It Happened Here--Knifetown, N.Y., U.S.A

In the United States many towns and cities got their identities from the predominate products manufactured in them.  In New York State there are many examples of this.  Schenectady became the "electric city" because of the electrical generation and distribution equipment, not to mention early electrical appliances manufactured there. For Corning it was glass; For Glens Falls it was paper;  For Amsterdam it was carpets;  For Gloversville, well....    (Cooperstown doesn't fit--It was founded by William Cooper and had no special connection to barrel production.)

In Orange County, New York,  little Walden became known as "Knifetown".  Walden began as so many other towns in the Northeast began, as a textile mill town with its founder,  Jacob T. Walden being attracted to the area by power of the Wallkill river as it surged through the Wallkill gorge.  By the early 1820's Walden had dammed the Wallkill and several woolen and cotton mills were in business.  But, by the end of the 1840's the mills were struggling and closing.  Leaders in the community, however, had heard of a group of cutlers, originally from Sheffield England, who were dissatisfied with their situation  in Mattaewan, (Beacon) New York and looking to relocate.  The skilled knife makers had been recruited with the promise of higher wages to form the core of the workforce of the Waterville (Connecticut) Knife Factory but when told they would have to buy/maintain their own tools sixteen of them revolted, each chipping in $200 of their own money and moving to Mattaewan to form the New York Cooperative Knife Company in 1852.  The Walden community leaders were able to offer them a modern factory with ample water power to run belts and pulleys to power saws, turn grinders and polishers, operate trip hammers and lathes--turning what for centuries had been a handicraft operation into a machine shop business. To seal the deal, the leaders, themselves, offered to transport the business across the Hudson  to Walden in1856.  

                                                                               34 North Montgomery St., Walden

                                                                                                                                         W. Main  St. cor. Orchard, Walden

The business thrived. After a few years, in order to meet demand and expand, the partners decided to turn the company into a joint stock company.  New York Knife Company became the major cutler for the Union Army, making forks as well as table knives. Their pocket knife/jack knife business burgeoned.  In the 19th century, every man (not just craftsmen, tradesmen, and farmers) carried a pocket knife.  Even middle class businessmen, merchants, lawyers, teachers carried pocket knives.  It probably started when quill pens needed to be routinely trimmed to write legibly, before they were replaced by steel pens; and  continued as fingernails needed to be trimmed, packages and letters opened, pencils sharpened and     twisted cigar ends cut off so they could be smoked.  Starting in 1911 New York Knife became the official supplier of scout knives for the Boy Scouts of America, a contract they held for over a decade. [1]   At the peak of their production  by 1900  they occupied twenty eight buildings, employed 400 people and produced  1 1/2 million   knives in a year.  One of their buildings, built up from the Wallkill gorge was seven floors tall, and had its main entrance at street level, on the seventh floor!

                                 Oak St. at the Bridge, Walden

The Walden Knife Company was said to  have been initiated by a dispute over a baseball game!  For several years knife-makers at New York Knife held baseball games between workers from different floors during lunchtime.  At one game, an argument between players turned into a general row.  The new plant manager, Thomas Bradley Jr. stepped in to breakup the fight declaring anyone playing baseball henceforth at lunch would be fired!  Several workers walked off the job, declaring they would start their own company.  Beneath the surface of the dispute, of course, were underlying strains. Bradley was trying to turn a machine assisted craft business into an assembly plant where lower skilled workers , responsible for only one or two operations,  worked together to assemble  a completed product, employing more complex machines to take over more of the production.  In 1874 the  Walden Cooperative Knife Company would open, a short distance from New York Knife. 

                                                                                                                E. Main St.  Walden

                                               

In 1892 George Shrade patented a pocket knife, the blade of which could be conveniently opened with one hand by pressing a button. Shrade went to the New York Knife Company to manufacture his knives (known today as the somewhat infamous "switch blade") before making improvements to its mechanism,  and striking out on his own in 1904, in Walden

                                                                                   

                                                                    

                       Orange Ave, cor, Main St., Walden

                                                                                                     

The growth of the American market for pocket knives attracted the attention of European manufactures who began to make serious inroads in the American market.  Thomas Bradley, Jr., a Congressman at the time and friend of President McKinley convinced him to include protections from imported knives in the 1897 Dingley Tariff Act.  The people of Walden erected a statue of McKinley in 1924 with money donated by Bradley. 

 By 1913, 19% of Walden's entire population worked in one of Walden's knife factories.

World War I saw a further increase in sales but after the war,  sales slumped as Winchester and Remington Arms entered the cutlery business in desperate attempts to augment their declining ammunition sales.  Walden Knife closed in 1926. The stock market crash in 1929 followed by the Depression, led to New York Knife's closure in 1931 

Shrade Cutlery managed to hang on until it moved to Ellenville in 1952. [2]

Marker of the Week  Fortnight (!)  --William Floyd ?

