New York State : Gateway to America : An Illustrated History [First ed.] 9781892724595

Table of contents :
Front Cover
Front Flap
Half Title Page
Full Title Page
ISBN: 978-1-892724-59-5
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
1 DUTCH AND ENGLISH IN THE HUDSON VALLEY 1609-1763
The Purchase of Manhattan
2 REVOLUTIONARY COCKPIT 1763-1789
Joseph Brant 1743-1807
3 THE RISE OF THE EMPIRE STATE 1790-1830
Population of New York State and New York City, 1790-1830
Advice and Reflections of Judge William Cooper from A Guide in the Wilderness
The Code Duello
4 GROWTH, REFORM, AND CONTROVERSIES 1830-1860
The Caroline Affair and Alexander McLeod
5 INDUSTRIALIZATION AND URBANIZATION 1860-1893
Population of New York State and New York City, 1860-1890
Party Factionalism in the Gilded Age
Coney Island
The Chautauqua Movement
6 THE PROGRESSIVE ERA 1894-1920
Population of New York State and New York City 1890-1920
High Society
Greater New York, 1898
The Triangle Fire
7 PROSPERITY AND DEPRESSION 1920-1945
Immigrant Demographics
Mohawks in High Steel
8 THE WANING OF THE POSTWAR BOOM 1945-1975
The Population by Nationality
The Verrazano-Narrows Bridge
9 FINANCIAL CRISIS AND RECOVERY AFTER 1975
Population of New York State and New York City, 1950-1980
10 NEW YORK, NEW WORLD
11 CHRONICLES OF LEADERSHIP
BANK OF AKRON
BATTLE OF PLATTSBURGH / THE BATTLE OF PLATTSBURGH ASSOCIATION
CAZENOVIA COLLEGE
CHAPIN INTERNATIONAL INC.
CLARE ROSE BEVERAGES
CLEARVISION OPTICAL COMPANY, INC.
D. BERTOLINE & SONS INC.
MOUNTAIN S ERVICE DISTRIBUTORS
O-AT-KA MILK PRODUCTS COOPERATIVE, INC.
PAYCHEX, INC.
SECURITY MUTUAL LIFE INSURANCE COMPANY OF NEW YORK
SLANT / FIN
SPEED GLOBAL SERVICES
THE NEW YORK STATE HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION
ST. BONAVENTURE UNIVERSITY
WOLF X-RAY CORPORATION
TRY-IT DISTRIBUTING CO., INC.
A TIME LINE OF NEW YORK HISTORY
BIBLIOGRAPHY
INDEX
CHRONICLES OF LEADERSHIP INDEX
GENERAL INDEX
Back Flap
Back Cover

Citation preview

ATEWAY TO AMERICA

AN ILLUSTRATED

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$34.95

NEW YORK STATE

GATEWAY TO AMERICA

New York's topography and resources, he tero­ geneous population, and breadth of economic activi ties have generated an exci ting, complex history. In New York State: GatCWcJy to Amriai, authors David M. Ellis and Sherri Gol dstein Cash have wri tten an overview of New York's development that can be enjoyed by scholar and casual reader alike. Hu ndreds o f miles of shel tered coas t l i ne cap tured trade from the beginning of colonial settlement, making New York a door to the New World . Transportation has always been a key to New York's domi nance, from the engineering marvel of the Erie Canal to the present ne twork of turn pikes. The state

has had a fasc i nating political

history, producing many influential leaders in national,

state,

and

c i ty govern m e n t.

New

Yorkers are proud of their heritage and of their ethnic, religious, and pol itical diversi ty, a resu l t o f t h e successive waves of imm igration that washed over the stare. Today, New York remains a vibrant, influential entity. Its beau ty and history are illustrated by page after page

of remarkable vin tage a n d

bril l iant color i mages t h a t i l l u m i nate t h e text. The chapter ti tled "Chronicles of Leadership" detai ls the invaluable contri bu tions made by some of i ts businesses and organizations. Finally, an i llu strated chronology of sign i ficant events i n New York S tate h istory enhances the m a i n text and puts it all in perspective. A spl endid colorful celebration of a p lace and its people through rime, New York State: Gateway

toAmriai is certain to be treasured and turned to agai n and agai n .

