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🏘️ Croton Local History
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designed by Robert Lovett, Sr., the patriarch of a family of famous engravers. He was born on March 19, 1796, and grew up in a quiet New York City neighborhood in an area now covered by the western end of the Brooklyn Bridge. After a brief military
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service during the War of 1812 he apprenticed in the shop of master stone seal engraver Thomas Brown. Advertisement from Poulson’s American Daily Advertiser , [Philadelphia], January 15, 1818. By 1816 he had married and moved to Philadelphia to set
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up his own engraving business, specializing in dies and seals. His early work can’t be identified because it was unsigned, but one significant commission has been discovered by Lovett expert and collector David Baldwin. “Correspondence between Thomas
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Jefferson and Thomas Cooper in 1819 identify Robert Sr. as the creator of the official seal for the University of Virginia.” 1 By 1824 Lovett was back in New York City, where he set up shop at 249 Broadway. “His shop location moved several times over
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the years,” according to Baldwin, “but he stayed in New York City until his death on December 31, 1874, just six hours after the passing of his wife of 60 years.” Lovett’s Croton Aqueduct Medal was produced in silver, bronze and white metal. The
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silver examples were individually engraved for the 17 New York City Alderman in office at the time of the celebration and various dignitaries, including poet George Pope Morris, author of the celebration’s “Croton Ode.” The example shown here is
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white metal. One side of Lovett’s exquisite medal is shown above and the other is below. If you want to enlarge the images to see the details click here to go to John Kraljevich Americana. Croton Water Celebration medal by Robert Lovett, Sr. Courtesy
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of John Kraljevich Americana. See this letter by Lovett to Thomas Jefferson and The Croton Aqueduct Completion Medal by Dave Baldwin. Token and Medal Society Journal , September/October 2013, vol. 53, no. 5. ↩ Share this: Print (Opens in new window)
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LinkedIn (Opens in new window) LinkedIn Like Loading... Related Tagged Croton Water Celebration George Pope Morris Robert Lovett Thomas Jefferson Published January 23, 2015 January 24, 2015
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Detail from a map of Cortlandt Manor in 1797 showing (A) the mill complex, (B) Van Cortlandt Manor and the Ferry House, (C) Bethel Chapel and the Quaker Meeting House, (D) docks on the Hudson River and (E) the location where Quaker Bridge is today.
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Since there is no line across the river indicating a bridge it is likely the bridge had been washed away by a freshet at the time this map was made. As the weather in Croton gets warmer and we rejoice that the snow and ice are finally melting, let’s
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look back to a time when the Croton River ran wild and spring thaws would often bring massive freshets—river floods caused by heavy rain and/or melted snow and ice. On Tuesday, March 10, 1818—exactly 197 years ago today—the Westchester Herald
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published a story about a freshet and the great damage it caused to “two Merchant Mills owned by Gen. Cortlandt.” 1 “Croton River.—The rapid thaw on Saturday . . . and the succeeding day, attended with heavy rain, occasioned the Croton river to rise
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to a considerable height, and floated down ponderous shoals of ice. Among the disasters it has occasioned we have to regret the damage done to the two Merchant Mills owned by Gen. Cortlandt, situated on that river. One of them was removed some feet
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from its base, the water-wheel destroyed, and some hundreds of barrels stove in; the floor of the second story was carried away, and upwards of one thousand bushels of feed destroyed. A saw-mill on the same race way was also swept away. The other
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mill, we are happy to learn, received but little damage. The whole loss is estimated at upwards of $3,000.” Although the article is short it gives us a wealth of information about the flour mills on the lower Croton River. There were two separate
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mills operating on the lower Croton River in 1818. As shown in the map above, they were both on the south side of the river. The “race” that diverted water from the Croton River also powered a sawmill. The mills are called “merchant mills” because
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they were large commercial operations that purchased unprocessed wheat from farmers and sold the flour themselves or through agents. 2 We get a sense of the size of the operation from the description of the damage— hundreds of barrels crushed, a
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thousand bushels of feed destroyed—and the estimated cost, roughly $55,000 in today’s dollars. Philip Van Cortlandt (1749-1831) by John Ramage. Watercolor on ivory, circa 1783. Courtesy of the New-York Historical Society Museum and Library. The mills
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were then owned and operated by Philip Van Cortlandt , (who was often referred to as “General Van Cortlandt” due to his rank at the end of the Revolutionary War) but they had been built by the Underhills in 1792 and operated by them until their lease
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with the Van Cortlandt’s ended acrimoniously in 1813. It’s unlikely this was the first freshet to damage the mill complex and it was certainly not the last. Indeed, the Great Freshet of 1841 —which caused the partial collapse of the earthen
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embankment of the old Croton Dam—destroyed the Van Cortlandt mills, along with all the bridges and buildings on the banks of the lower Croton River. 3 What’s remarkable is that the water power produced at the site was so valuable that despite the
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continued destruction something was always rebuilt there. The site was used for more than 80 years and by the 1840s iron had replaced wheat as the material processed at the location. Remains of the mill complex on the Croton River. Photo courtesy of
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Carl Oechsner. Iron bolt in a boulder at the edge of the river. Sadly, little remains of the mill complex remain today. If you paddle up the river— and you should —when you get near Fireman’s Island you’ll see a graceful brick archway, marking the
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end of the long race. Drilled into a boulder at the edge of the river there’s a large iron bolt where boats tied up. On the shore you can search for chunks of slag metal among the leaves, explore what’s left of the mill building foundation, walk
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along the top of the overgrown wall of the race and imagine what the mills must have been like in their heyday. Multistory mill buildings towering over the river, the constant sound of millstones grinding together, the creaking waterwheels, hammering
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sounds of barrels of flour being sealed, then the clattering of heavy barrels being rolled on planks into the hold of a waiting ship. One hundred ninety seven years ago today the sounds would have been very different, as a huge flood of water and
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“ponderous shoals of ice”—high enough and powerful enough to move a two-story building off its foundation—swept down the Croton River to the Hudson. The Westchester Herald began publishing in Sing Sing in Feburary, 1818—one month before this article
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was published—and continued to 1829. ↩ For more information on merchant mills see this article . ↩ At that time the mills were in a state of disrepair and were not in use. ↩ Share this: Print (Opens in new window) Print Email a link to a friend