William Floyd, William Williams, Oliver Wolcott, Francis Lewis, Lewis Morris, John Hart, Abraham Clark, John Morton, George Clymer, William Paca, Thomas M'kean, Jason Smith, George Taylor, George Ross, Thomas Stone, Josiah Bartlett, Mathew Thornton, Thomas Nelson,Jr., George Wythe, William Hooper, Joseph Hewes, John Penn, Thomas Heyward, Thomas Lynch, Jr.,  Arthur Middleton, Button Gwinnett, Lyman Hall, George Walton.   These are exactly half of the people who signed one of America's most important documents.  Can you guess which one?  Let me give you some additional names to jog your  memory.

      John Hancock, Samuel Adams, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson.

Oh! That Document!  As we celebrate another Independence Day and remember our Founding Fathers and the genius of our democracy, that was given its philosophical rationale in the Declaration of Independence, and its structure  in the U.S. Constitution, perhaps, we should pause to remember the common politicians;  the men who put aside  their generally successful personal and business lives to come together to represent the hopes and prejudices, grievances, shared fears and aspirations of their communities and their sections of their states, to provide  input and the momentum for the  documents that would become the frameworks of our Democracy.  (In the stories we tell ourselves about our military history we have done a pretty good job of upholding the stories of our common soldiers, perhaps we should do the same for our common politicians-qua-public servants!)

NYS Rte 64, Floyd, Oneida County

William Floyd had a prosperous farm he ran in Brookhaven, later established as Mastic on Long Island. He abandoned a formal classical education to take on a practical education when his father died at an early age and he had to manage the extensive farm. Socially and politically Floyd was tied more closely to his Yankee friends and relatives across Long Island Sound, in Connecticut  than to the more loyalist leaning inhabitants of New York City.  He served three times as a trustee of the Town before being elected to the Provincial Council and then in 1774 to the first Continental Congress.  With the rest of the New York delegation he refused to sign the first draft of the Declaration of Independence until he heard the sentiments of his constituents, signing the final document.  Soon afterwards,  Washington and army were forced from New York.  Floyd and his family sought refuge  with relatives in Middletown, Ct., his farm taken over by a regiment of British cavalry. During the war,  Floyd was given the rank of Major General of New York Militia but served in administrative posts seeing that local militias were properly provisioned, and coordinated with the Continental Army while also serving as a delegate in the Continental Congress.. Seven years later Floyd returned to his house and farm, finding both in ruins.  In 1794 he bought a large tract of land outside of Rome, New York and built a house closely resembling his house in Mastic.  A colleague once described Floyd as "one of the good men who never quit their chairs ", in other words, not a speech-maker, not a public orator but one through private conversations made their  positions known, representing their constituents and doing the hard work of democracy.   

 

[1]  The Scout knife was a part of the Boy Scout official uniform, not carried in a pocket but hung prominently via a snap hook from the belt of the uniform, earned after showing proficiency in its proper care and safe use. (Boys might carry toys, but a (young) man carried  tools. --a minor but meaningful symbolic step on the path to manhood.

[2] In this article I have not tried to document all the mergers and changes in ownership of these companies, only to mention a few of the developments and some interesting (I hope) facts about them.

--Beside the usual "Internet Suspects" rounded up I found these particularly informative: the summary and analysis sections of  Joseph Sepko. New York Knife Company , Cultural Resources Site Examination of New York State Museum Site 10935 .  2002

--Fred W. Pyne Descendants of the Signers of the Declaration of Independence,. " William Floyd"

  dsd1776.com/signer/swilliam-floyd/

              It Happened Here- "Giants in the Earth"

As the eighteen century turned into the nineteenth century the opening of the vast North American continent spawned interest  in the great number of species discovered and yet-to-be discovered.  American naturalists such as John and William Bartrand  (botanists) and John James Audubon (naturalist /ornithologist) began their explorations, categorizing and recording their discoveries through drawings, paintings and collections.  Charles Wilson Peale was a successful portrait artist who painted the portraits of many early American leaders, including Washington, Franklin, Jefferson and Hamilton, and many Continental Army officers.  He also became a proficient self taught taxidermist who built an extensive collection of American animals.  These became the core of his " Philadelphia Museum" along with other natural science specimens he had acquired in his travels.  

At the same time, interest in the natural sciences was burgeoning in Europe. French author and naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc Comte de Buffon wrote a massive compendium of natural history that ran to  thirty six  volumes with another fourteen volumes contemplated.  In the ninth volume he put forth a theory that the animals and people of the new world were smaller and inferior to the animals and people of the old world (Europe/Africa/Asia) because of the  Americas "colder, wetter climate" and it would/could not be otherwise.  One American who took exception to this was Thomas Jefferson.  Jefferson corresponded with Buffon,  directing James Madison to measure an American  weasel to compare it with its European counterpart  and even going to the extraordinary lengths of sending Buffon a stuffed Vermont bull moose! Jefferson was also aware of the of the exceptionally  large bones coming out of the Kentucky "Big Bone Salt Lick" (see NYSHMs: It Happened Here "Marker for a Mastodon"  Feb. 11, 2014.)  (He had several samples in his house, Monticello)  Since the notion of species extinction had not been widely circulated he would undoubtedly advised Lewis and Clark to keep an eye out for these critters on their expedition of discovery in the Louisiana Purchase.