NE

YORK STATE

AN ILLUSTRATED HISTORY

David M. Ellis & Sherri G oldstein Cash

© 2008 American Historical Press All Rights Reserved Published

2008

Printed in United States of America

Library of Congress Catalogue Card Number: ISBN:

978- 1 -892724-59-5

Ribliography: p.

l ·'-.1 udes Index

3 20

200893 5564

CONTENTS INTRODUCTION

9

Chapter 1 DUTCH AND ENGLISH IN THE HUDSON VALLEY, 1609-1763

15

Chapter 2 REVOLUTIONARY COCKPIT, 1763-1789

33

Chapter 3 THE RISE OF THE EMPIRE STATE, 1790-1830

55

Chapter 4 GROWTH, REFORM, AND CONTROVERSIES, 1830-1860

75

Chapter 5 INDUSTRIALIZATJON AND URBANJZATION , 1860-1893

97

Chapter 6 THE PROGRESSIVE ERA, 1894-1920

121

Chapter 7 PROSPERITY AND DEPRESSION, 1920-1945

163

Chapter 8 THE WANING OF THE POSTWAR BOOM, 1945-1975 Chapter 9 FINANCIAL CRISIS AND RECOVERY AFTER 1975 Chapter 10 NEW YORK, NEW WORLD Chapter 11

191

215

248

CHRONICLES OF LEADERSHIP

263

A TIMELINE OF NEW YORK STATE HISTORY

314

BIBLIOGRAPHY

320

INDEX

324

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INTRODUCTION

D

iversity has always characterized the history of New York province and state as well as its communities. A combination of factors encouraged diversity: topography and resources; a heterogeneous population; and the amazing breadth and complexity

of its economic activities. Edmund Wilson, America's leading man of letters in this century, spent much of his later

years at his ancestral home a few miles north of Rome, New York. He observed: "The country. magnificent and vast, has never been humanized as New England has: the landscape still over­ whelms the people." Wilson's observation highlights the creative tension and uneasy balance between man and his environment. On one hand nature has been singularly kind to New York. The great harbor with its hundreds of miles of sheltered shoreline enabled Manhattan's merchants to capture the bulk of the coastal, transatlantic, and interior trades in the early decades of the 19th century. The Hudson, a tidal arm of the sea for more than 100 miles, and its Mohawk tributary provided the best gateway through the Appalachian barrier. On the other hand nature compelled New Yorkers to perform amazing feats of engineering and construction. Note the digging of the 363-mile-long Erie Canal through the wilderness, the spanning of the Hudson River in addition to tunnels under it, the construction of the St. Lawrence Seaway. and the harnessing of the Niagara and St. Lawrence rivers for electric power. In I975 the state legislature selected the beaver as the state animal, a choice more than casually appropriate. Like humans, beavers try to change and conquer their environment. The legislature, however, might just as easily have picked the bulldozer as a state symbol, because it forced phantasmagoric changes in our cities and countryside after World War IL One example may suffice. Robert Moses, perhaps the greatest builder since Ramses II, marked the landscape with airports, bridges, highways, parkways, and power plants. Transportation has been the key to New York's development. The Hudson, turnpikes, canals, railroads, highways, and airlines forced each generation to make continual adjustments. Hardly had the canal system concentrated population in the urban corridor from Albany to Buffalo when businessmen and their political allies both within and outside that corridor promoted rail­ roads, which captured the bulk of the freight and the passenger traffic. The widespread acceptance of automobiles and trucks after I9IO spelled trouble for the railroads, which lost almost all of their passenger and much of their freight business.

