Episodes from a Hudson River Town

New Baltimore, New York

Clesson S. Bush

• Publisher: Excelsior Editions
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9781438440347, 9781438440330
• eBook ISBN: 9781438440354
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

Winner of the 2012 Award for Excellence presented by the Greater Hudson Heritage Network The seemingly unremarkable Hudson River town of New Baltimore has had its ups and downs, you could certainly say that. Here, generations of families have worked the fields until the yield tapped out, built and repaired ships and barges until the steam age died, and harvested ice until refrigeration made "icebox" a quaint colloquialism. Yet despite the various economic, social, and military forces that have transformed the town, New Baltimore and its residents have endured, celebrating their triumphs and enduring their tragedies. Drawing on original town board minutes, Greene County surrogate and land records, federal and state military records, land patents, colonial documents, conversations with local residents, censuses, and period newspapers, town historian Clesson S. Bush provides an authentic portrait of a small-town community, making the routine—and drama—of small-town life on the Hudson River come alive.

1

Prehistoric Times

Our Landscape and First People

The countryside along the Hudson River and throughout Greene County always has been a lure for settlers and speculators. Newcomers and longtime residents find the waterway, its tributaries, the Catskills, and our hills and valleys a primary reason for living and enjoying life here. New Baltimore and its surroundings were formed and massaged by the dynamic forces of nature, the result of ongoing geologic events over millions of years.¹

The most prominent geographic features in the region came into being during what geologists called the Paleozoic era, nearly 550 million years ago. It was a time when continents collided and parted, causing upheavals that pushed vast land masses into hills and mountains and complementing lowlands. The Kalkberg, the spiny ridge running through New Baltimore, is named for one of the rock layers formed in ancient times. Immense seas covered much of New York and served as collecting pools for sediments that consolidated into today's rock formations. The only animals around were simple forms of jellyfish, sponges, and arthropods with their characteristic jointed legs and exoskeletons, like grasshoppers and beetles.

The next integral formation event happened 1.6 million years ago during the Pleistocene epoch when the Laurentide ice mass developed in Canada. This continental glacier grew unyieldingly, expanding southward and retreating several times, radically altering the landscape time and again as it traveled. Greene County was buried. Only the highest peak of the Catskills, Ulster County's 4,200-foot Slide Mountain, may have poked up out of the frozen terrain. So much water was consumed by the glaciations that seas were a few hundred feet lower than today.

The latest significant geologic activity that defined today's landscape was during the Wisconsinan age with the last advance and retreat of the Laurentide ice formation. This icy accumulation covered all but a tiny sliver of New York about 22,000 years BP (i.e., before present, a common archaeological designation for time) and was gone from the state 10,000 years BP.

As the sheet melted, debris dammed outlets and led to the flooding of great glacial pools, including Lake Albany. This massive body of water existed between 15,000 and 10,000 BP, covering the Hudson River Valley area from near Lake George all the way down to around Staten Island.

As Lake Albany dried, it left hills and valleys and great deposits of silt, sand, and clay, which proved valuable for future residents in making pottery, ceramics, and bricks. This is the landscape much as we see it today after thousands of years of weathering and erosion. The remains of the sandy bottom of the lake still are very apparent in Albany's Pine Bush preserve. Some beach-like areas along the Hudson, particularly on the east side, also are remnants of Lake Albany.

One major by-product of the land shifting and upheavals and extensive glaciations was the creation of great stores of valuable chert and flint deposits that provided the earliest human arrivals with an important resource. Chert is a fine-grained, sedimentary rock related to quartz, with flint being a subcategory. The material is very hard yet susceptible to glass-like fracturing, making it well suited for crafting stone tools that were critical for survival in prehistoric times. The rock's hardness makes it very resistant to weathering and deterioration, which is why almost everyone seems to have either found or seen an old arrowhead.

