Remembering Fishkill

By Willa Skinner

From criminal bandits along the Hudson River to the signing of New York s first constitution, Remembering Fishkill offers a comprehensive look into a community sprung from hope, innovation and revolution. In this collection of historical vignettes, beloved local historian Willa Skinner provides accounts of Fishkill from its earliest Dutch settling to today.
Incorporating memories of harvesting ice on the Hudson River during pre-refrigeration days and replacing a lawn mower with Nanny the goat to keep the grass cut in a meadow now filled with condominiums, Skinner offers a charming personal account of life in Fishkill as only she can.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The History Press
• Release date: Oct 27, 2008
• ISBN: 9781625844682

Willa Skinner

Willa Skinner holds a journalism degree from New York University and is one of the founding members of the Fishkill Historical Society, which owns and operates the Van Wyck Homestead Museum. She serves on the publication committee of the Dutchess County Historical Society, is a member of the Dutchess County Municipal Historians Association and, on the state level, the Association of Public Historians of New York State (APHNYS). She is the author of Signal Fires in the Highlands, a town history, and taught a class entitled Tracing Your House�s Roots for Dutchess County Community College. She has conducted classes on local history for area schools and recently retired as columnist with Southern Dutchess News and Beacon Free Press.

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Fishkill People

THE LEGACY OF JAMES BROWN

When James Brown died in Fishkill Landing (now Beacon) in 1868 at the age of seventy-five, he left behind forty years of daily journals chronicling life in the Hudson Valley. He wrote about weather, people, politics, work, religion, travel, transportation, crossing the Hudson over the ice and the coming of the railroad. Most of all, he kept records of the garden plantings at Mount Gulian, the Verplanck family estate on the Hudson River just above Fishkill Landing, for he was the head gardener. What is remarkable about these diaries is that James Brown was a former slave who did not learn to read or write until he was an adult.

The Brown diaries were given to the New York Historical Society by John Bayard Verplanck, a descendant of Brown’s nineteenth-century employers. The journals were more or less forgotten until recently, when they were discovered by members of the Mount Gulian Society who were researching the Verplanck gardens, which are in the process of restoration. The original diaries are still kept by the New York Historical Society, but they have been placed on a microfilm owned by the Beacon Historical Society.

James Francis Brown was born into slavery in Maryland about 1793. He married his wife, Julia, while still in bondage. They had several children, but none reached maturity. After the couple’s five-year-old son died, James ran off to the North and to freedom, leaving Julia behind. He was later able to buy her freedom, and she joined him in New York.

James made his way to New York City, where he was hired as a coachman by the Verplanck family at their town house on Wall Street. One day, a guest at a party who knew Brown’s former master recognized the runaway slave and reported back to Brown’s owner.

Details of the situation are not clear, but it was at this point that James Brown became a free man. The Verplancks, who were against slavery, may have bought James’s freedom, or he may have obtained it through his own means. Whatever the case, he must have been a man of ambition, and with the help of Mary Anna Verplanck, he learned to read and write. He started by keeping receipt books, and the journals began in 1826.

One of James’s early journal entries states: Bought my wife’s freedom for 100 dollars the 21st of Sept., 1826. It was then that Julia Brown came north to join her husband, but the couple did not spend much time together. Julia’s work as a cook and maid in New York City, Saratoga and Fishkill Landing frequently kept them apart.

So far, no pictures—not even a pencil sketch—of James Brown have been found. What, then, did this former slave and master gardener look like?

Not handsome, by any means, said a friend of the Verplancks who was asked to describe him years later. "He was tall and of good build, and a gentleman in his deportment.

We knew him, said the friend in a newspaper interview that took place in the late nineteenth century, when he drove the Verplanck carriage and sat proudly on the box with the flue span of horses. We remember him to be social and pleasant, with a hearty laugh and always good-natured.

Then, on this curious note, the friend said, He could be a terror to children, for his features were enough to frighten them.

