Cruising up the Hudson, 1909-style

In “The Motor Boat: Devoted to All Types of Power Craft,”
author C.G. Davis gave us a colorful description of a 1909 trip up the Hudson
River and the Erie Canal aboard the yacht Marie, a 63-footer with two masts, a
12-1/2 foot beam and a rocking 65-horsepower Buffalo motor replacing a former
steam engine. The Marie made her way up the river overnight in just about 13
and a half hours, arriving on a Sunday Fourth of July, along with a fleet of
fourteen small motorboats in a race to Albany and back. The Marie was going
further on, and so had to lower its smokestack and masts in order to get under
the bridges; while the much-beloved Livingston Avenue Bridge and the
long-gone Maiden Lane were swing bridges that allowed ships of any height, the
Greenbush bridge was a lift, and most masted or stacked ships couldn’t simply
sail through.

He notes the ferryboat named for Troy bank director and
furniture dealer R.C. Reynolds. Above Albany, “we ran side by side with the
double-ended ferryboat R.C. Reynolds but she sucked the water past her so fast,
on account of the narrowness of the river, that we could not get by her until
she slowed up to stop at an amusement park on the left bank, called Al-Tro Park,
Albany’s Coney Island, fitted with water toboggans, merry-go-rounds, carousels,
etc.” (I’ve no clue how a merry-go-round might have differed from a carousel in 1909.)

Grounded

He writes of passing the opening to the Erie Canal above
this point, which is confusing or confused. On the opposite bank, Davis wrote
of the landscape consisting of a “high terrace of foundry slag dumped from the
foundries on that shore, with the Rensselaer College [RPI] high up on a wooded
knoll beyond.” He passed the collar and cuff factories, a pair of bridges, and
a wooded island (presumably the island under the Collar City Bridge) until
coming upon the “sloop lock, as it is called from the fact that years ago when
sloops carried all the river freight they went through here to the river
above.” This is now known as the Federal Dam at Troy.  Misjudging the channel, the captain grounded
the Marie on a shelf rock in the low tide, but they were able to toss a line to
another grounded canal boat waiting for the tide and dragged their keel off the
rock.

Dumping

There was an early sign of environmental consciousness, and the identification of a problem that haunts the river to this day. “As we were in the first lock we were the center of
attraction from all the gentlemen of leisure who make it their unremunerative
business to criticize every craft that comes into the lock. One fisherman
pointed to his shanty close by and told us all his nets were there stowed away
useless. He said the gas houses dump oily refuse into the river and a fish
can’t swim in it. ‘Inspectors?’ and he spat with disgust, ‘course no inspectors
ever see them dump any refuse. They can store it up till night time; but we boatmen
on the river at night – we see it come out and smell it, too.’” That fisherman
was speaking of the manufactured gas plants that made a form of natural gas
from heating coal, a process that first lit America’s gas lights but left a
toxic legacy of what is technically known as “schmutz” that is still being
cleaned up today. Even now, opening up a seam of the stuff, as happened during
cleanup in South Troy a few years back, can unleash a staggering stench. Nice
to know, though, that in 1909 there were those who saw poisoning the river as
something other than progress.

The lock-tenders, then as now state employees, were held out for praise. “We had heard so much about the pig-headedness of the lock
tenders that I took particular notice on this trip to see it, and must say the
lock tenders we met were a good-natured, willing lot of men.  We didn’t give the lock master a cigar, we
gave him the price of a good one and as he thanked us he remarked, ‘We lock
between fifteen and seventeen yachts a day here and nearly every one hands out
a cigar. Say! Them fellows must think we’re some kind of an animal, but we’re
human beings as well as they and we know a good cigar as well as they – but to
smoke some of the stuff they hand you would kill you dead.’”

A bridge, and then no bridge

Up at Waterford, the Marie passed under the Union Bridge,
built in 1804. Designed by Theodore Burr (as was the Western Gateway Bridge
linking Schenectady and Scotia), it was then the longest wooden bridge in
America, and was the first bridge over the Hudson north of New York City. On
the return trip, the bridge was gone, succumbing to a spectacular blaze on July
10, 1909. More on those bridges here.

Fifth of July

They moved up the Champlain Canal.  “Mechanicsville [sic] is quite a city, and as
we went through there we saw cords of pulp wood piled along the edge of the canal,
and saw canal boats unloading it at the pulp and paper mill, whose three
immense brick chimneys are the canal landmarks for Mechanicsville.” At
Stillwater, “A trolley car came dashing past us here and Mac, suddenly
remembering that this was the Fourth of July, or rather its substitute this
year, the fifth, had Sam load the gun and the next car that came along was
saluted with a gun that made its passengers jump.”  The celebrating continued, as at
Schuylersville [again, sic] they found a large black board planted at a corner
of the road on the river bank, on which was painted in white letters: “Here
Genl. Burgoyne Surrendered His Sword to Genl. Gates, Oct. 17^th,
1777.”

“We saluted families that came out on their porches to see
us pass, and also the mill hands in a large paper mill on the left bank. Every
auto, and several passed us between here and lock 10, was saluted by our
cannon.”

If you’d care to read the entire voyage, it can be found in two parts here.