Much closer to home,  Jefferson heard about farmers uncovering large bones in  swamps near Newburgh, NY.  John Masten, the farmer who owned one of three swamps  had accumulated a large number of the bones that he kept in  his granary and let  curious people in to see them, for a fee.  Jefferson sent  Masten an offer to buy them but it was declined.  When Charles Wilson Peale heard about the bones, Jefferson encouraged him to pursue their purchase .  Peale was able to succeed where Jefferson failed, going to the Montgomery farmer, offering him $200,  (about $4000, today), gowns for his wife and daughters and a double barrel shotgun for his son,  for the farmer's bone collection.  Another $100 secured the rights to excavate the swamp for any bones that might be found.

                                                                             At the Barber Site, Rte 17k, Montgomery, across from school

In the spring of 1801 Peale set out for New York's Orange Co. with a $500 dollar loan from the American Philological Society, a couple bilge pumps from the U.S. Navy and some U.S. Army tents (probably courtesy of President Jefferson's influence) to hire local workers in what has been called the first U.S.  scientific expedition. Encountering a flooded site (to the depth of 12 feet!) he devised an ingenious device. A continuous chain [1] with buckets attached would run down into the flooded sump to carry water up above the edge of the excavation where they would empty their contents  into a sluice-way that  would drain the water off, away from the site.  The series of buckets was connected to/powered by a belt /rope connected to a large wheel in the center of which was a treadmill where a crew of three workers walking , would turn the wheel, powering the belt of buckets. 

   A Swampy pond, Behind Marker, Probably the excavation site

 Remarkably efficient,  the invention, Peale calculated, could evacuate 1440 gallons per hour, and it was such a novelty he discovered farm boys were lining up to work the curious device--walk the treadmill, for free!  Between 1806 and 1808 Peale would paint a picture, The  Exhumation of the Mastodon  that clearly illustrates his invention.  In the months that followed, Peale was able to excavate marl swamps at the Barber and Millspaw farms as well as the Masten property and recover enough bones to recreate two mastodon skeletons.  His son Rembrandt Peale and servant (slave), Moses Williams assembled the skeletons, recreating missing bones carved from wood and part  of a cranium  and tusks from  paper-mache. 

The skeletons created a sensation.  Building a separate room in his museum and charging a 50 cent surcharge, Peale quickly recouped his debts and expenses from the expedition. His museum helped precipitate a wave of  enthusiasm both for legitimate museums of natural science and history, and public (pay to view) exhibits of freaks and oddities of dubious authenticity.  Undoubtedly, proud of his acquisition, he would paint two self portraits. In one he shares his portrait with a giant bone from one of his mastodons; in the other he dramatically lifts a curtain to reveal his museum with a mastodon standing behind his artist's pallet. 

 Over the years the museum would  move several times and have its ups and downs.  At one point it  would occupy the former Pennsylvania State House Building, "Independence Hall." In 1849 Peale's children would break up and sell the collection to pay off accumulated debts.    One of the mastodons was dismantled with parts of it ending up in many hands.  P.T. Barnum bought many of the exhibits.  It was thought the other mastodon was destroyed when Barnum's American Museum in New York burned  in one of two  fires in 1864 or 1865.  However, in recent years it was discovered that Peale's children had taken the surviving intact mastodon to Europe in hopes of finding a buyer.  There it had languished in storage for years until  German naturalist Johann Jakob Kaup bought it for  the Grand Ducal Museum of Hesse  purchasing it at a bargain price.  During World War II the museum in which it was housed in  Darmstadt  was extensively damaged in the bombing raids but the mastodon survived with only its paper-mache tusks having been destroyed. In 2020 it would return to the United States for a visit as part a of Smithsonian sponsored exhibit.

                                                                             ******

While  broadly, the Enlightenment, and more specifically interest in the natural sciences had created interest in finding the first "giants in the earth" in New York State, our second "giant in the earth" was "discovered" as the result of interest in--or more accurately-- opposition to, another social-cultural movement, the "Second Great Awakening"some six decades later.   George Hull was a cigar-maker and businessman, born in Connecticut's tobacco-leaf growing region, but raised in central New York in an area which, because of the intensity of religious fervor being generated there became known as the "burned over district".  Growing up, George had worked for a couple preachers doing work for them on their farms.  Both experiences had left him feeling exploited and cheated, and though he had been brought up reading the bible and could quote quite  extensively from it, he became disinclined toward religiosity.  As an adult, his cigar business suffered from inattention as he pursued various get rich quick schemes while unpaid debts and unpaid taxes mounted. Seeking to escape his debts, he moved his family to Wisconsin after setting his home and business on fire to collect the fire insurance [2].  There he reestablished his cigar manufacturing business, employing others to sell his cigars. When one of his salesman, an in-law working in Iowa began having financial difficulties, Hull visited him to help him straighten out his business affairs (and get payment for his most recent consignment of cigars.) While staying at the salesman's home Hull was joined by a traveling revival preacher, the family had invited to stay with them , while he was holding tent-revival meetings in their town. Over several days, Hull and the preacher  had extensive conversations.  The preacher believed in the literalness and inerrancy of the Bible--positions which infuriated Hull.

