Moonwatch and Open House this Weekend

Stereoview card made from photographs of the full moon taken by Henry Draper in the 1860s from his observatory at Hastings on Hudson. To read more about this card, which is in the collection of the Smithsonian Museum, click on the image.

On Saturday, October 16th, the Hastings Historical Society will be open from noon until 4PM. Come see our exhibition entitled "A Story of a Village: Hastings Maps from 1600 to the Present.

At 2PM astronomers will present an analysis of the Draper telescope parts here at the cottage.

At 7:30PM there will be a MOONWATCH in Draper Park, 407 Broadway. Large telescopes will be available, or you may bring your own. There are no lights in Draper Park, so flashlights are recommended.

House Tour Preview: Jasper F. Cropsey – A View from the Artist’s Studio

Jasper F. Cropsey at age 24, painted by Edward L. Mooney in 1847. From the Collection of the Newington-Cropsey Foundation.

Thanks to the generosity of the Newington-Cropsey Foundation, our May 22 & 23 house tour will include the house and studio of the painter Jasper F. Cropsey (1823-1900), one of the leaders of the 19th-century Hudson River School.

The Hudson River School has been called the first truly American school of painting, a school that glorified the beauty and grandeur of the American landscape. Cropsey himself was known as “America’s painter of Autumn.” His paintings of the fall colors of the Hudson Valley were so brilliant that the English thought he was exaggerating when he exhibited his work in London. He had leaves sent from home and displayed them with the paintings to prove that trees could really show such colors. Cropsey began his career in New York City as an architect, but from childhood he had shown a gift for painting. He exhibited a landscape at the National Academy of Design when he was 21 that earned him an invitation to become an Associate Member—the youngest in the history of that organization. In 1845 he left architecture to become a full-time painter.

"View of Hudson River and Palisades from Artist's Home," an oil painting signed and dated, "J.F. Cropsey 1886." From the Collection of the Newington-Cropsey Foundation.

His work reached the peak of its popularity in the 1850s and 1860s. During this period he travelled between Europe and America, painting English castles and abbeys for his American clients and the American landscape for the English. In 1861 he was presented to Queen Victoria, who greatly admired his “Autumn—On the Hudson River.” In 1862 the painting won a medal at the International Exposition in London and sold for the amazing sum of $2,000. Back in New York, Cropsey helped to found the American Watercolor Association in 1866. That same year Cropsey and his wife Maria purchased land in Warwick, NY on which they built a splendid house and studio that they christened “Aladdin.”

But during the 1870s the tide of fashion began to turn against the Hudson River School as the public became more interested in French landscape painting, and then Impressionism. The Cropseys, who were never careful with money, were forced to sell “Aladdin” in 1884. In 1885 they purchased a Gothic Revival cottage that had been built in the 1830s on Washington Avenue in Hastings. The couple gave the house the name “Ever Rest”, and they lived there together until Jasper Cropsey’s death in 1900.

Detail of a 1901 map of Hastings of the area between Main Street and Washington Avenue showing the Cropsey Estate, the house on Washington that backed onto the Ravine with its circular driveway, the stream running through the Ravine down to the industrial waterfront, and at the far right the "School" -- the 1863 Fraser Free School, the first school building built in Hastings.

As soon as they purchased the property, Cropey added a studio, a recreation of the one he had designed for Aladdin. The two-story room is paneled with dark wood and contains an Inglenook fireplace, modeled after one Cropsey had admired at Windsor Castle. Above is a square cupola whose windows can be opened with pulleys. The house and studio are full of his work, and you will also see Cropsey’s palette and easel there, as well as furniture and stained glass that he designed.

Interior of Jasper F. Cropsey's studio in Hastings.

Hastings, according to Cropsey, was “one of the finest passages of scenery on the river.” From 1885 on, the town began to figure prominently in Cropsey’s paintings and drawings. His studio overlooks the Ravine that begins behind Five Corners and leads down to the waterfront, under the Warburton Avenue Bridge that was built in 1899, the year before Cropsey died. The painting reproduced above shows the view looking west down the Ravine to the Hudson River. He also painted the view in the opposite direction, looking up the Ravine toward the back of Main Street. This watercolor, which you can see below, shows what was then the Fraser Free School (now the Hook & Ladder Company) and an axle mill in the Ravine, long since demolished, that was fed by the stream that ran through the Ravine. (For someone who had made his reputation as part of a group that prized wilderness above everything, it is surprising how many of Cropsey’s Hastings views include industrial buildings and steam boats.)

