Beneath the waters of the Hudson River Estuary lies a rich heritage of maritime history. Long before contact with European explorers and settlers, the river was a crucial component of Native American life and inter-village trading. The Hudson River was, to Native peoples, a valuable natural resource for as many as 12,000 years before European colonization. Since Henry Hudson’s voyage of exploration in 1609, the river has greatly influenced the development and expansion of the United States. It has served as a crucial link for domestic and international shipping trade between the Atlantic Ocean, New York City, the Great Lakes, and Midwestern U.S. Recent archaeological and historical research suggests that the river represents an extraordinary repository of undisturbed shipwrecks documenting some four hundred years of Euro-American commerce, military operations, technical developments and social history.
Submerged archaeological sites offer irreplaceable insight into the history of the river. Recent sonar imaging of the Hudson River bed has revealed images of the submerged objects, allowing researchers to describe their structure and likely origin, and integrating the submerged record into the known history of the Hudson River. These shipwrecks and other submerged resources in the Hudson River is have great historical value, and some sites have national and international significance. The Hudson River may have one of the oldest and best preserved collections of submerged historic resources in North America due to the strategic location of the river and its four-century role in European exploration and American expansion. Once one of the world’s busiest water highways, the Hudson River has been witness to exploration, colonization, wars, immigration and invention.
In 2011, The Hudson River Maritime Museum received funding from the Hudson River Valley Greenway to produce a white paper and programming for a Maritime Heritage program that would research, protect, and interpret historic features in the Hudson River. In May, 2017, the Hudson River Maritime Museum hosted divers, archeologists, cultural resources managers, academics, and the public for a day of presentations and discussions about New York's shipwrecks. The first annual Shipwreck Symposium represented the culmination of the Museum's multi-year initiative to focus attention on submerged cultural resources in the Hudson River and to position itself as an institutional leader in encouraging the preservation and interpretation of shipwrecks.
The Hudson River Maritime Museum has made this project available online, or printed in our Museum Store. A downable version of the research paper 'Preserving and Interpreting the Hudson River’s Submerged Heritage: Linking Submerged Resources to the Hudson Valley Landscape,' is available below. For more information, please contact us by email or call 845-388-0071 ext. 10.
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Contributors: Ellie Burhans, Editor-in-Chief – Hudson River Maritime Museum
Karl Beard – National Park Service Betsy Blair – New York State Department of Environmental Conservation Art Cohn – Lake Champlain Maritime Museum Roger Flood – SUNY Stony Brook Sydney Ganon – Hudson River Maritime Museum Adam Kane – Fairbanks Museum & Planetarium John Ladd – New York State Department of Environmental Conservation Daria Merwin – New York State Office Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation Kate Mitchell – Hudson River Maritime Museum Mark Peckham – Hudson River Maritime Museum Steven Resler – New York State Department of State Charles Vandrei – New York State Department of Environmental Conservation Brian Yates – New York State Office Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation