the Croton Dam, estimated at $28,500, set the city back $91,412.
Strikes Spread
The widespread unemployment resulting from the 1837 financial panic allowed wages to be kept low for the thousands of workers from the construction trades and the hordes of recently arrived Irish immigrants who found work on the aqueduct. Resentment over low wages and strict work rules led to violent strikes--"turn-outs" in official reports--took place during the building of the aqueduct. At the outset, laborers earned 75 cents a day. In the spring of 1838, when contractors offered them 81-1/4 cents a day, they demanded more. The laborers laid down their tools and marched "in a tumultuous manner" along the route of the aqueduct from Croton Dam to Sing Sing (Ossining). Along the way, they forced other aqueduct workers to join them until the protesters numbered several hundred. Local magistrates broke up their demonstration. After another strike in July of 1838, contractors raised wages to a dollar a day, and this rate was maintained during the summer of 1839. During the shorter days of winter, however, wages were cut back to 75 cents. In April of 1840, laborers again demanded a dollar a day, but contractors insisted on retaining the 75-cent rate.
By the spring of 1840 the aqueduct reached the northern edge of the city. Former mayor Philip Hone, the indefatigable diarist upon whom we are dependent for much of our knowledge of the life and times of the period, recorded:” There has been a flare-up amongst the Irish laborers on the Croton Aqueduct occasioned by the contractors reducing their wages from $1 to 75 cents/day. Large numbers turned out and marched from Westchester to Harlem, prevented others from working, and committed some acts of violence upon the workers."
This strike caused a worried Mayor Isaac Varian to try to intimidate the rebellious workers by calling out and leading three troops of aging mounted militia of the 27th Regiment of the National Guard. “The dogs barked, the boys shouted, the men laughed, the ladies smiled, and the men looked silly,” reported James Gordon Bennett’s Morning Herald. The part-time soldiers patrolled the line of the aqueduct as far as the Harlem River, but the Irish instinct to see life in a comic light prevailed. After meeting with good-natured heckling from the strikers, the cavalry troopers retreated. Because the depression caused by the financial panic of 1837 was still being felt, the laborers had to settle for 75 cents a day.
In spite of many handicaps, the Croton Aqueduct was completed in 1842 and brought an abundant daily supply of 90 million gallons of water to New York City. By the early 1880’s the Croton water, even after being supplemented by 20 million gallons of Bronx River water, had become inadequate for the city’s needs. A New Croton Aqueduct was authorized in 1883. Begun in 1885, it came partially on line in 1891 and was fully completed in 1893. The new system expanded the carrying capacity by 300 million gallons of water daily.
More Than Water
The Old Croton Aqueduct did more than carry water. Indirectly, it brought Roman Catholicism to the lower Hudson Valley. In cities, immigrants from Ireland tended to cluster around existing Catholic churches. Workers on the Croton Aqueduct, however, had no access to houses of worship. Missionary priests, notably Father James Cummiskey traveling from Sing Sing (Ossining), ministered to their needs in makeshift accommodations all along the aqueduct line.. Informal services in sheds and private homes provided the seedbed for the establishment of Westchester County's first Roman Catholic parishes in Yonkers, Dobbs Ferry, Beekmantown (later North Tarrytown, now Sleepy Hollow), and Sing Sing.
As it turned out, the thousands of Irish who labored to build the Old Croton Aqueduct were only the vanguard of the millions who would flee the Emerald Isle because of the Great Famine. Between 1845 and 1855, some 1,500,000 persons would leave Ireland for the United States. Paradoxically, the Irish influx was exactly what a growing America needed and what this country did not have: a laboring class with little choice but to accept the jobs that were offered. Fortunately, jobs such as digging canals and building aqueducts and railroads were many.
Pick-and-shovel work was new to America, and few Americans wanted to do it. As a result, successive waves of Irish were welcomed to the cities, where their labor met the need for better streets, sewers and new housing, all the while suffering terrible hardships doing the roughest, most dangerous work without complaint. The Irish hod carrier and bricklayer became the butt of many a vaudeville joke. With time, however, prejudices eventually faded, as the brawn and mechanical skills of the Irish made their adopted country an industrial giant and the envy of the world.
Labels: New York City, Old Croton Aqueduct, Old Croton Dam, Water Supply
Sunday, February 08, 2009
The Two Journeys of Abraham Lincoln
LOWER HUDSON VALLEY
Abraham Lincoln, sixteenth President of the United States, made two railroad journeys between his home in Illinois and Washington, D.C. One in 1861 as the President-elect and the other, in the opposite direction, as the victim of the bullet of assassin John Wilkes Booth. The second trip has been extensively covered; details of the first trip are less well known.
Lincoln was elected in November of 1860 after a bruising presidential campaign involving four candidates. He won, but with less than 40 percent of the vote he was hardly the people's choice. Of a total of some 4.7 million votes, the three candidates opposing Lincoln rolled up nearly a million more votes than he did. Until the 20th Amendment took effect in 1936 and changed the inauguration date to January 20, every four years there was a long delay between the election in November and the inauguration in March. With slavery a bitter issue, the four-month interval after the 1860 election changed history. While Lincoln waited to take office, Southern states made good on their threat to secede. The country began to fall apart.
An Affectionate Farewell
The journey that would take him to Washington began on February 11, 1861, at Springfield, Illinois. A somber crowd gathered in a cold drizzle to see Abraham Lincoln off to Washington. He told them, prophetically, "I now leave, not knowing when, or whether ever, I may return." He concluded with, "I bid you an affectionate farewell." For the next twelve days the presidential train moved from city to city across the country in an itinerary designed to showcase the President-elect and his family. He met the governors and legislators of five states; he delivered more that 20 speeches in key cities and shook the hands of thousands. The grueling journey had a larger purpose: to encourage support for the Union and strengthen the loyalty of the people of the northern states.
Lincoln's route covered 1,904 miles over eighteen different railroads. His train of three, sometimes four, cars went from Springfield to Indianapolis, Cincinnati and Columbus. After a detour to Pittsburgh, it headed for Cleveland and then Albany, N.Y. In the town of Westfield, south of Buffalo, Lincoln told the crowd, "I have a correspondent in this place, and if she is present I would like to see her. Her name is Grace Bedell." A young girl was brought to the platform. Lincoln explained, "She wrote me that she thought I would be better looking if I wore whiskers." Lincoln, who had been letting his beard grow for a month, said to the little girl, "You see, I let these whiskers grow for you, Grace." Then he kissed her. The crowd loved it, and The New York Tribune story was headlined, "Old Abe Kissed by Pretty Girl." He would continue to wear a beard, with only the upper lip shaved, for the few years remaining to him.
South Carolina had left the Union the day before Christmas in 1860. Six other "cotton states" of the Deep South followed. After stops at Rochester, Syracuse and Utica, as the Presidential train neared Albany on February 18, ominous news came over the wires to Lincoln: Jefferson Davis had taken the oath of office as President of the Confederate States of America in Montgomery, Alabama.
In Albany, the carriages carrying the Lincoln party to the Capitol passed a theater where 22-year-old tragedian John Wilkes Booth and a stock company were acting in a play, "The Apostate." The paths of Lincoln and Booth would cross again four fateful years later. From the steps of the old Capitol building, for the first time since he had begun the trip, Lincoln admitted he was weary. He ended his brief speech with, "I have neither the voice nor the strength to address you at any greater length."
A Stop at Peekskill
With Joseph Hudson of Peekskill serving as conductor, Lincoln's train traveled down the Hudson Valley on February 19, making scheduled stops at large cities. Peekskill was only a small village, but it was home to an old friend, attorney William Nelson, for whom the city's Nelson Avenue is named. The two had met in Washington in 1847 as freshman congressmen in the 30th Congress. A veteran member of that Congress was a florid-faced little man with delicate sideburns, 80-year-old John Quincy Adams, from 1825 to 1829 the nation's President. After he left the White House, his Massachusetts district repeatedly elected him to the House of Representatives.
When first elected to Congress in 1846, William Nelson, 62, was already a well-seasoned political veteran; Lincoln was a 34-year-old neophyte. Whig party politics kept Lincoln from running again, and his replacement was defeated in 1848. Locally popular, Nelson was re-elected to a second term. At Peekskill, the President-elect mounted a baggage wagon from which to speak and was joined by William Nelson. Cadets from the Peekskill Military Academy formed a hollow square around the impromptu platform. The Highland Democrat, a local newspaper that had not supported Lincoln, estimated the crowd at about 1,500.
