The Graphic History of Judge Charles Davis

by Michael Sullivan Smith with Audrey Klinkenberg

Graphic information is the most direct way to communicate, be it as simple as a smiley face emoticon or as densely packed as a weather map. Computers only took off when their screens had pictures, type styles and colors to present information.

Audrey and I were fresh off a course on digitizing historic archives at the Southeast New York Library Resources Council when we were first given the opportunity to tackle the material in Dan Lamb's Rosenblum and Lamb collection of local historical documents.

The first thing we did was record the contents of a square cabinet about five feet tall with twenty-five drawers. The organization of the cabinet had been shuffled from its original purpose over the years. After starting from the top drawer, down, to catalog it, at about the fifth or sixth drawer placard-size plates that were randomly mixed in with the contents of the top drawers filled these to the count of about fifty each.

I had recognized the size and type of information on these placards from two or three map-style images I'd found on the New York State Library collection's digital Internet archive. It was after I checked the writing style, signature and date on those against the ones in this cabinet that I realized what a totally unique resource we had.

The draftsman of these graphic plates was Judge Charles Davis and the contents of this cabinet were the original documents along with his graphics for diagramming them into property genealogies, so to speak, for the entire village of Saugerties. He had created a visual index to the hand written and sketched original descriptions of property exchanges in village wills and deeds made from the seventeenth century up to his time and this cabinet had been specially made sometime in the last decade of the nineteenth century form-fit for these placard-size memory devices.

Judge Charles Davis was born in the village and grew up in the family home on John Street, named after his father John W. Davis. Across the street from his childhood home was the estate of Fordyce Laflin, the father of his future wife, and beyond that to the east was nothing but farm fields with the Kiersted house and its barn floating in this open space; Washington Avenue had not yet extended north of Main street. To the south was the north edge of the village marked by the new Reformed Dutch church and beyond it westward more open farmland surrounding the home of Jeremiah Russell and his turnpike that stretched into the distance toward Woodstock and into the mountains. This would all grow dynamically in his lifetime.

About the time he had begun these studies of land transactions, in the 1880's, Charles Davis built his mansion house on John Street beside his childhood home. This house was still occupied by his daughter into the 1950's when she sold it to the American Legion Post 72. In their museum they have the copies of the original architect's drawings they found when they moved in.

Charles became a lawyer and then, into the 1890's a State senator and then Surrogate judge of Ulster County. He was serving on the water board of New York State during the planning and early construction stages of the New York City water supply system's Ashokan Reservoir when he died in 1913.

The small building with the columns on Main street that was long the town hall was built by Charles Davis when his son Byron became a lawyer and they became partners. Audrey had cataloged the papers of Byron Davis that are in the Saugerties Historical Society and these may have documents now recognizable as Charles Davis' but, on the whole, the contents of this cabinet collected by Morris Rosenblum sometime after the 1930's is the most important, lasting legacy that both Judge Charles Davis and the Rosenblum and Lamb collection could have preserved for us.

The Davis legacy in general has been fairly misplaced over the course of the twentieth century. It may surprise everyone to learn that the five acres encompassing the present stadium, diamond and tennis courts and extending over toward Market street extension was the land of John W. Davis that he had made into the ball field and driving park for horse racing as early as the 1890's when we first see this recreational space on maps of the village. Charles received this land in his father's will.

Also, the John W. Davis' estate owned all the land that had been Jeremiah Russell's farm on the north side of Ulster Avenue and it donated from this a small lot for parkland that was the original site of the Civil War memorial statue. Oddly, the statue was moved to the Davis land fronting Partition street when the American Legion bought it from Judge Davis' daughter. So this icon of Saugerties has continually followed the family around town.

The irony in this is that reminders of the course of Saugerties history related to the Davis family seem to be hiding in plain sight all over. This carries a message. That 1950's move of the GAR statue coincided with the death of the last Civil War veteran and the disbanding of the Grand Army of the Republic. This is an interesting marker for the turning point in Saugerties' relationship to its own history -- with all the changes that happened here in the 1950's and 60's. It is only now, with the digitizing of these plates Judge Davis made, that all can compare our past sixty years with what had likely gone missing also from the local memory in his time too, and what Judge Davis was also trying to find and preserve.