One of the biblical passages Hull and the preacher debated was Genesis 6:4. "There were giants in the earth those days..."  A few days after their conversations, Hull began to formulate a scheme. If he could "create " a giant, bury it somewhere to have it "discovered," then he could create a sensation with biblical literalists and lead them to declare they had found proof of the bible's veracity.  Then,  after he had created a suitable hullaballoo he could reveal the hoax, embarrassing the religionists that had used the giant as a proof of the bible's truth.  Additionally, he expected to make a large amount of money by charging admission for people to see the giant, and even after the hoax had been revealed, charge people again who still wanted to see the hoax to see if they, themselves, would have been fooled . (This, of course, was something P.T. Barnum had been doing with great success.)

To finance his scheme, Hull burned down his heavily insured cigar factory for its fire insurance  and moved to Iowa where he obtained a large block of  native gypsum and partnered with a Chicago marble dealer and a couple of stone carvers to create a 10 foot recumbent  naked figure modeled  after Hull himself!  He had it shipped by railroad in a box labelled "farm machinery" to Binghamton.   Re-boxed  in a sturdy iron-bound crate, Hull's Giant  was transported by Hull and several accomplices by night in a heavy army wagon to the Cardiff, New York farm of "Stub" Newell, a distant relative.  There it was buried, tucked under the root of a long dead tree to make it appear as if it had been in the earth a long time. 

                                                                         

                                                                             U.S.Rte. 20 by Bailey Rd., Cardiff

 After nearly three years Hull contacted Newell to tell him it was time to dig a new well on his property.  "Stub" directed the well diggers to the spot he had chosen and guess what they found!  News of the discovery exploded! Within 24 hours hundreds of people from farms all around the area had visited the site.  Newell rushed to buy a large tent and hire family and neighbors to take money and control the crowds. Within a week thousands would visit and secondary businesses began to appear as farmers wives showed up along the roads to sell pies and sandwiches to visitors and farmers abandoned their fields to shuttle the curious in their farm wagons from Syracuse to Cardiff and back for sizable fees, or,  to and from Tully and Lafayette, nearby towns serviced by the railroad. Within a few weeks omnibuses were making scheduled runs from Syracuse, hot meals could be obtained along the roads entering Cardiff and slabwood-board "taverns" were offering adult refreshment for the thirsty.

Debates began immediately.  Was the giant a  "petrification" or an ancient statue from a long lost, (apparently) caucasian civilization? [3]. Early visitors to the site, state geologist James Hall, Jr. and John Boynton, a scientific lecturer with  experience in paleontology doubted that it was a natural phenomenon citing lack of case evidence that soft tissue could petrify and lack  of stratigraphy in the area consistent with the gypsum giant.  On the other hand, antiquarians, the forerunners of archeologists, were at a lost to connect the giant to any known culture or connect its sculptor to any group of people.  A hypothesis that Jesuits might have sculpted it to impress their Indian converts  simply didn't merit any credibility.   For his part, George Hull was disappointed that the multitudes of biblical literalists were not rushing forth to proclaim that here was proof of the factuality of the Old Testament's stories. 

Hull could only sit back and watch the money roll in, while, operating behind the scenes, he negotiated through Stubs Newell the sale of the Giant. Eventually one of several competing syndicates of investors won out, buying a 3/4 share of the Giant for $40,000 (over $1million, today) [4]  and exhibiting it in Syracuse and Albany. Rumors of the deal caught the attention of P.T. Barnum whose offers to buy it from them were rebuffed. Undeterred, Barnum sought to have his own  Cardiff Giant.  He arranged to buy a copy, advertising it as the real Giant, introducing it to New York City via a spectacular parade up Broadway to Wood's Museum, the successor to Barnum's American Museum, destroyed a few years earlier. (Eventually the fake petrified giant, that inspired this fake-fake would inspire perhaps as many as a dozen other fakes to be displayed in ever smaller venues in traveling circus sideshows, carnivals, and county fair midways across the U.S. for decades to come.)

George Hull was "spot on" in his anticipation of the high levels of curiosity his Giant would create (not to mention its profitability) but he over-estimated the impact it would have on religious discussion and debate.  The fact was, by the end of the 1860's, the "Second Great  Awakening"in New York  had mostly run its course.  All those people susceptible to calls for personal salvation had pretty much sought it out;  the Millerites who predicted a date for the resurrection of Christ, had seen the date come and go with no apparent resurrection; the Mormons had largely left the state, taking their revolutionary ideas with them. What was mainly left was fatigue and skepticism.  In the absence of any compelling narrative as to what the giant was, or how it got there, skepticism grew about the giant, as well.  What else could it be but a Hoax!  Rumors and stories containing circumstantial evidence of a flim-flam began to circulate.  Who was this mysterious George Hull who was seen several years before and now was back again?  Why did Newell suddenly decide he needed a second well when he only had a couple cows and a few other farm animals, when he had a perfectly good well and why did he direct the well diggers to dig to the depth of 4 feet, exactly the depth of the giant?  Despite Hull's secrecy, people had observed Hull transporting his mysterious cargo in the iron-bound crate. These and  other stories came to light.  At first Hull ridiculed the stories circulating. Hull protested that he was an honest tobacconist who was expanding his business by selling tobacco growing farm machinery to his farmer-suppliers.  But then following the sale of the Giant  to the syndicate investors,  local bank employees reported Stub Newell had transferred $ 9.400  to George Hull,  After that it was only a matter of time before the story all came out, including confessions by the sculptors.