Page eight: The brilliance of orange and gold illus­ trates the power and beauty of a sunset at Lake George. Photo by Daniel E. Wray Facing page: Hiking ML Hadley in Saratoga County is a popular outdoor activity. Photo by Daniel E. Wray

Almost every community developed a specialty, sometimes exploiting a resource such as lumber, sometimes relying upon the enterprise of an entrepreneur.Niagara Falls catered to hon­ eymooners but also to heavy industry eager to utilize the waterpower of the Niagara River. The sanitaria of Saranac Lake attracted Robert Louis Stevenson and other victims of tuberculosis, but when medical science conquered that disease, businessmen sponsored winter sports and opened summer hotel�. Because the Finger Lakes moderated the climate along their shores, farmers cultivated grapes, which in turn nourished wineries in that region. The genius, inventiveness, and entrepreneurial skills and talents of individuals have located camera production (George Eastman) in Rochester, business machines (Thomas Watson) in the Binghamton area, and electrical devices (Charles Steinmetz) in Schenectady. The people who have acquired skills, shown imagination, and demonstrated a capacity for hard work have always constituted the greatest resource. No other state has had so mixed a population as New York, with the possible exception of California after 1960.Director General William Kieft in 1643 reported that 18 languages were spoken in New Amsterdam. The relative tolerance shown by the Dutch and their successors, the English, was codified in the state constitution of 1777, which guaranteed religious toleration and provided for the separation of church and state. New Yorkers have usually gone beyond a passive toleration of differences; many have taken pride in diversity whether ethnic, religious, or racial. St. John de Crevecoeur, the French settler who wrote graceful sketches of frontier life in Rockland County just before the American Rev­ olution, noted, "Here individuals of all nations are melted into a new race of men ... " Politicians, too, have boasted about the ethnic diversity of the Empire State and "balanced the ticket" so that each party slate usually has representatives of the major religious groups plus a black and Italo-American. Quite often candidates for mayor of New York City and governor will first take the "three I" tour, a whirlwind visit to Ireland, Italy, and Israel.St.Patrick's Day in New York City and a number of upstate centers has become a community festival involving many more people than the descendants from Old Erin. The upsurge of black conciousness in the 1960s stimulated the revival of ethnicity among Jews, Italians, and other groups. Sometimes overlooked are the Yankees, those enterprising New Englanders who swept into every corner of the state after the Revolution and who dominated the commercial, cultural, and financial life of the Empire State for the rest of the 19th century.Beginning in the 1840s a torrent of Irish and Germans rapidly became the major elements of the urban population for the latter half of that century.Thereafter newcomers from Italy, Russia (mostly Jews and Poles), and other parts of southern and eastern Europe outnumbered the immigrants from north­ western Europe. After World War I Congress reduced the influx of immigrants, especially those from southern and eastern Europe.This legislation, however, did little to curb immigration to the Empire State; it merely changed the geographical origins of newcomers.Job opportunities during the two World Wars and the booms of the 1920s and after 1945 attracted blacks from the Southern states, where the boll weevil and the cotton picker displaced thousands of sharecroppers, until by 1970 blacks constituted about 13 percent of the state's population, three-fourths of them in the metropolis. In 1940 Puerto Ricans had a small beachhead in Manhattan, but the prosperous times during the next three decades and cheap air fares led hundreds of thousands of these Amer­ ican citizens to leave their overpopulated island. Other Hispanics joined this northern flight: Cubans fleeing from Castro's tyranny; the Haitians, Dominicans, and other Caribbean islanders, from poverty; Central Americans, from civil war.Today Spanish is the mother tongue of more than a million and a half New Yorkers. Assimilation has accompanied immigration at a different rate for various groups. Recently interfaith marriages, a sensitive index of acculturation, have steadily mounted, to the dismay

