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Bluestone Festival Set for October 4
What’s 360 million years old, bluish in color and is found all over the City of Kingston – especially below your feet? Bluestone, of course, and on October 4 the Sixth Annual Bluestone Festival will be held at Gallo Park, which is located at the foot of Broadway, on the waterfront in the Rondout section of Kingston. The event runs from noon to 6 p.m. and includes a lecture on bluestone geology by Dr. Charles A. Ver Straeten of the New York State Museum of New York State Education Department in Albany. There will also be folk music as well as a bluestone wall-building demonstration, among other activities. To view a self-guided tour of bluestone features in Kingston, courtesy of the Friends of Historic Kingston, click here [this will link to the tour page].
Bluestone in Ulster County: A Self-Guided Tour
This self-guided tour is intended to guide you to some significant or representative examples of bluestone and its mining in Kingston and Ulster County, New York. We suspect and hope that, as you drive this tour, you’ll begin to notice bluestone just about everywhere and (a further hope) that you’ll begin to share our own view of bluestone as a unique and valuable component of our local landscape that deserves preserving.
A few facts:
Bluestone is typically bluish-gray in color (though it often has casts of purple, brown, and even yellow).
It is a densely compressed sandstone from the Upper Devonian era, about 360-385 million years old.
Its density and other properties (doesn’t get slippery with age, wear, or wetness) make it ideal for sidewalks.
Bluestone is found predominantly in eastern New York State and northeastern Pennsylvania. Most of it is found in Ulster County.
Beginning in about 1830, bluestone began to be shipped from Ulster County up and down the Eastern seaboard and beyond. The industry employed as many as 10,000 people in its heyday. In time, Portland cement greatly diminished the demand for bluestone but not before it had become part of the material fabric of streets and buildings in many American cities and towns.
Since Ulster County has been the nation’s largest supplier of bluestone, it is not surprising that you’ll find a lot of it today all over Ulster and neighboring counties and the Hudson Valley in general. In towns, it was commonly used for sidewalks and curbstones. In the country, it can be seen in many forms of walls and fences, formal and rough. Sometimes, shaped into blocks, it was used as the main material in a building; more often, it was used in foundations. Some people chipped out the insides of a piece of bluestone to make a birdbath or a water trough for chickens or hogs. Bluestone became hitching posts, gates, capstones, chimney caps, well covers, cornerstones, grindstones, and tombstones.
This tour is divided into three parts: downtown Kingston, uptown Kingston, and Ulster County outside of Kingston. Although the sites can be visited in any order, we’ve provided a sequence that we think will work well for anyone starting from the Heritage Area Visitor’s Center in the Rondout area of Kingston at 20 Broadway. The driving tour takes about three hours to complete. There is also an optional one-hour hike to an old quarry off Route 28.
Downtown Kingston
Before 1825, Rondout (now downtown Kingston) was farmland with a nearby dock for several Hudson River sloops that carried local produce. With the arrival of the Delaware and Hudson Canal, Rondout rapidly developed into a thriving village in the same period that bluestone mining was becoming an industry. By mid-century, bluestone had become a substantial part of its commercial and residential buildings and the Rondout Creek had become the largest distribution point for bluestone.
Start the tour at the Visitor’s Center at 20 Broadway. In the 19th century commercial buildings across the street, you see examples of stairs, window pediments, and other details made of bluestone that was brought to Rondout Creek, dressed in local sheds and yards, and then shipped up and down the Hudson to cities all along the Eastern seaboard. In the Visitor’s Center, you can learn more about the bluestone industry.
Thomas Chamber’s marker. In the little park outside the Visitor’s Center, notice a small pear tree planted by Friends of Rondout to replace one said to have marked the original grave of Thomas Chambers, an English carpenter who helped settle Kingston in 1652. Near the pear tree is a small bluestone marker to represent his grave. The carving in it replicates the carving in the original stone, now in the Senate House.
2. Bus-stop bench. At the nearby bus-stop, try out the park bench that the Friends of
Rondout recently erected with several heavy slabs of early curbstone. Many of Kingston’s streets are still lined with similar curbstone. (If you have been walking, at this point get back in your car and drive up Broadway two blocks to Union Street and turn left.)
