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🏘️ Croton Local History
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familiarity, to push themselves among gentlemen.” For more see Walt Whitman’s America by David S. Reynolds. ↩ Share this: Print (Opens in new window) Print Email a link to a friend (Opens in new window) Email Share on Facebook (Opens in new window)
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Facebook Share on X (Opens in new window) X Share on Pinterest (Opens in new window) Pinterest Share on Tumblr (Opens in new window) Tumblr Share on LinkedIn (Opens in new window) LinkedIn Like Loading... Related Tagged Croton Water Celebration High
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Bridge (Harlem River) Walt Whitman Published October 9, 2013 October 21, 2013
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A short prose piece by Walt Whitman from his 1882 collection Specimen Days & Collect . Hudson River Railroad tracks running through Sing Sing Prison. Stereoview by G. W. Patch. It was a happy thought to build the Hudson river railroad right along the
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shore. The grade is already made by nature; you are sure of ventilation one side—and you are in nobody’s way. I see, hear, the locomotives and cars, rumbling, roaring, flaming, smoking, constantly, away off there, night and day—less than a mile
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distant, and in full view by day. I like both sight and sound. Express trains thunder and lighten along; of freight trains, most of them very long, there cannot be less than a hundred a day. At night far down you see the headlight approaching, coming
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steadily on like a meteor. The river at night has its special character-beauties. Shad fishermen starting out with their net. Photo by Clifton Johnson from his book The Picturesque Hudson . The shad fishermen go forth in their boats and pay out their
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nets—one sitting forward, rowing, and one standing up aft dropping it properly—marking the line with little floats bearing candles, conveying, as they glide over the water, an indescribable sentiment and doubled brightness. I like to watch the tows
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at night, too, with their twinkling lamps, and hear the husky panting of the steamers; or catch the sloops’ and schooners’ shadowy forms, like phantoms, white, silent, indefinite, out there. Then the Hudson of a clear moonlight night. View from the
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Tunnel near Garrisons. Hudson River. From the stereoview published by E. & H. T. Anthony & Co. But there is one sight the very grandest. Sometimes in the fiercest driving storm of wind, rain, hail or snow, a great eagle will appear over the river,
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now soaring with steady and now overhended wings—always confronting the gale, or perhaps cleaving into, or at times literally sitting upon it. It is like reading some first-class natural tragedy or epic, or hearing martial trumpets. The splendid bird
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enjoys the hubbub—is adjusted and equal to it—finishes it so artistically. His pinions just oscillating—the position of his head and neck—his resistless, occasionally varied flight—now a swirl, now an upward movement—the black clouds driving—the
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angry wash below—the hiss of rain, the wind’s piping (perhaps the ice colliding, grunting)—he tacking or jibing—now, as it were, for a change, abandoning himself to the gale, moving with it with such velocity—and now, resuming control, he comes up
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against it, lord of the situation and the storm—lord, amid it, of power and savage joy. Breakneck from the South. From the stereoview published by E. & H. T. Anthony & Co. Sometimes (as at present writing,) middle of sunny afternoon, the old
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“Vanderbilt” steamer stalking ahead—I plainly hear her rhythmic, slushing paddles—drawing by long hawsers an immense and varied following string, (“an old sow and pigs,” the river folks call it.) First comes a big barge, with a house built on it, and
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spars towering over the roof; then canal boats, a lengthen’d, clustering train, fasten’d and link’d together-the one in the middle, with high staff, flaunting a broad and gaudy flag—others with the almost invariable lines of new-wash’d clothes,
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drying; two sloops and a schooner aside the tow—little wind, and that adverse—with three long, dark, empty barges bringing up the rear. People are on the boats: men lounging, women in sun-bonnets, children, stovepipes with streaming smoke. From
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Specimen Days & Collect by Walt Whitman. Rees Welch & Co., Philadelphia, 1882. Related posts What a Delightful Ride Hudson River Railroad Maps, 1867 Share this: Print (Opens in new window) Print Email a link to a friend (Opens in new window) Email
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Related Tagged Shad fishing Walt Whitman Published October 13, 2013
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Postcard published by William Terhune, “Ossining on Hudson,” N.Y., circa 1906. Here’s a postcard of the nearly completed New Croton Dam, sent from Ossining on March 13, 1906. Share this: Print (Opens in new window) Print Email a link to a friend
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LinkedIn Like Loading... Related Tagged Post card Published October 17, 2013
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View of Haverstraw Bay, from off Scarborough. Published by the United States Coast Survey, Washington, D.C., 1868. Click the image to enlarge it. At first glance you might think this beautiful print is an etching made by a Hudson River
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painter—looking north from Scarborough, showing a sweeping, placid panorama of the widest section of the river, stretching from Rockland Lake to the mouth of the Croton. The artist has depicted a sailboat in the foreground—representing the romantic,
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natural state of the river—and contrasted it with the industrial future—a steamboat chugging to New York City from the factory buildings on the distant shores of Haverstraw. Detail from View of Haverstraw Bay, from off Scarborough . Click the image
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to enlarge it. This is a beautiful print, but it’s a steel engraving, not an etching; created not by Kensett or Cole, but by what was then called the United States Coast Survey—the oldest U.S. scientific organization, dating from 1807 when President
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Thomas Jefferson signed “An Act to provide for surveying the coasts of the United States.” Detail from View of Haverstraw Bay, from off Scarborough. Click the image to enlarge it. The print is one of a series of views of the Hudson which were
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produced to supplement detailed maps and “trigonometrical surveys” that began in the harbor of New York City, expanded up the Hudson River and eventually covered the entire coast of the United States. 1 Antipodean Books, Maps & Prints , a rare book
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dealer just up the river in Garrison, was kind enough to let us share this print, which is just one of a group of similar views of the Highlands they are offering. To see this specific print click here . For all the Hudson River Coast Survey prints