Immigration to and Emigration from Schwäbisch Hall

One of Hastings' early shopkeepers, Frederick Breyer, was included in a book recently published by the city archive of Schwäbisch Hall in Germany. The translated title of the book is "Immigration to and Emigration from Schwäbisch Hall: 1600-1914." For those of you who speak German, we now have a copy of the book in the Historical Society library. Here is an online version. Some of the following material is from our files and some is information translated directly from the book. The photos included in this post are the same ones provided to the authors of the book.

Friedrich Breyer (known as Frederick Breyer in the U.S.), was the son of a railway linesman from Uttenhofen. Friedrich was born in Heilbronn, Germany in 1869 and raised in Schwäbisch Hall. In 1884, he emigrated to the United States at the age of 15 with his 22-year old half-sister Catharina (his mother’s illegitimate daughter). His younger brother Christian Breyer (born in 1872) followed his siblings to New York in 1889, but vanished without a trace in August of 1890. 

Proprietor Fred Breyer behind the counter of his meat market, Breyer's Prospect Market Choice Meats, at 3 Spring Street, c. 1910

Frederick settled in Hastings-on-Hudson in 1899, where he married a native-born American and opened a butcher shop on Spring Street. Named "Breyer's Prospect Market," the shop was a mainstay of the village's commercial district for several decades.

Fred Breyer is in the center behind the dog, his son Fred, Jr. is seated on the barrel, and Anna Rohrbach is standing on the far right, c. 1910. This location today is the home of Giordano Beauty.

Frederick's business must have flourished, because he was able to purchase a Ford Model T truck for his establishment in the 1910s. 

Prospect Market truck, likely in the late 1910s

Prospect Market truck, overlay Google Map.

In 1920 Breyer sold his business and retired; he died in 1925. His obituary called him one of the most remarkable men of Hastings, because he continued with his trade -- without any obvious impairment -- despite ultimately losing his eyesight completely. 

Fred Breyer, Jr. on the Warburton Avenue Bridge with Demmler children, one of whom is probably Charles Demmler. Photo is c. 1905-1910.

A Fourth of July Parade – 1910s style

In 1941, long-time Hastings resident Stephen Zebrock wrote a column for the Hastings News called “Main Street Through the Years.” In this column, he set down everything he could remember about his childhood in Hastings in the late 1910s. This week, we thought you might like to read what Stephen wrote about Fourth of July parades. (The photographs that illustrate this post are from the 1914 parade. For more information, click on a specific photograph.)

“Parades were really an event in our lives. A Fourth of July parade would have every kid in the village agog for weeks in advance. Who would march in it? Which band would lead? Where would they start? Ann and I and Margaret and Emma Rimar would awake at six A.M. actually waiting! Finally at eight o’clock or so we’d rush downstairs, wash up, dress, and dash out into the front yard.

My father had built a large picket fence insuring privacy and also a box-seat view of any Main Street proceedings. A hundred precautions to keep our clothes clean, and we’d finally hear distant drums beating…. The parade was coming! Across Warburton Avenue Bridge, we could see the gaily-colored stream of people marching toward us. There they were—going up Main Street.

Look! There’s Louie [Zebrock, Stephen’s older brother], and Steve Snyder, Joe Meyer, and other members of Hastings Brass Band. There too was Mr. [John] Prince, Kitty’s father. Next came Capt. [William] Cronell, looking like a general out of a history book, at the head of our police force. Then came the school children (no one under the fifth grade was allowed to march) all decked out in their finest, all the girls showing their newly-made curls (after a night of torture). …


Next in line came some of the teachers. I recognized Miss [Kate] Crane, Miss [Agnes] McLave, Laura Caffyn, Mae Devery, Emma Van Nostrand, Grace Harlow, Margaret Waldbillig, Grace Sylvester, Mary Toole, Miss Senn (my teacher) and Mr. Peters, the Manual Training teacher. Our new principal, Mr. [H.H.] Murphy, lead this contingent. Following the teachers came some of our well-known and most popular citizens: A.W. Bevers, C.C. Delanoy, John Lawler, Jas. Magee, Dr. H.C. Sherman, Frederick Zinsser [owner of Zinsser Chemical Company on the waterfront], Dr. W.J. Doerfler, Louis Limekiller, and Nicholas Cook.