Is that why he made these memory devices; for posterity? Or were they made simply as teaching devices he used professionally as a lawyer to explain a statement of fact to a jury or a judge. Some have evidence stamps on them. Maybe that is how some ended up in the State Library collection; as the remnants of something that went all the way to the highest court. More of these may yet be discovered it that's the case.

What I like to think is that our Judge Davis simply needed these to be an informed and useful citizen. They were personal prompts he used as a shorthand for knowing his home. Their earliest coincide with the distribution of the birds eye panorama of the village we're all familiar with. This was the Google Earth of its day and he was just making the "historypin" links to the many materials he would have to remember and search through to have the answer to a question; just as we do today.

We have the same motivation when we digitize, catalog and create a finding device. The image is what is used for studying so the original needn't have to be fingered over every time someone has a new context they want to research.

Judge Charles Davis, with his graphic information, was anticipating the browser of a computer and its links on the Internet of the information age. Thanks to Dan Lamb and the generation of Rosenblum and Lamb that preceded him this information is preserved and can now be available to the Graphic User Interface of a twenty first century medium.

Land For Sale

by Michael Sullivan Smith with Audrey Klinkenberg

We can't really know what the earliest inhabitants of Saugerties were like. Memoirs are a phenomenon of contemporary writing and there is evidence that most personal diaries were burned as a tradition when the writer passed away.

When a person is part of history it is only then that their diaries or personal observations in letters are saved. That, however, may actually skew our idea of history toward a particular point of view.

Last year Audrey transcribed the letter book of Henry Barclay. This is in the collection of the New York Historical Society and thanks to Audrey the letters of Henry Barclay are now available as one of their publications, no longer just pictures of scribbled pages on microfilm.

This handwritten record was donated to the historical society because the firm of Barclay and Livingston had an impact on New York City's growing status as a financial capital in the nineteenth century. Saugerties is very fortunate to be linked with this highly popular topic, with all of these letters falling under that heading in the catalog. But actually only a few of the letters are related to the finance business Henry Barclay founded and was retired from. Most of the letters relate to the Early Industrial Revolution and this ancillary link has now placed Saugerties squarely in the spotlight of that history for the first time in modern research thanks to Audrey's fine indexing practices and Barclay's contacts with the key names in both early industry and finance.

But that's not our topic here. Our topic is the value of land.

The record of Henry Barclay's appearance in an already established community of Saugerties can be found in an 1827 assessment role of all property owners in the town of Saugerties that is in Dan Lamb's collection. Barclay is recorded as the third highest assessed property owner of the town. This document is a snapshot made sixteen years into Saugerties existence as a town. It shows Saugerties in essentially the same state of development it had enjoyed for well over a century. It is a list of all the breadwinners of the time because everyone then still lived off the bounty of the land.

The names in this assessment role, which you can find in digital form in the History Atlas computer in the library local history room, are found on deeds written from the trustees of the Corporation of Kingston between 1687 and 1816. Over that entire period nearly a thousand of these deeds are recorded in the area that was to be the town of Saugerties, a list I've also placed in that computer in the library. Except for a few patents from the Crown in the part of Saugerties that was once in Albany county these trustees' deeds are the origins of the title to every piece of real estate you may buy or own in Saugerties today.

The vast majority of these trustees' deeds describe property as a rectangle on a grid in a row and file of a "class" that shows off a knowledge of the trendy new scientific method that had just come into fashion at the dawn of the nineteenth century. These lots in classes are what were called the Kingston Commons. When they were created in 1803 they represented one gigantic subdivision, preceding and perhaps prompting the 1811 "commissioner's plan" of the block pattern of New York City.

The Saugerties of this 1827 assessment period was surrounded by mega estates called manors, throwbacks to the patroonships of the days of New Amsterdam. Their authoritarian rule over tenants would not be relieved until New York changed its constitution in 1846.

The Saugerties Henry Barclay found was special. It had the hundreds of individual owners of separate lots of this assessment role. These properties ranged from fifteen to hundreds of acres in size and every one had a fresh free and clear title. The four hundred odd individuals on this roll were about to become beneficiaries of an increase in property value, not a landlord. The planned economic development of Henry Barclay's early industrialization was setting in motion the magic of the land-based asset creation that is so much part of our lives today; the functional side of the American dream.