On the bluff above the station, the Jefferson Guards had placed a cannon and fired a Presidential salute of 21 guns. Nelson's welcoming speech closed with, "You have our hopes and prayers that your administration will prove as prosperous and happy to our beloved country, and as honorable to yourself as the difficulties and dangers which now threaten you are great." The tall bearded man in a black suit thanked the citizens of Peekskill for their warm reception. His response was extemporaneous and short--only 137 words in all:
"Ladies and gentlemen: I have but a moment to stand before you, to listen and return your kind greeting. I thank you for this reception and for the pleasant manner in which it is tendered to me by our mutual friend [William Nelson]. I will say in a single sentence, in regard to the difficulties which lie before me and our beloved country, that if I can only be as generously and unanimously sustained as the demonstrations I have witnessed indicate I shall be, I shall not fail; but without your sustaining hands I am sure that neither I, nor any other man, can hope to surmount these difficulties. I trust that in the course I shall pursue I shall be sustained not only by the party that elected me, but by the patriotic people of the whole country."
The village of Peekskill and the town of Cortlandt responded generously throughout the protracted years of the war that followed; 690 of their citizens served in the Union forces. Among those who watched the Lincoln train fade into the distance were two Yale graduates, newly minted lawyers James W. Husted (Class of 1854) and Chauncey M. Depew (Class of 1856). Both would become active in Republican politics, Depew as a United States senator and Husted as a longtime speaker of the N.Y. State Assembly.
A Cool Reception in New York City
Lincoln's train reached New York and the Hudson River Railroad's depot at 30th Street and Tenth Avenue at three p.m. His waiting carriage--an open barouche that had transported the visiting Prince of Wales only a few months before--was escorted to the Astor House, opposite City Hall Park, by a mounted platoon of the newly formed Metropolitan Police.
New Yorkers, largely Democratic in their sentiments, had cast 62 percent of their votes for candidates other than Lincoln, but streets and buildings were crowded with spectators. Across from the Astor House, Barnum's Museum, at the corner of Chatham Street (now called Park Row) and Broadway, was decked out in bright welcoming banners and flags. Atop a horse-drawn Broadway omnibus mired in gridlocked traffic, 41-year-old Walt Whitman, freelance journalist and former editor of the Brooklyn Eagle, watched as Lincoln alighted from the coach and looked out over a crowd of some 40,000.
Whitman was struck by the "sulky, unbroken silence," he remembered. "I had, I say, a capital view of it all, and especially of Mr. Lincoln, his look and gait--his perfect composure and coolness--his unusual and uncouth height, his dress of complete black, stovepipe hat push'd back on his head, dark-brown complexion, seam'd and wrinkled yet canny-looking face, black, bushy head of hair, disproportionately long neck, and his hands held behind him as he stood observing the people. He look'd with curiosity upon that immense sea of faces, and the sea of faces return'd the look with similar curiosity."
At eight the next morning, Lincoln was driven to a Fifth Avenue mansion for breakfast with a hundred supporters, the city's most prosperous merchants. One guest remarked to Lincoln about the number of millionaires present. "Oh, indeed, is that so?" Lincoln responded. "Well, that's quite right. I'm a millionaire myself. I got a minority of a million in the votes last November."
During the rest of the day, Lincoln met at City Hall with Mayor Fernando Wood, a Democrat, who gave him a chilly reception. Fearing the interruption of the lucrative trade in dry goods that would come with a conflict, the Mayor had already suggested that New York become a free city, separate from the Union and able to trade with every section of the country. Mrs. Lincoln visited Barnum's Museum and received ladies at the nearby Astor House.
That night Lincoln attended a reception, followed by an elaborate dinner and a performance of "Un Ballo in Maschera" ("A Masked Ball"). Giuseppe Verdi's new opera of love, murder and betrayal in high society was performed at the Academy of Music on 14th Street. Lincoln wore black kid gloves--instead of the white gloves then in style for wear at the opera. Newspapers the next day poked fun at the only pair of black gloves in a packed auditorium filled with white gloves.
The following day he traveled to New Jersey by ferry to catch a train for Washington. In Philadelphia, he was warned by Allan Pinkerton, a railroad detective who would later create and head up Lincoln's Secret Service, "Beyond the shadow of a doubt there exists a plot to assassinate you." Like New York, Baltimore was a largely unfriendly city, and much of Maryland was sympathetic to the South. From Harrisburg, Lincoln was spirited back to Philadelphia and on to Washington in a berth in a sleeping car.
Through superhuman effort, for four years Lincoln managed to pilot the states loyal to the union to a hard-fought victory. But he made bitter enemies in the process. Following his second inauguration on March 4, 1865, Lincoln would serve only one month and eleven days of his next term. With the bloody Civil War behind him, he and his wife had decided to attend the theater on April 14, five days after Lee's surrender. The play, "Our American Cousin," a comedy on tour after its successful New York run, starred actress Laura Keene. In the middle of the performance, Lincoln was struck by a .44 caliber lead bullet from the single-shot derringer of disgruntled actor and Southern sympathizer John Wilkes Booth. Fate intervened, however. When Booth attempted to leap to the stage from the Presidential box, he caught one of his spurs in the decorative bunting and broke his leg in the fall, hobbling him.
Black-bordered newspapers all over the country the next day carried the word that Lincoln had been shot the night before at Ford's Theater on 14th Street in Washington and had died in Petersen's boarding house across the street. The first doctor to attend Lincoln in the theater was young-looking 23-year-old Charles A. Leale, of New York, assistant surgeon, U.S. Volunteers, who had been in the audience. Graduated from Bellevue Hospital Medical College only two months before, Dr. Leale was the surgeon in charge of the commissioned officers' ward of the Army General Hospital in Washington. He quickly recognized that Lincoln's wound was mortal and did everything to make the dying President comfortable in his final hours. A nearly forgotten player in the Lincoln drama, Dr. Leale later practiced medicine in New York City, not retiring until he was 86. He died in 1932 at the age of 90 and is buried in Oakland Cemetery in Yonkers, N.Y.
Another Journey Through a Valley in Mourning
More widely documented is Lincoln's second passage through the Hudson Valley. Exactly four years, two months and six days after his Peekskill speech, the special funeral train bearing the body of the murdered President paused at Peekskill.
The outpouring of grief by the nation was of monumental proportions. On Friday, April 21, Lincoln's embalmed body left Washington in a nine-coach funeral train. Also on board for the trip back to Illinois was the exhumed casket of his son Willie, dead in the White House of typhoid fever only three years before at the age of eleven. Except for the omission of Cincinnati and Pittsburgh and the addition of Chicago, the journey would duplicate in reverse Lincoln's trip east in 1861. A ferry brought the funeral party from New Jersey to Manhattan, passing ships in the harbor draped in black muslin. The ferry docked at Desbrosses Street, and Lincoln's casket was placed in a glass-sided hearse drawn by six gunmetal-gray horses.
Brooklynite Walt Whitman, changed by his three-year stint as a volunteer worker in Washington military hospitals, had crossed the East River by ferry to Manhattan. Walking up Broadway past shuttered stores draped in black, he recorded the mood of Gotham. It began to rain toward noon, he recalled. "Black clouds driving overhead. Lincoln's death--black, black, black--as you look toward the sky--long broad black like great serpents."
At the head of the procession was General John Adams Dix (for whom Fort Dix in New Jersey was later named) and troops of the Seventh Regiment. A German choral society marched, singing a funeral ode. The line of march was across Canal Street and down Broadway to City Hall, where the body lay in state. City businesses closed for the day; the courts adjourned. At the 19th Street Synagogue, the Rev. J.J. Lyons led the Jewish prayer for the dead, the first time such a ceremony was held in the United States for a non-Jew. On the following day, Tuesday, April 25, a 16-horse funeral car followed 18 bands as they marched slowly up Broadway from City Hall to 14th Street and Union Square, then up Fifth Avenue to 30th Street and across to the Hudson River Railroad depot.
Arrangements for the funeral were blemished by the decision of the Democrat-controlled Common Council to exclude blacks from the march. Despite the snub, the city's blacks held their own tribute featuring Frederick Douglass at the Cooper Institute. The Republican Union League Club protested the exclusion of black mourners to Secretary of War Stanton. A small token contingent of "freedmen," some in blue Union uniforms, was finally allowed to march at the rear of the procession.More widely documented was Lincoln's second passage through the Hudson Valley. The official timetable for the Lincoln funeral train shows only three stops in the Hudson Valley: Peekskill (3 minutes), Poughkeepsie (15 minutes) and Hudson (3 minutes)--although other stops may have been made to take on water or fuel. A "pilot engine" ran ten minutes ahead of the funeral train, which consisted of a locomotive named "Union" and seven coaches.