The Hastings Girl Scouts following the Boy Scouts took a round of applause. The Hungarian, Russian, Italian, Irish, and other local societies were well-represented, their native flags side by side with the American Flag.

About this time my mother would leave the kitchen to join Aunt Vera, Uncle John, my father, Mr. and Mrs. Szabo, and, generally, the proprietor of our home, Mr. Wagner, and his family. The parade stretched on, there were four or five different kinds of bands—from Uniontown, the Manor, from ‘the Juvenile Home’ up the Hill, and at least two or three brass bands. Finally, only a gang of kids trailed by…. The parade was over.

At the holiday spread, the one topic of conversation was the parade. “Didn’t Captain Cronell look dignified. Didn’t our Louis play better than all the rest? Wasn’t Mildred Young pretty in that girl scout uniform. Bill Hogan looked like a real captain. And the new dress on Kathlyne Collins! Mr. Zinsser looked like a Major in that uniform. And did you notice Dr. Doerfler marching?” This was a sample of the talk around the dinner table. We didn’t know whether to eat or talk. After all, didn’t everyone in the village turn out? And hadn’t people come for miles just to see our parade? Darn tootin! A parade in Hastings was an event in those days.”

House Tour Preview: Margaret Sanger’s Window

Margaret Sanger in a photograph she included in her book My Fight for Birth Control with the caption "Suburban Motherhood."

In 1998, Margaret Sanger was included in Time Magazine’s 100 Most Important People of the Century for her relentless crusade for women’s rights, and especially for birth control (a term she coined) as the tool with which women could take control of their lives. The revelations that led her to this vocation came in the tenements of the Lower East Side in 1912, two years after she left Hastings.

Margaret came to our town with her architect husband in 1904, recovering from the birth of her first child and a bout of tuberculosis, but full of hope for a life of motherhood and stability. She left in 1910, healthy again and bored with suburbia, anxious only to return to her nursing career and “the great Pageant of Living” in Manhattan.

In her 1931 book My Fight for Birth Control, she said that, looking back, she could see how every detail of her past life contributed to her final calling. Margaret had a love/hate relationship with the house that her husband designed for the family in Hastings’ Locust Hill, a development just east of North Broadway that included lots along Edgars Lane, Sheldon Place, Minturn Street. For Margaret, the house represented both a happy family life and the narrow suburban values that she would later struggle to change.

“In looking about the suburbs for a suitable location in which to build and bring up our family, we decided that we needed something more than a mere house. We wanted space. We wanted a house with a view. We wanted a garden. At Hastings-on-Hudson we came across a new development consisting of about fifty acres of hillside land overlooking the river. The land had been purchased by a group of professional people with the idea of developing a colony of homes for men and women of congenial tastes, and to insure a proper environment for their children. We were delighted with its possibilities. We bought an acre of this land with high hopes. We were going to have our own home at last! We were going to settle down for life. We were delighted with our neighbors. We planned a large family; a comfortable serene, suburban existence. …

The Hudson River looking west from the Locust Hill development, ca. 1915.

Ours was but one of several houses then in the early stages of construction. We were brought in close contact with our neighbors who were facing similar problems, the two primary ones being the building of a home and the rearing of a family. The wives spent their afternoons together conferring on these monumental problems. Out of our informal meetings there sprang a “literary” club… . It was made up of the wives of the artists, professors, scientists, doctors, and high school teachers who made up our little colony. There was an inclination, among both husbands and wives, to sink back into a complacent suburban attitude, to enjoy petty middle class comforts. For the wives, the height of adventure was a day “in town”—a shopping expedition followed by a bargain matinee. This adventure would furnish conversation for us all. At the “literary” club we read papers on Browning, George Eliot, Shakespeare, closely following the suggestions of the courses given at Columbia University. But deep in my soul I could not suppress my own dissatisfaction with the futility of such interests.

Meanwhile our house was nearing completion. It was “modern” in architecture, one of the first of its kind in this vicinity. It was even called a “show” house, and people came from far to study its simple design and the unadorned surfaces of the fireproof stucco of its walls.

