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Hatcher’s Greenhouses at Hoffmans
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Last time, we talked about the completely lost hamlet of Hoffmans, née Hoffmans Ferry, née Vedders Ferry, and wondered at all the life and business it once held, where now there is barely a trace. One of those businesses was a complete surprise to us – we had no idea that a fairly major…
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The Lost World of Hoffmans Ferry
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We posted this marker for Hoffmans on our Instagram account (@signsandmarkers) a little while back. Hoffmans is one of those places that, during our lifetime, always used to be a place, a name from history that probably couldn’t have been identified as anything, not even a hamlet, were it not for this historical marker.…
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Sacandaga Road and the Battle of Beukendaal
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Where else do you get a triple threat, two NYS Education Department historical markers and a monumental plaque, and with it the story of an ambush and a corpse tethered to a crow? The first: SACANDAGA ROAD CUT THROUGH THE PRIMITIVE FOREST BY EARLY SETTLERS, ALONG AN INDIAN TRAIL LEADING TO THE SACANDAGA REGION…
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Wolf Hollow
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Another of the historical markers placed in Glenville in 1935 through the efforts of Percy Van Epps, town and county historian for something like 25 years. This one was for Wolf Hollow, “A rent and displacement of 1,000 feet in earth’s surface rocks. Here in 1669 the Mohawks ambushed their Algonquin invaders.” As we…
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Percy Van Epps and the Historical Markers of Glenville
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Over on our Instagram account for signs and markers (called, with blinding directness, @signsandmarkers), we’ve been featuring a number of the historical markers that we grew up around. While anyone who grew up in Scotia, Glenville and Schenectady might think these historic markers are scattered just everywhere, that turns out not to be true…
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The Townsend Furnace – And Much Else
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Albany was once one heck of a foundry town. It’s well known that Albany and Troy were both prodigious producers of stoves of all types, and the old heating and cook stoves made in their foundries can be found all over the country to this day. But many other iron products came out of…
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Scotia’s Most Famous Composer
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One would think that if a composer of incredibly famous songs had once lived just a few blocks from one’s childhood home, one would have heard about it, no? But we didn’t know until this historic marker went up, sometime after 2000, that the composer Robert Allen (full name Robert Allen Deitcher) lived for…
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No Coffin Sitters in Schenectady!
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In digging all this old stuff up, we run across all kinds of oddities that are fascinating, yet trivial. If we can’t figure out something more to say about a little snippet, can’t tell some of the story of the people, businesses or buildings involved, then we’re likely to just let it pass. But…
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The Last Ashman
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For many, many years, the biggest problem in waste disposal for cities wasn’t what we think of as garbage — there was hardly such a thing as packaging, what there was was biodegradable, and food waste was hardly an issue. No, the problem was the daily disposal of coal ash. Nearly every building was…
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Dayton Ball: First in Lasts
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While we were nosing around Pruyn Street through the miracle of StreetView, we noticed that while all the buildings that were occupied by The Embossing Company, National Bonsilate, and many more are long gone (and replaced by a Holiday Inn Express), one (really, two) of the ancient factory buildings across Pruyn Street still stands.…