The Forgotten Mills of Saugerties Michael Sullivan Smith
From the river
From the south
From the north
You can’t be what you can’t see.
T
his is a photo essay with a few words. It is a lament and a relief. It laments the loss of the community’s memory of these mills and the near total forgetting of their history that these mills represent. It is a relief that these aerial photographs by Morris Rosenblum have definitively captured the mills in their element and that so many documents are preserved in the Rosenblum and Lamb law offices that cover this period of the decline of the mills, making it easy to revive this history. Morris began taking these photographs following WWII when he returned with a surveillance camera. About five rolls of five inch negatives from the flights he took beginning in 1949 and continuing into the 1960’s, with several dozen contact prints and a few enlargements, were discovered in 2013 among the vast collection of historical surveys and maps during the organization of the law office’s collection. The aerial images in this essay are from these originals. Period images that were found framed on the law office walls together with photographs found in rare copies of the 1875 “Pearl”, rarer artistic images from the 1830’s, and post cards and displays produced by the businesses all show exactly what the mills looked like in their day. For this digital publication these images are all recorded in the highest resolution so they can be enlarged for studying detail. If more enlargement than is possible with the streaming version or printout of this work is desired please go here and download the full size PDF version into your computer. The text for this photo essay is taken from a talk on the mills of Saugerties prepared for presentation at Lifespring on October 22, 2014.
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The Forgotten Mills of Saugerties
Often we associate factories with early twentieth century labor issues and, more recently, mills with Rust Belt and economic decline. Neither has much to do with the mills of Saugerties. The history of Saugerties' mills begins so early relative to general industrialization and the factory system that they fit into a completely different historical context.
I
took the view across the rooftops of Kingston from a doctors office this past week. These were all factory roofs. Factories are where materials are made into products – iron and steel into automobiles; flour into boxes of biscuits. Kingston was a factory town. Mills prepare nature's materials for making products – iron; flour; fiber. Saugerties had iron mills and paper mills; some of the first.
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In 1836 Davy Crockett died at the Alamo. In 1834 he had visited Lowell Massachusetts and made his report to Congress on how delighted he was with the standard of living of the workers and with the American ingenuity he saw in the booming textile industry there. This was a real conversion for a southerner and it lost him the next election. When the mills of Saugerties were being planned, in 1824, the only real industrialization in America, the textile mills before Lowell's factory system got its start, were still too small and fragmented to mean anything to the economy. Anti-industrial views dominated
The Forgotten Mills of Saugerties
politics and markets in the United States. The priority in finance was agriculture. We were happy to let England make things from our plentiful raw materials and, besides, England was really forceful in safeguarding its industrial superiority. Even if a wealthy gentleman wanted to exercise a private interest in an industrial pursuit, there was virtually zero expertise in technology in America. Those that shared a passion to invent, develop, or innovate processes or even had gained mechanical understandings or learned how this was done in England were very few in number. When the earliest mills of Saugerties were built there was no investment capital, no trained engineers, no technical expertise, no machinery.
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In 1836 when the mills of Saugerties had been in operation for a full decade, Saugerties had created the first polytechnic manufacturing center in America. The year before, in 1835, New York Governor William Marcy visited the lead works of Edward Clark at Glenerie to show his admiration for the industrial development there and Dr. James Eights wrote of meeting Clark and Henry Barclay and of the youthful exuberance and explosive growth of the new mill village of Ulster. Saugerties was by this time an inspirational place for those involved in the formative years of polytechnic education and to those like Dr. Eights it was a mecca. This is a watershed event in history; the vanguard of an era; and it certainly doesn't get its due. Perhaps this is because it happened with a minimum of disruption, chaos and crisis. Saugerties was gracefully incubating the methods of responsible distribution of ideas that created the momentum that made America an industrial giant and that gentle narrative just doesn't make it into history books. I personally believe this connection between Saugerties and the growth of our nation is not widely known or studied because the mills of Saugerties are forgotten. By comparison, Salem, Massachusetts has the first National Historic
The Forgotten Mills of Saugerties
Site designated by Congress simply because its maritime history had been a subject of local preservation since the early nineteenth century. By contrast, Saugerties allowed decay and demolition for what would have been the relics of its period of grace.
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Thanks to the Information Age, we're now in a position to correct that. There are pictures that have been newly discovered and studied. Saugerties attracted artists early on and was sophisticated enough to have the earliest photographers practice here. Its mills were popular subjects and these images leave a decent idea of what they were like from when they were a curiosity in the landscape at the birth of the Hudson River School of painters to when they met their fate in the 1970's.
The Forgotten Mills of Saugerties
The story told by these pictures is of dams, canals, and waterwheel drives and mill buildings constructed in Saugerties between 1825 and 26 where the Esopus Creek drops to the tide water of the Hudson River. But it is the story in the written records that informs of what was housed in these mills; the most advanced machinery available from England; that is why Saugerties can be said to be the center of innovation in America at the time. Between the lines of these records Saugerties shows why it became a destination, an important place on the map, as so many accounts of the period are steeped in admiration for Henry Barclay and his development of what was regarded as wonders, and from which comes the narrative of his liberal approach to sharing all of this openly. The Saugerties we know today began when so many were arriving to see the mills. By1827
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Henry Barclay had laid out a village in streets and lots to capture and organize an exponentially growing population. Merchants and doctors and lawyers and craftsmen and butchers and bakers and, yes, candle stick makers had all come because the busy mills were here. Among these, people like Edward Clark and Matthew Laflin were here for the like spirits and energy of the place. After initially creating mills around Henry Barclay's water power, both moved to develop their own at other sites in the countryside; Clark to make lead paint at the Glenerie Falls and Laflin to make gunpowder on the Platte Kill at Fishcreek. More is being learned about these forgotten mills all the time. But it's Barclay's focus on revolutionizing the manufacture of iron and paper that made the most enduring impact on Saugerties and this is
The Forgotten Mills of Saugerties
what we have the most facts on. His primary focus was producing paper by machine, and he accomplished this by setting up the first fordrinier machine in America for making the first machine made paper in America. Within two years he had installed a second machine here and two years later the machines could be found manufactured in Connecticut and their use was spreading like wildfire. In history, both machine made paper as an industry and machine manufacture as an industrial sector were the result. The Saugerties Paper Manufacturing Company was the name under which the paper mill moved from Henry Barclay's to incorporation under Barclay family ownership in 1831. But Henry Barclay's relationship to paper in his time made it possible to just call it “The Paper Mill� and assume it meant Henry Barclay's.
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