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Editor's Note: The following text is a verbatim transcription of an article written by George W. Murdock, for the Kingston (NY) Daily Freeman newspaper in the 1930s. Murdock, a veteran marine engineer, wrote a regular column. Articles transcribed by HRMM volunteer Adam Kaplan. For more of Murdock's articles, see the "Steamboat Biographies" category  The towing steamer "Pittston" at the cement work docks in Rondout Creek, undated. Donald C. Ringwald Collection, Hudson River Maritime Museum. Most of the steamboats built during the period before the Civil War were originally passenger vessels, and it was only in the later years of their service that they were rebuilt for towing purposes. Not so with the steamboat “Pittston”- she was one of the few sidewheel vessels built purposely for towing on the Hudson river, and she was in use for 57 years, hauling heavily laden barges on the river. The wooden hull of the “Pittston” was built at New York in 1852. She was 108 feet long, breadth of beam 20 feet, depth of hold six feet, and her gross tonnage was rated at 74 with net tonnage at 58. The Allaire Iron Works of New York built her vertical beam engine which had a cylinder diameter of 32 inches with an eight foot stroke. The “Pittston” was constructed for the Pennsylvania Coal Company and was considered one of the finest vessels of her type to appear on the Hudson river. During this period the offices and yards of the Pennsylvania Coal Company were located at Port Ewen and the towboat “Pittston” was placed in service towing canal boats off the Delaware and Hudson Canal from Eddyville to Port Ewen. She was under the command of Captain Thomas Murry with James Mollin as chief engineer, and she continued on this route for a period of 13 years.  Unidentified Cornell tugboat (far left) and towing steamer "Pittston" (center left) tandem towing two passenger barges, the "Empress" and "J. R. Baldwin." Donald C. Ringwald Collection, Hudson River Maritime Museum. In 1865 the Pennsylvania Coal Company moved its headquarters to Newburgh and the towboat “Pittston” was purchased by Thomas Cornell of Rondout. For the following five years the “Pittston” towed out of Rondout along the river to various ports, and in 1871 she was placed in regular service between Rondout and the city of Hudson. A year later, 1872, found the “Pittston” in service on the route between Rondout and Newburgh, towing in line with the towboats “Frank Carter,” “Ceres” and later the “Isaac M. North” of the Cornell Line. The crew of the “Pittston” during the years of the Newburgh run are listed as captain, William Roberts; pilots, Wash Saulpaugh and Joel Rightmyer; chief engineer, James Purdy. In the year 1875 the “Pittston” was withdrawn from the Newburgh route and placed in service between Rondout and Eddyville on the Rondout creek, taking the place of the steamboat “Maurice Wurtz” which had been towing on this route since 1857. The “Pittston” was used for towing the canal barges of the Delaware and Hudson Coal Company from tidewater at Eddyville to Rondout and she was under the command of Captain George E. Dubois, with Alonzo Woolsey as chief engineer. The “grand old days of the Delaware and Hudson Canal” came to a close in 1898 when the canal was abandoned, and the towboat Pittston” was then used around the Rondout harbor and as a helper for tows on the river. In September 1909 the “Pittston” was found to be in an advanced state of wear, and she was sold and broken up after 57 years of continuous service as a towboat. AuthorGeorge W. Murdock, (b. 1853-d. 1940) was a veteran marine engineer who served on the steamboats "Utica", "Sunnyside", "City of Troy", and "Mary Powell". He also helped dismantle engines in scrapped steamboats in the winter months and later in his career worked as an engineer at the brickyards in Port Ewen. In 1883 he moved to Brooklyn, NY and operated several private yachts. He ended his career working in power houses in the outer boroughs of New York City. His mother Catherine Murdock was the keeper of the Rondout Lighthouse for 50 years. The Pittston is one of many wrecked and abandoned boats in and around the Rondout Creek. To learn more about shipwrecks and other vessels, take one of our new Shipwreck Tours aboard our 100% solar-powered tour boat Solaris! If you enjoyed this post and would like to support more history blog content, please make a donation to the Hudson River Maritime Museum or become a member today!