3. 4 West Union Street. Pause to note the large blocks of bluestone used as building and doorway sills, another notable use of bluestone. Drive two blocks to Wurts Street and turn right up the hill.
4. 67 Wurts Street. Go two blocks to Spring Street, where you’ll see on your right the imposing bluestone home of James J. Sweeney, one of the most prominent dealers in bluestone during the late 19th century and the owner of over a thousand acres of quarries in Ulster County. Sweeney bluestone is said to have been used in the base of the Washington Monument. Notice across the street the…
5. Cornell entrance and retaining wall. Across the street from the Sweeneys lived Thomas Cornell and his family. Cornell barges carried bluestone as well as coal from the Delaware and Hudson Canal up to Albany and down to New York and other destinations during the latter part of the 19th century. The site of Cornell’s house is now a vacant lot and small city park but the retaining wall and entrance are still evident. They’re not of bluestone, however: they provide an example of another local material that has been popular since the area was first settled in the mid-1600s – the local limestone, which our official Soil Survey describes as “Onondaga limestone.”
6. High bluestone retaining wall. Continue driving up Wurts to McEntee where you must turn left or right. Turn right, go through the next traffic light, and notice the wall on your left as you turn up the hill. It’s patched here and there with our local limestone. Prepare to make a sharp left just after Broadway swings to the left on to West Chestnut Street.
7. Corner of West Chestnut and Broadway. Just before turning left, notice on the right and ahead of you the low bluestone retaining wall on Broadway with the “1993” in it. That year the State of New York started to erect a concrete block wall here to replace a 19th century bluestone wall. Local residents objected and this wall of new bluestone is the result.
West Chestnut Street in Kingston
This street was once the home of Rondout’s more prosperous citizens, who yet lived close enough to business to be able to walk down to work. Off and on for fifty years (1850 to 1900), horse-drawn wagons would occasionally bring in new bluestone for sidewalks, curbs, well covers, and other purposes. On the left going up the hill (fourth house up just past the split-level), look at….
8. 32 West Chestnut. This imposing Italianate building is built entirely of dressed bluestone. In 1858, Henry Samson, who made a fortune in leather tanning, built this home on property purchased from James McEntee, resident engineer for the D&H Canal Company.
9. 55 West Chestnut. This four-square Colonial Revival home built in 1899 is typical of many turn-of-the-century residences in the Hudson Valley. Like many, it has a bluestone foundation, large bluestone slabs leading up to the house, and a bluestone public sidewalk. Note the “55” chiseled into the steps by the sidewalk.
10. 80 West Chestnut. In front of this modest house from the early 1960s, notice two rounded pieces of bluestone by the sidewalk and two slabs of rutted bluestone along the curb. These mark the original carriageway entrance to the fortress-like home of Samuel and Mary Coykendall, heirs to the Cornell Steamboat Company. Their mansion was replaced by this small development. The developer courteously left these stones in place.
11. Coykendall Coach Houses. Drive one block past the intersection with Orchard Street to Augusta Street and make a slight detour to see three buildings, two coach houses and a chauffeur’s house, that served the Coykendall family. The foundations are of bluestone and so are the paving stones in front. The building nearest to Chestnut serves as home for the Coach House Players, a local theatrical group. Then go back to Broadway and continue on to…
12. The turnaround at the western end of West Chestnut. Find the bluestone cornerstone with the date “1873” on it, partly hidden by foliage. Once the cornerstone of the First Presbyterian Church at Abeel and Wurts Streets (now the site of a gas station), the stone was rescued and put here in 1973 by several homeowners who live at the turnaround.
13. Two bluestone hitching posts. Opposite from the cornerstone, notice two bluestone hitching posts (not original to this site, but representative of many bluestone hitching posts that don’t exist any more). Drive back to Montrepose past…
14. The Number 2 School. Coming back from the turnaround at the end of the block on the right, observe the bluestone foundation, steps, and sills common to many such public buildings in Ulster County prior to 1900. This school building is soon destined to be converted into loft-style condominiums, some with blackboards.
