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Road Trip: Livingston Country
Jun. 14th, 2015 02:08 pmI’m gonna fill my tank with gas and tell the world to kiss my ass…
I love road trips.
Most of my tripping these days is solo. Very few people I know/know share my lust for random wandering and roadside attractions. (L does, but although I never think of her that way and she never thinks of herself that way unless she’s trying to snag a Handicapped parking place, she’s officially disabled, can’t really walk very far, and most of my road trips involve huge amounts of hiking around, sometimes with no real payoff.)
This is generally not a problem since I’m one of my favorite people to spend time with.
So, yesterday…
Never made it to Knickerbocker Country, but did do a huge amount of exploring through upper Dutchess and lower Columbia counties.
These areas were once part of a humongous land tract granted to Robert Livingston in 1715. (It strikes me that Robert Livingston would be an excellent protagonist in a kind of Wolf Hall New World historical novel, adept as he was at playing both sides against the middle.) In the latter part of the 17th century, he’d become the secretary of one of the great Dutch patroons, Nicholas Van Rensselaer. When the English seized control of the Dutch possessions along the Hudson, Livingston talked himself into acquiring the rights to the Rensselaerswjick.
Livingston had many descendants, and his descendants had descendants, and newcomers like the Astors and the Vanderbilts considered themselves lucky if they were able to marry into the Livingston family.
As the land was subdivided into estates, many of them built enormous manor houses. The one above is called Montgomery Place.
Montgomery Place was essentially a plantation. The heavy lifting was all done by slaves. Though New York abolished slavery in 1817, it did so with a very odd caveat: The children of slave mothers were forced to continue as indentured servants until they were in their 20s. Thus, slavery didn’t effectively end in New York State until 1827, a mere 35 years before the Civil War.
I suspect this is one of the original structures on the Montgomery estate. It’s that characteristic Dutch stone building with a pitched gable roof and no foundation. That’s generally how you can tell 17th century and early 18th century structures from later structures that use stone in the same way, by the way: The earlier ones usually don’t have foundations or cellars. (Exceptions can be found, though, as for example in several of the stone Huguenot houses in New Paltz.)
From Montgomery Place, I drove to Red Hook. Red Hook was not part of the Livingston land grant, but a crossroads connecting the mills in Annandale and the docks in Tivoli (Livingston land) with the Albany Post Road. In the 18th century, the town was called Hardscrabble.
The area had originally been settled not by the Dutch but by the Palatine Germans, driven from the Middle Rhine valley by marauding French armies. Rhinebeck is called “Rhinebeck” because the Hudson River reminded them of the Rhine.
Today Red Hook mostly plays Town to the Bard College Gown. It does have some rather weird embellishments – like the Enchanted Diner:
I am very tempted to attend that Psychic Dinner!!
The other Bard hangout is the town of Tivoli, which is where Eleanor Roosevelt grew up under the iron thumb of her disparaging Livingston grandmother after her mother died and her father, Teddy Roosevelt’s younger brother, committed suicide.
Eleanor Roosevelt is a big favorite of mine. I would love to track down the ruins of Oak Lawn, Granny Livingston Ludlow’s manor estate and commune with the ghost of that little lonely girl. The ruins are rumored to be on an overgrown bluff somewhere on the grounds of the Clermont Estate, so that was my next stop.
First, I stopped for a fortifying cappuccino. I avoided the Hippie Cookies.
I marched around the Clermont grounds for an hour and a half looking for Oak Lawn’s ruins without success. It was 85 degrees out in bright, late afternoon sunlight, so when I ran out of water, I finally gave up.
There were some spectacular long views of the Hudson and the distant Catskills, though:
And on my way home, I did a little puttering in the graveyard of the church where L & C carted me off for a turkey dinner last year, in which many Revolutionary War soldiers are buried. Not soldiers who actually died during the war but soldiers who fought in the war, came back, resumed life, and died some time afterwards:
HIGHLY entertaining day.
###
The road trip’s gleam was dulled a bit by the news, this morning, that someone I only knew online, but liked a lot, has died… Not only was she one of the few people I know who reads as much as I do, but she read exactly the same books as I did, an eclectic hodgepodge, Gathering Prey, A God in Ruins, Alan Turing: The Enigma. And she was an animal nut, just like me. And her death was just very, very awful – for a year, she’d been telling her doctors she was in intense pain, but her doctors didn’t find anything, so they wouldn’t give her anything for the pain, told her it was all in her head. Then two weeks ago, they finally found it: pancreatic cancer.
