History, Natural History & the Arts
In 1914, after secretly running Knox Gelatine for six years, Rose Knox revealed that she’d assumed her deceased husband’s position as the company’s president.
As President of company from 1908 to 1947, she drew on traditional ideals of domesticity and womanhood to turn the company into an iconic American brand and herself into a business celebrity. [Read more…] about Rose Knox’s Gelatine, Leadership, Mixed Kitchen & Boardroom
In the spring of 1613, a sailor named Jan Rodrigues arrived at the shore of the Hudson River from a Dutch trading ship, likely the Jonge Tobias. Identifying himself as a free individual, he became the earliest documented Black man in New Netherland. Jan Rodrigues is the subject of one of 25 new, peer-reviewed biographical sketches published by the New York Genealogical & Biographical Society in August, part of the NYG&B’s New Netherland Settlers initiative. [Read more…] about 25 New Netherland Biographies Published
In 1934, Doctor Helen Hosmer opened a physician’s office on West Street in the Village of Galway, in Saratoga County, NY. Originally from Billerica, Massachusetts, when Hosmer arrived in Galway, she was 50 years old, and though an experienced chemist and scientist, she was just beginning her career as a physician. [Read more…] about Dr Helen Hosmer’s Rural Healthcare in the US & Canada
Gertrude Ederle led a long and amazing life. Born in New York City in 1905 to German immigrant parents who ran an Upper West Side butcher shop, Ederle became an Olympic swimming champion at age 19 in 1924, and in August 1926, a century ago this month, became the first woman – and the fifth person – to successfully swim the English Channel.
Henry Ederle promised his daughter a red roadster if she did it, and in a companion boat he and Trudy’s sister shouted reminders about the car as encouragement on the turbulent route from France to England. [Read more…] about Gertrude Ederle: The Queen of the Waves Hits a Speed Bump
In March 1902, eighty-five-year-old Alvah Dunning traveled from the Adirondacks to New York City for a sportsmen’s exhibition. By then, photographs and newspaper profiles had made his white beard and weathered face familiar. Visitors were not meeting an unknown woodsman.
They were being introduced to “Uncle Alvah,” a man presented as one of the last survivors of the Adirondacks before railroads, hotels and private preserves changed the region. [Read more…] about Alvah Dunning: The Guide Behind the Adirondack Hermit
History is often kindest to people who leave something permanent behind — a building, a business, a name etched onto a marquee. Their legacy remains visible. But those who built careers around live entertainment worked in a far more fleeting medium. The worlds they created existed in sound, light, energy, and memory, disappearing almost as quickly as they arrived.
Harry Altman (1890-1966) was one of those people: a once-prominent Buffalo nightclub owner and entertainment promoter whose name has largely faded from New York’s cultural memory, despite decades spent shaping the nightlife of Western New York. [Read more…] about The Man Buffalo Forgot: Harry Altman’s Lost Entertainment Empire
On a warm, sunny day amid the winding hills of Herkimer County, the world descended on Van Hornesville, a small Mohawk Valley community, without a train station but home to a global, widely respected statesman of commerce and international finance.
Ninety-five years ago this June, Owen D. Young (1874-1962), architect of the Young Plan on Germany’s fiscal rehabilitation after World War I, and longtime chairman of General Electric Company, presided over graduation ceremonies for the town’s newly built seven-room schoolhouse replete with a swimming pool, a playground, and an auditorium “wired for talkies.” [Read more…] about Owen D. Young: WWI Statesman, GE Radio & TV Pioneer
Born in Berlin-Schöneberg in December 1901, Marie Magdalena (Marlene) Dietrich made an early career in her home city before achieving international stardom. Mentored by the legendary Max Reinhardt at his Deutsche Theaterschule (German drama school), she then joined his stage company.
Throughout the 1920s, she performed in Berlin and Vienna, including roles in Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew and Bernard Shaw’s Back to Methuselah. [Read more…] about Marlene Dietrich: Park Avenue’s Goddess of Smoke
When Josiah Stratton was laid to rest in the Village Cemetery in Galway, NY, in 1904, he left behind a life of service to his county, survival in war, and dedication to family spanning his 94 years on earth.
His story is also one of tragedy and survival that could have ended 30 years too soon. [Read more…] about Josiah Stratton’s Second Chance at Life
Ulysses S. Grant’s ancestors first came to America in 1630 when Englishman Mathew Grant landing in Dorchester, Massachusetts. Grant was always proud of his forebears, but the most important individuals in his life were his parents.
His father Jesse Root Grant (1794-1873) was an ardent abolitionist who spent part of his early years living in the home of the father of the John Brown. His mother Hannah Simpson Grant (1798-1883) came from Pennsylvania parents who were die-hard Jacksonian Democrats. [Read more…] about Ulysses S. Grant: From John Brown to Grant’s Cottage
George Morton Wolfe (1885-1966) was a prolific Buffalo, NY architect who specialized in commercial and industrial architecture. Born in 1886 in Middletown, Connecticut, Wolfe spent two years at Hartford Technical High School in Hartford, Connecticut, before settling in Buffalo in 1903.