Great was our anticipation of the day of its completion. For weeks we both worked on our “rose window,” which was to surmount the open staircase which led upstairs from the library. Every petal had been cut, leaded, and welded together by our own hands. After the baby had been put to bed, we worked far into the night. It seemed to me as if this rose window was the very symbol of the stability of our future. …

At last our furniture was moved in. Carpenters and painters were pushed out. Everything was completed and finished. … Weary at last but like happy children on Christmas Eve, we tumbled into bed. We were rudely awakened a few hours later by a pounding at the door and the shout of the German maid—“Madam, come! come! A fire in the big stove!” The house was on fire!

There was no telephone within half a mile of the house. My husband ran in his night clothes to sound the alarm, but it was already too late.

The Sangers' house (background, right) in Locust Hill, ca. 1910.

I carried my terror-stricken son Stuart to the top of the staircase. Flames were then leaping through one side of it. I was confronted with a terrific danger: dare I venture down those steps? I knew I must. I put the bath robe over the child’s head, and pressing close to the other side of the wall I descended cautiously but finally to safety. I crossed the street to our nearest neighbor’s. I tucked the youngster into an impromptu bed with a prayer of gratitude that we had escaped with our lives.

In a few moments the flames that were consuming the staircase had swept through our precious beautiful rose window! This I realized as I stood gazing from the neighbor’s window into the night. … I recalled our cut fingers, our bleeding hands, our irritated nerves, our fatigued eyes, all the loving hopes and ambitions which had gone into that window. …

I stood there amazed, but I was certain of a relief, of a burden lifted, a spirit set free. … Somewhere at the back of my mind I saw the absurdity of placing all of one’s hopes, all of one’s efforts … in the creation of something external that could perish irretrievably in the course of a few moments. … My scale of suburban values had been consumed in the flames, just as my precious rose window of leaded glass had been demolished. …

Fortunately, the construction of the house was fireproof, and while the inside woodwork, doors and floors were badly damaged there was the possibility of quick restoration. Within a few months the place was renewed, and life went on apparently as if the fire had never been. But to me all was different. …

A new spirit was awakening within me; a strong, insistent urge to be in the current of life’s activities. I felt as if we had drifted into a swamp and had to wait for the tide to set us free. The fire, the destruction of the rose window, had done this. I was never happy in that house again. The first opportunity we had to sell it we let it go. We moved our three children back to New York to take our part individually or collectively in the great ‘Pageant of Living.’”

Teacher Jessie Trube and her kindergarten students, ca. 1908. The boy in the center of the front row is Stuart Sanger, Margaret's eldest son. The other children are neighbors of the Sangers, and "Bennett's Shack," where Jessie taught at this time, may have been an outbuilding of the R. Grant Bennett who lived on Sheldon Place.

Margaret and William Sanger’s house will be part of our May 22 & 23 house tour. For more information and to purchase tickets, follow this link.

Volumes of Good Wishes from the Historical Society

In 1982 Algernon Gordon Smith, known to his Hastings friends as Gordon, gave the Historical Society a small scrapbook of greeting cards, two of which you see here. Gordon was a third generation Hastings-ite, and he and his wife were charter members of the society when it was founded back in 1971. He was the first editor of the Hastings Historian and the second president of the Historical Society, and his historical notes are some of the oldest in our files.

Gordon compiled his scrapbook in the first grade – that would have been in 1911. One of the cards in the book actually has a copyright date of 1909, so Gordon had probably been collecting these cards for a few years. He gave his little scrapbook as a present to “Mrs. Smith,” presumably his mother. And today we share it with you – with volumes of good wishes this holiday season!

In Honor of Veteran’s Day

Parade on Main Street during or just after World War I, possibly on Armistice Day, November 11th, 1918

Parades matter. And Joseph Semberger reminds veterans why in the “Commander’s Message” from a booklet produced in 1969 for the 50th anniversary of the James Daley Post No. 200 of the V.F.W.:

“Each of us has an important role in this celebration. As you march up Warburton Avenue with your visiting delegations and military units, remember one important fact – your presence will help to rekindle that spark of patriotism which has been slowly vanishing in our modern society. We hope it will leave a lasting impression in the minds of the spectators, young and old, who will line the route of the parade. If by our actions we can generate the feeling of pride in being Americans, then our efforts will not have been in vain.

Certainly you must remember when you, as a child, stood in the sidelines and watched similar parades, that vibrant feeling of pride running up and down your spine as each band went by. How proudly you stood at attention to salute the Flag borne by the color guards of each contingent… Remember?”