The train left at 4 p.m. and headed for Albany at a slow speed. As the train passed, bells and cannon and guns sounded. From the windows of the train, the funeral party could see an endless tapestry of bonfires and flickering torches held by clustered mourners.Exactly four years, two months and six days after his Peekskill speech, the special funeral train bearing the body of the murdered President paused briefly at Peekskill.
Towns and villages in the Hudson Valley outdid themselves in paying tribute to the fallen President. "Yonkers mourns with the Nation" read a banner decorated with crepe, women nearby waved their handkerchiefs while tears streamed down their cheeks. Seven thousand persons assembled at the station in Irvington with its draped inscriptions, "The Honored Dead" and "We Mourn the Nation's Loss." At Tarrytown, American flags arched over the railroad tracks. Under a flowered dome of black velvet stood two dozen young women in white gowns.
The Lincoln funeral train with its coffin passed under Sing Sing's impressively tall memorial arch of draped flags spanning the tracks of the Hudson River Railroad. Thirty-six stars ranged across the arch marked the states of the Union. Amid dark-clothed ranks of mourners stood a woman impersonating the white-robed Goddess of Liberty, with a garland of evergreens around her neck. According to the Sing Sing Republican, dated April 27, 1865, "Detective James Jackson, connected with the Sing Sing Prison, was allowed to get on the funeral train and see the body of Lincoln when the train stopped for water."
Exactly four years, two months and six days after his Peekskill speech, the special funeral train bearing the body of the murdered President paused briefly at Peekskill. The village displayed a large portrait of Lincoln encircled with roses, and red, white and blue tassels. Firemen and a company of Highland Grays with drooped flags paraded before a large crowd. Almost 87 years later, Mrs. Alida Hutchinson, the last survivor of those who heard Abraham Lincoln speak and who saw the funeral train, died in Peekskill January 26, 1952. She was in her 96th year.
The entire student body and professors of the United States Military Academy at West Point crossed the river and assembled at Garrison's Landing on the opposite shore. A thousand gray-caped cadets stood at present arms with guns reversed, their muzzles pointing down. At Cold Spring a young woman stood, her face black-veiled; at her right, a kneeling boy soldier; at her left, a kneeling sailor boy. Fishkill decorated the motto "In God We Trust" with evergreen boughss. Also crowding both sides of the track were delegations from Newburgh, New Paltz, and other parts of the apple country across the river. At Poughkeepsie the throng stretched far from the depot and railroad tracks. Thousands stood, the men with uncovered heads, hundreds of women and children with miniature mourning flags, and a cornet band from the National Business College. Minute guns fired at each of the fifteen minutes during which the train had stopped. A committee of women was granted permission to enter the funeral car and lay a wreath of roses on the coffin.
As the funeral train chugged northward through the darkness, another drama was being played out in rural Virginia. Federal troops were closing in on John Wilkes Booth, hampered in his flight by the telltale broken leg he sustained at Ford's Theater. Near the village of Bowling Green, he was cornered in a burning tobacco shed and shot through the neck by Union Sgt. Boston Corbett. Dragged from the shed before the flames reached him, he asked for a glass of water. "Tell my mother I died for my country," he begged. He was carried to a nearby house and placed on the porch, where he muttered, "I thought I did for the best." Booth asked his captors to raise his hands so he could look at them. Staring at his hands, he spoke his last words, "Useless! Useless!" and expired.
At other stations north to Albany were crowds and mourning displays: at Staatsburgh, an ingenious circle of light; at Rhinebeck and Barrytown, torch formations; at Tivoli, lighted lamps; across the river at Catskill, huge bonfires and naval vessels on the river with flags at half-mast; at Hudson, booming guns at one-minute intervals and two hotels with all windows illuminated and draped in black. The train arrived at East Albany at 10:55 p.m. It was a journey the Hudson Valley would long remember.
Editor's note: This article was originally published on February 9, 2007.
Abraham Lincoln, sixteenth President of the United States, made two railroad journeys between his home in Illinois and Washington, D.C. One in 1861 as the President-elect and the other, in the opposite direction, as the victim of the bullet of assassin John Wilkes Booth. The second trip has been extensively covered; details of the first trip are less well known.
Lincoln was elected in November of 1860 after a bruising presidential campaign involving four candidates. He won, but with less than 40 percent of the vote he was hardly the people's choice. Of a total of some 4.7 million votes, the three candidates opposing Lincoln rolled up nearly a million more votes than he did. Until the 20th Amendment took effect in 1936 and changed the inauguration date to January 20, every four years there was a long delay between the election in November and the inauguration in March. With slavery a bitter issue, the four-month interval after the 1860 election changed history. While Lincoln waited to take office, Southern states made good on their threat to secede. The country began to fall apart.
An Affectionate Farewell
The journey that would take him to Washington began on February 11, 1861, at Springfield, Illinois. A somber crowd gathered in a cold drizzle to see Abraham Lincoln off to Washington. He told them, prophetically, "I now leave, not knowing when, or whether ever, I may return." He concluded with, "I bid you an affectionate farewell." For the next twelve days the presidential train moved from city to city across the country in an itinerary designed to showcase the President-elect and his family. He met the governors and legislators of five states; he delivered more that 20 speeches in key cities and shook the hands of thousands. The grueling journey had a larger purpose: to encourage support for the Union and strengthen the loyalty of the people of the northern states.
Lincoln's route covered 1,904 miles over eighteen different railroads. His train of three, sometimes four, cars went from Springfield to Indianapolis, Cincinnati and Columbus. After a detour to Pittsburgh, it headed for Cleveland and then Albany, N.Y. In the town of Westfield, south of Buffalo, Lincoln told the crowd, "I have a correspondent in this place, and if she is present I would like to see her. Her name is Grace Bedell." A young girl was brought to the platform. Lincoln explained, "She wrote me that she thought I would be better looking if I wore whiskers." Lincoln, who had been letting his beard grow for a month, said to the little girl, "You see, I let these whiskers grow for you, Grace." Then he kissed her. The crowd loved it, and The New York Tribune story was headlined, "Old Abe Kissed by Pretty Girl." He would continue to wear a beard, with only the upper lip shaved, for the few years remaining to him.
South Carolina had left the Union the day before Christmas in 1860. Six other "cotton states" of the Deep South followed. After stops at Rochester, Syracuse and Utica, as the Presidential train neared Albany on February 18, ominous news came over the wires to Lincoln: Jefferson Davis had taken the oath of office as President of the Confederate States of America in Montgomery, Alabama.
In Albany, the carriages carrying the Lincoln party to the Capitol passed a theater where 22-year-old tragedian John Wilkes Booth and a stock company were acting in a play, "The Apostate." The paths of Lincoln and Booth would cross again four fateful years later. From the steps of the old Capitol building, for the first time since he had begun the trip, Lincoln admitted he was weary. He ended his brief speech with, "I have neither the voice nor the strength to address you at any greater length."
A Stop at Peekskill
With Joseph Hudson of Peekskill serving as conductor, Lincoln's train traveled down the Hudson Valley on February 19, making scheduled stops at large cities. Peekskill was only a small village, but it was home to an old friend, attorney William Nelson, for whom the city's Nelson Avenue is named. The two had met in Washington in 1847 as freshman congressmen in the 30th Congress. A veteran member of that Congress was a florid-faced little man with delicate sideburns, 80-year-old John Quincy Adams, from 1825 to 1829 the nation's President. After he left the White House, his Massachusetts district repeatedly elected him to the House of Representatives.
When first elected to Congress in 1846, William Nelson, 62, was already a well-seasoned political veteran; Lincoln was a 34-year-old neophyte. Whig party politics kept Lincoln from running again, and his replacement was defeated in 1848. Locally popular, Nelson was re-elected to a second term. At Peekskill, the President-elect mounted a baggage wagon from which to speak and was joined by William Nelson. Cadets from the Peekskill Military Academy formed a hollow square around the impromptu platform. The Highland Democrat, a local newspaper that had not supported Lincoln, estimated the crowd at about 1,500.
On the bluff above the station, the Jefferson Guards had placed a cannon and fired a Presidential salute of 21 guns. Nelson's welcoming speech closed with, "You have our hopes and prayers that your administration will prove as prosperous and happy to our beloved country, and as honorable to yourself as the difficulties and dangers which now threaten you are great." The tall bearded man in a black suit thanked the citizens of Peekskill for their warm reception. His response was extemporaneous and short--only 137 words in all:
"Ladies and gentlemen: I have but a moment to stand before you, to listen and return your kind greeting. I thank you for this reception and for the pleasant manner in which it is tendered to me by our mutual friend [William Nelson]. I will say in a single sentence, in regard to the difficulties which lie before me and our beloved country, that if I can only be as generously and unanimously sustained as the demonstrations I have witnessed indicate I shall be, I shall not fail; but without your sustaining hands I am sure that neither I, nor any other man, can hope to surmount these difficulties. I trust that in the course I shall pursue I shall be sustained not only by the party that elected me, but by the patriotic people of the whole country."