Cropsey also painted pictures of the Hastings waterfront and views looking down to the river from the Hastings hills, as well as scenes in nearby river towns. “I have no occasion,” he wrote, “to travel much since I am so surrounded with beautiful scenery – the rocky palisades – the ever changing marine “bits” of the Queen River; and inland, the lovely meadow and wooded hills of the Saw-Mill River Valley, and the grassy Sprain River – where the summer verdure is most luxuriant and the autumn color is as brilliant as any where in our country. … [I] find my recreation with my sketch book, in little tramps about my home.”

"View from the Studio (Overlooking Ravine)," watercolor painted by Jasper F. Cropsey in 1891. From the collection of the Newington-Cropsey Foundation.

Admiral Farragut: Legends of a Hastings Hero

Part III: A Hero’s Welcome

The Battle of New Orleans, April 25-May 1, 1862 (click on any photograph for more information)

Farragut’s victories at New Orleans in 1862 and Mobile Bay in 1864 made him a national hero. He returned to New York in December of 1864 only to find himself caught up in two weeks of banquets, luncheons, parades, and interminable speeches by New York City dignitaries.

On a snowy Saturday in January (the exact date is uncertain), a little after 4PM, Farragut’s train finally pulled into Hastings. An 1865 biography of Farragut written by P.C. Headley speaks of the admiral and his wife Virginia alighting calmly at the Hastings train station to a grand reception. But William McConnell, William Ward Tompkins, and others who were there at the time remembered things a bit differently. According to them, the Farraguts wanted to avoid the kind of welcome they had had in New York City. Upon seeing the crowds waiting for them on the platform, the couple remained on the train. They had it stopped a little further down the track and got out, determined to walk back home from there.

But Hastings residents have always been clever and resourceful. They caught up with the Farraguts at Broadway, where the admiral cheerfully agreed to return to the train station for a proper welcome. In those days the plaza in front of the station (approximately where the station parking lot is today) was called Union Square. Here the villagers had erected a triumphal arch made of evergreen branches and decorated with a huge American flag. Banners hanging from the station and from nearby buildings displayed the names of the cities where Farragut had fought his famous battles: “St. Phillip,” “Jackson,” “Gaines,” “Morgan,” “New Orleans,” and “Mobile.” At the top of the arch was the inscription “Welcome to Admiral Farragut.” (Fifty years later, George Archard still remembered being tickled at the way the sign painter had signed his name. The signature was so prominent that the inscription seemed to read “Welcome to Admiral Farragut – Phillips.”)

Beneath this arch the ceremonies began, with Farragut shaking the hands of the welcoming committee of prominent citizens, including William Few Chrystie (who became the first president of the village in 1879) and Edmund S. Mills (our second president).

The original Hastings train station ca. 1900. This station was slightly to the south of the spot where the current station now stands.

The crowd then followed the VIPs to the First Reformed Church for the official reception. It had been snowing heavily all day, and Farragut and his wife were driven up to the church in sleighs. As they rode up Spring Street and approached Warburton Avenue, they passed under another evergreen arch. Directly in front of them, on the gate to what is now the V.F.W. property, was another sign reading “Honor to the Brave,” with the initial ‘F’ above it, surrounded by a pine garland.