What creates value in land? The loose geometric stone that you find digging below the surface of your lawn; the deep rutted trails you find on walks in your woods; the field that now is pasture at your stable; all of this represented one person's or entire family's land-based enterprise center that initiated your land's value. An unprecedented population boom for the mid-Hudson region that made the productive use of Saugerties land a benchmark was beginning to set a measure of value in 1827 that has remained right up to the present day.

If you look at the foundation of your house and it is made of stone, that house's builder was employing a land owner's quarrying enterprise.

If you've uncovered the framework of one of your walls and have found the hand sawed posts and beams you are looking at the employment of a land owner's foresting enterprise.

If you enjoy the old commercial buildings of the village center and have become aware of the businesses they contained when newly built you are looking at the outlets for the employment of scores of farmer, craftsman and teamster local land owners of Saugerties.

Until the arrival of competing producers with the railroad and then the motor roads, the land owners of Saugerties sustained it and it sustained them.

I always hesitate to reference something with the introduction of "I recall"... but... I recall an article in the New York Times real estate section sometime back in the 1980's (or thereabouts) asserting that real estate in the Hudson Valley was the toughest to tie down a title for. I thought then, that may be the case elsewhere but not in the land of the Kingston Commons.

Another memory: my business made a special plaque for Armonk headquarters in 1979 for it to give to Boca Raton congratulating them for the development of the IBM PC. A decade later I attended a conference at the State Library on the "research environment of the future" put on by Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). I'm imagining the property values in Boca Raton compared to today's in Silicon Valley where PARC was the only player back then.

This is the simple lesson. In the end, the industrial sites crumble and their land has no value because the industry was the asset. It is left as the grass growing through the cracks of the empty parking lots of Boca Raton. But a sustainable plan retains the symbiotic parts far after its initial purpose has passed and the value of Saugerties real estate is testimony to this history lesson.

Value is in the eye of the beholder and the value of Saugerties can only be beheld by beholding - beholding on tightly - that history of your land. As you look around at all those in Saugerties that use their home PC on their home Internet connection to sustain themselves and their families think of them as the beholders of this history lesson that is the key to the value of Saugerties today.

The Original Lead Mill at Glenerie

by Michael Sullivan Smith with Audrey Klinkenberg

The falls at Glenerie are familiar to drivers on route 9W -- on the right heading south leaving Saugerties. What is little known is that the industrial ruins of early mills, gone for over a century now, seen between the road and the falls there, are the site of Glenerie, not where the present road marker is a mile back toward Saugerties.

In 1836 a description of Glenerie was published by James Eights, a physician turned naturalist associated with the founders of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Eights describes a suspension bridge at Glenerie, one of only two in America at the time. An entry in a surveyor's field book dated April 20, 1833 in the collection of Dan Lamb lays out a public road from the Glasco Turnpike's bridge running along the west embankment of the Esopus, and uses landmarks of a mansion house and mill buildings at the falls.

Two years ago Audrey transcribed the file copies of letters kept in a record book of the business correspondence of the Great Falls Manufacturing Company. A sketched map included in one of these letters to Manhattan Life Insurance Company for the policy on an entire community and industrial complex at Glenerie sparked our discussions for a few months after that. They focused, not just on who the writers were and what the Great Falls Manufacturing Company was, but also on why the events they brought to light were so utterly missing from the pages of our history.

The letters were penned between December of 1835 and March of 1840. Two of the signers, John Kiersted Jr. and Judson Calkin, were in the 1881 History of Ulster County; Kiersted with a full biography and Calkin as a postmaster of Malden. The main writer, though, is a person only briefly mentioned in our history, and so we dug deeper.

As it turns out this main writer, Col. Edward Clark, was the principle of this business. He followed Henry Barclay to Saugerties. Both Edward Clark and Henry Barclay were in their 50's at this time.

Barclay was the developer of a water power infrastructure and this attracted Clark who wanted to build a manufacturing business. Clark's product was in a sector that at the time was in what is the oil industry today; oil paint to be specific. Clark's innovation in business was the delivery of packaged paint already with the pigment ground into the oil; our paint in a can of today. Before Clark, white lead base and color tint powders were bought from a chemical supplier and the painter ground them together into oil fresh for each job.