Turn right on Montrepose just past the school and take another right on Hudson Street all the way down to Abeel Street, which runs along the creek.
15. Fitch Building. In about half a mile shortly after passing under a railroad bridge you’ll come to an unusual 1870 mansard-roofed cupola-adorned building on your left by the creek. This cut bluestone building at 540 Abeel was the office for the Simeon and William B. Fitch Bluestone Company and a monumental advertisement for its use as a building stone. The yard beyond the building once contained thousands of well-organized slabs waiting shipment to points north and south.
16. Where the bluestone tramway ended. You have to imagine this site, but it’s probably in or close to the Fitch bluestone yard and may have extended along Abeel to other yards, such as Sweeney’s. It was a set of bluestone tracks that supported the wagon loads of bluestone that came down from the West Hurley and other nearby areas. The tracks were set in place as needed and possibly the entire stretch of about 18 miles between Olive Branch beyond West Hurley all the way to the creek here at Wilbur. Pieces of the often deep-rutted tracks can still be found here and there. Now let’s head up Wilbur Avenue, where the last part of the tracks ran, to the beginning of the bluestone tramway out under the Ashokan Reservoir.
Uptown Kingston
Described as a sleepy country village in the early 1800s, as the century progressed, Kingston began to develop a few of its own industries (such as coach-making) while it shared in the growth of nearby Rondout. Kingston could hardly fail to notice the wagonloads of bluestone being carried through the middle of its main commercial street and, inevitably, bluestone became the material it turned to for curbs, sidewalks, and a number of building uses.
17. 110 Fair Street. From Wilbur, follow Wilbur Avenue for 1.2 miles to Greenkill, turn left on Greenkill for two blocks, and then 45 degrees right at the big intersection onto Wall Street, roughly following the route of the old bluestone tramway. Go three blocks and, at St. James, turn right, then right again at the end of the block onto Fair Street. Further down the block at 110 Fair Street is the former home of Hewlitt Boice and his family. Like Sweeney, Fitch, and others, Boice became rich in the bluestone business and then lost most or all of it, usually in developing unproductive quarries. When he was rich, he had his name chiseled in the carriage stone by the curb. Also note the hitching post and urn bases.
18. The Old Dutch Church. Turn right for one block over to Wall Street again and drive into the uptown area. The bluestone tramway ran down Wall Street exactly on the path you’re driving (if you were in a time warp, you could actually collide with a wagonload of bluestone!). At the corner of Wall and Main Street, the Dutch Reformed Church, known locally as the “Old Dutch Church,” is home to the area’s first church congregation (1659). The present church, designed by Minard Lefever, was built in 1850-52 of local bluestone at a time when bluestone had become a much-admired, yet locally accessible building material. The church allows us to see how different it can look in randomly laid, dressed and adorned building blocks than it does flat on the ground as sidewalk flagstones.
19. Large slabs of the original uptown sidewalk. In the block beyond Main Street after passing the Old Dutch Church, notice the large slabs of bluestone in front of Schneider’s Jewelry and adjacent buildings and also across the street, probably part of the original bluestone sidewalk. Much of the uptown sidewalk has been redone using newer and thinner bluestone.
Lowell Thing, 9/20/2003; revised 9/7/2004. Special thanks to Dennis Connors, Edwin Ford, Pat Murphy, Edwin Pell, Kevin Umhey, and Francis Wolven.
If you have suggestions for improving or correcting this tour (or get lost!), please call Lowell Thing at 845-331-4985 or by e-mail at twothings@hvc.rr.com.
What’s 360 million years old, bluish in color and is found all over the City of Kingston – especially below your feet? Bluestone, of course, and on October 4 the Sixth Annual Bluestone Festival will be held at Gallo Park, which is located at the foot of Broadway, on the waterfront in the Rondout section of Kingston. The event runs from noon to 6 p.m. and includes a lecture on bluestone geology by Dr. Charles A. Ver Straeten of the New York State Museum of New York State Education Department in Albany. There will also be folk music as well as a bluestone wall-building demonstration, among other activities.
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