Though discredited, the Giant continued to make money for a series of owners, though with decreasing popularity.  Finally, after a disappointing showing at the 1901 Pan American Exposition in Buffalo, the Giant was retired to a barn in Fitchburg, Massachusetts.  In the twentieth century the Giant came in and out of retirement a couple of times for exhibition in state fairs before suffering the indignity of serving as a kind of oversized coffee table at the home of an eccentric newspaper publisher. It was bought by the Farmers' Museum in Cooperstown (now known  as The Fenimore Farm and Country Village)  in 1948,  where it continues to be exhibited.

                                                   Marker at the Fenimore Farm,  Rte 80, Cooperstown

[1] The chain pictured in Peale's painting appears akin to a colonial surveyor's chain with extended links.

[2] Hull led a life filled with petty crime, shady business deals, tax evasions and various grifts. In one of his earliest grifts , he partnered with a co-conspirator who would sell hotel patrons marked playing cards.  Then Hull would arrive in a day or so to engage the patrons in  "friendly" games of poker and use the patron's own marked cards they had bought to clean them out of cash.  Arson, however, was probably his most serious crime.

[3] Remember, Hull had modeled the stone figure after himself.  Local Onondaga Native Americans, who were among the first to view it had a rich tradition of legends and folklore that included giants but when they saw it, they concluded it was "no Indian" and pretty much lost interest in the debate.

[4] Different sources cite different amounts.

--articles on Charles Wilson Peale's Mastodon abound on the web.  Two that I found especially helpful are--- Sellers .Charles Coleman. Unearthing the Mastodon.  American Heritage. Aug/Sept. 1979,  vol.30  Issue 5.   and   Sues, Hans-Dieter.  The Story of Charles Wilson Peale's Massive Mastodon.  Smithsonian Magazine.  May 6,  2020.

--again, articles abound on the Cardiff Giant but a short book A Colossal  Hoax by Scott Tribble, 2009 is exhaustively researched and most thorough.

Marker of the Week  Fortnight (!) --Winifred gets her                                                                              Marker

On July 22, 2013 I wrote a blog (still available on the web) about Winifred Goldring the first women to head a major governmental paleontology department in the world.  In addition to a forty year career marked by many significant scientific discoveries in her field she fought a long and difficult battle against gender discrimination, battling not only for fair compensation but for an equal opportunity to "do good science". I regretted at the time of the piece that although during the George Pataki administration in 1998  a commission had been created to honor pioneering women through a series of historic markers, she was not among those chosen.

This past weekend this was rectified when the New Scotland Town Historical Society, the Pomeroy Foundation and the N.Y.S.Parks and Recreation Department erected a sign at the Thatcher Park Visitors Center, Rte 157, Voorheesville.

          It Happened Here- Not Hadrian's Wall,                                                                but Clinton's Ditch.

Part I: "Romancing (the clay &) the stone "

Both the heart of the British Empire, Great Britain, and the "Empire State" of New York are  homes to two singular archeological features, (viz. ruins). They run east to west, virtually across the whole of their respective territories.

In a few areas they are (with the help of some reconstruction) almost intact, their stones rising nearly perfectly aligned, as they were built, to a height of more than twelve feet; or plunging nearly 4-10 feet to form a forty foot wide channel--each with its accompanying six foot deep vallum (defensive ditch), for the wall; or the raised four foot wide graded tow path, for the canal.  In some places, especially through urban areas, both have been leveled, or filled in, robbed of their stones for use in nearby buildings and farmers' walls, graded and even paved over.  But in many areas traces of their structures can still be seen, as can the ruins of extensive support facilities that accompanied them as well. The wall had its mile castles, support roads, forts, granaries, soldiers barracks and even Roman baths.  The canal had its bridges, aqueducts, basins, dry docks, canal stores, boat yards and of course, locks.

 Hadrian's Wall took six years to build; Clinton's Ditch took eight years.  Hadrians wall spanned  73  miles;  Clinton's Ditch flowed  363 miles.  Hadrian's Wall ultimately failed; the barbarians were not kept out and Rome eventually decided to abandon Roman Britain.  The Erie Canal succeeded beyond the wildest dreams of its promoters and builders, opening the Great Lakes and the interior of the United States to markets on the east coast, and the world beyond.  Within a few years this canal would spawn nearly a dozen other canals in New York, including  numerous feeder canals which would connect  much of New York State to the Erie Canal.  Within two decades a wider version of the canal with double locks to ease congestion on the canal would be necessary. By the twentieth century new dam/lock technology would enable a newer, larger version of the canal that would use the Mohawk River, itself, as part of the canal.