of Jewish rabbis, Catholic priests, and Protestant ministers. For each community-Dutch, Hu­ guenots, Palatine Germans-that has vanished, newer groups have sprung up, adding fresh colors to the warp and woof of the demographic pattern. Our capacity to tolerate significant differences in social institutions, national backgrounds, and economic status has impressed foreign observers and kept our society remarkably open to fresh talents. Clifford Wharton, who administered the State University of New York during the first half of the 1980s, is black; Edward Koch, Jewish, is mayor of New York City; Mario Cuomo, who occupies the governor's mansion, boasts of his Italian descent. New Yorkers have pursued the Almighty Dollar with wholehearted fervor and enviable suc­ cess since the Dutch founded two trading posts on the Hudson River. The English, who captured New Netherland to plug up a hole in their mercantilist system, expanded trade. Yankee invaders bore witness to the Protestant ethic of getting ahead. Consider the value system expressed by John Brown of Providence, Rhode Island, who purchased a large tract near Old Forge in the Adirondacks. In 1798 he visited his tract and divided it into eight townships, bearing the names Industry, Enterprise, Perseverance, Unanimity, Frugality, Sobriety, Economy, and Regularity. Despite this high-sounding nomenclature his settlement failed to attract settlers. For a century and a half after 1820, New York led all other states in foreign trade, domestic commerce, manufacturing, finance, transportation, and even the arts. Only recently has California seized the lead in population and manufacturing. Conviviality has characterized the lusty transient society that grew up in the seaport, canal centers, and village crossroads. William Dean Howells declared that nothing was more char­ acteristic of New York City in 1895 than "the eating and drinking constantly going on in the restaurants and hotels, of every quality, and the innumerable saloons." Upstaters also appreciated good food and drink. Saratoga Springs gave us potato chips; Buffalo immortalized chicken wings; and Phelps, near Rochester, has the largest sauerkraut factory. With all their getting and spending, New Yorkers have also displayed a social conscience and a sense of compassion. Allan Nevins, distinguished historian, observed that no other me­ tropolis has produced so many leaders of humanitarian societies as New York. Upstate became a nursery of reform movements as well as strange cults and communities before the Civil War. In 1848 the embattled women met at Seneca Falls and drew up a declaration of women's rights. Some reformers attacked Demon Rum; others established settlement houses to aid the needy. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People emerged from meetings of white and black leaders in Niagara Falls in 1910. Of course these achievements were offset by criminals (Murder Incorporated in the 1940s in Brooklyn and the Loomis Gang in central New York during the 1860s), social pathology such as draft riots in the Civil War, and eccentric personalities (John Brown and Amelia Bloomer). If New Yorkers had achievements galore, they also had their share of shortcomings. Change-constant, uprooting, unremitting-has transformed New York since the fire of 1776 consumed a third of Manhattan's buildings and Indian-Tory raids devastated the Mohawk Valley. But did not the countryside so lovingly depicted by Grandma Moses enjoy stability and cherish traditional values? Not really. Half of the cultivated acreage of 1880 has gone back to pasture, forest, or underbrush. Cheap wheat from the Genesee Valley and the Lake States undercut wheat growers in the Schoharie Valley after the Erie Canal was built. Dairy farmers shifted production from cheese and butter to fluid milk because of western competition and the coming of railroads with refrigerator cars. If thousands of farms were abandoned, many of them were bought by city-dwellers eager to secure a summer home or a place from which to commute to a job miles away. Vacationers, tourists, sportsmen, and families swarmed into every corner of the state: the Hamptons on Long Island; the Adirondacks with its lakes and peaks; the ethnic resorts in the Catskills; and the

lovely villages of the Finger Lakes region. Each generation has found it necessary to make thousands of adjustments because of the influx of newcomers, the rise and collapse of manufacturing plants and modes of transportation, and the shifting values of a cosmopolitan society. For many these changes brought pain and heartache as old neighborhoods lost their cohesion and some villages withered away. For even more people these changes brought opportunity and accomplishment. On the whole New Yorkers have not spent too much time lamenting change but have made plans for a brighter future. John Jay Chapman, American essayist, observed: "The present in New York is so pow­ erful that the past is lost." He was referring to New York City, but his observation applies equally well to the entire Empire State. As a student of New York State's history for half a century, I am indebted to the writings and insights of hundreds of historians inside and outside academic walls. Many thanks. I would also like to thank many librarians, especially those at the Hamilton College Library, for manifold favors. David M. Ellis

