Hudson and the Closing of the Frontier
by Andrew Rieser

Review of Hudson's Merchants and Whalers: The Rise and Fall of a River Port, 1783-1850 by Margaret B. Schram. Black Dome Press. Paperback. 210 pages, Heavily illustrated. $24.95.

Margaret B. Schram has written a fine new book, fifty years in the making. Hudson's Merchants and Whalers begins with a vivid description of the town through a visitor's eyes, in this case, a farm family visiting Hudson around 1800. By then, everyone knew of Hudson's reputation as an overnight success story, a bogs-to-riches boomtown of three thousand souls. Enriched by the brisk trade in fish, rum, and whale oil, men were building grand homes filled with European luxuries and slaves. Perhaps Schram's fictional farmer aspired to such riches himself. Curious and excited, he steered his wagon towards the bustle of Water Street.

And then, it hit him--the smells and sounds of progress. A "pall of smoke" from hundreds of chimneys hung over the city while slaughterhouses, tanneries, overflowing privies, and piles of manure left "questionable scents in the air." The din of rumbling carts competed with the baying of cattle being marched to slaughter. Even more alarming would have been the deafening blasts of "a new street [that] was being hewn from rock." Like Rip Van Winkle emerging from his slumber, Schram's imaginary farmer must have wondered if the whole world had gone completely mad.

What made Hudson so strange, threatening, and exotic in 1800? And why is it that visitors today react with a similar mixture of curiosity and disgust? Everyone knows about Hudson's revival, its rich antiques trade, the real estate bargains being snapped up by second-homers, artists, and gay couples. But the same people who rave about the pleasing pastels of Warren Street will warn that if you stray one block from there you'll find yourself in neighborhoods of a different shade, wracked by poverty, prostitution, and drugs, and guarded by tough looking kids, white and black, the kind who make Rhinebeck soccer dads reach for the car door locks. Is Hudson fated forever to serve as a dysfunctional urban frontier for its more affluent, rural, and white neighbors? When does a frontier boomtown get to be called a cosmopolitan city?

Big questions. Let's start with the idea of Hudson as a "frontier boomtown."

The notion may seem strange on its surface. After all, Hudson was a port town, the second largest in the state, blessed with a deep water port and covered with docks open to seaborne trade. As Schram points out, it was founded in 1783 by Quaker merchants and whalers (the Proprietors) whose ties to their Nantucket homeland had been strained by religious infighting and overcrowding. The Nantucket whaling industry was decimated by the British embargo during the Revolutionary War and a stiff post-war tariff on American whale oil. The Proprietors needed a port far from all of the hostilities.

Fair enough. But if you want an inland port, why go 120 miles upriver to the northernmost point of navigation on the icy Hudson? Seems a long way to go if your main concern was European privateers.

The answer, I think, lies in part in the growing interest in the frontier, which Thomas Jefferson identified as a sort of "safety valve" that would prevent overpopulation and ensure never-ending prosperity. Hudson's attraction was not solely its status as an inland ocean port, but (like Cincinnati and St. Louis, the great frontier cities of the early national era) its proximity to the agricultural resources of the Hudson Valley and western Massachusetts. Another "pull factor" was the presence of successful Quaker settlement nearby and the availability of land. The Dutch settlers who lived at Claverack Landing, as it was called, owned title to their land outright, free and clear of the wealthy patroons who controlled much of the river front.

The Proprietors bought the land in 1783, platted a city grid, and dedicated a park called Promenade Hill on a bluff looking--significantly, I think--west. From this commanding vantage point, the Proprietors could gaze both southwest, towards the majestic Catskill Mountains silhouetted in the distance, and northwest towards the great Mohawk River Valley, gateway to the Great West. By 1790, a family settlement had grown to a city of 2,500; by 1820, Hudson's population stood at 5,300. The city seemed poised to claim the future.

Margaret Schram's book is strongest in its colorful descriptions and illustrations of life in these early boomtown years. It is spruced with mutinies, shipwrecks, and other high-seas dramas, along with the more mundane details that appeal to maritime historians, like long lists of whaling ships and an appendix on the whale harvesting process. But this is far more than maritime history. Schram has made a serious effort to place Hudson in a broader historical context. Thus, we have brief introductions of the Quasi War with France, the Callender Affair, the War of 1812, and the Panic of 1837. They lack the substance required for a more systematic exploration of industrial class relations, for instance, but offer just enough to sustain the narrative and provide background to wonderful moments in Hudson history, such as the anti-renter's siege on Hudson over the winter of 1844-45.

Most importantly, Schram resists the temptation to adopt the boosterish cliches of so much local history. She is not afraid to criticize the city's sometimes pathetic efforts to promote itself (such as nearly kidnapping Marquis LaFayette from his downriver hosts in 1824 to ensure that he paid a visit) and does not hesitate to point out its failures and shortcomings.

Those failures were beginning to mount. The comedy of errors that led to Hudson's decline began in the 1820s, when the Erie Canal opened up the vast resources of the Great West to eastern markets. Packet ships began to sail right past Hudson without stopping. Worse, the canal gave a strategic advantage to Hudson's arch rival, Albany. In addition to losing the right to host the state capital to its northern neighbor, Hudson's leaders badly mishandled its railroad opportunities. Both Albany and Hudson vied for a railroad line that would carry coal from Pennsylvania through Kingston to Boston. Hudson jumped ahead with the Hudson-Berkshire Railroad--but the line was poorly constructed and could not handle the weight of steam engines. Worse, business interests on the south end of the city had insisted that the railroad line take a route that bisected downtown, forever disfiguring the city. The tracks to Massachusetts were ripped up in 1960, leaving only the branch line up the hill to the ADM plant and generations of aggravated motorists.

Hudson's boom was over. By 1847, wrote one commentator, "almost every vestige of its former glory had disappeared." Hudson was a "finished city" according to another. Ouch.

For its first 200 years, the city suffered the ups and downs of a series of extractive industries: first, whaling and agriculture; then, in more recent decades, mining and cement production. These unsustainable schemes for enrichment left Hudson with its most exalted and its most troubling legacies: on one hand, a tremendous stock of authentic historical houses inhabited by a diverse array of white immigrants, the ancestors of immigrants, WASPy second homers, and African Americans; on the other hand, a tenuous economy and a legacy of poverty.

Is the current boom in Hudson fated to bust, just as before? The city's features appeal to a new generation of urban pioneers. Some of them, perhaps too many, are coming to speculate on Hudson's promise, make a few bucks, and leave. Others are coming to settle and start a family. These are issues I hope to explore in another article. For now, suffice to say that Margaret Schram's Hudson's Merchants and Whalers: The Rise and Fall of a River Port, 1783-1850 is a fine book and a timely contribution to the ongoing dialogue about Hudson's past, present, and future. I recommend it.

Margaret Schram will tell some of the historic tales in her book at the Pleshakov Music Center, 544 Warren St., on Saturday October 9, at 2pm.