 

Over the course of the remainder of this year, interspersed with my regular posts I hope to do several posts about the Erie Canal.  Though still in a formative state, I expect they will center around several different  topics:

             I.   The Politics of the canal's creation,  Or-- How could the idea of a canal spanning the entire width of New York State, first fleshed out by some guy serving time in a local jail be sold to a government and a people still grappling with the notion that it was the government 's (and taxpayer's) responsibility to build and maintain,  even, public roads!

             II. The Engineering and Construction of the canal, Or--How could a group of engineers and practical men, (most of whom had never even seen a canal) and whose work experience was no more than constructing a few small bridges and laying out a few millponds with dams and sluices and  water raceways, construct the longest canal at the time, one heralded at the time as the 8th wonder-of-the-world!

           III.  The Consequences, Or- How did New York State end up with so many "port" town and cities, most of which are miles from any major river or ocean!  (Think--Brockport, Port Byron,  Lockport, Weedsport, Middleport, Bridgeport, Spencerport, Port Crane and Port Dickerson).  Or how did grain produced near Watkins Glen end up being shipped (literally) to New York City?

Marker of the Week  Fortnight (!)    Plastics!

Delaware Avenue, corner with Southern Bvd., Albany

Pool/Billiard type games had been around since the 16th century when the northern European leisure  classes brought popular croquet-like lawn games indoors to be played on green fabric covered tables played with wooden  or ceramic balls. But wooden balls could warp and dent and ceramic balls  could chip and even shatter. By the beginning of the 17th century Elephant ivory became the preferred material for billiard balls.  Smooth, hard, and heavy, ivory was perfect for conveying energy from ball to ball for  a fast and exciting game. Billiards/pool became increasingly popular in the early Victorian period but by then Elephant ivory had become very expensive. (Only 4 or 5 balls could be turned from the thickest part of an elephant's tusk.) 

In 1865 Phelan and Collender, a NewYork manufacturer of pool tables and supplier of billiard balls offered a $10,000 prize for anyone who could discover an acceptable substitute for ivory.  A young 

inventor, and former apprentice printer John Wesley Hyatt from Starkey, New York was intrigued.

As a printer, he had learned some printers coated their fingers with  a collodion, a solution of nitrocellulose dissolved in alcohol which formed a clear shell over the finger to keep out the printer's ink.  It was also commonly used as a covering for small wounds to keep out dirt (and, though not known, then, germs.) He had previously experimented with concoctions of pressed fibers to produce checkers and dominoes.

After several years of experimenting with different solutions of alcohols, ethers and finally camphor on nitrocellulose under heat and pressure he produced a substance he called Celluloid in  1868.  Casting his new material around a core of fiber reinforced shellac he made the first synthetic billiard ball [1], going into business as the Albany Billiard Ball Company.  (He apparently did not pursue the prize money.) 

 Looking for new markets to pursue he opened the Celluloid Manufacturing Company that would manufacture dental plates for dentures, replacing the hard rubber dental plates that had been used. He would develop injection molding and extrusion technologies and sell his new plastic material to companies  for all kinds of plastic uses from combs and ball point pen bodies, to shirt collars and cuffs, to toys and knife handles and synthetic piano keys.  In 1882  a chemist working for him would  develop a solvent that turned celluloid into a tough clear film that would replace the glass plates used in photography and enable the motion picture industry.   

Like one of it major components, however,  celluoid had a major drawback.  Like the nitrocellulose (also known as "gun cotton") it was made from, celluloid was unstable  and could burn easily and violently, and under some conditions cause a small explosion when struck--sometimes happening with billiard balls!

In the early 20th century Bakelite plastic replaced celluloid as the material of choice for billiard balls, later to be replaced by phenolic resins. 

[1] In 20223 the Smithsonian Institution allowed a mico-sample of an original Hyatt billiard ball to be chemically analyzed   They found in addition to its known ingredients powdered beef bone had been added to give it extra structure and resilience.

 It Happened Here --"Clang, Clang, Clang Went The Trolley"

The Trolley cars of my childhood imagination, and the impression of trolley cars from my very limited experience with Trolley cars from driving around  Boston in the 1970's, differed greatly from each other.  Neither one of them reflected the reality of trolley car  transportation in the approximately  six and one half decades that trolleys flourished in and between  cities in New York State from 1888 until after WWII.  (Approximately 30 larger cities still operate  trolleys [1]   in the United States, though none are in New York State.) The trolleys of my imagination were small and ramshackle, piloted/conducted by  uniformed, officious employees of  local transit companies who could not be more taken with themselves than if  they were the captains of  the great ships of the White Star or  Cunard Lines.[2]   Less than serious transportation, in theater and movies, they, with SanFrancisco's cable cars,  appeared as backdrops /sets for musical productions. (Think:  Judy Garland's "The Trolley Song"or Tony Bennet's  "San Francisco"--"where little cable cars climb halfway to the stars" ). The only tangible contact I had with trolley cars was on shopping trips with my mother.  When transversing  the Belgian block paved city streets of Albany  we would come upon the sunken rails of the trolley line, surviving in the street like the fossilized footprints of some long extinct dinosaurs . And I still remember my mother cautioning me that stepping in them  would surely lead to a twisted ankle.  In contrast, the trolleys of Boston seemed like huge orange or green behemoths,  trundling down the middle of avenues,  their tracks making great sweeping curves through the very centers of intersections, somehow sublimely confident that all other vehicular traffic would yield to them. This was in spite of the fact that most of them, like aging pachyderms, bore the scars of combat  with lesser motor vehicles.