At the church entrance, the Farraguts walked under a canopy scattered with roses (presumably made of paper or silk) and flags. Two ladies offered the Farraguts bouquets as a band struck up “See, the Conquering Hero Comes.” More flags decorated the interior of the church, and over the pulpit was an inscription in pine branches that read “May God Bless and Preserve You.” The church was filled to capacity. People had come from Irvington, Tarrytown, and even as far away as Peekskill to see the hero of Mobile Bay. At the pulpit, Mr. Mills, an elder of the church, welcomed the admiral on behalf of the entire village. Headley’s 1865 biography gives Farragut’s reply:

“My friends and fellow citizens, it gives me great pleasure to meet you all once more at your happy home. When, nearly four years ago, I came to this village, unknown and without means, a voluntary refugee from my country… I was received with open arms, and with a warmth of friendship and a sympathy of patriotic and social intercourse that have ripened into attachments and associations which can never be effaced wherever I may be or whatever may be my future lot. Here also when absent on distant duty in a service dear to my heart, my family have found a quiet and agreeable retreat where the hand of friendship and the kindest attentions were ever extended to me. … I have been given many receptions by people throughout the country but none of them do I appreciate so highly as your warm greeting to me here in the village which is my home.”

Admiral Farragut then shook the hand of every person present. This apparently took several hours as the line moved up one aisle and back down the other. At the end of the day, the sleighs delivered the Farraguts to their dwelling on Washington Avenue.

Headley described the day, no doubt correctly, as “a scene that will be long and gratefully remembered by the inhabitants of Hastings-on-Hudson. They will dwell now and in aftertimes upon the coming of Admiral and Mrs. Farragut as among thier most cherished New Year's gifts.”

The interior of the First Reformed Church in 1900, their 50th anniversary year.

Admiral Farragut: Legends of a Hastings Hero

Part II: I Sailed With Farragut

Admiral David Glasgow Farragut (for more information about any photograph, click the image)

Last week’s post included several stories about David Glasgow Farragut’s early days in Hastings in 1861. But the reminiscences of Civil War times that were printed in the local papers in the 1920s and ‘30s also contained more personal memories of Farragut. William McConnell must have been a great storyteller in those days, because many of his childhood memories found their way into print -- memories of swimming in the Saw Mill River and of being chastised by the master of the local “little red schoolhouse”. In the 1930s, the Hastings News carried a story of his acquaintance with Admiral Farragut’s family.

“For a year or more the lad had been carrying two pails of drinking water a day to the cottage on Washington Avenue. The spring at the northwest corner of Washington and Broadway provided drinking water for the neighborhood. Young Willie McConnell received a quarter a week pocket money for the carrying of a heavy pail each morning and each evening to the Farragut door. He still remembers the southern mammy who presided in the kitchen and who took the pail from the boy’s hands.”

But of all the stories told in Hastings about Farragut, the most exciting must be the one about James Hitchcock. In 1933, a Hastings News reporter got the story from James’s younger brother William, who was seventy-seven at the time.

“Young Jim Hitchcock, reckoned the village’s boldest blood, who was reputed to be able to spit tobacco farther than anyone in Hastings, was a close neighbor of the Farraguts. Perhaps it was during the inactive summer of 1861 that the Captain first took an interest in the boy. Probably the lad worshipped the old Captain and listened by the hour to tales of the sea. At any rate, when Captain Farragut was sent to the Gulf Squadron, Jim Hitchcock went with him. The captain had promised the sexton [Jim’s father] and his wife to find a berth for the lad that would not take him into direct action.

Hastings' Admiral Farragut Post of the American Legion posing with a model of the "Hartford" presented to President Roosevelt ca. 1938.

‘Jim was many years older than me. …I wasn’t born when Jim went off to the Spanish waters with the Captain,’ Mr. William Hitchcock told the representative of the Hastings News who called upon him the other day. ‘Yes, that’s what we called those parts at the time – the Spanish waters. I’ve heard my father and mother tell about it often, how Jim went with the captain, and how the captain made him a sailor...’

‘Yes,’ Mr. Hitchcock went on, ‘Jim was on the Hartford with the Admiral, and Jim fought at Mobile Bay. I’ve heard him tell the tale many a time of how three men at the wheel were killed by a shot that went clean over his head because he happened to be stooping down at the moment. The Admiral’s promise to my father and mother? It wasn’t his fault he didn’t keep it! It was Jim’s. The Admiral told my father when he came back that he had tried to put Jim on another ship, but Jim had coaxed for the Hartford. ‘You’ll get your damned head shot off you then, Hitchcock,’ said the Admiral to Jim, ‘and it won’t be my fault either.’ ‘Yes, sir,’ said Jim and he stayed with the Admiral. I’ve heard him tell that story many times.’ ”

And where was Jim Hitchcock in 1933? Nobody knew. “He came back to see us every few years,” William told the Hastings News. “Every few years until thirty-five years ago, and then Jim never came again. I went down to Snug Harbor a few years ago looking for him, but his name wasn’t on their lists of old sailors. Jim must be dead by now.” The Sailors’ Snug Harbor on Staten Island was the first home for retired sailors in the United States. It opened in 1833 and lasted into the 1960s. That property is now the Snug Harbor Cultural Center and Botanical Garden.