The village of Peekskill and the town of Cortlandt responded generously throughout the protracted years of the war that followed; 690 of their citizens served in the Union forces. Among those who watched the Lincoln train fade into the distance were two Yale graduates, newly minted lawyers James W. Husted (Class of 1854) and Chauncey M. Depew (Class of 1856). Both would become active in Republican politics, Depew as a United States senator and Husted as a longtime speaker of the N.Y. State Assembly.
A Cool Reception in New York City
Lincoln's train reached New York and the Hudson River Railroad's depot at 30th Street and Tenth Avenue at three p.m. His waiting carriage--an open barouche that had transported the visiting Prince of Wales only a few months before--was escorted to the Astor House, opposite City Hall Park, by a mounted platoon of the newly formed Metropolitan Police.
New Yorkers, largely Democratic in their sentiments, had cast 62 percent of their votes for candidates other than Lincoln, but streets and buildings were crowded with spectators. Across from the Astor House, Barnum's Museum, at the corner of Chatham Street (now called Park Row) and Broadway, was decked out in bright welcoming banners and flags. Atop a horse-drawn Broadway omnibus mired in gridlocked traffic, 41-year-old Walt Whitman, freelance journalist and former editor of the Brooklyn Eagle, watched as Lincoln alighted from the coach and looked out over a crowd of some 40,000.
Whitman was struck by the "sulky, unbroken silence," he remembered. "I had, I say, a capital view of it all, and especially of Mr. Lincoln, his look and gait--his perfect composure and coolness--his unusual and uncouth height, his dress of complete black, stovepipe hat push'd back on his head, dark-brown complexion, seam'd and wrinkled yet canny-looking face, black, bushy head of hair, disproportionately long neck, and his hands held behind him as he stood observing the people. He look'd with curiosity upon that immense sea of faces, and the sea of faces return'd the look with similar curiosity."
At eight the next morning, Lincoln was driven to a Fifth Avenue mansion for breakfast with a hundred supporters, the city's most prosperous merchants. One guest remarked to Lincoln about the number of millionaires present. "Oh, indeed, is that so?" Lincoln responded. "Well, that's quite right. I'm a millionaire myself. I got a minority of a million in the votes last November."
During the rest of the day, Lincoln met at City Hall with Mayor Fernando Wood, a Democrat, who gave him a chilly reception. Fearing the interruption of the lucrative trade in dry goods that would come with a conflict, the Mayor had already suggested that New York become a free city, separate from the Union and able to trade with every section of the country. Mrs. Lincoln visited Barnum's Museum and received ladies at the nearby Astor House.
That night Lincoln attended a reception, followed by an elaborate dinner and a performance of "Un Ballo in Maschera" ("A Masked Ball"). Giuseppe Verdi's new opera of love, murder and betrayal in high society was performed at the Academy of Music on 14th Street. Lincoln wore black kid gloves--instead of the white gloves then in style for wear at the opera. Newspapers the next day poked fun at the only pair of black gloves in a packed auditorium filled with white gloves.
The following day he traveled to New Jersey by ferry to catch a train for Washington. In Philadelphia, he was warned by Allan Pinkerton, a railroad detective who would later create and head up Lincoln's Secret Service, "Beyond the shadow of a doubt there exists a plot to assassinate you." Like New York, Baltimore was a largely unfriendly city, and much of Maryland was sympathetic to the South. From Harrisburg, Lincoln was spirited back to Philadelphia and on to Washington in a berth in a sleeping car.
Through superhuman effort, for four years Lincoln managed to pilot the states loyal to the union to a hard-fought victory. But he made bitter enemies in the process. Following his second inauguration on March 4, 1865, Lincoln would serve only one month and eleven days of his next term. With the bloody Civil War behind him, he and his wife had decided to attend the theater on April 14, five days after Lee's surrender. The play, "Our American Cousin," a comedy on tour after its successful New York run, starred actress Laura Keene. In the middle of the performance, Lincoln was struck by a .44 caliber lead bullet from the single-shot derringer of disgruntled actor and Southern sympathizer John Wilkes Booth. Fate intervened, however. When Booth attempted to leap to the stage from the Presidential box, he caught one of his spurs in the decorative bunting and broke his leg in the fall, hobbling him.
Black-bordered newspapers all over the country the next day carried the word that Lincoln had been shot the night before at Ford's Theater on 14th Street in Washington and had died in Petersen's boarding house across the street. The first doctor to attend Lincoln in the theater was young-looking 23-year-old Charles A. Leale, of New York, assistant surgeon, U.S. Volunteers, who had been in the audience. Graduated from Bellevue Hospital Medical College only two months before, Dr. Leale was the surgeon in charge of the commissioned officers' ward of the Army General Hospital in Washington. He quickly recognized that Lincoln's wound was mortal and did everything to make the dying President comfortable in his final hours. A nearly forgotten player in the Lincoln drama, Dr. Leale later practiced medicine in New York City, not retiring until he was 86. He died in 1932 at the age of 90 and is buried in Oakland Cemetery in Yonkers, N.Y.
Another Journey Through a Valley in Mourning
More widely documented is Lincoln's second passage through the Hudson Valley. Exactly four years, two months and six days after his Peekskill speech, the special funeral train bearing the body of the murdered President paused at Peekskill.
The outpouring of grief by the nation was of monumental proportions. On Friday, April 21, Lincoln's embalmed body left Washington in a nine-coach funeral train. Also on board for the trip back to Illinois was the exhumed casket of his son Willie, dead in the White House of typhoid fever only three years before at the age of eleven. Except for the omission of Cincinnati and Pittsburgh and the addition of Chicago, the journey would duplicate in reverse Lincoln's trip east in 1861. A ferry brought the funeral party from New Jersey to Manhattan, passing ships in the harbor draped in black muslin. The ferry docked at Desbrosses Street, and Lincoln's casket was placed in a glass-sided hearse drawn by six gunmetal-gray horses.
Brooklynite Walt Whitman, changed by his three-year stint as a volunteer worker in Washington military hospitals, had crossed the East River by ferry to Manhattan. Walking up Broadway past shuttered stores draped in black, he recorded the mood of Gotham. It began to rain toward noon, he recalled. "Black clouds driving overhead. Lincoln's death--black, black, black--as you look toward the sky--long broad black like great serpents."
At the head of the procession was General John Adams Dix (for whom Fort Dix in New Jersey was later named) and troops of the Seventh Regiment. A German choral society marched, singing a funeral ode. The line of march was across Canal Street and down Broadway to City Hall, where the body lay in state. City businesses closed for the day; the courts adjourned. At the 19th Street Synagogue, the Rev. J.J. Lyons led the Jewish prayer for the dead, the first time such a ceremony was held in the United States for a non-Jew. On the following day, Tuesday, April 25, a 16-horse funeral car followed 18 bands as they marched slowly up Broadway from City Hall to 14th Street and Union Square, then up Fifth Avenue to 30th Street and across to the Hudson River Railroad depot.
Arrangements for the funeral were blemished by the decision of the Democrat-controlled Common Council to exclude blacks from the march. Despite the snub, the city's blacks held their own tribute featuring Frederick Douglass at the Cooper Institute. The Republican Union League Club protested the exclusion of black mourners to Secretary of War Stanton. A small token contingent of "freedmen," some in blue Union uniforms, was finally allowed to march at the rear of the procession.More widely documented was Lincoln's second passage through the Hudson Valley. The official timetable for the Lincoln funeral train shows only three stops in the Hudson Valley: Peekskill (3 minutes), Poughkeepsie (15 minutes) and Hudson (3 minutes)--although other stops may have been made to take on water or fuel. A "pilot engine" ran ten minutes ahead of the funeral train, which consisted of a locomotive named "Union" and seven coaches.
The train left at 4 p.m. and headed for Albany at a slow speed. As the train passed, bells and cannon and guns sounded. From the windows of the train, the funeral party could see an endless tapestry of bonfires and flickering torches held by clustered mourners.Exactly four years, two months and six days after his Peekskill speech, the special funeral train bearing the body of the murdered President paused briefly at Peekskill.
Towns and villages in the Hudson Valley outdid themselves in paying tribute to the fallen President. "Yonkers mourns with the Nation" read a banner decorated with crepe, women nearby waved their handkerchiefs while tears streamed down their cheeks. Seven thousand persons assembled at the station in Irvington with its draped inscriptions, "The Honored Dead" and "We Mourn the Nation's Loss." At Tarrytown, American flags arched over the railroad tracks. Under a flowered dome of black velvet stood two dozen young women in white gowns.
