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The Remarkable Darkness of Sept. 6, 1881
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The remarkable darkness of Tuesday morning, September 6th, 1881, was phenomenal. A heavy yellowish mist obscured objects a hundred feet distant from persons out of doors, and dimmed to a pale-blue brilliancy the burning gas-lights within doors. The children in some of the public schools were dismissed and the operatives in a number of…
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The Marshall Sanitarium
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Again, poking around an old Sampson, Davenport map of Troy, say 1873 (they didn’t change much from year to year, and as we noted yesterday, sometimes included buildings that were never built). Again, finding something we had never known about before. This time what caught our eye was a pair of complexes near Mount…
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The College That Never Was
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Imagine our surprise when we were looking at an old map of Troy (as we do) and suddenly saw something there we’d never seen before, and had never even heard of: St. Peter’s College. And it turns out there was a reason we hadn’t heard of it – it just didn’t last long. In…
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Schenectady’s Premier Aviator, Victor Rickard
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Sometimes we run across a name from local history and have to wonder how it’s possible that the person in question isn’t better known. And then we get vexed by trying to know them better, at the remove of a century or so. Such is the case of Victor Rickard. While Albany had an…
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The Mohawk Overall Company
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Saw this old postcard posted on the “Schenectady History – Photos and Discussions” Facebook group the other day, and it set us to wondering why we had never heard of the Mohawk Overall Company. It turns out it wasn’t around very long. The Mohawk Overall Company opened up in Schenectady in 1909, with a…
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Gov. Bouck’s Grand Quick Step
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More historic Albany sheet music, the product of historic Albanians. This one (again from the Lester Levy Sheet Music collection at Johns Hopkins) is “Gov. Bouck’s Grand Quick Step,” as performed by the National Brass Band, Albany. It was composed and arranged for the piano forte, “and respectfully dedicated to his excellency,” by Oliver…
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The Wide Awake Quick Step
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Well, here’s another piece of all-Albany sheet music that we just had to share. It’s 1860’s The Wide Awake Quick Step! A brief history of early American and Civil War music reports that “The ‘Wide Awakes’ were an early Republican political group that supported the election of Abraham Lincoln for president in 1860. The…
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My Cane Bottom Chair
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Our endless search for all things Albany and Troy recently turned up this bit of sheet music from 1856 (courtesy of the Lester S. Levy Sheet Music Collection of the Johns Hopkins Sheridan Libraries and University Museums). Published in 1856 by the music publisher J.H. Hidley of 544 Broadway in Albany, “My Cane Bottom…
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Modern Medicine Comes to Albany
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It seems almost impossible to imagine a world without antibiotics, but in fact penicillin is practically brand new, compared to some of the things we ramble on about here. On Oct. 6, 1943, its use was absolutely newsworthy, as the Times-Union reported on the recovery of a Chatham hairdresser: “Mrs. Florence Keniry, 28, Chatham…