Clark’s early career was spent in Philadelphia, but he was born in Sturbridge, Massachusetts. He was well recognized as an inventor, mainly for engineering unique dry dock installations for the government during the War of 1812. He is documented as giving presentations on inland navigation and lock technologies before Congress in Washington in the 1820's. Clark first developed the process he patented for making the white lead of a quality needed for his paint at a converted whale oil processing mill that used the water power of Barclay's dam. By 1832, though, he had left a relationship his young partner Charles Ripley made with John Jewett, a New York chemical products dealer, and had purchased all the land west of where West Bridge Street runs now, along with all the rights to flood the Esopus gorge (upstream of Henry Barclay's pond) from the bend up to Glenerie. He intended to build a dam at the bend and his mill on this land, but the falls at Glenerie proved capable of supplying power without needing a dam. He had already built his mills and his mansion house there when the first entries in the letter book were written.

Col. Edward Clark's Great Falls Manufacturing Company took on investors. Young John Kiersted Jr.'s position there represented his father's investment and Judson Calkin, who was clerk for Asa Bigelow, likely represented his investment. Barclay's was a family business so it appears many of the landed merchants, like Kiersted and Bigelow, found Clark agreeable to their profits being used in his company's operations.

This is where the letters get quite instructive. Investment was a good opportunity to exchange credits and notes for shares that actually had a chance to increase in value during the volatile economic times and it was to this topic of the economy that our interest was drawn.

The greatest depression America has ever experienced lasted from 1837 to 1841. Like our recent history in which the sub-prime bubble burst in 2008, The Bank of the United States was favoring land speculators. As a result, Andrew Jackson removed its control of the currency and put Washington's deposits in regional banks. When these banks began overproducing their own currency, confidence in the economy was shaken. It was during these uncertain times when there was no set value for currency that Saugerties was industrializing.

The details of economic, transportation, communications and legal problems over the period of the entries in this book, up to March 1840, are a treasure of first-hand experience. Considering this is the time that Dickens was writing about in England where there was a much more urbane support system for coping with such problems, we have a very good way from our own recent experiences in the "great recession" to picture the world Mr. Clark writes in.

From these letters we see he had problems with unscrupulous toll collectors at Henry Barclay's bridge. When his lead shipment went to Barclay's warehouse at the village docks, instead of to Glasco, the shipment was thrown overboard. His mail was wrongly delivered to the village and then postage is added to forward it to his actual address at Glasco. The vinegar that was promised never is delivered and his production of white lead has to be halted. Trips must be made to the patent office in Washington to keep Jewett from nullifying his patents. And nearly every week, a trip to the city was needed to sort out why shipments weren't getting from the dock to the dealer.

The Great Falls Manufacturing Company of Glenerie in Saugerties with its pioneering product innovation and perseverance during the hardest of economic times had a brief life. Clark walked away, leaving everything to his company's investors who declared failure in 1841. He set up residence in his townhouse in Brooklyn and died on June 8, 1848.

But the manufacturing at Glenerie continued, and without missing a beat. Notices immediately were published in trade journals that the quality of the product was being maintained by the new proprietors, the chemical supplier Battelle and Renwick. White lead continued to be manufactured by them in Glenerie for the remainder of the nineteenth century under the Ulster White Lead Company providing livelihoods for over a hundred families in a lively community that once thrived at the Glenerie falls.

Now there is nothing but the beauty of the Glenerie falls. But when you pass this setting you may want to ponder the innovation and perseverance that it also represents.

Cultural Geography

by Michael Sullivan Smith with Audrey Klinkenberg

We all know our address. It's a number. There's also the number "20" that represents Saugerties to visitors that come here. That's the exit number on the Thruway. If you're coming here from, let's say, San Francisco you get directions from Google Maps that follow many numbers on their respective roads right to the mailbox of your destination.

The assumption that roads lead you back home or someone can find you as a number on a public road or even that you can freely travel from home to some place and then back again is the basis of cultural geography. In other words, this way of sharing the land as roads has been used by a whole people for this purpose over a very long period of time. Roads are a cultural addition to the idea of geography.

