Saugerties Village in the 1870's
This Map and Panorama Illustration are of the Village of Saugerties, New York, as it was in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. The Map is from an engraved original in the 1875 Beers' "Atlas of Ulster County". The Panorama was a litho illustration by H.H. Rowley. They are a testament to the rapid growth of this community in the preceding decades and to the diversity of heritage that was founded in this period of growth.
In 1875 Saugerties was foremost, and had been since the 1820's, an industrial center. During its period of expansion Saugerties had become the leading producer of lead products, paving stones, gun powder, high purity iron and paper in the nation. It was the first place in America where paper was made by machines. Saugerties industries were all innovative leaders in the early industrialization of the United States.
Panoramas such as the one represented here were significant promotional works. Their publication could only be supported by communities with large, important commercial interests.
In the original of this highly reduced reproduction the architectural detail of the houses and commercial and industrial buildings are faithfully rendered. Now, over 100 years later, even the casual observer can recognize nearly 90% of these buildings still intact in the village.
The longevity of the physical character of the Village of Saugerties can be attributed to its geography. The ravines that are seen to snake through its center and the broad crossing of the Esopus Creek have, since the first settlements, discouraged direct movement either to or through the village. Thus it avoided the intrusion of heavy motor traffic that has changed the character of many other communities in the twentieth century.
Saugerties is a treasure trove of unique architectural finds waiting to be re-discovered. From its stone houses of the first Dutch settlers to the sturdy brick worker's cottages that line its hillsides to the grand estate houses of the latter quarter of the nineteenth century; the period of Saugerties' urbane maturity; the creative character of an enterprising populace is everywhere represented.
An Early History
Saugerties was first settled by Europeans early in the eighteenth century. Settlement was mainly by subsistence homesteaders of Dutch and German origins. At this time Saugerties was a part of Kingston and made up the northern section of the "Kingston Commons".
Most of this region was originally settled by Indians who cultivated large plantations of maize and traded their products with other peoples of the Hudson and Delaware River Valleys long before the arrival of the first Europeans. These plantations were along a great natural flatland watered by the Esopus Creek and its many tributaries that drained the eastern face of the Catskill Mountains, The Great Wall of Manitou. The aboriginal (Algonquin) name for the south of these flats is Atharhacton (great field) and Tendeyachmeck (land of low bush) is the name for the north at Saugerties. In the mid seventeenth century these great flats were purchased from the native population and became the most productive granary of the early Dutch and English colonies, feeding the population from New England all the way to the West Indies. The more remote Indian plantations of the north, purchased in the "Sagiers", as the region was known, were not actually applied to this production since their distance from the transportation and commercial center of Wiltwyck (Kingston) was too great.
After settlement in the eighteenth century, growth in the Sagiers remained slow. Gradually, by the time of the revolution, a scattering of taverns, shops and seasonal mills had been established mainly to supply the needs of travelers on the King's Highway passing through Saugerties to Catskill and Albany. When a landing was developed at the mouth of the Esopus Creek, trade from the sloops of the Hudson River began and this gave rise to more sophisticated commercial interests. Soon a hamlet was formed. In the last decade of the eighteenth century the Livingstons of Clermont purchased much of the land around this landing and the hamlet. Their efforts to establish productive tenant farms and manufacturing ventures at the many mill site waterfalls on the Esopus Creek were disappointing. The prevailing economic and social attitudes of the post revolution period remained in Saugerties long into the first quarter of the nineteenth century preventing the assembly of a stable workforce and thus deterring further investment for exploitation of the vast water resource that was there.
A period study of the early history of Saugerties by Benjamin Brink, published in 1901 and available in reprints, adds much detail to this era of Dutch and German settlement. Saugerties' representation in the French and Indian War, the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812 are covered extensively.
Saugerties After 1825
The Saugerties of this map is essentially a creation of the vision of Henry Barclay. In 1825 Henry Barclay purchased the holdings of the Livingstons in Saugerties, along with those of others, and began to develop a sophisticated plan for mill sites and a village for the workers. By 1827 he had established two productive manufacturing facilities and had increased the population by five hundred. His workers were all emigrants from England and Ireland, highly skilled in the manufacture of iron and paper. Under Henry Barclay's influence these workers owned their own homes, became some of the first workers to receive a guaranteed weekly wage, were supplied with progressive public works projects, a village government and churches of all denominations were established and erected. Saugerties was well in the forefront of social innovation for this period in history.
