This article features an interesting print which comes to us from the digital collections of the New York Public Library. I was clued into the existence of this image by a friend across the river who saw a bound collection of these prints up for auction on Ebay. The Greene County Historical Society didn’t try to bid on the eBay listing, but I was able to find a free version online to satisfy our curiosity!
Irma and Paul Milstein Division of United States History, Local History and Genealogy, The New York Public Library. "View of the Hudson and the Catskill Mountains" New York Public Library Digital Collections. Accessed February 14, 2022. https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/510d47da-55c9-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99
This view of Middle Ground Flats and the communities of Athens and Hudson come to us from a work by Jacques Gerard Milbert first published in Paris in 1828 titled: “Itineraire Pittoresque du Fleuve Hudson et des Parties Latérales de l’Amérique du Nord.”
Within the three volume set are 54 lithographed views of the Hudson River Valley. I found this particular view of note for one initial reason - it may be the earliest view available of the ferry cut or "canal" that was dug through Middle Ground Flats for the benefit of the Hudson-Athens Ferry in 1818. The canal was less than a decade old at the time the scene was composed, and shows a steam-powered ferry using the cut. At Athens today one can still spy the remnants of this canal from the Riverfront Park by discerning where the thinnest region of tree growth is on the now heavily wooded flats.
The steam ferry was an interesting inclusion by the artist, because Athens wouldn't receive its first steam ferry until the 1850s. Perhaps the person composing the scene thought a steam ferry would convey a better sense of the progress and affluence that was on display in the Hudson Valley at that time. What the artist would have actually seen was a "Team Boat" powered by several horses on treadmills which plied the same stretch of water.
The scene itself is composed from somewhere near Promenade Hill in Hudson at the end of Warren Street, and I find the artist’s inclusion of some Hudsonians having a leisurely picnic to be a very interesting feature of the scene. These well-dressed folks were part of an affluent up and coming merchant/leisure class that called Hudson and Athens home in the 1820s, and they are no doubt picnicking in a spot where they could look out on a scene they found beautiful and also had financial interests in. Perhaps one or two of the picnickers may have owned some of the ships sailing the river, while others on this picnic profited from trade of the goods being carried in the holds of those passing vessels. Still others may have owned and leased tracts of land in the distant Catskill Mountains.
“Four ships? Thats nothing - I’m exploiting the labor of seven tenant families in the Hardenbergh Patent!” - possible quote of a picnicker.
These leisure class picnickers are one and the same as the clientele who came to the earliest resorts of the Catskill Mountains; through their consumption of new art forms and materialistic diversions they would inadvertently help define the intrinsic value of the American wilderness while paradoxically continuing to exploit and industrialize it.
Cumulatively, Jacques Gerard Milbert’s stirring scenery, bustling traffic, carefree populace, and built landscape all conspire to make a definitive statement about what the United States was in the 1820s.
Questions and comments can be directed to Jonathan Palmer, Greene County Historian, via archivist@gchistory.org
An earlier version of this article first appeared in Porcupine Soup on March 12, 2021.