Recently there has been a flurry of interest in early maps. The Library of Congress has put on the Internet more and more fine examples from its collection. One very interesting one is from before the Revolution; the 1749 Evans map. There are even earlier ones but they are less detailed in their depiction of the land and pathways that cross over it. Our interest in maps is where we are and that is pretty much uncharted territory on early maps. Our cultural geography isn't formed yet.

Audrey uses censuses often to "map out" the generations of families. The actual location of where a person resides at a particular time gives you confidence that you have the right person for a name you are studying. Getting the same person for the one that was born to match the one that died is trickier than you may think. That's when knowing where one was during life comes into play. Maps not only orient the search for this but sometimes are a primary source.

The earliest maps of Saugerties that are close to accurate are the wall size maps of Ulster County from the 1850's. They have recognizable road courses and even names of nearby landowners. These maps have selected street layouts of population centers around their ornate borders. A small village of Saugerties is represented in the border of the 1853 Tilson and Brink map and is a major feature with a directory of businesses on the 1858 French's map.

This mapping of the village has a very early start. A large size printed map was made in 1851 when it was the Village of Ulster. That map almost precisely followed the 1827 survey made by John Kiersted in its plan of the streets and lots of Livingston and Barclay. Any address in the village is precisely known because nothing much has changed from this original plan.

In the Beers Atlas of 1875 the village is even more precisely plotted, occupying separate spreads for the north part and the south part in the book's pages. But things are a bit more sketchy when it comes to the town. Though it is upwards to twenty times the land area of the village it is given but a single spread. For the best mapping of the period we still don't have much certainty when it comes to locations in the town.

Fortunately, within the next decade or so the federal government began the geological survey program and some of the first studies were done in the area of Saugerties. The topographical maps of the mud-Hudson region produced first in 1893 give not only the roads but indications of the locations of houses along them and between them.

The most interesting thing we get from the 1875 Beers Atlas is its division of Saugerties into hamlets. The full town map has these boundaries and there are separate detail studies of their commercial centers on other pages. Since this period of time is one of population growth in rural Saugerties a lot of what is indicated here can be firmed up in business directories and in the church and school records of the community within the hamlet borders.

This is very important because as the nineteenth century moved into the twentieth these same hamlets grew into centers of employment as boarding houses and resort colonies became the mainstays of Saugerties' rural economy. This remained the case right into the 1940's when studies of the effects of closure of the last railroad passenger depot of the original four that supported this industry in Saugerties were done. The destinations of Saugerties became one of the principle reasons the first stretch of the Thruway was dubbed the "Catskill Thruway" in its promotions; as a reassurance.

The same names of the hamlets found on the town of Saugerties map in the Beers Atlas were used in promoting these destinations during this "resort" era. From this association the names are still in popular use today. People live in Blue Mountain or High Woods or Flatbush and often say they live, for instance, on High Falls Road in Quarryville. Land surveys and deeds used the hamlet location in their legends and property descriptions right up to the 1950's.

So as we move into the Twenty-first century the question that surfaces continually among the new arrivals runs something like "am I in West Saugerties or Daisy?" There is rarely a hamlet center anymore that has shopping, a school, or a church so the question is more one of cultural geography significance... what the traditional boundaries are.

In 1875 the boundaries of the hamlets were placed because they represented a post office address area and because of that they outlined election districts and school districts and tax districts. Even after many of the post offices were consolidated the other distinctions stayed.

I like to remind people of the history of their neighborhood which is what a hamlet pretty much represents now. It is very easy to enhance interest in a landmark one passes every day or lives in. People want to feel there is something they can relate to as part of their home environment.

The accompanying map shows the boundaries of the hamlets as they are taken from the 1875 Beers Atlas map of the town. The lines are made precise by following the same natural features, like streams, as on the original and, where property lines were followed, the outline follows the current parcel map of the town. The roadways are provided so you can easily travel visually to your home parcel and find which hamlet you are in. This is probably the closest way to experience the idea of cultural geography without leaving your chair.

Get familiar. These hamlet locations will be popping up in every aspect of Saugerties history that will be looked at. They will be referenced, for instance, when the Laflin powder mills or the Bigelow bluestone yards come up. It is this cultural geography that we will use to make you feel right at home with history.