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DUTCH AND ENGLISH IN THE HUDS ON VALLEY

1609-1763 E

dmund Wilson, America's leading man of letters, observed in 197 1 that in New York "the landscape still overwhelms the people." Two-thirds of the state's land mass consists of upland regions including the Adirondacks in the northeast and the

Catskills and the Allegheny Plateau or Appalachian Uplands rolling gently across the southern and southwestern parts of the state. Each generation of New Yorkers has sought routes through or around these barriers, which have formed a backdrop to the unfolding drama of exploration, settlement, and transportation. Every corner of the state presented obstacles as well as opportunities to travelers and pioneers. In the west Niagara Falls blocked navigation between Lake Ontario and Lake Erie. To the north Indians and traders dared to shoot the rapids of the St. Lawrence River, but ships had to wait for canals and the Seaway. Challenged by these obstacles of varying magnitude, New Yorkers refashioned their environment by prodigious feats of engineering and construction. Novelists, songsters, and historians have celebrated the upstaters who dug the Erie Canal through

363 miles of wilderness, a stupendous achievement. Later generations displayed equal engineering prowess by erecting Brooklyn Bridge across the East River, by tunneling under the Hudson River, and by spanning the Hudson and the Narrows with bridges praised for their engineering and admired for their design. Within the past half century New Yorkers have harnessed the turbulent waters of the Niagara and St. Lawrence with dams and powerhouses. Pictures from satellites have given us three-dimensional views of New York's landscape. Most noticeable are the rugged Adirondacks, which geologically belong to the Canadian Highlands. Perhaps the oldest mountains in the world, these mountains emerged from the primordial sea millions of years before the Rockies took shape. Mount Marcy, 5,344 feet above sea level, is the highest

among the 46 peaks more than 4,000 feet high. The advancing and retreating glaciers wore down scores of peaks apd studded this region with hundreds of lakes by depositing moraines across the valleys. The New York State Forest Preserve of almost 2.5 million acres is the largest state park in the lower 48 states, and since 1894 the state constitution has protected this preserve by the "forever wild" clause in that document. The Catskill Mountains belong to the Appalachian chain. Once a plain, this region was pushed upward only to have its peaks rounded off by water, wind, and ice. The peaks, approximately 3,000 feet high, do not form parallel ridges like those in the Adirondacks. Because of its proximity

to New York City, the Catskill region annually attracts hundreds of thousands of visitors who throng its resorts and fill hundreds of motels. West of the Catskills the Allegheny Plateau extends southward to New Jersey and westward all the way to _Lake Erie, embracing about a third of the state's surface. Some 50 million years ago the Hudson River carved a channel from the Great Lakes to the sea. Ten million years ago the channel became deeper and extended well out to sea beyond Sandy Hook. According to geologists, the last ice age-about 20,000 years ago-cut its way

Page 14: The pristine beauty of this scene of the Sacan­ dega River in Hamilton County is not unlike what drew early explorers and settlers into New York and the New World. Photo by Daniel E. Wray Page 15: One of the earliest extant American land­ scapes, Van Bergen Overmantie, attributed to John Hea­ ton, was originally a panel over the fireplace of the parlor in the Van Bergen homestead. Rich in detail, it offers a comprehensive view of a Hudson Valley Dutch farm around 1733. Martin Van Bergen, the builder of the manor house, is depicted in his long coat, "knickerbocker" breeches, and white stockings. Courtesy. New York State Historical Association, Cooperstown Right In 1664 New York City, New Amsterdam, con­ sisted of a cluster of canals and streets, surrounded hy a protective wall Two gates guarded the city, a land gate near the western part of the settlement, and a water gate, shown here, at Wall and Pearl s1reer.1. Courtesy, Picture Collection, The Branch Librar­ iPs, Th