World War II veterans in the Memorial Day parade on Warburton Avenue in 1949

Billie Burke and Burkeley Crest

Mary William Ethelbert Appleton “Billie” Burke, best known as the good witch Glinda in the 1939 film version of “The Wizard of Oz,” began her film and stage career in 1907. She was 24 years old and already a star when she bought the Kirkham estate on Broadway in Hastings in 1910. The estate possessed a fine mansion that Billie re-christened Burkeley Crest. In 1914 Billie Burke and Flo Ziegfeld were married, and for a while they lived in New York City.

Their daughter Patricia was born in 1916, and it was at that point that the family moved permanently to Burkeley Crest. They decorated the house with Italian and English antiques and Chinese hangings. They installed a fully-equipped projection room where they could watch movies, and built a “playhouse” for their daughter that was modeled on George Washington’s Mt. Vernon. Flo loved flowers and had the gardens around the house planted with hyacinths and daffodils, 24 blue spruce trees, and an English box hedge at the gate. A staff of seventeen servants catered to the needs of the Ziegfelds, their guests, and their menagerie of animals that included deer, parrots, geese, pheasants, bears, ponies, and buffalo.


At the time, having celebrities like the Ziegfelds living in Hastings was the village’s claim to fame, as Stephen Zebrock recalled in an article written for the Hastings News in 1941.

The names of Billie Burke and Florenz Ziegfeld of course went hand in hand every time anyone mentioned Hastings. It seemed as though no one could ever speak of our village without invariably adding, “You know, that’s where Billie Burke and Ziegfeld live.” It even got so Aunt Mary Salaky from Perth Amboy made a special trip one Sunday – just to see if this fantastic tale was really true. Every time my mother would say ‘this’ or ‘that’ about Billie Burke, Aunt Mary would look at her skeptically and murmur, “Go on – it isn’t so.”

Steve Zebrock at age 12, standing in front of the gates of the Burke Estate

Finally, she could resist no longer and made the trip; as she stood in front of “Burkeley Crest” on South Broadway and took in the vast estate, she shook her head from side to side, chanting, “Florenz Ziegfeld, Bille Burke – right before my eyes.” Then turning to my mother as we walked back, “Just wait til I get back to Amboy and tell the others that I saw Billie Burke’s house.” We all looked at her, beaming with pride, while my mother added the burning remark, “Well, I told you so.”

Aunt Mary took on a bit of local pride from them on, and every time she went to see a Billie Burke movie she would preen herself and, at the same time, whisper to her companion, “I saw her house in Hastings – I really did!”

After the stock market crash of 1929 the Ziegfelds were left badly in debt. They closed up the Hastings establishment and moved to the west coast so that Billie could continue her career in the movies. Flo died there soon after, and in 1940 Billie sold the estate. Burkeley Crest was later demolished, marking the end of Hastings’ most glamorous era.

Billie Burke sitting at her desk in Burkeley Crest

Cutting Edge Technology in Hastings: The Automobile

The Society's earliest photograph of a car, probably taken before 1907 (click on any photograph for more information)

On Memorial Day of 1896, Hastings residents were thrilled by an event that had, until then, only been witnessed by residents of Paris, London, and Chicago – a horseless carriage race! The race began at about 2PM at King’s Bridge and passed along Broadway through Yonkers, Hastings, and Dobbs Ferry, with the finishing line in front of the veranda of the Ardsley Country Club. The judges waiting on the veranda included John Jacob Astor, Chauncey Depew (President of the New York Central & Hudson River Railroad) and Frank Thomson (Vice President of the Pennsylvania Railroad). Here is how this momentous occasion was described in a 1929 article from the Hastings News:

“John Brisbane Walker, then editor of the Cosmopolitan, living at Irvington on an estate near what is now the Chevrolet factory and in a house built by Stanford White, offered ... $1,000 to anyone who could ride from New York City to Irvington in one of the new-fangled “horseless carriages.” No time limit was stipulated. All the contestants had to do was to get to Irvington. People from miles around … gathered in anticipation of the momentous ride.

All Hastings jammed its way along the road. From New York seven [according to the New York Times, there were only six] determined riders started out. Riding before them on horse back were couriers who were to clear the way and to see that no on was hurt by the speeding monsters. Hours passed. People on the Handy porch [at Broadway and Warburton] craned their necks. There was a tremendous noise, as if a dozen threshing machines were in action. Around the bend two puffing, steaming horseless carriages were coming at a terrific rate of 8 miles an hour. Cheers broke out.

