In the September, 1797 edition of the New-York Magazine, or Literary Repository a fascinating engraving was presented as the frontispiece. The image was accompanied by a short paragraph which follows below:
“The plate annexed represents a view of Kaats’ Kill, in the state of New-York, on the west side of Hudson’s River, about 130 miles north of the city of New-York. This village contains nearly one hundred houses and stores, and is in a thriving condition. It has the advantage of a considerable extent of back country, which is rapidly settling by an industrious set of people. Vessels of 80 or 90 tons approach it from the Hudson through a creek. —The mountains in this vicinity, known by the name of the Kaats’ Kill Mountains, make a majestic appearance, and, it is said, furnish many things for the gratification of the curious.”
New-York Magazine, Sept. 1797.
There is of course a considerable amount to address even in this simple woodcut. Top on my list is the “controversy” concerning the composition of the engraving itself. In Field Horne’s 1994 book The Greene County Catskills: A History this image is included and captioned as showing Catskill, but the caption further states that it was engraved in reverse — hence the community being located on the “wrong” side of the creek. This is incorrect, and assumes the image shows Catskill from the east bank of the Hudson River. As the excerpt above insinuates, Catskill Landing (the village hadn’t been incorporated yet) was not visible from the Hudson because it was farther up Catskill Creek and hidden from the river by a bluff. Within a decade of this engraving’s publication the long dock and wharf we know now as Catskill Point would be constructed for several businessmen in the community, but even in the 1820s observers remarked that aside from the long dock and steamboat landing little of the Village proper was visible from the Hudson. It is more or less still the same way today.
Instead of showing Catskill from the other side of the river, this engraving actually shows Catskill from the opposite side of the creek. The landing for “vessels of 80 or 90 tons” described in the excerpt was at that time in the vicinity of modern Catskill Marina at the foot of Green Street below Main. The community grew up initially in that vicinity before spreading further along Main Street. To understand the composition of this scene imagine the artist standing somewhere along the stretch of West Main Street between Creekside Restaurant and the garage and office of the Greene County Highway Department. The artist used some license to compose a birds-eye view, but recognizable features include the hop-o-nose rock at the right of the engraving, the central bluff where the Prospect Park Hotel once stood and where the Friary is today, and the mysterious building that looks like a church but is actually the old Academy. The latter building appears on maps of the Village from the 1790s as standing above Main Street but below the crest of the bluff.
A detail from John Cantine’s extensive map of the Town of Catskill from 1798. The map curiously shows a prospective municipal grid at Catskill Landing, which at that time had not yet been incorporated as a Village. The new academy building, constructed following an initial subscription among residents of the landing, appears as a landmark labeled “accadimy.” Detail from Map NYSA_A0273-78_369B in the New York State Archives, viewable at https://digitalcollections.archives.nysed.gov/index.php/Detail/objects/36925
For all of you on the Mountaintop the excerpt which accompanied this image should be of considerable interest. The image and excerpt were published during an intersectional period when the name of the Catskill Mountains was still in flux. There are maps published right up to the end of the 18th century which use “The Blue Hills” when referring to the Mountains, and this article calling them the “Kaats’ Kill Mountains” foreshadows the “Catskill Mountains” which would become their popular and official name.
Equally interesting is the editor’s final remark stating that the Mountains offered both a “majestic appearance” and “many things for the gratification of the curious.” The industrious people he spoke of as settlers in the backcountry were not the sort seeking pretty sights and relaxing getaways — what I mean to say is that the first settlers on the Mountaintop would probably have called the Catskill Mountains “inconvenient” rather than “majestic” and found the rocky soil and thick timberland anything but a “gratification for the curious.” If you do not want to take my word for this I implore you to try running a furrow anywhere in the Catskills and report back to me on the experience. All this is to say that the editor of the New-York Magazine, four years prior to the birth of Thomas Cole, was already sensitive to an alternative value in the scenery of the Catskill Mountains. Rather than being a place where profit only existed in lumbering, tanneries, and farming, the editor alludes to intrinsic value in the appearance of the place itself. Whether the writer ever lived to see his point proven is unknown, but within a century the biggest industry in the Catskill Mountains would be selling the region’s majestic appearance and gratifying the curious.
By Jonathan Palmer, Greene County Historian