Ed Ford's Kingston, part 1

K76+

This article originally appeared in Kingston Times in 1997. At that time, local history was still considered somewhat of a provincial pursuit. I’m proud that this interview helped introduce a new generation to Kingston history and to Ed Ford, who continued to champion the town until his peaceful passing at age 103.

Kingston of the 90s was not the city we know today. IBM ceased operations in 1994, storefronts were empty, City Hall was boarded up, and the crack epidemic wasn’t helping.  The city’s future was uncertain, at best.

While our conversation predated a turning point by many years, I can see how it helped encourage, at least in my own mind, a greater pride in Kingston, and a faith in a brighter, if yet unseen, future for our town.

As I recall, we talked on a bench that’s no longer there, on North Front across from Wall Street, within the boundaries of the old Stockade. The interview was likely recorded on my handheld Panasonic cassette recorder, just before the world went digital…

We’ll be breaking the article into two parts. Today’s installment begins with the Dutch and works its way through George Clinton.

Edwin Ford has been Kingston’s city historian since he was appointed to the position by then-mayor Peter Mancuso in 1984. Ford and his wife Ruth ran Ford Printing Service on Furnace Street from 1949 through 1989. That business is still operating down in Port Ewen.

Born in Highland, Ford moved to uptown Kingston as a boy in 1928. He attended Number 7 School (now the school administrations’s office on Crown Street), then Kingston High School and college in New Paltz. I interviewed him recently.

Adam Snyder: Is there a particular era in Kingston history which most appeals to your personal imagination?

Ed Ford: I think the early Dutch, mostly. People don’t realize that this was such an early settlement. This was the third Dutch settlement in the Hudson Valley, the first being New Amsterdam, which is now New York City, the second being Fort Orange, which is Albany. And there was nothing in between.

As early as 1652* the settlers had overgrown Fort Orange at Albany. They petitioned Peter Stuyvesant (the Dutch colonial governor), and he finally granted permission for them to live anywhere they wanted to live, and they chose here. not down on the river—there wasn’t any river travel of any consequence—but near where we are now, on the banks of the Esopus Creek.

They came here for the farming, because all the flat land was a flood plain. They didn’t have to cut trees down, the Indians were already growing crops. They bought the land from the Indians and they were all set up for a community. That’s why of all the land between New York and Albany they came here first.

And they were Dutch. They spoke Dutch, the records are in Dutch, the Old Dutch Church had their sermons in Dutch. Even after the English took over in 1669, there were still people speaking Dutch here. In fact, they even preached Dutch in the Old Dutch Church up until 1808. That’s how long the Dutch traditions held on here.

For the most part, people are inclined to figure Kingston’s like other towns and cities in the Hudson Valley, but it really is a little more unique than that. I’m very interested in that early period, and I think we should play it up here as much as possible, like we do with what we call the Stockade area.

AS: We’re sitting in the Stockade right now, aren’t we?

Ford: Yes, we are. North Front Street, that was the north front of the Stockade. Clinton Avenue was the east front, Main Street was the south side, and Green Street was the west side. That was at its largest. It had started smaller and was enlarged two times.

AS: What was the purpose of building a stockade?

Ford: Well, by 1658 there had been troubles between the settlers and the Indians**. They just didn’t understand each other. They had two different cultures. The Indians, they didn’t figure ownership of land. They just lived there. They weren’t nomadic, but if they wanted to move half a mile to another site a little bit better, more water, better conditions, they just moved. They didn’t figure plot-lot ownership as we do today.

But of course the settlers did, and when they bought the land from the Indians for blankets and pots and guns, and liquor, unfortunately, there started to be trouble, and there was killing on both sides. The settlers petitioned Governor Stuyvesant to have his soldiers build a stockade as protection against the Indians, and they did. It lasted from 1658 up until about 1700 when it just deteriorated from non-use. They didn’t need it any longer so it just kind of disappeared.

AS: What was life like for people who lived inside the stockade?

Ford: They were not necessarily, like in some cases, poor people. They were farmers, but they lived a pretty good life. They were very self-sufficient. They had their own shoemaker, for example; they had their own leather maker, they had their own silversmith. They grew their own food and all that, and they had their livestock. It wasn’t luxury, but it was probably as good as what they had in Europe.

And they had their fun, too. They enjoyed life. The kids went to school. Dutch were very strong on education. They wanted every child to have an education, girls and boys both. So they were pretty good at that.

AS: How did the transition come about from Dutch to British?

Ford: Well, while the Dutch were here in the Hudson Valley, the English were all up and down the New England area. Then the English figured that this was part of their land, too, so they told Peter Stuyvesant he’d better surrender. He didn’t want to, but a council finally said to him, “Look, they’re gonna kill us all. They’ve got more ships, they’ve got bigger guns than we have, and they’ll blow us out of here.” So he surrendered. They didn’t put him in jail or anything, they sent him back to Holland.

