Beavers serve as nature’s hydroengineers, creating ponds and lakes, diverting streams, slowing stormwater runoff and designing landscapes that welcome a myriad of waterfowl and fauna. Not the least of these is the great blue heron, which can often be seen perched in or around the beaver lodge at the Mill Brook Preserve in New Paltz.
The Great Chain could be dismantled and pulled ashore in winter, when the Hudson wasn’t navigable anyway, to protect it from being smashed apart by tide-tossed icebergs. Its placement in the river could also be adjusted using a pulley system. Just downriver, a second barrier of wooden booms was floated, making it nearly impossible for a ship to get up enough momentum to break through the chain – although the notorious traitor Benedict Arnold had advised the British that they could, when he handed over the plans to the fortification at West Point. They never tried.
Reclusive millionaire Oliver Hazard Payne was as wealthy as he was enigmatic. The eight years this bachelor lived in West Park left a legacy that lingers today.
Ingredients include vegetable rice, black beans, coleslaw, guacamole, pico de gallo, onion marmalade, a sweet chili sauce and cilantro. But the star of it all is the tender, juicy, short rib.
Millipedelike creatures called myriapods likely shared this forest ecosystem, but dinosaurs would not begin to evolve for another 140 million years.
Matthew Vassar barely acquired any formal education, being kicked out of night school after throwing a bottle of ink at the schoolmaster who had just smacked him in the head with a ruler. A niece named Lydia Booth, who had begun her teaching career as a private tutor and opened the Cottage Hill Seminary on Poghkeepsie’s Garden Street, was the first to plant in Matthew’s mind the notion that a fully accredited college for women was direly needed.
Many of the old Game Farm buildings still stand, and the site’s 3.5 miles of paved walkways – which connect to a 20+ mile trail system that leads to waterfalls and swimming holes – are open to visitors.
Part IV in a series on Hervey White. Erroneously named “founder” of Woodstock by Life magazine in 1938, White [1866-1944] is better described as godfather of a town he personally transformed into America’s most famous Bohemia, earlier even than 1920. But despite this fact, and although admired by artists and farmers alike, Hervey lived and died an enigma. Some knew part, but none knew all his secrets.
Creekside Bar and Bistro has opened in the old Matsu building in Rosendale. The new business is owned by former longtime Gilded Otter employees Reshma Ramoutar and Juan Galvan.
The lower Hudson Valley region and the Lake Champlain region are two of the largest and most important apple production areas in New York state, which ranks second in the nation for apple production and first in the country for canned apple products, although much of that crop is produced in western New York.