The Rensselaer County Historical Society has announced that they may be forced to close due to economic hardship. I will reprint here the message they sent:
We Need Your Help!
Keep the lights on and history alive!
To our members and friends,
As you may have read in [yesterday's] Times Union, RCHS is currently experiencing severe financial difficulty. The organization been running annual deficits for several years, and despite special efforts, the situation has now become critical. In a matter of weeks RCHS will no longer have funds available to meet its basic operating needs. What may have seemed - even ten years ago - a reasonable endowment with sustainable cash reserves has now dwindled to the point where we are no longer able to pay our bills. Without an immediate and substantial infusion of funds (upwards of $150,000), it appears that we will be required to close our doors while we work to implement a prudent fiscal strategy.
If we must close,
· our loyal and hardworking staff will be furloughed. Together these professionals have over 74 years of service to our community.
· exciting new educational initiatives, popular public programs, and long-planned exhibits would cease or be cancelled. The loss to our community - both economically and psychologically - would be incalculable. RCHS collections hold over 60,000 items of decorative arts, furniture, paintings, and sculpture. None of these items would remain available to the public. More importantly, an even greater number of documents relating to our past would be completely inaccessible. The utility bills alone for maintaining these collections are almost $6,000 a month.
· RCHS efforts as a major catalyst in highly visible efforts to use the historic fabric of our county to stimulate economic development will be curtailed. We hope to be able to continue serving - in fact inspiring - our community through these efforts.
We are beginning a public campaign to "keep the lights on and history alive!" As in the past, we are grateful for your active interest and suggestions regarding strategies to ensure RCHS's survival. We also urgently need your personal assistance in providing immediate financial support during this financial crisis.
Our plan is to take the next three to four months to develop - in partnership with our supporters - a new business plan for RCHS, designed to ensure its long-term sustainability. We are fortunate to have Rachel Tooker, a very experienced and energizing Transitional Executive leading this effort. The dedicated members of the RCHS board are prepared to join Rachel to discuss our finances and future plans in detail. Please give us a call if you have questions or suggestions for us.
In the meantime, here are some things you can do to help RCHS:
Help us to spread the word about RCHS and its positive impact on the community.
Distribute RCHS membership and program brochures to your clubs and community organizations.
Hold a brunch or get-together and make a group donation to RCHS.
Give an RCHS membership as a birthday present or gift to a new neighbor.
Volunteer to help with an RCHS program or project.
Send us your ideas for making RCHS sustainable and an even more valuable part of the community.
Wednesday, March 11, 2009
Rensselaer County Historical Society May Close
Friday, February 13, 2009
Threatened Churches of Troy
Here is an announcement from the Rensselaer County Historical Society about an upcoming event looking at the threatened churches of Troy:
Many of our downtown churches are threatened by declining attendance and the demands of maintaining historic structures.In Troy, the Roman Catholic Church plans to close six of the fourteen churches in Troy; two of the five Episcopal Churches are for sale, and others are also threatened. Unfortunately, many of the most threatened churches seem to be the oldest and most historic.
Architectural historian Ned Pratt will survey the important architecture and stained glass of these churches, and examine several examples of the adaptive reuse of historic Churches, including four in Troy itself.
Ned Pratt is a preservation consultant and President of the local chapter of the Society of Architectural Historians. He has an interest in the stained glass and architecture of area churches, and has given talks and tours of area churches and stained glass for the Hudson Mohawk Gateway, Hudson Valley Community College, the Sage colleges, Historic Albany, and for Oakwood Cemetery - to mention just a few.
Please note - due to the public interest in this talk, it has been moved from RCHS to the Bush Memorial Center at Russell Sage College. The Bush Center is an adaptive reuse of the former First Presbyterian Church and provides the perfect setting for this topic.
The event will be held Thursday, February 19, 2009, 5:30 - 7:30 pm at the Bush Memorial Center, Russell Sage College, First & Congress Streets, Troy.
Although there was an area of intensive social services centered on St. Mary’s Church that had grown at the base of Mount Ida north of the Poesten Kill, in the late 1800s there were few churches serving the area around the lower Poesten Kill. Between Washington Park and the Poesten Kill there was just two: Saint Jean Baptiste (St. John the Baptist) and St. Laurence; south of the Poesten Kill there was only St. Joseph’s. Saint Jeane Baptiste was a French speaking church that was organized in 1850 on Ferry Street; their church on Second Street, south of Adams was dedicated in 1869. St. Laurence’s Church was a German speaking Roman Catholic congregation. It was first organized at meetings at St. Mary’s Church and then for a year at Alexander Lutzelberger’s Billiard Hall on River Street; they met at the French church in 1869 and the following year began building their church on the southeast corner of Third and Jefferson streets.
