USA > New York > Warren County > Warren county : a history and guide > Part 13
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Roman Catholic parochial schools were established at Glens Falls as soon as the religious groups became strong enough to support them. There are no Protestant parochial schools other than Sunday school classes. In Glens Falls the Jewish Community center offers afternoon Hebrew classes for school children.
The first parochial school in Warren County was erected by Catholics of French descent at the corner of Pine and Crandall Streets, Glens Falls, in 1873. Under the direction of the Reverend H. Huberdeault it carried on for several years. The building, a dwelling-like structure of red brick, now houses the eleven Sisters of the Assumption, who comprise the faculty of the present St. Alphonsus School, a grade school opened in 1908. In 1940 it had a registration of about 300 pupils.
On January 29, 1883, during the pastorate of the Reverend James McDermott, the Catholics of St. Mary's parish, Glens Falls, erected the first St. Mary's Academy, a brick building, now unused, but still standing in Church Street. In 1885 the school had 545 pupils, of whom two made up the first graduating class in 1889. In 1902 St. Mary's was chartered by the Regents.
By 1903 the first building became inadequate for the needs of its 1,085 students and a three-story brick structure to house the high school depart- ment was built adjacent to the first building. In 1904 a one-story addi- tion for a kindergarten was built behind the high school. In 1924, with 1,210 pupils registered, St. Mary's was badly crowded and the old grades building had reached an unsafe state of disrepair.
In that year a campaign for funds to erect a new school building was begun and in 1930 St. Mary's Chapel, corner of Warren and Church Streets, was razed along with several adjacent buildings to prepare the site. On January 29, 1932, at the beginning of the school's golden jubilee year, the new St. Mary's was formally opened.
The faculty consists of twenty-five Sisters of the Order of St. Joseph and three secular teachers. The school is maintained by regular contribu- tions of the parishioners, and in 1940 its enrollment approximated 1,000. It is the only parochial school in Warren County with a high school de-
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partment and takes rank as one of the largest of its kind in the United States.
The State library system was set up in 1838 and today Warren County has exceptionally good library facilities with seven Regent-chartered libraries of which six own their own buildings. Glens Falls has a handsome building close to the center of the city, a collection of 38,830 books and an annual circulation of 172,602, while Warrensburg, with 11,038 volumes, has a circulation of 37,353. Both are open daily, summer and winter. The Lake George, Diamond Point, Bolton Landing, Mountain Side, and Stony Creek Libraries have an average of over 6,000 volumes each and are open from 8 to 42 hours each week with longer summer schedules.
PART II Resort Towns and City Streets
Glens Falls
Railroad Station: Delaware & Hudson Railroad Station, cor. Lawrence and Cooper Sts., for Delaware & Hudson R. R.
Bus Stations: 16 South St., for Adirondack Transit Lines, L. B. K. Lines, Hudson Transportation Co., Corinth Bus Lines; 74 Ridge St. for Cham- plain Coach Lines; 168 Glen St. for Whitehall Autobus Co., East Lake George Motorbus Line.
Airport: Floyd Bennett Airport, 21/2 m. N. on US 9, for Canadian Colo- nial Airways (Montreal - New York) ; local flights, 12 min., $1.50; 20 min., $2.00.
City Busses: 10c; 14 tickets $1.00.
Taxis: 20c per person.
Traffic Regulations: Speed limit 20 m. per hour; no U turns at designated intersections; parking meters in business section, 9 a. m. to 6 p. m., 5c for 1 hr; all night parking prohibited.
Accommodations: 9 hotels; tourist homes, boarding houses.
Information Service: Chamber of Commerce, 191 Glen Street.
Motion picture Houses: 4.
Athletics: Recreation Field, Glen St .; baseball, softball, track, tennis, skating, tobogganing.
Swimming: Municipal Beach, Bush St.
Golf: Glens Falls Country Club, 5 m. N. of center of city, off US 9, 18 holes, greens fee $2.50.
Annual Events: Eastern States Basketball Tournament, March; Italian Celebration Feast of St. Anne, July; Glens Falls Open Tennis Tourna- ment, August; Flower Show, August.
GLENS FALLS, (345 alt., 18,836 pop.), at the southeastern entrance to the Adirondacks, spreads east and west along the Hudson River on a great plateau. Manufacturing and trading center, it benefits from a large tourist business.
Almost in the heart of the city, the Hudson drops 60 feet, supplying power for local industries. At and below the rapids are paper, cement, wallpaper, and pigment color factories. These, with shirt shops and a few minor industries scattered throughout the city, and the Glens Falls Insur-
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ance Company, whose building rises above other structures in the business district, provide the bulk of employment for office and factory workers.
Glen Street, the main artery of travel, begins at the falls and climbs an easy grade to the plateau level, where it enters the shopping area. Most of the commercial buildings, with mansard roofs and gingerbread trimming, were built after the disastrous fire of 1864. The few modern structures, by reason of their architectural simplicity, now stand out in sharp contrast. Elm-shaded residential streets radiate, fan-like, from the two squares in the center of the city.
Numerous fine homes, many owned by retired families, testify to the city's high per capita wealth. A large percentage of the smaller homes is owned by wage earners.
The desire for land brought pioneer farmers to Glens Falls; the presence of water power fostered its industrial development. When Lord Jeffrey Amherst, in 1759, smashed the French center at Ticonderoga and Crown Point, the plateau on which the city now sprawls was a virgin forest, with one line of communication, the Military Road from Fort Edward to Lake George, which was cut in three days by Sir William Johnson's army.