Horse drawn streetcars appeared first, at the beginnings of the industrial revolution with the need for workers to get  to and from their homes to their workplaces in a regular and timely fashion. Few workers could afford the expense of a horse  w/ carriage to say nothing of stabling/caring for said horse the hours they worked. As factories and cities grew, housing became displaced to ever greater distances from workplaces. As distances between home and work grew from feet to miles, then many miles, taking "shanks mare" (walking) became impracticable. Placing omnibuses on rails buried in the streets allowed horses to pull much greater loads of passengers than possible on the rough and usually rutted surfaces of roads.  

By 1832 New York City had its first horse drawn street cars, of the New York and Harlem Railroad.  By 1855 horse car rails would snake through most NYC neighborhoods and NYC streetcars would provide 18 million rides per year!  By 1859 Philadelphia, Baltimore, Chicago,  Pittsburgh and Cincinnati had horse trolleys and many other cities would follow.   Two horse streetcars that could carry perhaps a couple dozen passengers and the smaller 1 horse "bob-tail" cars [3]  carrying around a dozen riders were becoming common.

Horse drawn streetcars, however, were expensive to operate, and could go only 5 to 6 miles per hour. One two horse car, operating on a  busy line for six long days a week,  might utilize five to ten horses. [4] And for  the horses, trolley car service was extremely taxing with trolley horses typically having only a three to five year working life!   And then, of course, there was the manure.  A trolley horse might produce 10 1/2 lbs. per day. But this could have some value. One trolley company with $40,000 in fares/year reported $14,000/year in manure sales to farmers.  Additionally, as with any living creature,  there is the risk of disease.  In 1872  an epidemic of epizotic apthinae killed thousands of horses.

Not surprisingly, very early on, inventors and entrepreneurs began looking for alternatives ways to power  trolleys.  Andrew Hallidae, a wire rope manufacture from San Francisco developed the first successful urban cable car system after he witnessed an accident in which four horses attempting to pull a street car up one of SanFrancisco's infamous hills, lost their footing and were dragged by their runaway car over the rough cobblestones to the base of the hill. (All four animals had to be destroyed.)  Hallidae's system involved a continuous moving cable (wire rope) in a channel running below the surface of the streets, supported on rollers and directed around corners by large pulleys, all powered by a central steam plant. The "cable  cars" utilized a gripping mechanism that extended down into the channel, locking and unlocking the car onto/ from  the continuously moving cable.

Small steam powered tractors were tried on some lines. Often concealed to look like streetcars themselves, in part to frighten horses less, these "steam dummies" still were noisy, producing clouds of steam, smoke and cinders but were used on some suburban lines with  fewer stops.

Electricity, however,  provided the most promise for trolley car propulsion in the fourth quarter of the 19th century.  For over two decades inventors in the U.S., Germany and England made steady improvements in electric motors, undercarriages, and current collection devices. By 1888 Frank J. Sprague had developed a car and electrification system for Richmond Virginia that became the model for trolley car systems across the nation, not only within, but between towns.

 In most areas where rails were accessible to pedestrians horses and other animals, electrified 3d or "hot" rails quickly and often disastrously proved impractical, though they became standard in subways and along some stretches of protected elevated urban railroads. Overhead power, through a system of electrified wires quickly became the safer norm.

                      The Albany-Hudson line persevered with 3d rail power, except in high traffic areas. despite accidents

                                            Remains of  the overhead electric system on Hamilton St., Albany

Leo Daft, an electrical engineer, working in the field of electrical distribution/ trolley propulsion built a    1 1/2 mile demonstration electric railway in Saratoga but was better known for a  four wheeled device sliding along the overhead-suspended electric wire was known as a "troller".  Pulled along by the streetcar, it took current  directly from the wire for the car's electric motors.  The term "trolley car " became synonymous with any streetcar wether horse-drawn, steam or electric propelled.  Unfortunately, troller wheels had some propensity to jam or jump free of the electric wires they travelled along and then the troller could unexpectedly come crashing down on their streetcars.  The solution was  one or two flexible poles, spring loaded, mounted on each car.   At the top of the pole was a wheel held onto the wire by the spring tension of the pole, that made contact as it ran along the underside of the electrical power wire. 

Almost overnight, cities large and small began contracting with entrepreneurs to build trolley systems. With electric propulsion, the price of operating a car/mile dropped from $0.25 to $0.15 car/mile, and unlike with cable car systems there was not the huge upfront cost of building a large steam power plant and extensive underground facilities to enable a continuous cable to travel in an unending loop.  Cities could charge trolley car companies for the franchise to run their cars along city streets, often requiring them to pave and maintain the streets on which they operated.  Real estate developers often courted trolley car companies to build lines adjacent to properties they were developing because access to  the city's trolley car system could multiply their properties' value.  Fairly extensive trolley systems could be operated by small electric generating plants located on small streams or rivers running through cities, or powered by steam engines.