In the first stage of his career, Wolfe worked as a draftsman in the contracting business of S.H. Woodruff. In 1908, he started his own architectural and engineering practice specializing in “factory, warehouse, and commercial building construction in their many forms.” [Read more…] about George Morton Wolfe: A Wide-Ranging Buffalo Architect
A soon to be published biography of Andy Rooney (1919-2011) carries readers through the arc of a true American original, a New Yorker who was once one of the country’s most popular television and newspaper commentators.
Born in Albany, he attended Albany Academy, and later Colgate University in Hamilton, NY, before he was drafted into the United States Army in August 1941. [Read more…] about An New Biography Explores Andy Rooney’s Lucky Life
During its glory years of operation, the first two decades of the 20th century, the J.E. Sexton Boat Shop, located in Hague, was one of the most respected boat-building businesses on Lake George.
Years later however, the decaying wooden structure where Jesse Sexton and his colleagues built many excellent vessels, finally tumbled to the ground. [Read more…] about Jesse Sexton’s Lake George Boat-Building & Photography Shop
Live Free or Die: The Life and Times Of John Stark (Page Publishing, 2025) by William Baker Jr. is the story of how one of the American Revolution’s best battlefield commanders triumphed over the self-interest of others to play a major role in securing victory for the new republic.
Most often referred to as the “Hero of the Battle of Bennington,” John Stark also played pivotal roles in the Battle of Bunker Hill and the Battle of Trenton. [Read more…] about The Life and Times of John Stark
On July 13, 1905, the Columbia Weekly Republican reported that the prominent Hudson, NY architect Henry S. Moul (1857-1925) had prepared the plans and specifications for construction of the Railway Steel Spring Company’s new foundry building; he presumably also designed the sand house that supported its operations.
Moul was from a family with a long history in the Columbia County area. The son of a masonry contractor, Moul came to Hudson in 1875 and apprenticed with James E. McClure, a local carpenter and builder, while studying architecture in the evenings. He was subsequently employed by McClure and took over the latter’s business after McClure’s death in 1888. [Read more…] about Hudson Valley Architect Henry S. Moul
The death last month of eight-term U.S. Rep. Richard Lawrence Ottinger (D-Westchester) brings to mind the remarkable career of his father, Lawrence (1884-1954), an important player in plywood history.
Lawrence was the youngest of four sons of Moses Ottinger, a real estate developer who as a child emigrated from the German kingdom of Wurttemberg in the mid-nineteenth century and became known for developing properties along Columbus Avenue on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. [Read more…] about Plywood History: Lawrence Ottinger’s Timber, Tenacity and Triumph
Paul Schaefer’s life in the Adirondacks began in 1921 on account of his mother, Rose. Gertrude Fogarty and Peggy Mearns Allen, Paul’s sisters, described their arrival in the small Adirondack hamlet of Bakers Mills in northern Warren County. The family had heard of this area of the Adirondacks from Rose Schaefer’s brother, their Uncle Frank Holtslag.
Rose Schaefer was an accomplished musician, but she “had hayfever and asthma and she was this time in such poor health that her doctor said she would not live through another year unless she left the Schenectady area during the hay fever season…until a hard frost killed the ragweed in town.” [Read more…] about Paul Schaefer’s Coming of Age in the Adirondacks
As Rick Cotton retires as the latest in a long line of executive directors of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, it’s worth thinking about the original, lurching journey to create the agency a century ago.
The Port Authority, which last year recorded gross operating revenues of almost $7 billion on assets of more than $63 billion, oversees many of New York City’s bridges, tunnels, marine terminals, and airports and a 1,500-square-mile port district. It was created in 1921 via a two-state compact ratified by Congress. That launch had not been assured, nor was getting there smooth. [Read more…] about NYC Mayor John Hylan and the Fight to Create the Port Authority
Simon Cordery’s Gilded Age Entrepreneur: The Curious Life of Albert Benton Pullman (Cornell University Press, 2025) illuminates the fascinating and chaotic business world of Albert Pullman (1828-1893).
The influential but little-known older brother of George Pullman (1831-1897) and the craftsman of the family, Albert designed the first luxurious Pullman railroad cars and hosted promotional trips to show them off. In those heady early days, he met national business and political leaders and hired the first Pullman porters. [Read more…] about Albert Benton Pullman: Gilded Age Entrepreneur
The Fort Plain Museum & Historical Park has announced the winner of their inaugural James Kirby Martin Book Prize, Jane E. Calvert’s Penman of the Founding: A Biography of John Dickinson (Oxford Univ. Press, 2024). The Prize is given in honor of Martin, an 18th century historian and museum supporter who died unexpectedly this year. Martin’s posthumously published final book, also on the American Revolution, has also just been released.
Quaker pacifist John Dickinson (1732-1808) of Pennsylvania and Delaware, one of the wealthiest men in the colonies, was an important early leader of the resistance to British rule before the outbreak of the American revolution and among the first to advocate civil disobedience as a form of protest. [Read more…] about Non-Violent Resistance During the American Revolution
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