The USS Hartford, on which Jim sailed, was one of the last wooden warships and had been commissioned in 1858. She was set on fire during a battle in 1862, but was saved by Farragut and his crew and continued to be Farragut’s flagship for all his major naval victories. The news of their neighbor’s exploits no doubt thrilled the villagers of Hastings. But they had no opportunity to show their tremendous pride and admiration for their local hero until the Admiral’s return to Hastings in the winter of 1865. That spectacular homecoming is the subject of next week’s post.

Decorative stamp showing the "Hartford" organized by local residents for Hastings' 1936 Farragut Day, celebrating the 135th anniversary of Farragut's birth

Admiral Farragut: Legends of a Hastings Hero

Part I: How Farragut Came to Hastings

"Damn the torpedoes! Full steam ahead!" Admiral Farragut in the rigging of his flagship, the 'Hartford', at the Battle of Mobile Bay. (Click on any of the photographs for more information.)

Before Billie Burke arrived to dazzle the village with the glamour of the theater, Hastings’ most famous resident was Civil War hero, David Glasgow Farragut. The Farragut family lived in Hastings for barely five years, and for most of that time Farragut himself was at sea. But those years, 1861 to 1865, spanned the Civil War, during which Captain (from 1862 Rear Admiral) Farragut became an American legend.

“Interest in and appreciation of Admiral David Glasgow Farragut increases at Hastings from year to year,” wrote a local reporter in the early 20th century. “There is no place in this broad country that has a better right to claim his citizenship and reverence his memory.” The Historical Society is full of memorabilia and articles about the great man and his time in Hastings, enough to fill many blogs. We have selected a handful of these stories to share with you over the next couple of weeks.

The verifiable facts about Farragut’s time in Hastings can be stated in just a few sentences. Before the Civil War, Farragut, who was a captain in the Navy, lived in Norfolk, Virginia. But he was a loyalist, and when Virginia seceded from the Union in April of 1861, Farragut moved with his wife and son to Hastings-on-Hudson. For a time, they lived at 60 Main Street. Farragut also rented from John William Draper half of a two-family cottage at the corner of Washington Avenue and Broadway. Over time, the number and order of these residences has become confused. Perhaps they lived in two houses; perhaps it was three. In 1865 the war came to an end. At about the same time, the city of New York presented the Farraguts with money to buy a house in town, and the family moved into Manhattan, ending their brief connection with Hastings.

A.C. Langmuir's 1939 photograph of the Draper cottage occupied by Farragut. In the 1910s, most of the locals claimed that this, and not the house on Main Street, was where the Farraguts spent most of their time while in Hastings.

But having an American hero in Hastings, even for a short time, fired the local imagination. 60 Main Street became known as “the Farragut house.” An oak tree on Main Street became “the tree under which Admiral Farragut used to sit.” In the early 20th century, reporters sought out Hastings old-timers and wrote up anything they could remember about Farragut. Many of these old-timers had been children during the Civil War, and their stories often appear to change from one article to the next. The Society has two scrapbooks, one compiled by journalist J. Otis Swift in the 1910s and 1920s, and another by A.C. Langmuir in the 1930s, that include such articles. Are they “memories” or “tall tales”? After all this time, it’s hard to say.

An article from 1919 tells one story of how the Admiral came to choose Hastings-on-Hudson for his residence.