Industrialization resulted not only in standardization of working times but also the standardization 

of non-working times, which resulted in both a problem and an opportunity for trolley companies.  

One day a week, Sundays, (and soon two days a week) trolley cars ran mostly empty. To fill these ridership voids trolley companies began to develop routes to popular recreational destinations like

 beaches and parks. To enhance the attraction of these destinations they combined with civic 

authorities and private entrepreneursto build bandstands, concert halls, dance halls, ball fields, 

racetracks and casinos.  The success of Mr. Ferris' giant wheel at the Chicago World's Fair in 1893

sparked the creation of a variety of "thrill" rides as well. Electrification of these parks,  (necessary 

for trolley operation) allowed for the entertainments to continue after dark, with festive colored 

lighting.  In many areas the local trolley company, itself, created a "Trolley Park" where a person 

could buy, for the price of a trolley fare, a full day's amusement.

From Albany Hudson Electric Trail signs at the Electric Park

site, Niverville, off Rte 203

I

 As urban congestion increased, larger cities looked for alternatives to the rail-bound, street level trolleys.  Elevated railways reduced street congestion and with the introduction of electric engines, eliminated the smoke and cinders associated with steam trains. With other large east coast cities, New York City would develop an extensive subway system.  To facilitate the flow of traffic, some trolley companies experimented with rubber tired cars, trolleybuses, that, though still tethered to the overhead electric grid,  no longer rode on steel rails and could maneuver (somewhat) through traffic, letting passengers safely off at the curb.

The twentieth century saw a number of developments that would remove trolleys from all but a few cities by mid-century.

Rising costs doomed many trolley systems for while the price of maintaining rails, the overhead electrical system, replacement cars and parts, and labor continued to rise, the price of fares did not, often frozen in initial franchise agreements with municipalities.  Labor unrest over static wages was a frequent problem.  In Albany, in 1901 and 1921 strikes against the United Traction Company became violent.  In 1901 two strikers were killed byNational Guardsmen called in to protect strikebreakers operating the cars. [4]  Even when not prohibited by franchises with municipalities, fare increases were immensely unpopular with the public.  Early on, the 5 cent fare had become sacrosanct.  

The main reason for the decline of the trolley, of course, was the proliferation of gasoline powered automobiles, vans and buses.  Automobiles offered a flexibility that trolleys could not compete against. Suburban areas expanded beyond the profitable range of streetcars.  Beginning in 1910 economic down turns encouraged some automobile owners to turn to the cities to solicit rides for a fare.  So called "jitney" cars became an urban phenomenon, not offering scheduled service, but skimming ridership away from trolley runs at the most profitable  peak times.  ("Jitney" is thought to have originated in New Orleans, a corruption of the creole word  "jetnee" or "nickel" referring to the common fare at the time.)  By a second downturn in 1914-15 between 6000 and 10,000 "jitneys" may have been operating in the U.S. .   Car companies were abetting them by offer larger multi-seated vehicles and small busses.  While jitney cab popularity would ebb and flow with economic conditions, efforts of municipalities to regulate/license these independents,  and labor disruptions, the effects were inevitable.

The Second World War provided a reprieve for the Trolley industry with people flocking to U.S. cities to work in war industries, and with automobile production halted and gasoline severely rationed.  But by mid-century the end was clear.[5]   Car manufacturers were cranking out thousands of new cars, and Americans were addicted to the freedom and independence of personal transportation.  Mass transit  would continue but gasoline powered busses would replace trolley cars.

[1] To be clear, by Trolleys I mean electric surface passenger trains that run on electric motors and get their power off of overhead wires, or occasionally from a third rail.

[2] This meme appears to have developed from a syndicated cartoon "The Toonerville Trolley that Meets All Trains" that ran from 1908 to 1955 in newspapers across the country.

[3] The horses of one horse trolleys were often hitched closer the streetcar itself, so their tails were often cut/bobbed to avoid them being tangled in the front grills of the trolley or whip in the faces of the drivers.

[4] By 1885 Albany's trolley system had 30 miles of track,  71 horse-drawn trolley cars, and 400  horses to draw them!

[5] The last trolley ran in Albany in August 1946

--An encyclopedic overview of the trolley in America and worldwide, with simple and clear explanations of trolley technology is provided in William T. Middleton.  Time of the Trolley. Milwaukee, 1967. 

 --A short history of Albany's United Traction Co. can be found at friendsofalbanyhistory.wordpress.com/tag/united-traction-co,/.   Friends of Albany.  "Getting from Here to There in Old Albany:  It was all about the Trolley". April 8, 2018. )

--The Albany-Hudson Electric Trail has numerous tablet-signs that are very informative, featuring prints of old photographs, etchings snd postcards along the trail, usually within 200 feet of where the trail crosses a road in Stottsville, Stockport, Stuyvesant Falls,  Kinderhook, Valatie, Niverville, N.Chatham and Nassau.

Marker of the Week  Fortnight (!)-- Proof!

                                                           "Rome Wasn't Built in a Day"

                                                          :)