Hastings’ First Female Doctor

Sarah Elizabeth "Lizzie" Curry, probably taken in the 1880s.

Do you find obituaries depressing? But you never know what fascinating lives lie behind these short paragraphs! Take a look at this obituary from the Yonkers Herald Statesman of 1932.

“Hastings-on-Hudson, May 31 – Dr. Sarah Elizabeth Curry, one of the oldest woman doctors in the country, died at her home here yesterday after a long illness. Dr. Curry, who lived at 219 Thompkins Avenue, was in her late seventies. Born in New York, the daughter of the late Francis M. and Mary Lane Curry, she moved to Hastings at an early age. Because the Curry home was on the Yonkers-Hastings line, she attended School One in Yonkers for a number of years before continuing her education in Chappaqua and Pennington Seminary. She was graduated from the Women’s Medical College in New York and after practicing in that city, returned here to enter general practice. She retired about 15 years ago because of poor health. She is survived by her brother, Town Judge Frank E. Curry of Greenburgh, and a number of nieces and nephews. ... Burial will be in the family plot in Mount Hope Cemetery.”

Bare bones, indeed—but intriguing! A few comments in the oral histories done for the Historical Society by Vira Curry McNiece, Sarah’s niece, fill in some of the details.

“There was a carriage house on the property that was quite a distance from the house. It housed a two-seater carriage and a buggy. It had a flight of stairs that wound upstairs where the walls were plastered. That’s where school was held. Some of the children around attended, as did my mother. My doctor aunt taught there for a while after my grandfather died while she was waiting for her inheritance.

Later she practiced somewhere in New York, and then she came home and commuted on the old Putnam Railroad, going down every morning and coming back in the evenings. Still later she had her office at our house in Hastings. She charged 50 cents for office visits. I don’t think she had too large a practice, but she made lots of house calls—for $1.00 each—in her horse and buggy. She had quite a few patients in northern Yonkers and on Washington Avenue in Hastings. [Both lower income neighborhoods (Ed).] She was a homeopathic doctor. She lived to be 76 when she died of cancer.”

We’d love to know more about Dr. Lizzie. Anything we discover, we’ll share with you!

June 1894 graduating class of the New York Medical College and Hospital for Women, a homeopathic institution incorporated under the University of the State of New York in 1863. Sarah is the tallest woman standing in the back row, framed by the central arch. This was the first place in New York City where a woman could study medicine and, until 1918, the only hospital that accepted female interns. When Sarah attended it, the school was located near Carnegie Hall.

A Joyful New Year

When icicles hang by the wall,
And Tom bears logs into the hall,
When blood is nipt and ways be foul,
Then nightly sings the staring owl,
Tu-whoo! Tu-whit; tu-whoo!
-- Shakespeare

We are starting to develop quite a nice collection of 19th- and 20th-century greeting cards here at the Historical Society. This is one of the most elaborate. It measures five by seven inches, and is a double-sided card made up of two cards pasted back to back surrounded by silk fringe. The scenes are printed in beautiful detail using the color lithograph process; on one side is a Christmas greeting and on the other side is a New Year’s greeting. At the very bottom in letters too small to read without a magnifying glass is the name of the publisher: Wirths Bros. & Owen.

The Wirths brothers, Colvert and Robert, were engravers. In the 1850s they emigrated from Hanover, Germany to the United States. From the 1860s to the turn of the century the brothers designed and produced greeting cards, calendars, and small illustrated books. By the time this card was published in the 1880s, they had offices in New York at 12 Bond Street, and in London. Their cards, however, were printed in Germany. This was common for cards and postcards produced before the first World War, since German printing methods were considered far superior to American.

The Boston printer Louis Prang had introduced English-style Christmas cards to the United States in 1874, and the Wirths brothers began designing their own cards soon after. In the 1880s, Christmas cards were still a novelty, and each December the cards of the season were reviewed in popular magazines like The Literary World and Athenaeum. Wirths brothers’ painted satin cards and cards frosted with glitter were praised as “dainty and attractive” and “much superior to the common run.” Cassell’s Family Magazine admired their sunsets and snowy landscapes. And in 1887, the London magazine Punch confirmed the popularity of Wirths Brothers cards in its supposedly humorous verses on new Christmas products:

Wirths Brothers cards we like, and for this reason
They are in keeping with the Christmas season
Of Christmas Cards, you will ask, well, where on
Their point? Quite so, but here’s your money’s wirths.

Open House This Saturday, Dec. 5th

Now that Thanksgiving is over and the last slice of pumpkin pie has been eaten, we can turn our attention to the next set of holidays! We don’t often open the cottage on a Saturday, but in honor of the season we are going to have an open house this coming weekend.

Come by and visit us at 407 Broadway between 10AM and 2PM on Saturday, December 5th. It will be your last chance to catch our 2009 exhibitions, including the displays on the Hudson-Fulton Celebration of 1909 and on John William and Henry Draper’s contribution to celestial photography. You can also help to support the good work of the Historical Society by stocking up on our t-shirts, postcards, prints, throws, and maps, buying yourself a copy of the Arcadia Press book on Hastings, or renewing your membership. They all make wonderful gifts. If you can’t make it to the cottage, take a look at our “Emporium” on the web site. It includes pictures of all our offerings and a mail-in order form. Give us a call if you have any questions.

