As summer vacation comes to an end, students are once again preparing to return to school. What follows is a letter written in 1854 by a student at the Jonesville Academy. The Academy was a private school, built about 1839, complete with dormitories. It still stands today as a private home in the hamlet of Jonesville, in Clifton Park, Saratoga County, NY. [Read more…] about ‘Send Pies’: A Letter From School, 1854
Sand Lake
1873 Rensselaer County Firehouse Threatened with Destruction
A Rensselaer County fire department is planning to demolish its historic former home and replace it with lawn and landscaping for a new firehouse next door. Local historians oppose the destruction of the 1873 fire house and are seeking community help to save the structure. [Read more…] about 1873 Rensselaer County Firehouse Threatened with Destruction
Rensselaer County Industrialist Albert Fox: A Short Bio
Albert Rodmond Fox was born on February 10, 1810, and came of age during a dynamic period in American history, as the new nation found its footing. Fifty years after the Declaration of Independence there was a new generation of leaders. It was a time of internal improvements (infrastructure) – new roads, canals, railroads and, eventually, the telegraph – and the industrial revolution. Fortunes were made.
It was also a time of social reform: circuit-riding preachers; new schools and churches; missionaries of all sorts; temperance and abolition advocates. Albert Fox of Sand Lake, Rensselaer County, was in the middle of it all. [Read more…] about Rensselaer County Industrialist Albert Fox: A Short Bio
Rensselaer County Floods: A Short History
Floods have been a fairly frequent occurrence in Rensselaer County, especially along the Poesten Kill and Wynants Kill and at their mouths which are impacted by the flooding of the Hudson River.
Two whales that ascended the river and were stranded during exceptionally high water in the Hudson in 1647 died there. In 1654 flooding all but destroyed the West India Company’s garden below Fort Orange and in 1666 Jeremias van Rensselaer reported that “fully forty houses and barns have been carried away, among which our house in which we lived, the barn and the brewery, the new as well as the old are lost also, so that hardly any traces can be found of where they have stood.” [Read more…] about Rensselaer County Floods: A Short History