The Lincoln funeral train with its coffin passed under Sing Sing's impressively tall memorial arch of draped flags spanning the tracks of the Hudson River Railroad. Thirty-six stars ranged across the arch marked the states of the Union. Amid dark-clothed ranks of mourners stood a woman impersonating the white-robed Goddess of Liberty, with a garland of evergreens around her neck. According to the Sing Sing Republican, dated April 27, 1865, "Detective James Jackson, connected with the Sing Sing Prison, was allowed to get on the funeral train and see the body of Lincoln when the train stopped for water."
Exactly four years, two months and six days after his Peekskill speech, the special funeral train bearing the body of the murdered President paused briefly at Peekskill. The village displayed a large portrait of Lincoln encircled with roses, and red, white and blue tassels. Firemen and a company of Highland Grays with drooped flags paraded before a large crowd. Almost 87 years later, Mrs. Alida Hutchinson, the last survivor of those who heard Abraham Lincoln speak and who saw the funeral train, died in Peekskill January 26, 1952. She was in her 96th year.
The entire student body and professors of the United States Military Academy at West Point crossed the river and assembled at Garrison's Landing on the opposite shore. A thousand gray-caped cadets stood at present arms with guns reversed, their muzzles pointing down. At Cold Spring a young woman stood, her face black-veiled; at her right, a kneeling boy soldier; at her left, a kneeling sailor boy. Fishkill decorated the motto "In God We Trust" with evergreen boughss. Also crowding both sides of the track were delegations from Newburgh, New Paltz, and other parts of the apple country across the river. At Poughkeepsie the throng stretched far from the depot and railroad tracks. Thousands stood, the men with uncovered heads, hundreds of women and children with miniature mourning flags, and a cornet band from the National Business College. Minute guns fired at each of the fifteen minutes during which the train had stopped. A committee of women was granted permission to enter the funeral car and lay a wreath of roses on the coffin.
As the funeral train chugged northward through the darkness, another drama was being played out in rural Virginia. Federal troops were closing in on John Wilkes Booth, hampered in his flight by the telltale broken leg he sustained at Ford's Theater. Near the village of Bowling Green, he was cornered in a burning tobacco shed and shot through the neck by Union Sgt. Boston Corbett. Dragged from the shed before the flames reached him, he asked for a glass of water. "Tell my mother I died for my country," he begged. He was carried to a nearby house and placed on the porch, where he muttered, "I thought I did for the best." Booth asked his captors to raise his hands so he could look at them. Staring at his hands, he spoke his last words, "Useless! Useless!" and expired.
At other stations north to Albany were crowds and mourning displays: at Staatsburgh, an ingenious circle of light; at Rhinebeck and Barrytown, torch formations; at Tivoli, lighted lamps; across the river at Catskill, huge bonfires and naval vessels on the river with flags at half-mast; at Hudson, booming guns at one-minute intervals and two hotels with all windows illuminated and draped in black. The train arrived at East Albany at 10:55 p.m. It was a journey the Hudson Valley would long remember.
Editor's note: This article was originally published on February 9, 2007.
Labels: Abraham Lincoln, Civil War, New York City, Peekskill
Monday, January 29, 2007
The Peter Cooper Story, 1: The Lost Peekskill Years
LOWER HUDSON VALLEY
Few people hurrying along the north side of South Street in Peekskill, N.Y., take notice of the tablet gracing the wall of the Wachovia Financial Center. For the past 76 years this bronze bas-relief casting has marked the site where Peter Cooper once lived. Erected by Peekskill's Friendly Town Association and affixed to the since-demolished building of the Peekskill Savings Bank, the tablet was unveiled on Peter Cooper's 140th birthday, February 12, 1931.
Designed and sculpted by George T. Brewster, head of the art department at Cooper Union in New York City, and cast by the Gorham Company in Providence, R.I., it reads, "Upon this site from 1793 to 1810 lived Peter Cooper, inventor, educator, philanthropist." Through the years, the tablet and its almost ghostlike image of Peter Cooper have acquired a lovely moss-green patina. Unfortunately, the plaque also has the baggage of an erroneous and imprecise legend.
Unfortunately, the tablet's claim of a 17-year residence in Peekskill by Peter Cooper is inaccurate. Buried in biographies of Peter Cooper by Allan Nevins (Abram S. Hewitt: With Some Account of Peter Cooper. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1935) and Edward C. Mack (Peter Cooper: Citizen of New York. New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1949) is incontrovertible evidence that he lived in Peekskill during only part of that period. A year before he died, Peter Cooper dictated to a stenographer more than 200 pages of a memoir of his early life. The typescript of these reminiscences was lost, but fortunately the original stenographic notes were discovered later at Cooper Union, the remarkable educational institution he founded.
Peter Cooper was one of the most significant American figures of the 19th century. Although he had less than a year of formal schooling, he became a successful inventor, engineer, industrialist, educator, civic reformer and philanthropist. He had the Midas touch--but not the Midas curse. He made a fortune and gave much of it away during his lifetime. He did indeed spend part of his youth in Peekskill--but not over the span of years shown on the tablet. To trace where Peter Cooper lived as a youth, we must trace the movements of his peripatetic parents.
A Genealogical Detective Story
Historical and genealogical research is not unlike detective work, requiring patience and attention to detail. Hidden clues often confirm suspicions and reveal truths. Just as frequently they lead to dead ends. Here is what can be pieced together about the Cooper family's years in Peekskill and elsewhere:
Peter Cooper's father, John Cooper, was born in Fishkill, N.Y., in 1755, the fifth of eight children of Obadiah Cooper and Hester Terboss Cooper. The Terbosses were among the first settlers in Fishkill. His mother, Margaret Campbell Cooper, was born in 1762 in New York City, the daughter of John and Sarah Oakley Campbell. Her father was a wealthy manufacturer of pottery and tiles. His business located on the site of the future St. Paul's Chapel on Broadway at Fulton Street, erected between 1764 and 1766.
When the Revolution began, Peter's father was in business as a hatter in Fishkill and owned a few slaves. He was among the first to enlist in the fight to free the colonies from British rule, serving as a sergeant in a regiment of local Fishkill "minutemen." Minutemen were expected to be ready to assemble under arms on a minute's notice. His regiment was rushed to New York City in 1776 to dig trenches on Governor's Island. A huge fleet of British warships and troop transports was anchored in the Lower Bay, and British troops had landed on Staten Island.
The American forces were too few to hold the city and abandoned it. A week later, a fire broke out in a tavern called the Fighting Cocks. Swept by a brisk wind, the flames raced through the city, destroying the original Trinity Church and everything as far north as Barclay Street. The regular firemen had left with the American forces. The retreating American army had carried off most of the church bells and other fire alarm bells.
Suspecting arson, irate British authorities rounded up some 200 men and women for questioning. Among them was a young captain in the American forces named Nathan Hale, who was not in uniform. When questioned at the headquarters of British General William Howe in the Beekman House at 50th Street and the East River, he was found to be carrying incriminating papers. General Howe ordered him hanged without the formality of a trial. His last words from the gallows, paraphrased from Joseph Addison's play, Cato, were to become famous: "I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country." For collectors of trivia, the site of the hanging is believed to have been in a British artillery park at about today's Third Avenue and 66th Street.
From Harlem Heights, George Washington watched the southern horizon glow red and remarked, "Providence, or some good honest fellow, has done more for us than we were disposed to do for ourselves." John Cooper's regiment retreated northward to Westchester County, taking part in the Battle of White Plains and garrisoning Fort Constitution, below West Point.
John Cooper's first wife was 19-year-old Martha Pinfold, from Newtown, a small settlement between Maspeth and Flushing in the present borough of Queens. They were married on May 4, 1777, in Newtown. Sixteen months later, on September 18, 1778, Martha Pinfold Cooper died in Fishkill, leaving him with a week-old infant son, also named John. After serving as a minuteman for two years, John Cooper was drafted for service outside New York State. He took advantage of a law that permitted him to pay $60 to get a substitute to serve for him.
Returning to Fishkill, he joined a regiment of Dutchess County militia as a second lieutenant and served for four years at West Point, at Highland under George Clinton and as commander of a detachment at Fishkill. On December 21, 1779, John Cooper married for the second time. His new wife was the 17-year-old daughter of General John Campbell, then deputy Quartermaster General of the Continental Army. She was educated at the Moravian Young Ladies Seminary in Bethlehem, Penna., the first boarding school for young women in America. Hugh Campbell, John Campbell's brother, evidently a Presbyterian, was buried in the graveyard of New York City's Brick Presbyterian Church at Beekman and Nassau streets, but John Campbell and his wife were--or became--Moravians and were buried in the graveyard of the Moravian Church in John Street.