Brown began keeping his journal in earnest in 1829. He noted that he had been careless about not keeping a regular record but would begin again on the first of January 1830. An early entry reads:

The day began first with a little snow…I went to church at Fishkill Village and returned home threw [sic] the rain and got very wet, but heard a very good sermon preached from the fifth chapter of the Epistle of the Ephesians and 16th verse.

The verse he refers to reads:

Make the most of the present opportunity, for these are evil days. Do not continue in ignorance, but try to discern the will of the Lord. Avoid getting drunk on wine. That leads to debauchery. Instead, be instilled with the Spirit.

James was a religious man and attended church, sometimes twice or three times on Sundays, occasionally traveling to Fishkill Village or crossing the river to attend services in Newburgh, frequently quoting Biblical texts in his daily notes. He was confirmed, the diary tells us, on July 25, 1841, by Bishop Onderdonk at St. Anna’s Church, Matteawan.

We learn that he abstained from drinking of any kind and attended meetings of the temperance societies that were organized in the area of Fishkill Landing and Newburgh, and he disapproved of the hired hands who drank.

On September 16, 1845, there is the following notation: "The colored people has [sic] a temperance celebration at Newburgh. Pleasant weather. Began to house the greenhouse plants and to earth celery 2nd time."

On March 4, 1853, James wrote: President Pearce was this day inaugurated into office…President of the United States…Planted early peas and corn. The weather warm and clear until evening it clouded over and began to snow. The next day, he planted potatoes in a frame, probably meaning a cold frame.

James Brown may have been one of the first free blacks to own property in Fishkill Landing. An entry in the diary on July 14, 1836, states: Paid one hundred dollars to P.C. DeWindt for lot No. 37 on Division Street and received deed for same.

Seven years later, he notes that he paid the tax gatherer $1.64 levied on my house and lot at Fishkill Landing. He did not live at his house until his later years. During the week, he stayed in the gardener’s cottage on the estate grounds.

James met frequently with the foremost horticulturist and landscape artist of his day—Andrew Jackson Downing, whose books on landscape gardening are still published today. Downing laid out many of the great estates in the Hudson Valley.

A diary entry from February 1844 states: Crossed ice on river to go to Mr. Downing’s. Bought 3 roses for Miss Verplanck. Sowed parsnips, planted garlic.

In 1923, Virginia Verplanck gave Vassar College a copy of her brochure, The Verplanck Garden. It described the garden, started in 1804, that for so many years was under the loving care of James Brown.

Originally six acres but later cut down to four, it was on a flat plain opening to the great expanse of Newburgh Bay. Relieving the flatness were two great magnolias, while large trees of various kinds brought the path down from the house. There were old June roses, fraxinella, heliotropes, forget-me-nots, daffodils, narcissuses, irises, grape hyacinths and snow drops, all planted so long ago, as Miss Verplanck described them.

The former Mid-Hudson Medical building, the mid-nineteenth-century residence of Judge Jackson, whose gardens James Brown observed on his many walks to Fishkill Village. Courtesy of David Miles.

The garden is today the subject of a restoration project begun by the Mount Gulian Society. Were many of these plantings from James Brown’s time? If so, what a legacy he left!

THE POSTMASTER AND THE PRESIDENT

William Pelham was a persistent man. When he wanted something, he believed in going after it, especially when it concerned a government appointment. And in his case, he went to the very top to secure it—directly to the president of the United States.

Pelham was a watchmaker and jeweler by trade who lived in Fishkill in the 1840s. He was active in political circles and a loyal member of the Whig Party, the forerunner of the Republican Party. He campaigned vigorously for the election of General Zachary Taylor, organizing torchlight parades and meetings.

When Taylor won the election of 1848, the Whig Party was jubilant, and Pelham expected a political appointment as a reward for his services to the party. The appointment he wanted was that of Fishkill postmaster. He submitted his name among a list of candidates, and it looked as if he would get the job. But through some political maneuvering, his congressman had agreed to recommend someone else.

Pelham learned of the other man’s impending appointment and told his congressman that he would not accept the decision without a battle, adding that he would take his case to the highest authorities—to the president if it were necessary.

He was as good as his word.

A few weeks after Taylor was inaugurated, Pelham