Eventually one of the two got to Irvington. The Columbus got Mr. Walker’s $1,000.”

The winner of the race was Frank Duryea. He was driving one of his company’s Duryea Motor Wagons, which were among the first “motor-vehicles” powered by gasoline. Frank covered the 13 miles from King’s Bridge to Ardsley in one hour, five minutes, and forty-two and two-fifths seconds. A year earlier, Frank had won the Chicago Times Herald race with an even better speed -- 7.5 miles an hour.

In 1895 the horseless carriage was called “a pack of French nonsense,” which could never replace a horse. In 1910 a series of photographs were taken of the lively Hastings - Dobbs Ferry Auto Club, documenting the first stirrings of Hastings’ addiction to the newfangled machine.

The Hastings - Dobbs Ferry Auto Club on Broadway near the Hastings - Dobbs Ferry boundary in 1910. Many Hastings residents were members, including Irving Smith, Frederick Charles Sr., Thomas F. Reynolds, Walter Keys, Henry Collins Brown, and the actor Walker Whiteside. These were some of the wealthier members of our community, and it’s not surprising to find them all in the auto club, since they were the ones who could afford to purchase automobiles.

The Hastings Hospital

by Judy (Wemer) Chamberlain

Dr. Jenks hopital building in the 1960s.

If you have taken a trip down Olinda Avenue lately, you may have noticed that something is missing on the south side of the street. For more years than I can remember, a small, old wood and stucco structure stood empty and somewhat neglected. At first I thought it was just an old garage but when I asked about it, I was told that at one time it was a hospital. It seemed kind of small for a hospital. But yes, people have admitted to being born there and others told of their visit to get a few stitches, or having an appendix removed, or reverently spoke about how a family member stayed there while recovering from the influenza that devastated the country beginning in 1919, just after World War I.

The doctor who was responsible for this hospital was Dr. Gedney Jenks. And though it took him 3 years, Dr. Jenks actually built this hospital with his own hands. The hospital was two stories and fully equipped with wards, an operating room and all the modern appliances of the day.

Dr. Gedney Jenks in uniform, standing in front of his hospital on Olinda.

There is an interesting story about Dr. Jenks that I discovered in an old newspaper clipping. It says: “Dr. Jenks enlisted as a surgeon for overseas service when America entered the war (World War I), but the people of the village petitioned Washington for his return, as they were left without a doctor. He was sent back over his protests.”

Dr. Jenks’ hospital was torn down in December of 2008 and with it, a little piece of history.

Unexpected Guest at Opening Reception

Welcome to our Opening Reception: From left to right: Trustees Evelyn Drewes and Eileen Forbes-Watkins and members Fred Olsson and Marvin & Nancy Weinberg. In the background are parts of Henry Draper’s telescope and the Riverview Manor Hose Company display.

It was lovely to see so many old and new friends at the Opening Reception for the Society’s exhibition on Sunday. Two Draper descendants, Mary Draper and Gail Maury Bauer, came to see our display on their famous forebears. But the most important guest, unfortunately, could not fit through the door. First Assistant Chief James Sarfaty of the Riverview Manor Hose Company was in attendance, with firemen Steve Horelick and Lary Greiner, and Captain Bob Cadoux. And they brought with them their brand new and very shiny fire engine, a 2008 model Seagrave Marauder II Pumper. The back door bears a gilded logo faithfully copied from fire company’s 1910 charter by artist Forrest Hill. He also rendered in gold the department badge on the front door, originally designed by former Captain Andy DeFrancesco. The company is working on a history for their commemorative journal, and we hope to learn even more about this historic company during the coming year.

In the top photograph, Assistant Chief Sarfaty, Historical Society Trustee Kenneth Loyal Smith, and member Chris Postma admire the new fire truck. Click on the photograph of the truck and you will get a better picture of the gold logo on the door.

The company was formed in the early days of the Riverview Manor development, when it had only a dozen or so houses. You can see below a photograph of the company’s first machine, a 1911 Buick Jumper, loaned by the Livingston Hose Company of Dobbs Ferry. This fire truck had no motor, and when there was a fire, the firemen had to pull the hose cart through the streets with a rope! (A 25 cent fine was levied for each man “not pulling on the rope with enthusiasm while proceeding to or from a fire.”) Even so, the men in that photograph look just as proud of it as Captain Sarfaty and his crew are of theirs.