These mills of Saugerties are long gone. Large trees grow through their massive foundations. But there is still a solid physical link to the industrial past and the very beginnings of these mills that literally connects them. The very first thing that Henry Barclay did in Saugerties of 1825 was to make a deep cut in the great rock face above the falls. He then constructed a dam on the falls to divert the flow through this cut and down a stone-lined raceway to the water wheels of his mills. This dam and raceway are intact in the same place that Henry Barclay put them over 165 years ago. These structures are the closest thing that Saugerties, or the Hudson Valley has, besides Saugerties itself, to a monument to its place in the industrial past of America.
The names of the owners of the houses and buildings on this map of 1875 still bear the predominately Irish and English surnames of the skilled population that Henry Barclay introduced nearly fifty years before. The names of the earlier Dutch and German farmers, innkeepers and merchants are still to be found, though in proportionately smaller numbers. At the time of the engraving of this map the populations of the satellite hamlets around Saugerties were even more dominated by the Irish and the English.
Saugerties had been separated from Kingston and incorporated as a town in 1811. Saugerties Village was incorporated as the Village of Ulster in 1831. This Village of Ulster was the central shipping port for the numerous communities its great industrial success had helped to spawn; Quarryville, Bethel, Unionville, Glenerie. This success had even spawned competitors; Glasco and Malden. These ports had their own land transportation routes: The Woodstock and Saugerties Turnpike; The Malden Turnpike; and, The Glasco or Ulster and Delaware Turnpike. All three shipping centers were also important links to the tannery communities that lay far into the mountains and also to the mountain resorts that were growing in popularity.
The growth of this period permitted the second generation of the original mill workers to head out into their own enterprises. More and more that enterprise was the quarrying of Bluestone. Many communities based on the Bluestone Industry sprang up. The emigrant population of Saugerties increased even more as these communities prospered. Hundreds were employed in the large quarries run by the Malden and Saugerties yards and hundreds more quarried their own smaller plots of land. Bluestone was a multi-million dollar annual business in Saugerties by 1875.
The deposits of Bluestone had been discovered in Saugerties in 1831 by an engineer hired by Henry Barclay to construct a bridge between the mills and the village commercial center across the Esopus. The stone yards of this engineer, Silas Brainard, are still active in 1875 on the Saugerties waterfront.
Along with the dam and mills, a major feature of Saugerties was the bridge over the Esopus Creek at Barclay's Pond. This was one of the first for the length of its span, nearly 270 feet, when built in 1831. When this 1875 map was drawn the bridge represented was the second replacement for the original and it was only one year old. It was one of the first spans made totally of iron and was said to be the longest of its kind for the period in the state.
Another feature, the West Shore Railroad is not as yet firmly located when this map is drawn. Its right-of-way along the river is shown. The Panorama of five years later shows its present location west of the village.
Neither the Map nor the Panorama show the lighthouse, built in 1869. At this time the lighthouse was in the middle of the Hudson River. The map indicates that the shoreline in 1875 was nearly in the same position as it is found in maps of a hundred years earlier. At present the effects of channel dredging, the construction of three jetties and heavy siltation from several periods of upstream ruptures in the mill pond dam have brought to the Saugerties coastline a profile that is unique among all of the tributary deltas of the Hudson. These wetlands, extending nearly a mile into the river, form one of the most exposed freshwater tidal wildlife habitats on the west shore of the Hudson. Saugerties has been designated as a Federal Coastal Management District in recognition of this unique natural habitat and its historic significance. Vast areas of tidal flats at the mouth of the Esopus, north and south of the lighthouse are owned by the state.
The significant part that Saugerties played in the early history of the Hudson Valley and in the industrial history of the United States is now only beginning to be recalled. This part is mostly in the innovative industrial processes that were introduced here. But of greater importance is its place as a first foothold for the many skilled emigrants from industrialized England that followed. It is their skills that finally permitted industrialization to emerge in early nineteenth century America. The emigrant workers of Saugerties each came by choice, based on a demand; not as a result of economic hardship, famine or political strife. The history of their contribution and the contribution of the founder of Saugerties, Henry Barclay, between 1825 and 1850, is a testament to the best that America has to offer: the social responsibility, human enterprise and faith in just reward from hard work that has evolved into our ideal of the "American Dream".
Michael Sullivan Smith, Saugerties, New York ©1990