The Revolution Ends
After the war, the couple continued to live in Fishkill. Around 1785, perhaps at the suggestion of her parents who had already returned to New York City, they moved their growing family to the burgeoning community at the south end of Manhattan Island. With daughters Sarah and Martha in tow, they became part of a large-scale migration from the country to the young nation's growing cities. John Cooper opened a business as a hatter, the only trade he knew, in his home on Little Dock Street, between Broad Street and Old Slip. At the end of the 18th century, Little Dock Street was close to the East River's docks and piers; later renamed Water Street, today it is lined with skyscrapers.
His business prospered. One day he met a young fur trader named John Jacob Astor, who was looking for a shop. He found one at 40 Little Dock Street. "Very likely through a hatter named Cooper, who dwelt not far from No. 40," wrote Arthur D. Howden Smith, Astor's biographer, in his biography, John Jacob Astor, Landlord of New York (Philaelphia: J.B. Lippincott, 1929). John Cooper became a good customer of the fur trader, buying the beaver skins that Astor bought from western Indians and so-called "Mountain Men." If a customer lacked money to pay for a hat, Cooper took payment in "hay, buggy-hire, bricks, firewood, tobacco, wool, sugar, flour, honey, old sheepskins, casks of rum, three days' work of a Negro, and so on," according to an account left by one of his granddaughters. For all practical purposes, John Cooper was as much a grocer as he was a hatter.
A son, James, was born in 1786; another son, Thomas, arrived in 1788 but lived only 11 months. The 1790 census lists John Cooper as head of a household of five white males over 16, three under 16, and four females. Aside from the members of his family, the others may have been boarders, servants or helpers. On February 12, 1791, Margaret Cooper's third son, Peter, was born in the combination house and hatter's shop on Little Dock Street in New York City.
To Peekskill
John Cooper moved to Peekskill in 1794, with four children, ages 12, 10, 5 and 3. We can date Peter Cooper's arrival in Peekskill with a fair degree of accuracy. According to his own memoir, when Peter was three years old, John Cooper moved his family from Manhattan to Peekskill. Since Peter's third birthday was February 12, 1794, this would make the year of his arrival in Peekskill 1794--not the 1793 of the tablet on the bank building. In Peekskill, John Cooper bought a parcel of land, built a house and opened a grocery store. Since he had been successful in business in New York City, biographers ascribe no rational explanation for his move to the country other than wanderlust or restlessness--ignoring the appeal of the life he had previously known in the Hudson Valley.
Peter Cooper himself later explained the move by saying that he "became enamored of the country life." He wrote, explaining his lack of education, "My only recollection of being at school was at Peekskill, where I attended three or four quarters, a part of the time (probably half of it) being half-day school." He added, "The reason I was the only one of my father's family who had so poor a chance was that he [Peter's father] moved to the country when I was only three years old."
Business in Peekskill was brisk for John Cooper--his ledgers show sizable sales of molasses, rum and sugar, along with such items as penknives, buttons, oilcloth and bridle bits. As before, he was a storekeeper, hatter, shoemaker, brewer and farmer, sometimes all at the same time. He also scoured the woods for wild honey and fur, netting wild pigeons for extra income. Young Peter was befriended by Pierre Van Cortlandt, New York State's first lieutenant governor, who used to give him peaches from his orchards at the Manor House in Croton.
But John Cooper was no businessman. An easy touch, he extended credit generously to customers. As a youth, he had been swept up in the fervor of the Methodist revivalism of evangelist George Whitefield's "Great Awakening." A devout Methodist, John Cooper not only took the time to help his fellow Methodists build a chapel but also opened his home to visiting clergy and gave them unlimited credit at his store.
An early Cooper biographer was J.C. Zachos, a professor at Cooper Union, the exceptional educational institution Peter Cooper founded, and the inventor of the stenotype machine. In his 1876 biography, he wrote that it was "not more than two or three years before he [John Cooper] found that nearly all of his property was in the hands of other people, and that it was impossible for him to collect it." The inevitable financial disaster followed. For the next dozen years or so, John Cooper and his family moved from place to place in the Hudson Valley seeking success but leaving little trace of their presence. Additional sons made their appearance: a second son named Thomas in 1794, William in 1799 and Edward in 1803.
Young Peter's sporadic education came to a halt after the family left Peekskill. He was forced to help his father as the family traveled from one location to another. In addition to hat making, the elder Cooper tried dairy farming, brickmaking and brewing. It is not easy to pinpoint the destinations of Peter Cooper's chronically restless and insolvent father and his tagalong family; they ranged from Brooklyn, then a separate city to the south across the East River from Manhattan, to the Hudson River town of Catskill on the west bank of the Hudson to the north.
Back to New York City
We know that John Cooper moved back to New York City around 1799 and took up hat making again. He either lived in Brooklyn (he had a home there some time between 1796 and 1808) or in a house on Duane Street owned by his mother-in-law, where Peter remembered living as a boy. Standing on Broadway in front of St. Paul's Chapel, Peter Cooper witnessed the mock-funeral procession of George Washington in New York City in 1799. Many other places conducted similar ceremonies to honor the former President, who died December 14, 1799, at Mount Vernon, his Virginia estate. Young Peter was particularly impressed by the "peculiar way in which his boots were reversed in the stirrups of the charger that followed the hearse."
John Cooper's ledgers show sales of hats between 1796 and 1808, and show that he accepted rum, food and wood in exchange. Eventually, he sold his hat shop at Duane Street to Peter's half-brother, John, 13 years older than Peter. We also know that Peter's father moved back to Peekskill at some time between 1800 and 1804 and built a brewery there, and that he later built another brewery in Newburgh, where he was living before 1808 and again after 1814.
One clue suggesting the Cooper family's presence in Peekskill in 1804 is the marriage in Peekskill of John Cooper, Peter's half-brother and only child of Martha Pinfold, who had died in childbirth. On April 21, 1804, 26-year-old John Cooper married 17-year-old Elizabeth Hawes. Born October 2, 1786, in Peekskill, she was the daughter of Soloman (Solomon?) Hawes and Lavinia Hammond. As might be expected, newlyweds John and Elizabeth Hawes Cooper remained in Peekskill after their marriage. A son, Thomas Edmund Cooper, was born there August 15, 1812.
The written record of the Cooper family's movements is often clouded. In 1866, when he was 75, Peter Cooper wrote in an eleven-page autobiographical fragment that when he was 12 or 13 (1803 or 1804), his father built a brewery in Peekskill and a year later another in Newburgh, a town in which he remained for two or three years. "He then again removed to Brooklyn and went back into hats and keeping cows for the sale of milk." That would place Peter Cooper in Peekskill again only until about 1805, making the 1810 date on Peekskill's plaque impossible.
Ten years after writing his brief autobiographical reminiscence, he told biographer J. C. Zachos that after building the Peekskill brewery his father moved to Catskill, where he made bricks and hats, and that he then moved to Brooklyn. In this account, the Newburgh brewery follows the Brooklyn interlude, and young Peter worked at brewing in Newburgh until he was 17--in 1808. Regardless of the sequence of the periods when he lived elsewhere, Peter was gone from Peekskill by 1805.
The Coachmaker's Apprentice
Young Peter Cooper cut family ties in Newburgh in 1808 and struck out for himself and headed for the burgeoning metropolis of New York City. Abandoning hat making, brewing and brick making, the trades at which he had worked for his father, he apprenticed himself for four years at $25 a year to coachmaker John Woodward, of the firm of Burtis & Woodward. So sure was his new employer young Peter would serve out the full term of his apprenticeship, he never asked him to sign an indenture bond. The coachmaking workshop was at the northeast corner of Broadway and Chambers Street. That corner in 1846 became the site of A.T. Stewart's "Marble Palace" department store, which later became the New York Sun building and still stands.
The dates and facts of his apprenticeship in New York starting in 1808 are well documented in existing records, further casting doubt on the Peekskill tablet. While he was learning coachmaking, Peter Cooper taught himself a variety of skills, including ornamental wood carving and sold his handiwork to Woodward and other coachbuilders. Always curious about new methods, young Peter invented a machine for mortising carriage wheel hubs--work that had previously been done by hand. Woodward was impressed with it and bought it from him. In 1879, Peter Cooper could write, "That method is still mortising all the hubs in the country."
So satisfied was Woodward with his apprentice that he voluntarily paid him $50 for his third year and $75 for his fourth. After completing his apprenticeship in New York City late in 1811, he rejected Woodward's offer to set him up in the coachmaking business. Instead, he found a job in Hempstead, Long Island, in a shop making machines for shearing the nap from cloth. In November of 1812, with two partners, he bought the rights to the machine.