And now, she’s dead.
Phyllis Arlinda DePriest, I will miss you…
I love road trips.
Most of my tripping these days is solo. Very few people I know/know share my lust for random wandering and roadside attractions. (L does, but although I never think of her that way and she never thinks of herself that way unless she’s trying to snag a Handicapped parking place, she’s officially disabled, can’t really walk very far, and most of my road trips involve huge amounts of hiking around, sometimes with no real payoff.)
This is generally not a problem since I’m one of my favorite people to spend time with.
So, yesterday…
Never made it to Knickerbocker Country, but did do a huge amount of exploring through upper Dutchess and lower Columbia counties.
These areas were once part of a humongous land tract granted to Robert Livingston in 1715. (It strikes me that Robert Livingston would be an excellent protagonist in a kind of Wolf Hall New World historical novel, adept as he was at playing both sides against the middle.) In the latter part of the 17th century, he’d become the secretary of one of the great Dutch patroons, Nicholas Van Rensselaer. When the English seized control of the Dutch possessions along the Hudson, Livingston talked himself into acquiring the rights to the Rensselaerswjick.
Livingston had many descendants, and his descendants had descendants, and newcomers like the Astors and the Vanderbilts considered themselves lucky if they were able to marry into the Livingston family.
As the land was subdivided into estates, many of them built enormous manor houses. The one above is called Montgomery Place.
Montgomery Place was essentially a plantation. The heavy lifting was all done by slaves. Though New York abolished slavery in 1817, it did so with a very odd caveat: The children of slave mothers were forced to continue as indentured servants until they were in their 20s. Thus, slavery didn’t effectively end in New York State until 1827, a mere 35 years before the Civil War.
I suspect this is one of the original structures on the Montgomery estate. It’s that characteristic Dutch stone building with a pitched gable roof and no foundation. That’s generally how you can tell 17th century and early 18th century structures from later structures that use stone in the same way, by the way: The earlier ones usually don’t have foundations or cellars. (Exceptions can be found, though, as for example in several of the stone Huguenot houses in New Paltz.)
From Montgomery Place, I drove to Red Hook. Red Hook was not part of the Livingston land grant, but a crossroads connecting the mills in Annandale and the docks in Tivoli (Livingston land) with the Albany Post Road. In the 18th century, the town was called Hardscrabble.
The area had originally been settled not by the Dutch but by the Palatine Germans, driven from the Middle Rhine valley by marauding French armies. Rhinebeck is called “Rhinebeck” because the Hudson River reminded them of the Rhine.
Today Red Hook mostly plays Town to the Bard College Gown. It does have some rather weird embellishments – like the Enchanted Diner:
I am very tempted to attend that Psychic Dinner!!
The other Bard hangout is the town of Tivoli, which is where Eleanor Roosevelt grew up under the iron thumb of her disparaging Livingston grandmother after her mother died and her father, Teddy Roosevelt’s younger brother, committed suicide.
Eleanor Roosevelt is a big favorite of mine. I would love to track down the ruins of Oak Lawn, Granny Livingston Ludlow’s manor estate and commune with the ghost of that little lonely girl. The ruins are rumored to be on an overgrown bluff somewhere on the grounds of the Clermont Estate, so that was my next stop.
First, I stopped for a fortifying cappuccino. I avoided the Hippie Cookies.
I marched around the Clermont grounds for an hour and a half looking for Oak Lawn’s ruins without success. It was 85 degrees out in bright, late afternoon sunlight, so when I ran out of water, I finally gave up.
There were some spectacular long views of the Hudson and the distant Catskills, though:
And on my way home, I did a little puttering in the graveyard of the church where L & C carted me off for a turkey dinner last year, in which many Revolutionary War soldiers are buried. Not soldiers who actually died during the war but soldiers who fought in the war, came back, resumed life, and died some time afterwards:
HIGHLY entertaining day.
###
The road trip’s gleam was dulled a bit by the news, this morning, that someone I only knew online, but liked a lot, has died… Not only was she one of the few people I know who reads as much as I do, but she read exactly the same books as I did, an eclectic hodgepodge, Gathering Prey, A God in Ruins, Alan Turing: The Enigma. And she was an animal nut, just like me. And her death was just very, very awful – for a year, she’d been telling her doctors she was in intense pain, but her doctors didn’t find anything, so they wouldn’t give her anything for the pain, told her it was all in her head. Then two weeks ago, they finally found it: pancreatic cancer.
And now, she’s dead.
Phyllis Arlinda DePriest, I will miss you…
