It Happened Here -- The "Tanlords" of the Catskills*

As the days proceed through November along the upper Schoharie valley and the Kaaterskill in the northern Catskills, the surrounding mountains have turned a soft brown. The broadleaf hardwood forests have shed their fall mantle of red and brown and golden leaves and wait the first winter snows. But two hundred and fifty years ago this scene would have looked much different. Up and down these mountains, from mountain top to creek valley, wide swaths of green Hemlock trees--primeval giants, often three and four foot, and more in diameter would have crowded the land. What happened to these giants was the coming of the leather industry in the first half of the nineteenth century.

Rte 23A, Hunter

Edward's Tannery was the first large Hemlock based Tannery in the Catskills

 Leather had been tanned from prehistoric times.  Europeans brought their knowledge of tanning using the tannic acid produced from oak bark with them to the New World.  The first tanners set up shop in New Amsterdam but were driven out of town by the burghers who objected to the foul smelling enterprise.  They reestablished themselves down stream from the Collect Pond, the original source of New Amsterdam's water in an area known as "the Swamp". Eventually, the businessmen of "the Swamp" came to dominate the leather trade, from the importation of hides from Latin America to the wholesale distribution of leather.  In the 18th and 19th centuries leather was much more widely used than it is today.  Besides boots and shoes, the horse-powered transportation system depended heavily on leather with leather saddles, harnesses and horse collars. Even many carriages swung on a suspension system of leather straps. People might wear leather pants and leather stockings; leather coats and leather hats.  They used leather buckets and even bound their books in leather.

 Hemlock an American species was first used for tanning in Massachusetts. Similar to Norway spruce, used for tanning in Europe, it was said to produce a stronger tanning liquor but gave the leather a distinct reddish color.  Early tanneries were established in Hudson and bark from the Catskills and Helderbergs was first hauled by wagons and flatboats there. But raw hides and the finished leathers were much less bulky than the hemlock bark used to produce them and William Edwards, a man from a long line of craft tanners decided it made more sense to bring the hides to the source of bark, rather than the other way around. In 1822 Edwards built his tannery and went into large scale production, employing the latest technology to cut labor and costs. The tan vats were covered to protect them from the weather. The Schohariekill not only provided clean water

for washing the hides but power to grind the hemlock bark, and pump the tanning liquors from one vat to another, or when it was spent, discharge it back into the Schoharie. The turning water wheels also powered machines to work the leather, rolling and beating it to give it its finish. Soon other tanneries began to dot the hollows, along the streams between the mountains. In the town of Schohariekill, three years later, Zadock Pratt would build an even larger tannery  At 550 feet by 43 feet with 330 vats it was the largest tanning operation in the world. It featured 6 heaters to warm the tanning liquor, 12 leaches to drain the vats, 2 water powered bark mills to grind the hemlock bark and 3 water powered hide mills to flex and soften the thick, dried and often salted imported hides. Pratt would proclaim his accomplishment in the carved cliff side above the town that came to bear his name, Prattsville, "One Million sides of Sole Leather Tanned with Hemlock Bark in Twenty Years by Zadock Pratt”. (In a future post we will revisit the remarkable Colonel Pratt.) 

  

Tanning was hard on the environment. Large tanneries stank for miles around; the acid effluent from their vats killed fish and degraded streams for miles downstream; and most significantly, tanneries required large quantities of hemlock trees.  The bark mills at Pratt's tannery ran day and night. The mills could grind over a cord of bark an hour. (A cord is a pile of bark/wood 4' x 4' x 8' !) Warmed water was filtered through the chips to make a tannic acid liquor in which hides were steeped for months at a time. Over time, whole forests were chopped down, stripped of their bark and the wood and brush usually left to rot on the hillsides or catch fire. 

The Tannery Brook that runs across the western section of
Woodstock, past quaint little shops and T-shirt outlets would
have provided a much different ambiance in its day. It would have been clogged with chunks of putrid flesh and hair and regularly contaminated with the acidic effluent of the mills.

Smaller tanneries were once common; Co.Rte 38, Greenville

By the early 1840's tanners were having to go ever greater distances for their tanbark. Zadock Pratt ran sledges or bark wagons as far as 50 miles from bark harvest sites to his tannery.  In 1845 he closed his Prattsville tannery and moved his tanning operations to Sampsonville in Ulster county. By 1855 there were only nine small tanneries in Greene county, down from some 56 in 1840. By the time of the Civil War tanning boom (millions of boots were required for marching armies) the tanning industry had largely left New York State and was centered in the Alleghenies and even farther west.



Marker of the Week --Other Remnants of the Horse-powered Society

At the Inn of Jacob Crounse, Altamont

 

Wagons and carriages tended to have large wheels, because large wheels afforded a mechanical advantage, enabling horses to pull them through ruts, over corduroy roads and across boggy ground. But large wheels gave them height, making entrance and exit from carriages difficult, especially for women in voluminous skirts, children, and the elderly. Often around markers in front of historical homes, stone carriage steps can be seen. One can only guess, for every stone step that survived, how many were carted away when roads were widened—and beyond that, how many wooden ones have disappeared from age and decay.

Another Carriage step, made from flagstones in front of a residence in Dormansville