Peter Cooper married 20-year-old Sarah Bedell of Hempstead, N.Y., in her parents' home in that Long Island community on December 22, 1813. The marriage lasted 56 years, ending with her death in 1869. The couple had seven children--although only three would live to adulthood. The new groom delayed announcing his marriage to his parents--still in Newburgh--in a letter two weeks after the event. "I would inform you that you now have another daughter-in-law," he wrote laconically. After his marriage, he bought out his partners. Now he was in business for himself and would never work for another person. Peter Cooper was on his way and never looked back. There is no record that he ever visited Peekskill again.
When a newspaper makes an error in reporting a story, it prints a correction. If errors are found in a book after it has been printed, the publisher inserts or tips in each copy an errata sheet correcting the errors until a new printing is made. But what can a community do when a 76-year-old memorial contains misinformation?
In John Ford's 1962 motion picture The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, actor James Stewart, playing a U.S. senator, returns to the small town of Shinbone in which he got his start. He attempts to correct the story that he shot a notorious outlaw named Liberty Valance by explaining to the editor of the local newspaper that the real hero of the incident was Tom Doniphon, played by John Wayne.
At the end of the film, Stewart asks the editor, Maxwell Scott, played by veteran character actor Carleton Young, "Mr. Scott, you're not going to use the story?" "This is the West, sir," the editor replies. "When the legend becomes fact, print the legend." That seems to be what happened in the eastern city of Peekskill in 1931, when some overenthusiastic citizens created a legend and then cast it in bronze.
Few people hurrying along the north side of South Street in Peekskill, N.Y., take notice of the tablet gracing the wall of the Wachovia Financial Center. For the past 76 years this bronze bas-relief casting has marked the site where Peter Cooper once lived. Erected by Peekskill's Friendly Town Association and affixed to the since-demolished building of the Peekskill Savings Bank, the tablet was unveiled on Peter Cooper's 140th birthday, February 12, 1931.
Designed and sculpted by George T. Brewster, head of the art department at Cooper Union in New York City, and cast by the Gorham Company in Providence, R.I., it reads, "Upon this site from 1793 to 1810 lived Peter Cooper, inventor, educator, philanthropist." Through the years, the tablet and its almost ghostlike image of Peter Cooper have acquired a lovely moss-green patina. Unfortunately, the plaque also has the baggage of an erroneous and imprecise legend.
Unfortunately, the tablet's claim of a 17-year residence in Peekskill by Peter Cooper is inaccurate. Buried in biographies of Peter Cooper by Allan Nevins (Abram S. Hewitt: With Some Account of Peter Cooper. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1935) and Edward C. Mack (Peter Cooper: Citizen of New York. New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1949) is incontrovertible evidence that he lived in Peekskill during only part of that period. A year before he died, Peter Cooper dictated to a stenographer more than 200 pages of a memoir of his early life. The typescript of these reminiscences was lost, but fortunately the original stenographic notes were discovered later at Cooper Union, the remarkable educational institution he founded.
Peter Cooper was one of the most significant American figures of the 19th century. Although he had less than a year of formal schooling, he became a successful inventor, engineer, industrialist, educator, civic reformer and philanthropist. He had the Midas touch--but not the Midas curse. He made a fortune and gave much of it away during his lifetime. He did indeed spend part of his youth in Peekskill--but not over the span of years shown on the tablet. To trace where Peter Cooper lived as a youth, we must trace the movements of his peripatetic parents.
A Genealogical Detective Story
Historical and genealogical research is not unlike detective work, requiring patience and attention to detail. Hidden clues often confirm suspicions and reveal truths. Just as frequently they lead to dead ends. Here is what can be pieced together about the Cooper family's years in Peekskill and elsewhere:
Peter Cooper's father, John Cooper, was born in Fishkill, N.Y., in 1755, the fifth of eight children of Obadiah Cooper and Hester Terboss Cooper. The Terbosses were among the first settlers in Fishkill. His mother, Margaret Campbell Cooper, was born in 1762 in New York City, the daughter of John and Sarah Oakley Campbell. Her father was a wealthy manufacturer of pottery and tiles. His business located on the site of the future St. Paul's Chapel on Broadway at Fulton Street, erected between 1764 and 1766.
When the Revolution began, Peter's father was in business as a hatter in Fishkill and owned a few slaves. He was among the first to enlist in the fight to free the colonies from British rule, serving as a sergeant in a regiment of local Fishkill "minutemen." Minutemen were expected to be ready to assemble under arms on a minute's notice. His regiment was rushed to New York City in 1776 to dig trenches on Governor's Island. A huge fleet of British warships and troop transports was anchored in the Lower Bay, and British troops had landed on Staten Island.
The American forces were too few to hold the city and abandoned it. A week later, a fire broke out in a tavern called the Fighting Cocks. Swept by a brisk wind, the flames raced through the city, destroying the original Trinity Church and everything as far north as Barclay Street. The regular firemen had left with the American forces. The retreating American army had carried off most of the church bells and other fire alarm bells.
Suspecting arson, irate British authorities rounded up some 200 men and women for questioning. Among them was a young captain in the American forces named Nathan Hale, who was not in uniform. When questioned at the headquarters of British General William Howe in the Beekman House at 50th Street and the East River, he was found to be carrying incriminating papers. General Howe ordered him hanged without the formality of a trial. His last words from the gallows, paraphrased from Joseph Addison's play, Cato, were to become famous: "I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country." For collectors of trivia, the site of the hanging is believed to have been in a British artillery park at about today's Third Avenue and 66th Street.
From Harlem Heights, George Washington watched the southern horizon glow red and remarked, "Providence, or some good honest fellow, has done more for us than we were disposed to do for ourselves." John Cooper's regiment retreated northward to Westchester County, taking part in the Battle of White Plains and garrisoning Fort Constitution, below West Point.
John Cooper's first wife was 19-year-old Martha Pinfold, from Newtown, a small settlement between Maspeth and Flushing in the present borough of Queens. They were married on May 4, 1777, in Newtown. Sixteen months later, on September 18, 1778, Martha Pinfold Cooper died in Fishkill, leaving him with a week-old infant son, also named John. After serving as a minuteman for two years, John Cooper was drafted for service outside New York State. He took advantage of a law that permitted him to pay $60 to get a substitute to serve for him.
Returning to Fishkill, he joined a regiment of Dutchess County militia as a second lieutenant and served for four years at West Point, at Highland under George Clinton and as commander of a detachment at Fishkill. On December 21, 1779, John Cooper married for the second time. His new wife was the 17-year-old daughter of General John Campbell, then deputy Quartermaster General of the Continental Army. She was educated at the Moravian Young Ladies Seminary in Bethlehem, Penna., the first boarding school for young women in America. Hugh Campbell, John Campbell's brother, evidently a Presbyterian, was buried in the graveyard of New York City's Brick Presbyterian Church at Beekman and Nassau streets, but John Campbell and his wife were--or became--Moravians and were buried in the graveyard of the Moravian Church in John Street.
The Revolution Ends
After the war, the couple continued to live in Fishkill. Around 1785, perhaps at the suggestion of her parents who had already returned to New York City, they moved their growing family to the burgeoning community at the south end of Manhattan Island. With daughters Sarah and Martha in tow, they became part of a large-scale migration from the country to the young nation's growing cities. John Cooper opened a business as a hatter, the only trade he knew, in his home on Little Dock Street, between Broad Street and Old Slip. At the end of the 18th century, Little Dock Street was close to the East River's docks and piers; later renamed Water Street, today it is lined with skyscrapers.
His business prospered. One day he met a young fur trader named John Jacob Astor, who was looking for a shop. He found one at 40 Little Dock Street. "Very likely through a hatter named Cooper, who dwelt not far from No. 40," wrote Arthur D. Howden Smith, Astor's biographer, in his biography, John Jacob Astor, Landlord of New York (Philaelphia: J.B. Lippincott, 1929). John Cooper became a good customer of the fur trader, buying the beaver skins that Astor bought from western Indians and so-called "Mountain Men." If a customer lacked money to pay for a hat, Cooper took payment in "hay, buggy-hire, bricks, firewood, tobacco, wool, sugar, flour, honey, old sheepskins, casks of rum, three days' work of a Negro, and so on," according to an account left by one of his granddaughters. For all practical purposes, John Cooper was as much a grocer as he was a hatter.
