Lasher
July 25, 2008
July 16, 2008
Staats House
just so happens the house, c1656, and a significant acreage of prime wet lands can be yours for 2.4m. surrounded by DEC land. the deed allows 5 parcels, I quote, 'a fine subdivision.' oxymoron asshole. how did that get past the conservancy lawyers.
June 09, 2008
Prize Fight
February 10, 2008
Rudd
January 02, 2008
Peter Sharp's Landing
January 01, 2008
500 Ft West
December 16, 2007
Defiance
Town Lines
August 29, 2007
Iron
four forges folks!
Ancram
drats, those sneaky livingstons!
Turnpike
the pike!
Burned to the Ground
blaze!
August 26, 2007
Marking the Historic: Manorial Dropping
Marking the Historic
The Hudson Valley has an astounding amount of history, reaching back into the early stages of New Netherland. Much of the landscape that has played host to this history has not changed conspicuously in the last 300 years. This space has allowed for a unique, and at times quite strange way of re-inscribing events upon the landscape a century or two later. Unique demarcations whose meaning has, in many ways, absolutely no bearing on how we have come to interpret landscape today. Yet these markings constellate a way of understanding that can be both strange and humorous. So begins a new Category of documentation here at Portage, Marking the Historic. I hope to shed light on some of the events and characters to which these signs purport to mark the significance of... others, well, I love me some Taxonomic documentation.
The first in the series, of course, deals with the patroonship of the Livingstons. Many of the markers deal in town lines and the creation of townships from the the manorial estates these early Dutch families controlled. Interestingly enough, the Livingston's were Scots, forced into exile during the Reformation of the Scottish Church. By the early 1800's the Livingston's had acquired over a million acres in what is now Columbia, Dutchess, Greene, and Ulster county. George W. Bush is descendant of Henry Livingston.