Casperkill Watershed Oral History Project

Ed Lynch with his bike on Vassar campus Ed Lynch has lived on College Avenue since 1979. Before that, he lived in the Wappingers Creek area, where he canoes even today. As a longtime area resident, Mr. Lynch remembers many of the events that we have written about on this blog. While attending middle school […]

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Orange ooze at the mouth of a culvert that channels water through the old Burnett Boulevard landfill underneath the Route 44 and Dutchess Center Plazas. Background information: Our interview with Alison Keimowitz, a Chemistry Professor at Vassar College, about the orange ooze actually started with her asking us a question: “What is in a landfill?” […]

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In 1940 John Van De Water leased the land that was once occupied by the Poughkeepsie Brick Corporation to the Town of Poughkeepsie (see The Rise and Fall of “Brickyard Hill”).  At that time the 120-acre property was really just an enormous hole in the ground, left from a century and a half of clay […]

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This 1867 map shows two brickyard sites to the west of the Casperkill At the beginning of the 20th century, brickmaking was the dominant industry along the Hudson River.  The extraordinary growth of New York City between 1880 and 1920 guaranteed a steady demand for Hudson Valley bricks, while the uniform clay banks running from […]

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