Riverview Manor Hose Company in 1912. The firemen identified on the back of the postcard are: Captain John O. Berg (at the wheel in the white hat), John S. Miller (in front seat), W. W. Burgess, Charles Doty, and John Donnelly Sr. (in rear seat), Homer G. Balcom (with hand on car), C. F. Meder, Oliver Burdette, and L. D. Van Aiken (on the hose reel), and Charles L. Brookheim (behind Jumper).

We hope that everyone who was not able to be there on Sunday will come and visit us during our regular hours, or call and make an appointment to see the exhibition!

John P. Davies’ Historical Map of Westchester

Every generation of Hastings residents has its history buffs. One such was civil engineer John Percival Davies. Being a mapmaker, Davies came up with the idea of a map that would visually encapsulate the entire history of Westchester County – or at least the period from the arrival of Henry Hudson in 1609 to the completion of the railroad lines in the 19th century.

Davies was born in South Wales in the UK, but lived much of his life in Hastings. He built his own house at 169 Edgars Lane, and had Margaret Sanger and Lewis W. Hine as neighbors. Hastings oldtimers remember Davies as the first captain of Hastings’ World War I Home Guard, from which he resigned to enter the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in 1918.

Captain John P. Davies of the Hastings Home Guard in 1917. (Click the photograph to see the entire Home Guard group.)

But by 1932, Davies was working in the city on 40th Street. He seems to have been an expert mapmaker, because our collection includes a number of maps that Davies drew up for the village of Hastings – street maps, an Air Raid Protection Service map, and a sociological map for Superintendent John Hopkins dissertation on the Hastings public school system. Davies’ office was right around the corner from the New York Public Library, and it was there that he did the research for his historical map.

The final product was printed on buff paper and hand colored in pale washes of blue and red, giving it all the romance of an antique. Among the wealth of details are tiny drawings of Patriots and Redcoats, trains and horses, and the proud coats of arms of Westchester’s earliest European settlers.

Sigges Rock on the Andrus Property

Needless to say, the map includes several important Hastings landmarks. One is Sigges Rock. Today this huge boulder on Andrus property on the east side of Broadway straddles the official line between Hastings and Yonkers, but it is said to have marked the boundary between the Weckquaeskeck in Dobbs Ferry and the Manhattes in Yonkers in Indian times. The name itself means boundary stone in the Algonquin language. Another landmark on the map is the neutral forge that served both sides during the Revolution, and was later incorporated into the house that is today called Forge Cottage at 383 Broadway. The third Hastings landmark is marked by crossed swords—it is the spot on Broadway at Edgar’s Lane where, in 1777, the Hessians soldiers and the American troops under Colonel Richard Butler clashed.

383 Broadway ca. 1900, said to have been a neutral forge during the American Revolution

It is a good-sized map, 17 x 23 inches, and far too large to fit on our scanner bed. But when Katie Hite, president of the Westchester County Historical Society, was looking for pieces to include on their “Historical Treasures of Westchester County” web site, she scooped up this map and took it away with her to scan at the Westchester County facilities. Thanks to Katie and Patricia Dohrenwend, Director of the County Archives and Records Center, we have not only an excellent digital image of the map, but also a wonderful collection of Hastings masterpieces on the web.

2009: The Hudson-Fulton Celebration’s 100th Anniversary

Souvenir button from the Hudson-Fulton Celebration of 1909

To kick off the 2009 Hudson-Fulton-Champlain Quadricentennial celebration, the Historical Society and the Hastings Public Library recently co-sponsored a concert of 17th century lute music and a slide lecture by Roger Panetta. Roger is a professor of history at Fordham University, as well as a former Hastings resident and one-time trustee of the Historical Society. Roger’s topic was the Hudson-Fulton Celebration of 1909, one of the biggest public festivals ever held in New York.