Our First Human Residents

The cycle of long periods of icing and warming made the area rather uninviting, particularly when coupled with the large and hungry feral animals that roamed the wilderness. As early people gained basic tools, skins for warmth, and weapons for protection and food gathering, they were equipped to overcome such obstacles and move from their native Europe and Asia to exploit the abundant natural resources of the lands of North America.

Solid information about prehistoric times is sketchy and based broadly on examination of geologic features and fossil remains, the types of stone tools used by people at different times, and the use of more exotic scientific methods such as radiocarbon and radiometric dating. The evidence points to about 11,000 BP as the date for the first human habitation of the Greene County and New Baltimore areas, right as the ice and water finally left.

How people got here is subject to much ongoing guesswork. The initial feelings were that adventuresome travelers came across Beringia. This long-submerged strip of land linking Asia with Alaska had been created by the lowered sea levels caused by the ice ages. Some researchers now believe that people could have come in makeshift, seagoing water craft, landing at a range of possible locations along the west coast.

The newcomers then took hundreds of years to trek across North America, perhaps in search of viable food sources. The arrival of people to our area was rather late in the game. Discoveries in Africa date man's ancestors there to be six million or more years old. Our people do not even match up well with the earliest relics of human life in the rest of North America, which date anywhere from 12,500 to 20,000 BP.

As New York was recovering from the last ice age, the land became tundra-like with clumps of foliage and various grasses and ground cover. Pine, hardwood forests, and other woods and brush were becoming reestablished after the long period of icy cover. With the fresh vegetation came new sources of nuts, berries, and other nourishment that attracted foraging caribou, elk, deer, mastodonts, bears, giant beavers, wolves, and turkeys. Richer aquatic life also was appearing so fishing was increasingly possible. All these factors combined to provide incentive for human residence.

Who Were These Earliest People?

The Paleo-Indians were the first arrivals to America. These people are thought to have been hunters about 8,000 to 13,000 years BP who wandered the countryside in small groups to discover whatever adequate food supplies existed. ²

As the people adopted more complex ways of life, researchers assigned other names to the groups to differentiate them. The last ancient settlers, the Woodland people, appeared about 3,000 BP in eastern North America and lasted nearly to the time of first European contact. They differed from older classification groups primarily through their more sophisticated development of pottery and agriculture (particularly growing of the three staple crops of corn, beans, and squash) and the use of funerary mounds, earthen works to entomb their dead. The Woodland people are the direct ancestors of the more familiar Mohicans who dominated much of the Hudson Valley for many years.

Archaeologists have found the mid- and upper-Hudson region, including Greene County, to hold many treasures documenting prehistoric man, starting with the Paleo-Indian culture and extending through to the arrival of the first Europeans. The most familiar and renowned sites may be Flint Mine Hill in the town of Coxsackie and West Athens Hill in the town of Athens. New Baltimore was part of Coxsackie until the State legalized it as a separate municipality in 1811. Another major finding was made at the Goldkrest site just north of New Baltimore across the Hudson River at Rensselaer County's East Greenbush.

Flint Mine Hill

For many years, amateur relic hunters had been digging on the ridge just south of the village of Coxsackie looking for arrowheads and other stony artifacts. In 1921, state archaeologist Arthur C. Parker started to investigate the plot of land that he had been eyeing for quite a while. Called Flint Mine Hill, this site was viewed as an Indian quarrying location for a considerable period, but no organized scientific investigation had been done.

What Parker discovered was “the most remarkable archeological monument in the state of New York. It was literally a mountain of arrowheads!”³ Employing much hyperbole and poetic waxing, Parker wrote the first widespread documentation of the importance of the site. Flint Mine Hill still ranks as one of the largest chert quarries ever uncovered in the East.

