It Happened Here--Zadock Pratt and

the Town He Built (Part 1)

He must have looked like a young Rip Van Winkle, before his long sleep, hiking up the heavily forested mountains and down into the deep cloves of the Catskills with his dog at his side. But the young Zadock Pratt was no henpecked husband escaping a shrewish wife by going hunting for small game in the mountains. Zadock Pratt was hunting for trees, specifically Eastern Hemlocks – lots of them. And quite unlike the laid-back and lazy Rip, Zadock reflected much more the image presented in another book, published fifteen years after Washington Irving’s 1819 tale.

  

In 1830 Alexis de Toqueville visited America. In 1834,1835 he would publish Democracy in America, vol. 1 and 2. Among the things that impressed the young French aristocrat was the spirit he saw in many Americans. Unlike his countrymen, divided into the wealthy nobility who disdained the pursuit of wealth as vulgar and crass, and the masses who largely despaired of ever becoming wealthy, many Americans, Toqueville observed, actively – even fervently pursued their dreams of fortune, through their own efforts. A second trait Toqueville observed and admired was the tendency for many Americans to embrace public service. Both of these traits Zadock Pratt would exhibit in abundance.

 

Zadock Pratt was born in 1790, in Stephentown in Rensselaer County New York. He learned from his father the craft of tanning hides to produce leather.  After an apprenticeship, Zaddock worked for his father and brothers as a journeyman saddler at their tannery before going into business on his own operating a general store, and selling his saddles and leather goods. Zadock worked sixteen hours a day and slept under the store counter to save money. Often bartering his goods for produce from his neighbors he, in turn, sold their produce in New York City. 

Zadock returned to the tannery business forming a partnership with two of his older brothers. For several years the business grew. In 1819, Pratt, after buying out one of his brothers, embarked on a trading venture to sell leather goods and harnesses in rural Canada, however, when he returned to the United States a major setback greeted him. In his absence, his tannery had burned.  Over the next four years Zadock and his older brother Ezra rebuilt their business. In the course of this time Zadock's ambitions out grew those of his brother. The younger Pratt dreamed of building a tanning factory.  In 1824 Zadock ended the partnership, and began a search for hemlock forests that would span four counties.  Zadock selected a site in the little hamlet of Schohariekill.

 Encountering skepticism and hostility from some of the inhabitants, Pratt declared his intention to “live with (the residents) not on them.” The tanning business had a rather checkered reputation in the Catskills. Tanning was hard on the environment. Large tanneries stank for miles around; the acid effluent from their vats killed fish and degraded streams and tanners clear cut hemlock forests for their bark, leaving stacks of downed timber--an ecological catastrophe and a dangerous fire hazard. (see NYSHMS:It Happened Here on11/19/13.)
 

Tannery-based communities in the first half of the nineteenth century, in the Northeast had some similarities to mining communities in the West in the second half of the nineteenth century. Entrepreneurs would come into an area and set up their operations. Workers with little other resources than strong backs and a desire to make a living wage would be attracted to the area. Shanty towns would spring up, and when the ore/hemlocks were all extracted, or if the bottom fell out of the market for the commodity produced, the operators would shut down their operations and leave with their profits (or losses). Left behind would be the wreckage of a community, destined to struggle on for decades or become a ghost town.

  

Pratt Museum, Rte 23 Prattsville

Having declared his intention to make this community his home, Zadock launched into his tannery project.  Zadock’s tremendous enthusiasm, boundless energy and willingness to work along side of his workers gradually won over all but his most skeptical critics. He developed a reputation of being a boss who would never ask a worker to do anything he would not or could not do himself – this, in an industry which routinely required workers to handle 100 pound skins, clean fetid vats and scrape hides with scraps of putrefying hair and fat attached.  Pratt bought a large parcel of meadow straddling the Schoharie creek. He  immediately started damming the creek to build a large millpond, declaring his intention to be able to swim the length of it before the year was out. On November 1, 1824, breaking a skim of ice before him, he made his swim.  The next spring he began his mill. At 550 feet by 43 feet with 350 vats it was the largest tanning operation in the world.

Kiosk at Pratt Rocks, Rte 23, Prattsville

Soon after beginning his tannery, Pratt began building a large boarding house for his workers. He would follow this, over time, with the construction of 100 homes, built for workers and sold to them on reasonable terms. Unlike most other tannery operations, many debarked hemlock logs would find their way to the Pratt sawmill and into the homes built for Pratt workers and buildings of other Pratt enterprises.  The Tanner partnered with other businessmen and entrepreneurs to open a variety of businesses. An indefatigable businessman, Pratt seemed virtually unable to turn his back on any enterprise that seemed likely to be able to turn a profit. A grist mill, a cabinet shop, a machine shop, a hat factory, an oil cloth factory, 3 cotton mills, a match factory, an iron foundry, a chair factory, an India rubber factory, several general stores and a printing plant which produced the town’s newspaper all came into existence, the result of Pratt’s partnerships and money. 

Pratt Home/Museum, Rte 23, Prattsville

 Though not particularly religious, Zadock Pratt appreciated the salutatory influence that religion could have on a community and the steadying influence it might have on its workforce.To both the Dutch Reformed and the Methodists he supplied 1/3 the costs of their new buildings and to a Baptist printing company that produced bible tracts he gave a $4000 no interest loan and provided them with an office and two houses, rent free.
 

The Prattsville Tanner’s education was limited¹ to what his mother was able to teach him when he was a child, and whatever business training he would learn from the saddle-maker with whom he apprenticed and his father and brothers. Pratt developed a respect, even a veneration of the written word and for education that some people denied an education come to hold. Over the course of his life with the help of editors and ghostwriters, he would write an autobiography, and numerous articles about his tannery, his dairy farm and tanning and agriculture in general. In an age when tanning methods were closely guarded secrets, he shared his tanning methods with all. He reveled in his son’s academic achievements and in 1842 promoted the Prattsville Academy, a secondary school for the sciences and classics, offering to pay for half of its construction. 

Prattsville Cemetery, Rte 23A, Prattsville

From Zadock’s early days in the Catskills, Pratt held various town offices. From Prattsville he was twice elected to the U.S. House of Representatives. The Prattsville tanner took these responsibilities very seriously participating in every role call vote during his first term and refusing to leave Washington, to return to his business even when spring floods washed out his mill dam and caused major damage to his tannery one year. During his tenure he promoted the first survey for a continental railroad, the creation of the Bureau of Statistics and the construction of the Washington monument. He was most proud of his sponsorship of a successful bill to roll back the price of U.S. postage, and the bill to finance a survey of the continental railroad--accomplishments he had inscribed on his cemetery monument!

 

1 This would become an issue in one of his political campaigns when an opponent, a member of the Greene County Bar Association would accuse him of being “practically illiterate”.

Marker of the Week--Jacacks' Landing! Well, maybe.

Rte 89, East Varick

Let us hope I misread this sign at first, and it was not a misreading of the map/documents of the committee who ordered the sign or the foundryman who produced it.


 Next Week--Veterans Laid to Rest

In Two Weeks--Z. Pratt (Part 2) Farmer, Banker, Monument Maker