Casperkill Watershed Oral History Project

The Fonteynkill, a major tributary of the Casperkill, drains a portion of the City of Poughkeepsie.  It flows from Park Avenue to Vassar Lake, then under Raymond Avenue and onto the main Vassar College campus.  On campus the Fonteynkill runs between Olmstead and Skinner Halls before joining the Casperkill just south of the Sunset Lake dam.

It is hard to conceive of the space between Olmstead and Skinner Halls as anything other than an overgrown wetland.  However from 1923 to 1948, when this site served as the Dutchess County Ecological Laboratory, it looked drastically different.

In the early 20^th century this space bordering the Fonteynkill was primarily an open field of poison ivy with a few oak trees.  In 1920, when Botany Professor Edith Roberts was granted four acres of land by Vassar President MacCracken and the Board of Trustees, she set to work developing the space as an Ecological Laboratory.  After traipsing through “every bit of field, woodland, and bog in Dutchess County” to obtain plant specimens, Roberts and her students constructed an outdoor laboratory that included all of the major plant associations found in the county at that time.

Roberts’ motive for developing the space was to provide students with the opportunity to learn about the taxonomy, morphology, and physiology of native plants.  Additionally, she wanted the Ecological Laboratory to be a demonstration of the beauty of such plants.  She and her students often gave tours and lectures in order to share their knowledge with the general public, and thus expand restoration initiative throughout the county and nation.  For example, Vassar students helped to organize an exhibit at the 1926 NY Flower Show where they handed out informative leaflets on how to propagate dogwood trees.  Three years later, Roberts collaborated with Elsa Rehmann to write the book American Plants for American Gardens.  In that book Roberts and Rehmann “presented the material in a popular manner to encourage the general public to use native plant associations as a model for landscaping around their homes and properties.”

By the 1930s twenty-eight of the thirty plant associations of Dutchess County were well established in the Ecological Laboratory. When Roberts retired in 1948 there were only three plant species, out of some two-thousand, that were not established (depending on the association [open field, swamp forest, pine, juniper, emergent aquatic, etc.] the quantity of component species [trees, shrubs, herbs, and ferns] numbered one-hundred or more).

Unfortunately the Ecological Laboratory that Roberts started in the early 1920s has transformed over several decades of neglect so that only some of the original plant associations remain.  Initially the Laboratory’s position alongside the Fonteynkill was very favorable.  The space offered locations naturally adapted to the different associations found throughout Dutchess County; Roberts and her students used the Fonteynkill in order to establish the stream association, the pond association, and the emergent, floating, and submerged aquatic associations.  However, when Raymond Avenue was straightened and widened in 1964, much of the Fonteynkill silted in.  This caused the hydrology to shift to a wetland, and thereby destroyed many of the original associations.

Photograph of Vassar students working in the Ecological Laboratory in the early 1930s

Information from:

“Outdoor Ecological Laboratory at Vassar, First of Kind in United States, Bears Most of Area’s Native Plants.” The Poughkeepsie Eagle. 5 April 1948.

Roberts, E. 1933. Development of an out-of-door botanical laboratory for experimental ecology. Ecology 14(2):163-223.

Ronsheim, Margaret. Personal interview. 2 June 2010.

The Casperkill watershed is located within the City and Town of Poughkeepsie and extends from the Peach Hill area to the Hudson River, just southwest of the Poughkeepsie Galleria. For the past four years (since the spring of 2006), the Casperkill Assessment Project (CAP)—a partnership between Vassar’s Environmental Research Institute (ERI) and local organizations and individuals – has been conducting research on the Casperkill Creek and its watershed. Students and faculty at Vassar have conducted in-depth research on the biology, geology, and chemistry of the creek, as well as the land use and policy decisions that affect it and, by extension, our community. They have conducted water quality monitoring on a monthly basis, assessing such parameters as the amount of road salt in the stream, bacteria levels, and the extent and species composition of streamside vegetation. The project’s primary goal has been to use its research to make the Casperkill the best and healthiest possible community resource. It has built its work on the notion that a healthy watershed can be an asset for the social, environmental, and even economic health of our community. For students at Vassar and in the surrounding community, the Casperkill watershed has been a great educational resource. Through research, education, outreach, and involvement in local policy-making, CAP is trying to ensure the welfare of the watershed for the sake of residents, business owners, and the diverse wildlife whose habitats we share. Vassar College Members of the CAP have presented Casperkill data at national conferences and through publications in scientific journals, all the while continuing their data collection every month. The continued goal of the CAP is to build a truly collaborative preservation project that involves both residents of Poughkeepsie and students and scientists at Vassar College.

The project seeks to extend the CAP into the social sciences and humanities by compiling an oral history and collecting photographs through which we can create an illustrated history of the watershed since the mid-20th century. This will be the first step in what we hope will be a full history of the area dating back to pre-colonial times. Through its work with the Casperkill community, CAP has collected the names and addresses of all residents and businesses in the area. Through informal conversations with residents (many of whom have lived in the area for several generations) it has become clear that residents (young and old) have a wealth of information about the area, and the creek in particular, that represents an untapped resource for the development of a Casperkill watershed history. We would like to interview as many of the local residents as will be willing to participate in the projects (there are roughly 400 households within the watershed) and seek access to photographs of the area from their family collection. The interviews and photographs will be the basis of a history to be presented partly through the CAP’s website and more fully through a searchable database.