In the mid-1990s, a team from the State University of New York at Albany found remains of tools used in the production process and tools that were end products themselves. The objects dated from about 3,400 to 5,000 BP back to the Paleo-Indians, suggesting that the site had been used as a quarrying workshop for thousands of years.⁴

West Athens Hill

In 1962, a local resident, R. Arthur Johnson, was poking around on a hill in Athens after hearing that a telecommunications tower was to be constructed on the site. Johnson began to notice significant deposits of flint and other evidence subsequently dated back to the Paleo-Indian culture. Professional archaeologists were called in, and research of the area has continued since that time.

Perched four hundred feet above its surroundings, West Athens Hill turned out to be the largest Paleo-Indian stone tool quarrying and manufacturing workshop and possible residential site found to date in New York State. The location is one of the most well-documented Paleo-Indian sites in the East. A key researcher throughout this period was longtime state archaeologist Robert E. Funk, whose work is summarized in An Ice Age Quarry-Workshop: The West Athens Hill Site Revisited, published by the New York State Education Department in 2004.

Goldkrest Site

Just a few miles north of New Baltimore on the opposite side of the Hudson, the Consolidated Natural Gas Transmission Corporation was planning in the early 1990s to set a natural gas pipeline across Kuyper Island in the town of East Greenbush. This formerly freestanding piece of land now is joined to Papscanee Island, which, in turn, has been linked to the mainland, mostly through deposits of dredging spoils.

As part of the required archaeological survey for such projects, investigators found numerous remnants of human life, including bone, wood, and stone artifacts, pottery pieces, and evidence of wood-fire hearths. The treasures dated from the middle of the Woodland period into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Goldkrest is archaeologically and historically significant for two reasons. It was an undisturbed habitation site from the latter part of the Woodland and early European periods. This discovery was the first of its kind in this region and right near the center of the Mohican territory, solidifying the location's connection to that group of people. The area around Papscanee Island was the home base for the Mohicans for many decades. Perhaps most importantly, Goldkrest also contained distinct evidence of pole-frame living quarters, including a “long house,” again a first for the upper Hudson Valley.⁵

New Baltimore

Important archeological discoveries in Athens and Coxsackie and nearby places like Bethlehem, Catskill, and Leeds have demonstrated the wide range of time for a human presence in Greene, Albany, and Rensselaer counties. What about New Baltimore itself? No sites quite as dramatic as Flint Mine, Athens Hill, or Goldkrest have been found yet, but exciting discoveries continue to be made. While people may have been living in village-like communities during the latter part of prehistoric times, no compelling evidence has been found to link any of them to New Baltimore. More likely, the local findings relate to hunting camps and other temporary visitors.

In his influential 1920 work, The Archeological History of New York, Arthur C. Parker reported evidence of “Camp sites at New Baltimore village.”⁶ Regrettably, Parker often relied on anecdotal, ill-defined information as the basis for listing certain sites. In New Baltimore's case, there does not appear to be any additional details on the location of the “camp sites” beyond crediting prominent geologist George H. Chadwick and local residents Egbert Beardsley and Orin Q. Flint as sources of information on Greene County discoveries.⁷

Early populations were largely nomadic or semi-nomadic so the findings may be linked to those periods. The later Mohican inhabitants commonly had movable living shelters and other temporary quarters like lean-tos at locations used for hunting and fishing. Since they were prominent near the northern New Baltimore border, it is not hard to suggest that there was a relationship to the Parker “camp sites.”

In 1977, Mary Ivey, Gary Berg, and Susan Halpern reported on an archaeological evaluation of the path a proposed sewer project was to take in the New Baltimore hamlet on the Hudson.⁸ They had dug shovel test pits every fifty feet along the project's right of way except where bedrock was present. The only substantive artifacts found were in neighboring Coeymans, where the sewer system would have emptied into that town's waste treatment facility. As a result, they theorized that the Parker “camp sites” really were in that adjoining municipality.

Almost in New Baltimore, just a stone's throw to the north, lies what was once Barren Island. At the mouth of the Hannacroix Creek, in the town of Coeymans, this small plot of land is now part of the mainland. It has a long, interesting history and has been rumored to be the burial place of Barent Pieter Coeymans, an important European landowner who will come up again later in this narrative.