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Editor's Note: These articles are from 1825 - 1827.  January 8, 1825; New York Evening Post The books opened yesterday agreeably to notice at the Tontine Coffee House, for subscription to the stock of the Delaware and Hudson Canal Company, with a capital of $1,500,000 were filed, as we are informed, at a little past 2 o'clock.  October 11, 1825 Vermont Gazette, Bennington. To Laborers. We are authorised, by the Board of Managers of the Delaware and Hudson Canal Company, to state by information of their agents it is probable, that one thousand men would find immediate employment on that part of the line which is located in Mamakating Hollow, Sullivan county.  February 24, 1826 - New York American Three Thousand Men. Will find employment at good wages, on that part of the Delaware and Hudson Canal, which is now under contract, commencing at the Hudson River, near the village of Kingston, 60 miles below the City of Albany, and about 80 miles above New York, extending through the counties of Ulster, Sullivan, and Orange, in the State of New York, to the Delaware River. A line of 65 miles of Canal, together with all Locks, Aqueducts, Culverts, Bridges, and Fencing is to be completed during the present year. Laborers and Mechanics will find employment on application to contractors on the line, as soon as the spring opens. The country is remarkably healthy; in this respect it offers greater inducements than any other work of the kind in the U. States, to all persons wishing steady employment throughout the season. (Signed,) Maurice Wurts, Agent, For the Delaware & Hudson Canal Co. Kingston, Feb. 2, 1826.  July 21, 1826 Albany Argus (Albany, New York) The work upon the Delaware and Hudson canal, (says the N.Y. Mercantile Advertiser) is progressing rapidly, and a union of the two rivers, (64 miles apart) is confidently expected this season. A continuation of the line upon the Delaware, is now locating, and more masons and laborers are wanted. Three thousand men are at present employed. Masons receive from 1.50 to 2 dollars a day, and laborers from 11 to 13 dollars per month, besides their board.  August 14, 1827 Albany Argus (Albany, New York) Delaware and Hudson Canal. (From the Ulster Sentinel). We announce, with peculiar satisfaction, that on Saturday morning last the canal boat Neversink of Wurtsborough arrived in tide water at Eddy-Ville from the summit level at Mammakating, a distance of 40 miles, without having encountered a single accident, or being detained a single moment by obstruction on the route. The canal has an abundance of water, and no difficulty was experienced in passing the locks. At the aqueduct thrown across the Rondout at the High Falls, the Hon. Nathan Sanford, of the U.S. Senate, accompanied by President Bolton and John Sudan, Esq. witnessed the progress of the boat, and were highly gratified with a short passage on the canal. The bottom and sides of the aqueduct are so impervious to water, that these gentlemen stood under it without being discommoded by any leak. We may observe, in explanation of the reports heretofore circulated, that the canal has been once or twice filled with water, previous to this experiment, and again drained, for the purpose of saturating the banks and allowing them to settle. They are, in consequence of this precautionary measure, now so compact and firm, that no interruption of the navigation is anticipated through breaches or apertures of any serious magnitude. The lock tenders and other assistants of the company are now taking their places on the line, and by the middle of this month, the whole distance from the Delaware to the Hudson, will be in perfect condition for regular navigation. Thus do we see a new, and, let us add, a blessed era opening upon the good old county of Ulster and her daughter Sullivan, even to the fulfillment of their highest hopes. AuthorThank you to HRMM volunteer George Thompson, retired New York University reference librarian, for sharing these glimpses into early life in the Hudson Valley. And to the dedicated HRMM volunteers who transcribe these articles. If you enjoyed this post and would like to support more history blog content, please make a donation to the Hudson River Maritime Museum or become a member today!
