Albany’s proximity to the Hudson River made it an ideal trading center, beginning with Native American-Dutch fur trading in the early seventeenth century.
By the late eighteenth century, the city had cultivated a small lumber market consisting of a half-dozen wholesale lumber merchants, clustered just south of the neighborhood around Columbia Street and present-day Clinton Avenue (to the south of what would later be considered the “Albany lumber district” proper). [Read more…] about The Rise & Fall of the Albany Lumber District (1810s-1910s)
My yard is full of 
The eastern white pine (
Last summer I regularly passed a stand of towering white pine trees at Camp Plymouth State Park in Ludlow, Vermont, where I live and work.
The term psithurism (sith-er-ism) doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue, but it’s not meant to. The word, from the Greek psithuros (whispering), indicates the melody that rolls off pine needles in a gentle wind. It also means the sound of “proper” leaves shaking in the treetops.