Historic Environments

The Fall 2018 version of this 6-week course has come to an end. We visited the Appalachian Trail at Nuclear Lake, the historic house properties of Locust Grove, Maple Grove, and Springside, Matthew Vassar’s grave at the Poughkeepsie Rural Cemetery, the Slabsides cabin of John Burroughs, the cemeteries of the Ulster and Dutchess County Poorhouses, […]

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The Cary Institute’s campus is spread across approximately 2,000 acres in the Hudson Valley of New York.  The institute’s buildings consist of a research complex, analytical laboratories, an environmental monitoring station, classrooms, an education department, and an auditorium. These grounds function primarily as a laboratory for field research and for extensive research on the ecology […]

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Recently we visited the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies in Millbrook, NY, which is a leading institution for environmental research. They are a “living lab to study ecological processes”, with 2,000 acres of property, and 15 full time scientists on staff. We met with one of their scientists, who told us about the history of […]

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The West Point Foundry Preserve was a functioning iron factory through the 19th century and served as an important site of artillery production during the Civil War. In 1911, the site was abandoned and lay in waste for almost a century, used as a dump site for Cold Spring residents and a battery factory that […]

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Scenic Hudson is an organization whose mission is to expand the public’s access to some of the most beautiful and at-risk land in the Hudson River Valley. At the West Point Foundry, one of the organization’s historic sites, we met with a member of their communications team named Reed Sparling. He shared with us that […]

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Scenic Hudson, the environmental organization that has protected over 45,000 acres in the Hudson Valley since its inception, didn’t start out nearly quite so large. Indeed, it started as one of the first grassroots environmental movements. When Con Edison proposed installing a hydropower plant at Storm King Mountain, just up the Hudson River from Cold […]

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Our Field Experiences crew took advantage of a beautiful fall afternoon to tour the West Point Foundry in scenic Coldspring, NY. The West Point Foundry, now being reclaimed as a natural area/historic park by the Scenic Hudson group, was originally opened as an ironworks in 1817 to generate munitions for the then-fragile republic. As the production […]

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Two places that our class visited over the past two weeks were the previous locations of the Ulster County and Dutchess County Poorhouses. Sadly, there are very few known details about those who lived in the poor houses outside of the actual locations of these sites. Today, these two places share the same purpose: to […]

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In the 1600s and 1700s, the concept of poorhouses was brought over to America from England. Meant to house the poor and mentally ill – essentially anyone that couldn’t work or who wasn’t normal – these government-run facilities often had very low-quality living conditions and treated its people less than well. These poorhouses were meant […]

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Innisfree Garden, located in Millbrook, NY is part of the scenic hudson valley. It was originally the residence of Marion and Walter Beck. The Becks began the garden designs in the late 1920s and later collaborated with landscape artist Lester Collins from Harvard University. This nonprofit foundation opened to the public in the year 1960 […]

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