History of the Delaware & Hudson Canal - Supplying coal to the 19th century industrial era. From its opening in 1828 till its closing in 1899, the barges of the D&H canal carried anthracite coal from the mines of Northeastern Pennsylvania to the Hudson River at Kingston where it was transshipped to market in New York City. William Wurts was the first to explore the anthracite coal fields of North East Pennsylvania. He believed anthracite, sometimes known as “hard coal” could be burnt for heating and fueling of steam boilers. He brought samples back to Philadelphia for successful testing. When restrictions were placed on the import of British coal and inspired by the success of the newly opened Erie Canal , Wurts wanted to build a canal of his own from Pennsylvania to New York, through the narrow valley between the Shawangunk Ridge and the Catskill Mountains ending at the Hudson River near Kingston. William convinced his brothers Charles and Maurice to join him in creating the Delaware and Hudson Canal Company. In 1823 they successfully obtained charters from the States of New York and Pennsylvania to establish the canal company. Unlike the Champlain and Erie Canals the D&H company was to be privately financed. To attract investment, the brothers arranged for a demonstration of burning of anthracite in New York City in January of 1825. The reaction was enthusiastic, and the stock oversubscribed within hours raising 1.3 million dollars. D&H canal construction started in May 1825 and was completed October 1828 with the labor of 2500 men. The engineering challenges were significant as the canal had to climb 600 feet from the Hudson River at Rondout to reach the Delaware River and then proceed to Honesdale Pennsylvania. Overall 108 locks were required to travel the 108 miles. Fifteen miles of gravity railroad brought the coal over mountains, which were too steep for a canal, from the mines near Carbondale to be loaded on barges at Honesdale. The canal had to cross the Delaware River and did so using a slack water dam allowing barges to float across relatively still water of the Delaware. In 1847 a suspension bridge aqueduct designed by the now famous engineer John A. Roebling, increased traffic capacity and reduced conflict with log rafters bringing timber down river. The canal was quite successful and by 1832 carried 90,000 tons of coal and three million board-feet of lumber. Also shipped down the canal was Rosendale cement, bluestone, and agricultural products. With the canal’s success the communities along the canal grew into vibrant villages and towns. High Falls, Ellenville, Wurtsboro, and Port Jervis are present day reminders of the canal’s economic impact. During the later part of the 19th century, the canal faced increasing competition from railroads which ultimately benefited from a more direct route across New Jersey and the ability to operate for much of the winter, while the canal boats were wintering over, iced in at Rondout and New York. The canal ceased operation in 1899.Unlike many other canals of the 19th century the D&H canal remained a profitable private operation for most of its existence. Roy Justice is a singing historian known as a Time Travelling Minstrel. He presents programs on different aspects and topics of American History, combining music of the time period with the historical landscape within which the music was a part. https://royhjustice.com/home THE D & H CANAL - LYRICS Around and round the Wurtsboro Bend The big boat chased the squeezer Ed Lax’s boat had passed them both Slicker than the weasel In eighteen hundred and seventy-eight the canal was hit by a freshet The embankment broke and flooded the vly The damage was terrific. A load of cement went through the break Houses and barns were uprooted To try and save whatever they could To the river the big boat scooted There was a girl named Sarah Jane And a youth named Samuel They courted long and happily On the D&H Canal They loved each other tenderly And the Rosendale folks all said That before the boating season was o’er These lovers would be wed. These lovers would be wed. But they never did, for he succumbed to hard times. And his lifeless body was buried six feet beneath the sod Along the Twelve Mile level. And e’re her lover was dead one week She started keeping company With a junk dealer that did live up back in Rondout. Up back in Rondout. From “Of Canals and Coal”. Roy Justice Time Travelling Minstrel. 2007. Thanks to HRMM volunteer Mark Heller for sharing his knowledge of Hudson River music history for this series. If you enjoyed this post and would like to support more history blog content, please make a donation to the Hudson River Maritime Museum or become a member today!
