I remember when I was little, one Autumn day my whole family and I walked down the two streets from our house to the riverside. It seemed like the whole town was gathered at the park there, families picnicking in the pavilion, and kids on the swings. Some older couples had brought binoculars and we all gathered to watch a replica Dutch trading ship sail up the Hudson, right past our town. I can’t remember much else about the event other than the fact that it happened, but it was a great reminder of the beginnings of Kingston’s legacy in New York history: the Dutch settlement.
In 1609, Henry Hudson sailed to Kingston on his ship, the Half Moon. In his quest to find the Indies, he turned the ship around after sailing South along the East Coast to Sandy Hook, New Jersey and sailed upwards to what eventually became Kingston. Originally settled by the Esopus tribe of the Delaware Nation of Native Americans, it was first established as a fur trading post in 1615. It was a natural harbor and a home to fertile farmland, flood plains, and the first permanent settlement was built by the Dutch who traveled South from Albany in 1652, dubbed Esopus by the governor Peter Stuyvesant. Peter Stuyvesant fortified the community, and build a stockade to house the settlers. It only protected an area of about eight blocks, but it worked against several small skirmishes with the Esopus tribe. He soon issued a charter in 1661 that renamed the settlement to Wiltwyck, Dutch for “wild woods”.
A group of British settlers arrived in 1652, and according to Wick’s book Esopus, “Dutch official remained in office, British soldiers replaced the Dutch at the fort. This was a good plan because while the Dutch were a worthy merchant traders and farm folk, their temperament did not lend itself to a soldier’s way of life.” The new British rule renamed the settlement Kingston, meanwhile the Dutch mended relationships with local Native American tribe, the Lenape, and continued trade with them.
In 1777, it was named the capital of New York. Many other positive things happened in 1777, like the first convention of the state’s legislature, senate and supreme court, and the first state constitution was adopted in Kingston. The successes were short lived, however, and during the Revolutionary War in the same year, British troops attacked the Continental Army in Kingston. In retaliation for the Continental Army winning at the Battle of Saratoga, the Redcoats decided to attack the new capital. They landed in Kingston, fought a small naval battle, and then marched up Rondout Creek and to the Stockade that Stuyvesant built, burning buildings the entire way. Most of the city was abandoned, and the British fleet managed to ruin the city and burn over 300 buildings. It didn’t stop the residents though, who came back to the town and rebuilt their legacy.
One of the buildings burnt in the fire was Kingston Academy, a school founded to teach American colonists in the capital. It focused on Latin, mathematics, science, and the arts. Teaching resumed after the building was restored in 1778, a year after it was originally burnt. The school taught many people who eventually would be big names in history, like the artist John Vanderlyn, whose pieces are on display in the Rotunda in Washington D.C., and DeWitt Clinton, the man eventually responsible for the Erie Canal.
In 1825, the plans for a canal between the Delaware River and the Hudson River were formed so that the newly discovered coal and natural resources from Pennsylvania could be harnessed elsewhere, like New York City. Abraham Hasbrouck stored produce from Kingston’s farmers on one of the stops at the end point in Kingston. Meanwhile, another town began to grow from a stop close by that was used for storage of building materials, Rondout. Kingston and Rondout became the hub for the building material industry, and they housed important things like coal, cement, slate, and bricks made from Hudson River clay. Eventually in 1872, the two villages combined and formed the official City fo Kingston, and the City Hall was built on the road between them.
Kingston’s historical legacy lives on today. The Stockades district uptown is filled with plaques commemorating buildings for either surviving the fire or being rebuilt from the ground up. There’s a cemetery called “Wiltwyck”, after the first Dutch name of the settlement with graves dating back to the late 1700’s. There’s a park one street down from my house, the same park that I watched the replica Dutch ship sail from, where the riverside is filled with surplus bricks, dumped from the factories and storehouses along the Delaware and Hudson Canal. No matter where you go in Kingston, the history will follow. Its legacy will always live on.