“It was just before the beginning of the Civil War, when there were many Southerners and Southern sympathizers in New York, that young Farragut came up from the South to visit New York. The Government of Washington, hearing that its favorite young naval officer was on his way to the city, and fearing some Southerner would kill him, sent word to him to get out of New York city instantly. Farragut got the message as he was crossing from Jersey to the city, and promptly transferred to a small sloop, which came up to Hastings and landed at the old dock where the cable factory is. Hastings was a secluded place, cut off from New York by a ravine and miles of country road, and he stayed here for some time, making many friends, so that he afterward decided to live here, and took the house on Main Street known now as the Farragut house….”

Potscard of 60 Main Street with the caption "Admiral Farragut's Home" produced by HC Todd ca. 1905. Todd included both a photograph of this house and of Farragut himself in his booklet of historic photographs of Hastings. There is also a photograph of Grace Episcopal Chapel with the caption "Farragut worshipped here."

An earlier article from March of 1911 gives a slightly different version.

“When [Farragut] first came among the people, he was treated with coolness, as a southern refugee. An absurd story was circulated that he was an emissary sent to Hastings to blow up the Croton Aqueduct where it crosses the deep ravine near the Farragut House.”

A 1933 article adds a story told by Miss Emma Dorland, whose mother bought 60 Main Street in the 1870s: “…the northern troops that were patrolling the aqueduct in 1861, making sure that New York’s water supply was safe, had destroyed a sextant which [Farragut] had left one day on his lawn on the grounds that it was an ‘infernal machine’ which might blow up the aqueduct!”

A reporter for the Dobbs Ferry Register in 1919 relates another tale, which even he cannot bring himself to believe – that Farragut and John William Draper were attempting to photograph the heavens when soldiers destroyed their camera, imagining it to be some kind of bomb.

But as the war progressed and news of Farragut’s naval exploits reached Hastings, the tide of Farragut’s popularity turned. Local residents became tolerant, and even enthusiastic, about “their” Admiral Farragut. Tune in next week for Part II of the saga of Admiral Farragut in Hastings.

Carte-de-visite photograph produced as a souvenir around 1865 after the Battle of Mobile Bay by photographer Charles C. Fredericks of New York City. This particular card comes to us through the Draper family. John William Draper remained a close friend of the Farraguts, even after they left Hastings.

Opening April 26th “Milestones in Astronomy: The Drapers of Hastings”

Chasing the Moon, Part II

Henry Draper in Civil War uniform. He served as an army surgeon in 1862.

In the last post we described how John William Draper took the first photographs of the moon. His son, Henry, was also a physician and an avid amateur photographer. In 1857 he visited Ireland and the world’s largest reflecting telescope built by the Earl of Rosse in the 1840s. When he came back to the United States, he began to build his own observatory on the family property in Hastings.

The observatory, completed in 1860, was very much a home-made affair, constructed with help from his father and his brother, Daniel. They polished the mirrors for the telescope by walking on a treadmill.

Henry Draper's observatory, ca. 1880, showing both the first dome, built in 1860, on the far right, and the later dome in the center.

In 1863 Henry took a series of photographs of the moon through his telescope that showed far more of the moon’s features than any photographs taken previously, or for several decades to come. They were so sharp that the moon could be enlarged up to 50 inches in diameter without loosing any detail. They conveyed the appearance of the moon so vividly that at the time they were referred to as “portraits”. The director of the Smithsonian Institution visited Henry’s observatory and was so impressed that he asked Henry to write a description of his process, which the Smithsonian later published.

One of the 1500 photographs of the moon taken by Henry Draper in 1863.

The most spectacular of Henry’s moon photographs was taken September 3, 1863. It was reproduced in Harper’s Magazine in 1864 next to a long, rambling article about the place of the Moon in human history. The publication of his photographs made Henry Draper famous, and his observatory became a place of pilgrimage for dedicated astronomers until his death in 1882.

In 1869, Henry constructed a second observatory adjoining the first, in order to house a new and larger telescope. With this, he took some of the earliest photographs of comets, lunar eclipses, and nebulae, and the first photograph of the spectrum of a star.

Part of the observatory building was destroyed by fire in 1905. The remainder became a private residence. We are proud to say that now, after a 1996 restoration, the Draper observatory is the home of the Hastings Historical Society, which also houses an important collection Draper family letters, books, and photographs.

Draper Cottage, home of the Hastings Historical Society, at 407 Broadway, in the middle of Draper Park.