 A busy day at Rondout c. 1880, shows the passenger steamer “M. Martin” turning in the Rondout Creek to leave amid a crowd of canal boats, some full of coal, at the end of Island Dock, during the heyday of the D. & H. Canal. Hudson River Maritime Museum Collection If you enjoyed this post and would like to support more history blog content, please make a donation to the Hudson River Maritime Museum or become a member today!  "Handy Book of the Catskill Mountains," 1887 traveler's timetable. Donald C. Ringwald Collection, Hudson River Maritime Museum. In working in the archives today with volunteer G.M. Mastropaolo, we discovered this delightful timetable in the Donald C. Ringwald collection. Outlining travel times and locations for steamboats, steam yachts, ferries, stages/stagecoaches, and railroads in Rondout, Kingston, "and vicinity."  Timetable for the ferry boat "Transport," leaving Rondout. Among the many time tables is that of the ferry boat Transport. To learn more about the Transport, check out our past blog post about its history and use.  Time tables for local stages and the steamboat "Mary Powell." Of particular interest to the collections staff and volunteers at the museum was this time table for the steamboat Mary Powell, the star of our 2020 exhibit, "Mary Powell: Queen of the Hudson," opening April 25, 2020.  Steamboats "Mary Powell" (center left) and "Albany" (right) at the Sunflower dock at the mouth of Rondout Creek. Hudson River Maritime Museum Collection. "Handy Book of the Catskill Mountains" was designed for those traveling to the Kingston area for access to the Catskill Mountains and mountain houses. Measuring just 4 by 2.5 inches, this tiny little handbook would fit perfectly in a pocket or lady's reticule. The Hudson River Maritime Museum is pleased to make this handbook available to the public. If you would like to view the entire book, chock full of both traveler's information and period advertisements, click the button below to download a PDF. If you enjoyed this blog post and would like to support the work of the Hudson River Maritime Museum, please make a donation or become a member today!
March, 2020 is March Membership Madness here at the museum. If you join in the month of March, you can receive 20% off (for 2020) any membership level. Learn more. The Hudson River was integral to the development of the Delaware and Hudson Canal. The Canal was conceived by Philadelphia dry goods merchants Maurice and Charles Wurts in the second decade of the 19th century, in order to transport anthracite coal from Pennsylvania mines to New York City. The coal traversed the 108-mile-long Canal, winding through the Lackawaxen, Delaware, Neversink, Bashakill, Sandburgh and Rondout valleys before arriving at the Hudson River near Kingston, NY. From there, the cargo would travel south on the Hudson for over eighty miles to supply the primary market in New York City. Coal was also shipped north to Albany—about forty-five miles—and from there it could be transported on the Erie Canal to support the westward expansion of the population.  Island Dock in the Rondout Creek showing coal loader machines made by the Dodge Coal Storage Co. of Philadelphia. The canal boats behind the steamboat have had their rear compartments 'hipped', the addition of higher sidewalls to accommodate a greater load, and appear to possibly rafted together to be towed by the steamboat. D&H Canal Historical Society Collection, #73.22. Benjamin Wright (the chief engineer of the middle section of the Erie Canal) oversaw the original plans for the D&H Canal, which date from 1823. He believed that “the Canal boats may navigate the Hudson. A steam boat of 50 horse power will tow ten of them, and if double manned will perform the trip to New York and back in 2 days, the distance 100 miles.”[1] However, the earliest canal boats, which were 75 feet long and 9 feet wide, with a capacity 30 tons, proved unsuitable for travel on the river. As a result, coal had to be offloaded from canal boats to other vessels at Rondout for transport on the Hudson River—a time-consuming and costly process. In Steamboats for Rondout Donald Ringwald writes, “...the canalboats obviously had to be small size and because of this and a need to keep them on their regular work, they generally did not go beyond the Company works on Rondout Creek.”[2] By 1831, the Company had begun purchasing barges for use on the Hudson. The first two were the Lackawanna (146 feet in length) and the James Kent (135 feet in length), and to tow them, the D&H Canal Company “chartered and then purchased an elderly sidewinder named Delaware.”