• Earl & Wilson

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    Carl Johnson

    From Arthur Weise’s “The City of Troy and Its Vicinity,” 1886, comes this description of a long-forgotten factory that once employed thousands, the Earl & Wilson Company: “The senior member of this widely-known firm, William S. Earl, in 1848, entered the linen-collar and shirt-bosom manufactury of Jefferson Gardner, at No. 16 King Street, to…

  • Troy – home of the most famous Christmas poem ever

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    Carl Johnson

    There’s no point in re-inventing the wheel: Don Rittner has already told the whole story of how the most famous Christmas poem ever, “‘Twas the Night Before Christmas,” was first published in the Troy Sentinel in 1823. Read the whole story here.

  • One of these things is not like the other.

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    Carl Johnson

    I’m always delighted when I find that some great old building that’s in the Historic American Buildings Survey still exists on our city streets, so when I ran across this lovely edifice, listed as the Thomas Samuel Vail house at 46 First Street in Troy, I was pleased to learn that it not only…

  • North Greenbush’s one-room school

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    Carl Johnson

    It is claimed that District School No. 1, now called The Little Red Schoolhouse, is the only one-room schoolhouse operating in New York State. Built in 1861, it’s just south of Troy near Hudson Valley Community College; this school is the North Greenbush school district. Its survival in the age of school consolidations is…

  • Water tower with bells on

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    Carl Johnson

    It figures that if I’d trip across such a thing as a water tower that has, inexplicably, bells, there would be some kind of local connection. It appears that in 1902, a millionaire in Scituate, Plymouth County, Massachusetts, wasn’t going to be pleased with the local water tower ruining his view, and so he…

  • Hoxsie’s all a-Twitter

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    Carl Johnson

    Hoxsie has grown and grown since I launched it earlier this year as a (nearly) daily collection of pictures and snippets relating to the local history of Albany, Schenectady, and Troy, and a few other parts of the Capital District as well. I’m happy to have a few hundred daily readers who aren’t just…

  • Where there’s smoke…

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    Carl Johnson

    … there’s work.   The furnaces of the Burden Iron Company, Troy, 1886.

  • Troy-built Starbucks

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    Carl Johnson

    I suspect that, armed with a little bit of information, one could find bits of Troy’s manufacturing history in every state of the union. Here from the Library of Congress is a view of the base of a cast iron tower on the Bidwell Bar Suspension Bridge & Stone Toll House, near Lake Oroville…

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