The Back-story

by Michael Sullivan Smith with Audrey Klinkenberg

It's funny how the term "history" is used now. We're all familiar with the "Historic Saugerties" signs and can name the attractions. But it's the visitors that every day frame these attractions into GPS coordinates in the selfies they send to big data collections through their social media postings that is the "history" record of today.

So we've relegated "history" as a term to these cold facts. That means that what we're really interested in here is what we'll call the "back story". This is also not what's considered history in an academic sense but really something like the flash of memory that is found in a movie story where you're given what motivates a character.

That notion we have about Saugerties' back story we can thank Benjamin Myer Brink for. Our most popular "memory" of our past; a selfie for all Saugerties; was written over a hundred years ago. Brink produced a magazine covering every history topic of the region; "Olde Ulster"; and also published a book about Saugerties; "The Early History of Saugerties 1660-1825".

If you "Google" Brink's full name you'll find a Library of Congress copy of this book you can save to your computer for free. For half a century most in Saugerties have been buying reprints of it and coveting the rare original found in a used book store. You probably have a copy on your bookshelf if you've been here for more than a generation.

For those who binge on this kind of thing Brink is just the tip of the iceberg. There are many "historic" accounts from the late nineteenth and early twentieth century that document Saugerties history. Brink's interprets it as a view of his time, just the most recent of these many, and draws on the earlier ones for his facts. As a summary it is the most recognized reference for Saugerties' historic identity.

The past few years have seen the availability of these "historic" (pre-copyright protected) books become digitally available on the Internet. Comparison reading of all the viewpoints has become a history geek pastime. This is no longer for just a select group sharing an expensive library. Those originals are now artifacts; rarely cracked.

Saugerties is probably better represented in these regional and local accounts of the past than most other communities. While the game elsewhere is often to debunk histories as folklore; Rip Van Winkle and all; in the case of the mid-Hudson region it is usually to fill in the blanks. Much has become important that was considered insignificant in the narrative the early authors of histories were concerned with.

Having a "feel" for the times of the author has become part of the back story of reading in general. Recently we've discovered a way to get this back story to the back story of our past.

Audrey is transcribing the hand written diaries that Benjamin Myer Brink faithfully kept from the age of 33 until his death. At the same time she is transcribing a newspaper clippings scrapbook of stories that parallel this personal account with entries from 1880 to 1915. This is revealing the motivations of our key motivator!

Transcription takes a lot of time. As of now Audrey's work is twenty years of Brink's entries away from when he started writing his history of Saugerties. To "jump ahead" you'd still have to read straight through a few thousand pages of the handwriting of Brink. And you'd still need to have absorbed the content of the 35 years of newspaper reports that matched the timespan. It remains to be seen whether the "smoking gun" or guns are there, by which is meant, the factors that influenced life, the efforts taken to do the research and what the sources were.

Add to this a "plot twist".

A note discovered in the State Library Cockburn Collection gives a time-line of past events between the earliest record and the date of this note in 1770; our earliest history document. Were these facts unavailable when our "1660-1825" history was formalized by Brink?

This note is for a legal argument of the rights of Lieutenant Swords to a 2000 acre bounty overlaying most of the mid section and village of today's town. It covers nearly every concept regarded as key to Saugerties' origins; from the Sawyer to the settlement of the Palatines to Indian treaty boundaries; and it is written within the personal memory or directly transmitted memory of those living at the time.

Brink is writing over a century and a quarter after this document. How did the mutations of fact between Brink's names and dates and those of this record occur and does this show a trend that had a beginning point and a cause?

As Audrey transcribes the nearly 13,000 daily diary entries the sources that influenced the facts that formed the story of our past will become part of a body of evidence. These digital transcriptions of Audrey's make the field wide open to mass participation. It's now a game more and more are able to play; an ADA ramp giving accessibility, finally, to the facts of history.

What we intend to do is supply some training wheels. All these new understandings need perspective. We'll do this by presenting new takes on old Saugerties. The digital era is bringing something new to light every day. These small weekly steps will add a contemporary perspective to what you never knew or always wondered about.

I, for one, will not pass the "Historic Saugerties" sign again without a sense of expectation. We hope to build this for you over the weeks and months ahead.