[3]  Canal boats being unloaded with elevators made by the Chase Patent Elevator Company of Fall River, Mass. The picture was taken c1890 by amateur photographer and D&H employee Louis Hoysradt, who signed it on the reverse. D&H Canal Historical Society Collection, #82.19.14 As the Canal Company prospered, the Canal was enlarged. In the 1840s, the depth was incrementally increased from four to five feet, with no change in the original width of thirty-two feet. In 1847, anticipating increased traffic from a deal with the Wyoming Coal Association (which later became the Pennsylvania Coal Company) to transport their coal on the D&H Canal, the company enlarged the waterway, which reached its final depth of six feet and width of forty to fifty feet by 1850. The new dimensions of the Canal accommodated boats that were ninety-one feet long, fourteen and a half feet wide, and could carry up to 130 tons of coal.[4]  Men with shovels and wheel barrows moving coal on the banks of the Creek in Rondout. The cost of handling coal was greatly reduced after the 1850 final enlargement of the D&H Canal, as the larger boats could be towed on the Hudson River. D&H Canal Historical Society Collection, #82.19.2 Safe navigation of the Hudson was considered so important that, in a letter dated January 21, 1852 from head engineer Russel Farnum Lord to President John Wurts, a discussion of the new boats for the enlarged canal noted: “The Birdsall Lattice Boats derive their advantage of carrying the largest cargoes, mainly, if not entirely, from the difference in their weight when light – Their plan of construction however is such that there is a reason to doubt their durability and substantial ability for use on the river.”[5] Later, referring to boats from a different builder, he wrote: “From the experience had, it is evident that the Round Bow Section Scows are, and will be, the best and most desirable for the Coal Canal business – With them an important and permanent reduction in the rate of freight may be established – The only draw back is, whether they will be competent for the river transportation.”[6] The cost of handling the coal at Rondout was uppermost in their minds and the larger boats that the company ordered proved Hudson River – worthy.  The steamboat "M. Martin" turning around in the Rondout Creek in a 1896 photo. D&H Canal Historical Society Collection, #73.158 Throughout the 19th century and into the 20th, rafts of up to 100 canal scows were frequently encountered on the Hudson. On August 18, 1889 The New York Times wrote: Very few persons who journey up or down the Hudson River either upon the palatial steamers or upon the railway trains that run along both banks of this great waterway know how great an amount of wealth is daily floated to this city on the canalboats and barges that compose the immense tows that daily leave West Troy, Lansingburg, Albany, Kingston, and other points along the river bound for this city…. From Kingston, which is the tide-water outlet of the Delaware and Hudson Canal, another class of merchandise is shipped in the same manner. From the mouth of the Rondout Creek, which forms the harbor of the thriving and busy city of Kingston, can be seen emerging every evening huge rafts of canalboats, tall-masted down-Easters, and barges of various sorts, laden with coal, ice, hay, lumber, lime, cement, bluestone, brick, and country produce. Many of these craft have received their cargoes at the wharves of Kingston, while others have come from the coal regions about Honesdale and Scranton, in Pennsylvania, all bound for this port and consigned to, perhaps, as many different persons as there are boats in the tow.”[7]  Large tows of canal boats were a common sight on the Hudson River in the second half of the nineteenth century. D&H Canal Historical Society Collection, #73.143 From its opening in 1828 through the closing of most of the canal in 1898—and even through 1917, when the section from Rosendale to Rondout finally stopped carrying cement—the Delaware and Hudson Canal was responsible for vast amounts of traffic on the Hudson River. Indeed there would not have been a Delaware and Hudson Canal without the Hudson River! Notes: [1] H. Hollister M.D., History of the Delaware and Hudson Canal Company. Unpublished MS c1880. p. 22. [2] Donald C. Ringwald, Steamboats For Rondout, Passenger Service Between New York and Rondout Creek, 1829 Through 1863. Steamship Historical Society of America, Inc. 1981. p. 17. [3] Ibid. [4] Larry Lowenthal, From the Coalfields to the Hudson. Purple Mountain Press. 1997. pp. 142-48. [5] The letters of Russell F. Lord, chief engineer of the Delaware and Hudson Canal Company, June 1848 to October 1852. D&H Canal Historical Society collection #2016.01.01. Transcribed by Audrey M. Klinkenberg. [6] Ibid. [7] New York Times, August 18, 1889. AuthorBill Merchant is the historian and curator of the D&H Canal Historical Society in High Falls, NY. He lives in a canal side, canal era house in High Falls with his wife Kelly where he also works as a double bass luthier and antique dealer. |
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