When the U.S. Congress was choosing a city in which to hold the 1893 Columbian Exposition, New York was passed over in favor of Chicago. This insult to New York’s pride, Roger tells us, resulted in the Hudson-Fulton Celebration -- a festival designed by New Yorkers to demonstrate the importance of their state and its place in American history. The celebration combined two anniversaries. The first was the 300th anniversary of Henry Hudson’s exploration of the river that later bore his name. (The 1909 event was sometimes referred to as the “Tercentennial Celebration”) The second was the 100th anniversary of Robert Fulton’s trip up the Hudson River in the “North River Steamboat” (later called the “Clermont”), the first commercially-viable steamship. To the organizers of the Hudson-Fulton Celebration, Hudson’s voyage symbolized the spirit of exploration, as well as New York’s Dutch roots. Fulton’s steam experiments, on the other hand, represented progress and technology, and New York’s place at the center of American commerce.

Official U.S. postage stamp produced for the Hudson-Fulton Celebration

This celebration of the Hudson River was held over a two-week period, from September 25th to October 9 of 1909. It included parades on land and water, fireworks displays, an airplane flight, banquets, music festivals and art exhibitions, and even school essay prizes in history. More than two million people attended the festival, which involved the entire island of Manhattan as well as the communities along the Hudson River. You’ll be reading more about Hastings’ festivities in the next “Historian.”

You can still catch Roger’s lecture, archived by village technology gurus Rafael Zaratzian and Jen Corso, on the WHOH TV web site. We hope it will inspire you to visit our next exhibition here at the cottage, “1909: Hastings in the Year of the Hudson-Fulton Celebration,” which will feature the items in our collection from the Hudson-Fulton Celebration. But more on that in another post!

*****

Hudson-Fulton Celebration resources on the web

• The Hudson River Maritime Museum has digitized the final report of the Hudson-Fulton Commission that details all the events of the celebration.


• We have formed a Flickr group for the Hudson-Fulton Celebration and posted a few images from our collection there. Anyone who has photographs or memorabilia from the Hudson-Fulton Celebration is welcome to add their images to this group!


• Watch the New-York Historical Society web site for information on their exhibition on the Hudson-Fulton Celebration, still in the planning stages but slated to open in September.


• On Google Books you can find the catalogs from the exhibition of Dutch art and the exhibition of American art held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1909, as well as other publications from the time of the celebration.


• The 2009 Hudson-Fulton-Champlain Quadricentennial has its own web site. Look there for upcoming Quadricentennial events.

First Mass at St. Stanislaus Kostka, 1914

Back in 1988, Ted Borys gave the historical society a Polish Bible that had belonged to his mother, Caroline. Jan Gustafson was recently making a new box for it, and in the back we discovered a handful of lovely old prayer cards. One in particular caught our attention -- a card printed in France with an English verse on one side and a Polish text on the other. No one here can read Polish, but we could certainly read the words “Hastings-on-Hudson” and “St. Stanislaus Kostka.”

A Polish friend of archivist Muriel Olsson made a rough translation for us, and we found that the card was, in fact, a souvenir made to commemorate the consecration of the church. The text reads:

"SOUVENIR
For the first church of St. Stanislaus Kostka
in Hastings on
Hudson, NY
on Sunday June 14, 1914
[blessing] was given by Father
J.F. Mooney [Vicar General of the Archdiocese of New York]
…
The first
holy mass in this church was given by Father Dr. J. Dworzak and Father K.
Galuszka."

The text goes on to say that Father Dworzak [of St. Casimir’s Church in Yonkers] founded the congregation on September 1, 1912, and that it was incorporated on May 19, 1913. The building was bought on December 19, 1913 for $3,000 from the Baptist Church by parishioners J. Jarosz, T. Maslowski, B. Karnicki, and A. Kowalski.

This card was an exciting discovery because it complements five small photographs in our collection that show the procession to the church on this important day. St. Stanislaus’ 90th anniversary booklet describes this procession. Paderewski’s Band was playing as the marchers left Washington Avenue, crossed the bridge, and streamed up Main Street. The new congregation included over a hundred children, and the little girls dressed in white appear to have led the procession. (The Polish Military Association of Yonkers also participated, which may explain the photograph of men with rifles.)

The procession coming across the Warburton Avenue bridge

The procession on Warburton Avenue, nearing Main Street

Shooting rifles

Crowds at the entrance to the church. Father Mooney gave the blessing in front of 3,000 people before the congregation entered the church for Mass

One of the other cards found in Caroline’s Bible is dated 1912. Is the date just a coincidence, or could this be a souvenir of the founding of the congregation mentioned on the first card?