Wednesday, January 28, 2009
A New Book About The Poesten Kill
On the Hudson River along upstate New York’s eastern border within the natural boundaries of river and mountains lies the rough rectangle of Rensselaer County. It is literally cut in half by the Poesten Kill, a powerful stream that scours its way downhill from 1,600 feet in the Petersburg Mountains to the sea level flats of the Hudson River. The Poesten Kill splits the county across the middle into two pieces of roughly equal size, north and south. It tumbles off the mountains and meanders across a ten-mile wide plateau and then falls abruptly through a series of steep gorges to settle into the Hudson River floodplain.
Although frequently hidden now behind modern development and historic ruins, the Poesten Kill’s geologic wonders are impressive. As it descends, the kill cuts through layers of rocks, shales, and silts and emerges from forested mountains, winds through rolling farmland, falls over steep cliffs and slides into the tidal Hudson. There are five major natural waterfalls on the Poesten Kill. They include Poesten Kill High Falls (Mount Ida Falls) in Troy, Barberville Falls in east of Poestenkill Village, and three falls in the Town of Brunswick: the falls at Eagle Mills, Fred's Falls in Cropseyville (on the Poesten Kill’s largest tributary, the Quacken Kill), and Buttermilk Falls.
The Poesten Kill has been home to American Indians who hunted, gathered, fished and farmed along its shores, frontier Dutch farmers and traders, colonial tradesmen, merchants, millers, and lumbermen, and nineteenth century iron, steel, textile, and paper workers. Dutch, English, Irish, German, French, Italian, immigrants and others have lived along its length. Its mouth at the Hudson was the first truly European frontier settlement beyond the walls of Fort Orange (what is now Albany).
So the Poesten Kill was a frontier outpost that seemingly had it all: a large flat farmable flood plain, a potent source of water power, and it also had room to grow. From the mouth of the Poesten Kill, Manhattan Island, the Atlantic seaboard, Lake Champlain, Montreal, the St. Lawrence River, the Mohawk River, the Great Lakes, the Hoosac River and New England were all within reach – even in prehistoric times. The markets at Albany, New York, and later Troy in particular, are crucial to understanding the development along the Poesten Kill.
The force of the water in the Poesten Kill helped drive the early development of Troy, once one of America’s most important nineteenth century industrial cities. The Poesten Kill’s waters were harnessed for the American industrial revolution that built the golden age of American industry, trade, and commerce; its banks afterward stood witness to industrial abandonment and urban decline.
Mills established along the Poesten and Quacken kills sent their goods, mostly grain, farm produce, wool, cotton, and iron products, but also a variety of other consumer goods, to the markets at Troy and beyond. For instance, in the 1870s Poestenkill Village was home to saw and grist mills, a cotton batten factory, a flax mill, and a shirt factory. At the same time mills along the Quacken Kill produced twine and carpet warp, paper, brush handles, cotton batten, carded and fulled wool, including cashmere, flannel, and yarn. At Eagle Mills there were saw and grist mills, two iron foundries producing hoes and other farm tools, and nearby, three shirt factories.
At the head of Hudson River navigation the mouth of the Poesten Kill was located at the eastern end of the Erie Canal, the southern end of the Champlain canal, and an important center of the very early Rensselaer & Saratoga and later Troy & Greenbush and New York Central railroads. The Poesten Kill was home to the first paper factory in Northern New York and for many years Troy rivaled Pittsburgh in iron and steel production. What really made life along the Poesten Kill so unique, however, was the diversity of products made there. Unlike other eastern urban areas, the Poesten Kill was home to producers of agriculture and forest products along with feed, flour, paper, plaster, paint, textiles, iron and steel products like stoves, valves, and wire – a substantial variety of consumer goods used along the kill and in the world beyond.
The Poesten Kill, will be published by The History Press this Spring. I'll be posting plenty of additional material here that didn't make the book, along with images, maps, and more. You can sign up to get the RSS Feed or get the posts by e-mail by entering your email address at right.
Until The Poesten Kill is available, pick up a copy of Don Rittner's new book Remembering Troy: Heritage on the Hudson
