On June 18, the Delaware & Hudson Canal Museum and Bienstock Family Mid-Hudson Visitor Center at the DePuy Tavern in High Falls opens to the public at long last. “It’s about 80 percent completed,” according to Peter Bienstock, D&H Canal Historical Society president and major donor. Last week Hudson Valley One got a preview tour of the space, introduced by Bienstock and a bevy of other D&H dignitaries and conducted by Bill Merchant, deputy director for collection, historian and curator of the Museum.
Some HV1 readers will be familiar with the recent history of the conversion of the building from the legendary DePuy Canal House restaurant into a repository for canal-era artifacts, triggered by a $500,000 grant from the New York State Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation in late 2014. The Open Space Institute came up with matching funds in the form of a loan that made it possible for the Historical Society to acquire the building the following year and launch a capital campaign. Restoration began with a roof replacement in the summer of 2018 and has continued, slowly but surely, through the pandemic years.
There’s a bittersweet feeling as one enters what is now the Visitor Center and was once nouvelle cuisine pioneer John Novi’s kitchen, where fabulous gourmet meals had been prepared for more than 45 years. Indeed, the first museum display to meet the eye is a collage of DePuy Canal House mementos, including a blowup of the four-star New York Times review by Craig Claiborne that put the restaurant on the map back in 1970 and a wine list chalked on a slate slab by the restaurant’s first sommelier (and later international wine guru) Kevin Zraly.
Beyond that point, the room opens out to reveal a counter, a tap-screen electronic concierge system to assist tourists in planning their activities in the mid-Hudson Valley, orientation signage around the walls and a large open space in the middle. “We hope to make it a kind of community center. We want to revive our lecture series, probably on Friday evenings, and have pop-ups during busy weekends,” Bienstock said. “It will also be an event space for rental, including the bluestone terrace that’s being relaid later this month.”
From the former restaurant kitchen, a 1973 addition to the building, the tour went on into the original structure, which was built as an inn by Simeon DePuy in 1797, more than a quarter-century before work began on the D&H Canal. The transitional space, a small room that the Canal House used for its dishwashing sink, was the only part of the historic building where the 18th-century floor planking had to be torn out due to years of water damage. A mirror, installed as an accessibility enhancement for people with disabilities, directs the eye upward to the original hand-hewn hemlock ceiling beams.
Traffic then flows into the Economics Room, a former Canal House dining room with an open fireplace, its walls painted in the authentic 1850 colors revealed after some 30 layers of old paint were stripped down during renovation. On one wall is a glimpse of exposed 1797 woodblock-printed wallpaper. Merchant said that the DePuy family had used this room as living space during the building’s tavern days, and that it likely housed slaves later on when the family built a separate home. Among the treasures displayed here is a grocery account book kept by the local locktenders during canal days, with entries in exquisite calligraphic handwriting.
Next comes a room with exhibits focusing on the founding of the canal and the historical trends that drove its creation. Merchant explained that the Hudson Valley was experiencing an “energy crisis” at the end of the 18th century due to the clearcutting of trees and the high price of coal imported from England for heating fuel. Upon the realization that “three-quarters of the world’s anthracite is in northeast Pennsylvania,” a gaggle of entrepreneurs got together to finance the digging of an 108-mile-long canal from Honesdale to the Rondout. Among the precious artifacts displayed in this room is an original copy of the 1829 act by the New York State Assembly authorizing the canal project — still in pristine condition, Merchant noted, because it was printed on “pre-acidic” rag paper.
Dubbed the Technology Room, the next exhibition space uses some original 1797 cabinetry to display more objects that explain the engineering challenges met by the canal-builders. There’s a cross-section of the revolutionary “wire rope” developed by John A. Roebling in the 1840s for use as cables for suspension bridges, including the High Falls Aqueduct in 1850 and the Brooklyn Bridge in 1883. This room already features a static three-dimensional model of a canal lock and will soon become home to the Historical Society’s old working lock model with moving parts. Other aspects of local industrial history also get a mention, such as the Rosendale cement industry, which throve on high-quality limestone deposits discovered during the canal’s excavation.
Proof that this Museum will be kid-friendly was provided on the day of the tour by a small girl named Ruthie, daughter of Egg’s Nest proprietors Eric and Cristina Silver. On one wall of the Technology Room is mounted an electronic signboard that shows several possible outcomes when the visitor flips a switch to try to set off a dynamite charge to excavate a canal lock. Ruthie giggled as she coaxed the animation through various mostly explosive scenarios.
The last room, with small dining tables arranged to evoke its past as a tavern and storefront, is devoted to the Social History of the D&H Canal. In the last few years earnest effort, as well as some grant money, has been put into unearthing and cataloguing the roles of women, children, people of color and immigrants in the operation of the Canal. Hoggees, as mule-drivers on the canal towpaths were called, could be as young as 7 or 8, Merchant said, and barge captains as young as 15.
He noted that, although “hundreds of thousands of women” are known to have worked on the canal, few of their names were recorded. To honor them, a glassed-in cabinet displays two quilts made by local women from fabric remnants bought from dry goods stores that lined the D&H Canal route. Outside the window can be glimpsed a metal sculpture by Gardiner artist Annie O’Neill: a silhouette of a young girl hoggee leading her mule, based on a rare antique photograph displayed in this room.
While some exhibits were still in the process of installation, it was clear from the tour that the renovation is nearly complete and the Canal Museum is on track to be ready for primetime by the Grand Opening on June 18. More high-tech interactive displays, video screens with QR code links and audio speakers for playing canawler songs are the last pieces left to fall into place. Each of the rooms has space available for more objects from the Historical Society’s collections, and Merchant never stops looking for new artifacts to add. Exciting new acquisitions are usually announced on the Museum’s Facebook page at www.facebook.com/dhcanalmuseum.
Once opened, the Museum will be open from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. seven days a week, staffed mainly by volunteer docents. To learn more, or find out how to volunteer or rent the Visitor Center space, visit www.canalmuseum.org.
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