We also have some lovely note cards with Hastings scenes that make perfect Season's Greetings cards. Our best seller since 1982 is this lovely little watercolor painting by Jasper F. Cropsey showing a sleigh flying down Ravensdale Road.


In Cropsey’s day, Hastings was much less built up than it is today, and his many paintings of our town show an area where the presence of human beings had not yet disfigured the natural landscape. And it was the natural landscape that inspired Cropsey, as you can tell from this letter that Cropsey wrote to John Wickliffe Kitchell in November of 1897.

“Some years ago, one winters day, I felt like having a little recreation—and a tramp in the snow—which lay freshly fallen, and very tempting in the sun-light. It did not seem cold—the air was so soft, and glorious; although a biting frost prevailed and with buttoned up overcoat I wended my way nearly knee-deep, out, and along the Farragut Avenue, here, near my place at Hastings-on-Hudson till I came to a turning called Ravensdale Road. This struck my fancy as being delightful, picturesque, and artistic. I immediately turned in, on this lovely road. By this time the sun had warmed the sky, and an afternoon glow had begun to prevail. A little further tramping and I entered a bit of wood, in which the snow lay pure and soft, and untrodden; tinted with gleaming sun light that flitted in, and out through the stately tree-trunks warming the branches with roseatic light, while it deepened every little hollow in the more obscure parts of the woods, with a cool shadow. Thus, I tramped along, admiring the beauty of the soft blue in the sky overhead—the warmth and glow in the fresh snow besplattered tree trunks: when turning to take a moments breath, I had before me, ... just as the sleigh came dashing along, the subject of your picture, cool and tender, as no language can describe.

It is needless to say, I went no further but then and there made notes which I embodied in the picture which was produced on my return home of which I think you are to be congratulated as the happy possessor.”

Cropsey is referring to the fact that Kitchell had recently purchased one of his paintings entitled “The Ravensdale Road in Winter.” Kitchell’s painting and the painting on our note card are two of Cropsey’s variations on the same theme. Not all are dated, but they must have been produced after 1885, when Cropsey first moved to Hastings.

Another of our Cropsey note cards, "Winter on the Hudson," painted in 1887. The original painting is in collection of the Newington-Cropsey Foundation

John Wickliffe Kitchell was a mid-westerner who had made his little fortune in developing coal mines and farming land in Illinois. In the 1890s he retired and began to enlarge his art collection. His favorite artist was Jasper F. Cropsey. Between 1897 and 1900, Kitchell purchased twenty of Cropsey’s paintings through the St. Louis dealer Alfred Newhouse for a sum in excess of $5,000. This must have seemed like a fortune to an artist who spent the last years of his life in poverty.

Kitchell liked to have a “pedigree” for his paintings, and Newhouse encouraged Cropsey to send Kitchell notes about the paintings he bought, giving him some description of the subject—whether it was Greenwood Lake, Niagra Falls, or Storm King. It was perhaps from these letters about Kitchell’s purchases that a friendly correspondence developed between Kitchell and Cropsey. Kitchell urged the artist more than once to visit him at his home in Pana, Illinois. But Cropsey, worried perhaps about the cost of the trip, always excused himself, explaining that he simply had too much work.

Kitchell’s painting, along with his correspondence with Cropsey, is now in the collection of the MacMurray College in Jacksonville, Illinois. The painting on our note card is in the collection of long-time Historical Society friend and supporter Barbara Newington. And there are several other versions of the Ravensdale Road theme in other collections, in watercolor and oil. One of these, a watercolor entitled “Winter—Ravensdale Road,” sold at auction at Christie’s in 1995 for $45,600.

And yet another! "The Ravine at Hastings," a watercolor painted by Cropsey in 1895 and showing a view down the Ravine only a few years before the Warburton Avenue Bridge was built, with the pond in the center, a few of the houses near the railroad tracks, and, in the distance, steamships and sailing boats on the Hudson. The original painting is in the collection of the Newington-Cropsey Foundation.

Bottled in Hastings: Marc Rosner and the International Hotel

Society member Marc Rosner is a chemistry teacher in the Hastings High School and an avid bottle and coin collector. Somehow, “avid” does not really seem to be a strong enough word to describe his passion for hunting through the backwoods of Westchester in his search for the perfect specimen.

“The holy grail for me has always been a Hastings bottle, and the closest I had come was a shard with "ASTINGS" on it. Recently, I have been scouring the area for new digs and working my way north. The vicinity of the East Irvington Nature preserve yielded some interesting finds. Then I returned to a secret spot I had found last summer, near what I discovered recently is Irvington's "Hermit
Grave."

Although I haven't found an intact one yet, the site has yielded the best stuff yet for my collection, and I have been sneaking off at odd hours to dig. As I move north, the bulldozers move south and we have been dancing around each other through the poison ivy and ticks. Every time I think I have the last good one, I find a few more, which I'd like to rescue from getting paved under the next new mansion.