A son, James, was born in 1786; another son, Thomas, arrived in 1788 but lived only 11 months. The 1790 census lists John Cooper as head of a household of five white males over 16, three under 16, and four females. Aside from the members of his family, the others may have been boarders, servants or helpers. On February 12, 1791, Margaret Cooper's third son, Peter, was born in the combination house and hatter's shop on Little Dock Street in New York City.
To Peekskill
John Cooper moved to Peekskill in 1794, with four children, ages 12, 10, 5 and 3. We can date Peter Cooper's arrival in Peekskill with a fair degree of accuracy. According to his own memoir, when Peter was three years old, John Cooper moved his family from Manhattan to Peekskill. Since Peter's third birthday was February 12, 1794, this would make the year of his arrival in Peekskill 1794--not the 1793 of the tablet on the bank building. In Peekskill, John Cooper bought a parcel of land, built a house and opened a grocery store. Since he had been successful in business in New York City, biographers ascribe no rational explanation for his move to the country other than wanderlust or restlessness--ignoring the appeal of the life he had previously known in the Hudson Valley.
Peter Cooper himself later explained the move by saying that he "became enamored of the country life." He wrote, explaining his lack of education, "My only recollection of being at school was at Peekskill, where I attended three or four quarters, a part of the time (probably half of it) being half-day school." He added, "The reason I was the only one of my father's family who had so poor a chance was that he [Peter's father] moved to the country when I was only three years old."
Business in Peekskill was brisk for John Cooper--his ledgers show sizable sales of molasses, rum and sugar, along with such items as penknives, buttons, oilcloth and bridle bits. As before, he was a storekeeper, hatter, shoemaker, brewer and farmer, sometimes all at the same time. He also scoured the woods for wild honey and fur, netting wild pigeons for extra income. Young Peter was befriended by Pierre Van Cortlandt, New York State's first lieutenant governor, who used to give him peaches from his orchards at the Manor House in Croton.
But John Cooper was no businessman. An easy touch, he extended credit generously to customers. As a youth, he had been swept up in the fervor of the Methodist revivalism of evangelist George Whitefield's "Great Awakening." A devout Methodist, John Cooper not only took the time to help his fellow Methodists build a chapel but also opened his home to visiting clergy and gave them unlimited credit at his store.
An early Cooper biographer was J.C. Zachos, a professor at Cooper Union, the exceptional educational institution Peter Cooper founded, and the inventor of the stenotype machine. In his 1876 biography, he wrote that it was "not more than two or three years before he [John Cooper] found that nearly all of his property was in the hands of other people, and that it was impossible for him to collect it." The inevitable financial disaster followed. For the next dozen years or so, John Cooper and his family moved from place to place in the Hudson Valley seeking success but leaving little trace of their presence. Additional sons made their appearance: a second son named Thomas in 1794, William in 1799 and Edward in 1803.
Young Peter's sporadic education came to a halt after the family left Peekskill. He was forced to help his father as the family traveled from one location to another. In addition to hat making, the elder Cooper tried dairy farming, brickmaking and brewing. It is not easy to pinpoint the destinations of Peter Cooper's chronically restless and insolvent father and his tagalong family; they ranged from Brooklyn, then a separate city to the south across the East River from Manhattan, to the Hudson River town of Catskill on the west bank of the Hudson to the north.
Back to New York City
We know that John Cooper moved back to New York City around 1799 and took up hat making again. He either lived in Brooklyn (he had a home there some time between 1796 and 1808) or in a house on Duane Street owned by his mother-in-law, where Peter remembered living as a boy. Standing on Broadway in front of St. Paul's Chapel, Peter Cooper witnessed the mock-funeral procession of George Washington in New York City in 1799. Many other places conducted similar ceremonies to honor the former President, who died December 14, 1799, at Mount Vernon, his Virginia estate. Young Peter was particularly impressed by the "peculiar way in which his boots were reversed in the stirrups of the charger that followed the hearse."
John Cooper's ledgers show sales of hats between 1796 and 1808, and show that he accepted rum, food and wood in exchange. Eventually, he sold his hat shop at Duane Street to Peter's half-brother, John, 13 years older than Peter. We also know that Peter's father moved back to Peekskill at some time between 1800 and 1804 and built a brewery there, and that he later built another brewery in Newburgh, where he was living before 1808 and again after 1814.
One clue suggesting the Cooper family's presence in Peekskill in 1804 is the marriage in Peekskill of John Cooper, Peter's half-brother and only child of Martha Pinfold, who had died in childbirth. On April 21, 1804, 26-year-old John Cooper married 17-year-old Elizabeth Hawes. Born October 2, 1786, in Peekskill, she was the daughter of Soloman (Solomon?) Hawes and Lavinia Hammond. As might be expected, newlyweds John and Elizabeth Hawes Cooper remained in Peekskill after their marriage. A son, Thomas Edmund Cooper, was born there August 15, 1812.
The written record of the Cooper family's movements is often clouded. In 1866, when he was 75, Peter Cooper wrote in an eleven-page autobiographical fragment that when he was 12 or 13 (1803 or 1804), his father built a brewery in Peekskill and a year later another in Newburgh, a town in which he remained for two or three years. "He then again removed to Brooklyn and went back into hats and keeping cows for the sale of milk." That would place Peter Cooper in Peekskill again only until about 1805, making the 1810 date on Peekskill's plaque impossible.
Ten years after writing his brief autobiographical reminiscence, he told biographer J. C. Zachos that after building the Peekskill brewery his father moved to Catskill, where he made bricks and hats, and that he then moved to Brooklyn. In this account, the Newburgh brewery follows the Brooklyn interlude, and young Peter worked at brewing in Newburgh until he was 17--in 1808. Regardless of the sequence of the periods when he lived elsewhere, Peter was gone from Peekskill by 1805.
The Coachmaker's Apprentice
Young Peter Cooper cut family ties in Newburgh in 1808 and struck out for himself and headed for the burgeoning metropolis of New York City. Abandoning hat making, brewing and brick making, the trades at which he had worked for his father, he apprenticed himself for four years at $25 a year to coachmaker John Woodward, of the firm of Burtis & Woodward. So sure was his new employer young Peter would serve out the full term of his apprenticeship, he never asked him to sign an indenture bond. The coachmaking workshop was at the northeast corner of Broadway and Chambers Street. That corner in 1846 became the site of A.T. Stewart's "Marble Palace" department store, which later became the New York Sun building and still stands.
The dates and facts of his apprenticeship in New York starting in 1808 are well documented in existing records, further casting doubt on the Peekskill tablet. While he was learning coachmaking, Peter Cooper taught himself a variety of skills, including ornamental wood carving and sold his handiwork to Woodward and other coachbuilders. Always curious about new methods, young Peter invented a machine for mortising carriage wheel hubs--work that had previously been done by hand. Woodward was impressed with it and bought it from him. In 1879, Peter Cooper could write, "That method is still mortising all the hubs in the country."
So satisfied was Woodward with his apprentice that he voluntarily paid him $50 for his third year and $75 for his fourth. After completing his apprenticeship in New York City late in 1811, he rejected Woodward's offer to set him up in the coachmaking business. Instead, he found a job in Hempstead, Long Island, in a shop making machines for shearing the nap from cloth. In November of 1812, with two partners, he bought the rights to the machine.
Peter Cooper married 20-year-old Sarah Bedell of Hempstead, N.Y., in her parents' home in that Long Island community on December 22, 1813. The marriage lasted 56 years, ending with her death in 1869. The couple had seven children--although only three would live to adulthood. The new groom delayed announcing his marriage to his parents--still in Newburgh--in a letter two weeks after the event. "I would inform you that you now have another daughter-in-law," he wrote laconically. After his marriage, he bought out his partners. Now he was in business for himself and would never work for another person. Peter Cooper was on his way and never looked back. There is no record that he ever visited Peekskill again.
When a newspaper makes an error in reporting a story, it prints a correction. If errors are found in a book after it has been printed, the publisher inserts or tips in each copy an errata sheet correcting the errors until a new printing is made. But what can a community do when a 76-year-old memorial contains misinformation?
In John Ford's 1962 motion picture The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, actor James Stewart, playing a U.S. senator, returns to the small town of Shinbone in which he got his start. He attempts to correct the story that he shot a notorious outlaw named Liberty Valance by explaining to the editor of the local newspaper that the real hero of the incident was Tom Doniphon, played by John Wayne.
At the end of the film, Stewart asks the editor, Maxwell Scott, played by veteran character actor Carleton Young, "Mr. Scott, you're not going to use the story?" "This is the West, sir," the editor replies. "When the legend becomes fact, print the legend." That seems to be what happened in the eastern city of Peekskill in 1931, when some overenthusiastic citizens created a legend and then cast it in bronze.
Labels: New York City, Peekskill, Peter Cooper, Revolutionary War