In 1959, and later in the 1960s, archaeologists excavated a number of places on the island and made some exciting discoveries.⁹ Included were several hearths containing numerous remnants of native life such as charcoal, bone and shell fragments, and flint chips. Many stone and pottery artifacts also were uncovered.

The bulk of the materials dated from the early and middle parts of the Woodland period, although evidence of earlier times also was found. There even were human remains that could not be identified, nor could the writers offer an idea of a burial date. The researchers proposed that Barren Island was a long-term spring and summer hunting and fishing encampment.

At a site in the southern part of New Baltimore on the Coxsackie Creek, two amateur archaeologists digging by hand in the summer of 1967 found stone projectile points, spear points, knives, scrapers, drills, and other items.¹⁰ These artifacts generally were discovered in plowed fields, near the surface of the ground, and were attributed to Archaic people who lived between the Paleo-Indian and Woodland eras, about three to four thousand years ago.

The location was conjectured to have been a fishing or hunting camp or winter quarters for wandering natives. However, no evidence of fishing was found beyond one possible net sinker, despite the site being only about half a mile from the Hudson. The men also dug up the remnants of what were considered two small hearths, which lends credence to the theory that the place was a temporary camp of some sort.

Over an extended period between 1982 and 1984, the same two individuals who unearthed the Coxsackie Creek site artifacts were exploring near the Hudson River again in the southeastern corner of town.¹¹ They found more projectile points from the Archaic period. This research has never been formally published so details are lacking, and dates have not been confirmed. Interestingly, at least one of the people responsible for this work subsequently gave up such explorations because of the damage untrained searchers could do to important historic sites.

As we entered the twenty-first century, the Greene County Industrial Development Agency (IDA) was busy attempting to entice businesses to locate in a spot along New York State Route 9W straddling the New Baltimore and Coxsackie town lines. The southern portion was developed first into the Greene Business and Technology Park, becoming home first to a Save-A-Lot grocery warehouse. The northern section of the property was named the Kalkberg Commerce Park, commemorating the spiny ridge running its way through both towns. In 2004, the National Bedding Company, makers of Serta mattresses, became the initial company committed to locating in the park on the New Baltimore side.

As part of the State's requirements for evaluating the environmental impact of such projects, intensive archaeological surveys were done across the proposed development area. To examine the section extending into New Baltimore, the IDA commissioned Edward V. Curtin, a consulting archaeologist, who identified sixteen previous reports about the locations of prehistoric archaeological artifacts within a two-mile radius of the site.

After examining the ground's surface and digging a series of test pits, Curtin and his associates uncovered a number of places with concentrations of artifacts. The materials at the Kalkberg site included a scattering of projectile points, flakes, and similar items, again indicating evidence of short-term camps.

Curtin suggested a wide spread of time for dating the bulk of the discovered objects, from the latter part of the Paleo-Indian period to the middle of the Archaic period. He also described more isolated examples of the late Archaic and middle Woodland periods. Given the site's location along a historically prominent roadway, Curtin also found artifacts from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—glass, ceramics, and nails that would be associated routinely with more modern human settlement and buildings.¹²

The Mohicans

As the seventeenth century dawned, New Baltimore was part of the area controlled by the Algonquian-speaking Mohican people.¹³ One of their primary living places for many decades wa...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Introduction
• Chapter 1. Prehistoric Times: Our Landscape and First People
• Chapter 2. Europeans Settle in Greene County
• Chapter 3. Revolution Opens the Door
• Chapter 4. New Baltimore is Born
• Chapter 5. Town Growth and Another War
• Chapter 6. Life on the River
• Chapter 7. The Train Arrives in New Baltimore
• Chapter 8. War and Modern Times
• Chapter 9. Off to School
• Chapter 10. The Road to New Baltimore
• Notes