Among the finds are several Hastings bottles with the top broken but the body intact. The bottle you see was unrecognizable until I cleaned it with several different chemicals. My relatives think I'm crazy, with good reason, but I enjoy this tinkering.”

Marc’s find is particularly interesting to us because of the words embossed on the glass. They read: “Chas. H. Bevers / Hastings, N.Y.” At the end of the 19th century, Charles H. Bevers and his wife Amelia Halbe Bevers ran the “International Hotel” on the west side of the train tracks, just opposite our present-day train station. (In the 19th-century, the station was slightly to south of its current position.) A hotel stood on the site as early as 1868. An article on Charles H. Bevers in our files tells us that in 1877 Charles went into business with his father to run the International Hotel. The article does not make it clear whether his father, whose name was also Charles, was already running the hotel by himself, or whether the International Hotel actually opened for business in 1877.


An 1889 insurance map (detail above) adds the useful information that beer bottling was performed in the basement of the building. If you look carefully at the photograph of the hotel below, you can see a sign that reads: “Yonkers Beer Ales & Porter.” So the bottles may have belonged to Bevers, but the alcohol in them seems to have been imported from a brewery in Yonkers.

The railroad purchased the International Hotel property from Bevers, probably around 1910 when the new station was built. The building itself, or part of it, might have survived until 1912. A booklet published in 1949 on the history of industry in Westchester says that the “Old International Hotel” and a saloon called the Tammany House on the same side of the train tracks were torn down to make room for a new mill being built by the National Conduit and Cable Company (the precursor of Anaconda).


It's hard to imagine that there was anything “international” about a 19th-century hotel/saloon in a small town like Hastings-on-Hudson. But the article on Bevers tells us that “during its palmy days, this was one of the most widely patronized and universally popular hotels of Westchester County, and held leading rank among others of its group in the State.”

We are grateful to Marc and other local archaeologists for their enthusiasm and their generosity. They supply us with the artifacts that keep the memory of these old Hastings landmarks alive.

Hastings’ First Jail

This photograph of the village “lockup” has attracted 72 “views” on our Flickr site! So when we came across an old article that mentions the history of the local jail, we decided to share it with you. The 1933 Hastings News article is from a series by an anonymous writer on the early mayors of Hastings, who were called presidents until 1927. This particular article is on the tenure of Joseph Phillips, who was president from 1884 to 1887.

Joseph Phillips, village president from 1884 to 1887

Phillips was a painter, and his house and shop were at the corner of what is now Main Street and Warburton Avenue, in the same spot as Suburban Renewal. He must have had an excellent reputation, for the article says that when Hastings oldtimers wanted to praise any piece of work, they would call it “a Phillips job.”

Warburton Avenue, looking north from the bridge, ca. 1905. The entrance to Main Street is on the right, and the large building on the corner was, in the 1880s, Joseph Phillips' home and store.

Here is what the article has to say about the jail:

“Joseph Phillips, village president number four, had no major crisis with which to contend. The building of a village lockup seems to have provided the main difficulty of his successive terms of office...

Phillips and his board of trustees had a lockup built in the summer of ’86 at the foot of Washington Avenue. John Schlachter, village carpenter, had finished the iron-bound wooden shack, and it was ready for occupation, when a certain Mr. Ezra Munsen, Washington Avenue property owner, decided that a lockup would not improve property values. He employed a clever Tarrytown attorney, Lucius T. Yale (of the Yale lock family) to prevent the lockup from being officially opened. Yale was able to secure an injunction preventing the board of trustees from opening the new jail…. John Schalchter was told to move the lockup to a situation on the bank of the creek (now occupied by the Station Plaza).

The lockup had become “the house that Jack built” in the Hastings newspaper of the day. Village drunks were assumed to prefer its new position, which was more sheltered than its first bleak site on the river bank.

The Hastings Record of the time, leading weekly paper of the community, had several verses of doggerel to celebrate the move. A stanza ran:

This is the house that Jack built;
This is the Yale lock, tumbled and strong,
That helped the friendly injunction along;
For the winter boarders singing a song,
The song of the house that Jack built.”

The 1889 map above (a detail from an insurance map in our map collection) shows the jail in its “new position.” In 1933, when the article about the jail was written, this area was called Station Plaza. We would now call it Zinsser Plaza, the parking lot across the street from the railway station. As you can see from the map, the area was called Depot Square in the 1880s. Southside Avenue had not yet been built, but you can orient yourself by looking at the train tracks at the top of the map and the street called Valley Street, which is now the part of Southside Avenue that runs down to the train tracks from the Municipal Building. The “lockup” is on the far left, next to Ravine Brook, the creek that used to run all the way down through the Ravine.

The photograph of the lockup at the top of the blog was taken by local druggist Hanford C. Todd around 1905. He used it in a pamphlet of local historic views that he had for sale in his store, so by 1905 this particular jail had probably been abandoned. The photograph appears to have been taken looking north from the jail toward the entrance to Valley Street.