So the English took over, but they did things very gradually here. They didn’t come in and put completely new council or local government here. They didn’t put in a new sheriff. As long as things were going along pretty well, and people seemed to swear allegiance to the English king, they didn’t seem to mind them having their own government.

So the transition was very gradual and, for the most part, quite harmonious.

AS: Now, most of us have heard the story that in 1777 the British burned Kingston. What was the transition like prior to that which led Kingstonians to consider themselves American rather than British?

Ford: It must’ve been a hard time for a lot of people. Some of them or their near ancestors had come from England not too long before, but the people here for the most part seemed to be patriots. They had what they called a Committee of Safety, and they met in a stone house that still exists, on the corner of Fair and Maiden Lane. Dr. John Roberts had his office there. And the committee’s purpose was to determine who was a patriot and who had Tory sympathies, English sympathies.

But I don’t know of any great incidents here where anybody had any real particular hard time. Mostly here they seemed to be of a patriotic nature. This seemed to be kind of a center for patriotism here.

AS: Is this how Kingston came to be the first capital of New York State?

Ford: Well, when the government was formed, the New York State Assembly met here in April 1777, at the old courthouse, if I remember rightly. Then in July, George Clinton was sworn in as first governor of New York State, they had an election.

And obviously the British heard about that. They could see that New York was forming a government. By September the British had already occupied New York City and were starting to move up the Valley. The New York State Senate decided that they would meet in Kingston. So in September, the 20th I think it was, in 1777, they met in the Senate House, which is how it got its name.

The Senate ratified the New York State government, the Assembly had done it already, they had a governor in place, and Kingston officially became the first capital of New York State.

And now we’re up to September 20th and Kingston was burned by the British on October 16th of the same year. So that meant that within only a couple of weeks after the Senate had met at the Senate House, they had to start packing up their belongs because they knew that the British were going to come up the river with a fleet of ships. And of course the British did come up, they got through the chain across the Hudson at West Point.

They dropped anchor out in the river and had small boats which they rode to shore. Four hundred British soldiers landed at the foot of Broadway, 1,200 landed at Kingston Point, and they marched on up. You know where Delaware Avenue and Broadway come to a point at the top of the hill?*** They met there, 1,600 of them, that were coming to burn Kingston.

AS: How many people were in Kingston at that point?

Ford: None. The inhabitants had fled, and the army had been south of here protecting Fort Clinton and Fort Montgomery, which were near West Point and overlooked the chain. They wee marching back up here but at that time there were probably only two hundred that were able and available. And that would’ve been two hundred against 1,600 British soldiers, were were well-armed and well-supplied from those ships. So the colonial army only got as far as what they call Golden Hill, where the jail is now. They could see the smoke rising from the burning of Kingston, but they were really powerless to do anything about it.

One story says there was a small garrison down by Hasbrouck Park overlooking the river that shelled the British ships and kept them from landing for several hours, but in the end they knew it was hopeless so they just spiked the guns and took off. Nobody was killed in all that. When the British came and burned Kingston**** no one was killed.

The inhabitants had loaded up in wagons, headed out towards Hurley, and saved as much as they could. Obviously the stone houses’ roofs burned off and the interiors burned, but in most cases they were rebuilt, though there were some stone houses that were just reduced to rubble from the intense fire and heat. Must’ve been like a firestorm, every house on fire, a whole area. And every house at that time had a barn for their horses or whatever, and they had a hay barracks. All those were very flammable.

Outside of the stone houses, we have no idea what Kingston looked like, prior to the burning of October 16th, 1777. We just don’t know. We know that they had wooden frame houses, but we have no idea of their appearance.

AS: Back to Governor Clinton. Didn’t he go on to become Vice President of the United States?

Ford: Yes, under Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson was president from 1801 and served two terms. For the first term Thomas Jefferson’s vice president was Aaron Burr. And Aaron Burr was very, kind of difficult to get along with, he’s the one who had the duel with Alexander Hamilton down in Fort Lee, New Jersey and killed Alexander Hamilton.

And as a result of that duel which was in about 1803 or ’04, Thomas Jefferson realized that Aaron Burr was no longer a credible politician, and he didn’t want him as a vice president. His next choice was George Clinton, who had been governor of New York State for 21 years.

Under George Clinton’s direction, New York had formed its government, the court system, the education system, legislative, everything. So he became the vice president under Thomas Jefferson. Then the next president was James Madison, and Clinton was selected to be vice president again under Madison. He served for three more years and then he became ill.

I’m not sure what he died of, pneumonia probably. I think it was in April of 1812 that George Clinton died in Washington, D.C., and he was buried there in what they call the Congressional Cemetery, where a lot of congressmen and public figures were buried.

Then in 1908, almost a hundred years later, a committee from Kingston decided they would like to have George Clinton brought back to Kingston***** and have him buried within sight of the courthouse. They got permission from the descendants. They disinterred his body, and they sent the monument here to be reassembled in the Old Dutch Church yard.

They took his body to the Smithsonian Institute. They wanted to see what kind of shape he was in after 100 years. Instead of being only bones, they found that his body had been wrapped in lead, and the lead was inside a copper casket, and the copper was inside mahogany, so George Clinton was all intact. He was all all resplendent in his brigadier general Revolutionary War uniform with silver buttons on the sleeves and up and down the tunic.

They did an autopsy, and were going to put him back in the lead, the copper and the mahogany, then the story goes that the committee said, “Well, we’d like to take another look at him before you put him back,” and when they looked his buttons were all gone.

AS: Ouch.

Ford: Somebody stole all George Clinton’s silver buttons. I hope they’re in some museum somewhere but I don’t know whatever happened to them.

So in 1908 they brought him from Washington to New York. As they left Washington, all of Congress came out and stood on the steps of the capitol to pay their respects to George Clinton. When he got to New York City, 40,000 people went passed his casket at the city hall to pay their respects. And then he had a flotilla of ships of different sizes bring his body up the Hudson River. Every time they passed a town, there was a 21-gun salute. When they got to West Point, all the cadets stood out on a bluff at attention till they passed by.

This was Memorial Day weekend of 1908. They got here on a Saturday and it was a very rainy day, so there are very few pictures of any kind. They show a little bit of downtown Kingston where they unloaded his body from the ship and put it on a wagon to bring it Uptown, but I found no pictures at all of him being interred in the Old Dutch Church yard.

Underneath the monument is a cube of concrete that’s ten feet deep and ten feet wide, with just a channel in the center for the casket to fit into and then be sealed up again. They put his body in there, as I said, on a very rainy Saturday. Then on Sunday in all the churches, synagogues, whatever, they had historical addresses concerning him, or concerning history. And on Monday, which was the Memorial Day, there were all kinds of celebrations, and 75,000 people were said to have come to Kingston, and we’ve only got 25,000 here to start with. They said the trolley cars were overloaded with people, the wheels were breaking down and everything.

AS: This was a big deal.

Ford: Oh, a big deal, and people were coming from far and near, mostly in horses and wagons, to come to Kingston for the big celebration. And that’s how George Clinton got to Kingston.

AS: I read somewhere that he was one of the few colonial politicians who was in favor a smaller government.

Ford: Yes. He was, what I think is a bad term, “anti-Federalist.” I don’t think he was anti anything, I think he was for states’ rights. I don’t think he had any idea whatsoever that the United States would ever go west of the Mississippi River. That was common at that time. Thomas Jefferson, at first, thought the same thing.

You’ve got to remember, the fastest means of travel and communication in the late 1700s and early 1800s was by horse, so they didn’t foresee the huge United States at all, they really couldn’t. George Clinton thought that even New York State was very difficult to populate much beyond the Hudson and Mohawk Valleys. Outside of a few places on Lake Ontario, there wasn’t much of anything else.

He believed very strongly in states’ rights and was very very influential in the Bill of Rights, whereas in the beginning, you know, there were some people that wanted George Washington to be like a king. They foresaw a father figure, a kingly figure and all that.

George Clinton was not of a wealthy family. He was more of a man of the people, and he thought more of people’s rights than some of the rest of them did. Some of them were more aristocratic and they were used to that kind of feeling of authority. But George Clinton thought his ideas were more important, and he expressed those very strongly.

He probably could have been one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence. It’s not that he didn’t believe in it, but I think he figured he was too busy fighting a revolution and that he had other things to do. They had other people from New York State. They didn’t all agree on those constitutional conventions and all that. There was a lot of dissension about how the government should be formed.

NOTES:

*Henry Hudson noted a creek in his journal on his exploratory journey in 1609 up the river now bearing his name. It’s believed the Dutch set up a “redoubt” close to the mouth of this creek perhaps in the 1620s. This name would morph into “Rondout” and was probably the first European settlement in what’s now the City of Kingston.

**There were people living in what’s now Kingston for something like 7,000 years. There were Lenape villages and farm fields here when the Dutch arrived. While Ed Ford touches on their different conception of land ownership, the full story is more complicated and tragic. After years of being shuffled around, descendants of the Lenape can be found today in the Midwest and in Canada, but not locally on what was once their land. There is also information to be found elsewhere about the so-called Esopus Wars which were a foundational moment in Kingston’s history.

***Brit forces linked up at Stewart’s, obviously having a little coffee break before sacking the village.

****British Lieutenant-General John Vaughan claimed Kingstonians had been firing at his troops from the windows of their houses, possibly a fiction to justify the burning of the village, otherwise questionable in terms of rules of combat.

*****See “George Clinton Blues” by Adam Snyder, possibly to be posted on Substack in the future…

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