Amherst, building a fort at Crown Point, envisioned this land, some of which he might himself own, dotted with growing towns and productive farms. He informed Lieutenant Governor de Lancey of New York that settlers would "have nothing to fear from the incursions of the enemy which they may henceforth safely look upon to be at an end." On Sep- tember 21, 1759, de Lancey proclaimed that "Those who ... shall now choose to go and settle between Lake George and Fort Edward, will there find three Several Spots of cleared ground," and that "on condition of immediate settlement thereof in the form of a Township" he would recommend grants of land, free from the usual quitrent or annual tax.
In the early part of 1760 syndicates headed by James Bradshaw, Daniel Prindle, Trueman Hinman, Jehiel Hawley, Ebenezer Lacey, and Benjamin Hoyt petitioned for patents of land. They set forth that they were "neighbors" from the Oblong, Dutchess County, and from New Fair- field, across the line in Connecticut. On February 1, Bradshaw received a promise of the first tract on the Hudson above Fort Edward. Out of his colonizing efforts grew the village of Sandy Hill, now Hudson Falls.
Nineteen days after approving the Bradshaw, or Kingsbury Patent, the Provincial Council advised de Lancey "to grant to Daniel Prindle and his associates a tract of land six miles square to be laid out adjoining the land proposed to be granted to James Bradshaw and others, and to run toward Lake George; so that the present road leading from Fort Edward to Lake George may, as nearly as may be, run through the center of said tract of six miles square." The other syndicates, headed by Hinman, Hawley,
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Lacey, and Hoyt, were put off with the promise that they would be "con- sidered as the first petitioners" when the government was ready to grant the land they sought.
The Lords of Trade in London passed the Prindle application on June 13, 1760, recommending to the Crown an exemption of quitrent for ten years. King George II gave his tacit approval but apparently side-stepped formal assent to avoid a precedent in the matter of quitrent exemption. In July, de Lancey died and was succeeded by Cadwallader Colden; in October, George II died and George III came to the throne; thereafter serious difficulties beset the application of Daniel Prindle and his associates. Colden had hardly settled himself in the governor's chair before he dis- patched a letter to the Lords of Trade expressing some disapproval of the pending land grants. After a heated exchange of correspondence with the governor, the Lords of Trade complained to the King that Colden and his council proposed "making fresh grants and settlements more for the benefit of themselves and families than for the subjects in general."
On March 19, 1761, possibly as a result of this letter, Colden ordered the grant surveyed. This consumed all summer and fall and resulted in another land dispute, when Sir William Johnson became piqued because some members of the Provincial Government, who were also land specu- lators, balked his efforts to secure a patent to 40,000 acres in the Mohawk Valley, which had been deeded to him by the Indians. His reaction brought to a head the whole issue of the rights and interests of the Indians in the matter of land grants.
With all the authority of his royal appointment as Superintendent of Indian Affairs, Sir William declared that the proposal to parcel out terri- tory on the west side of Lake George made the Mohawks "uneasy," as it took from them their hunting grounds. The upshot was intervention by the Lords of Trade with an order that no lands should be granted adjoin- ing territory occupied by the Indians, claimed by them, or reserved for them.
However, on April 15, 1762, the council advised the governor that the Prindle patent should be granted, as conveying land formerly belonging to the Schaghticokes who had "renounced allegiance to his Majesty" in 1754 and had gone to Canada. The governor accepted the ruling and, on May 20, 1762, he formally issued the grant under the name of the Queens- bury patent.
The patent encompassed 23,000 acres, nearly 36 square miles, and, despite the exemption from quitrents offered as an inducement by de Lancey, it did require the payment annually of the usual two shillings six pence quitrent for each 100 acres. It further called for the cultivation of three out of every fifty acres of arable land and the settling of one -
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family on each 1,000 acres within three years. Under its terms the cutting of pine trees "fit for masts" was forbidden, and all mines of gold and silver were reserved to the Crown. The Provincial Government made little effort to enforce these regulations. Though laws were passed for the collection of quitrents, they were not enforced at first, and later those due from Queensbury were remitted to compensate for losses suffered by the settlers during the Revolution.
In all, 112 men signed the several applications for the patent, but the ultimate grant was to 23 men, only four of whom had placed their signa- tures on the previous petitions. A proprietors' meeting disclosed that ownership had been transferred to 31 men, nearly all Quakers, of whom but four were of the original 23. Only a few of the 31 ever became actual settlers.
Local tradition has it that the entire deal was prearranged by wealthy Quakers in New York City, who were anxious to help members of the Society of Friends at Quaker Hill in the Dutchess County Oblong to found another Quaker colony on the upper Hudson. In any event, Quaker Hill is the mother community of Glens Falls, for Quaker Abraham Wing, the largest land holder under the Patent a month after its issuance, was the accepted leader at the new frontier colony, and the small band of settlers selected to move with him into the new lands were all his own relatives or dependents, residents of Quaker Hill or its vicinity.
Wing and Zaccheus Towner, surveyor for the patentees, made the first journey to the site in August 1762. To their surprise they found living here Jeffrey Cowper, a former sailor in the British Navy and a friend of Lord Amherst. Sharing Cowper's quarters in the old British military huts, Wing and Towner began to lay out the town plot from the Halfway Brook southward to the northern confines of the present city of Glens Falls. After a few months, they returned to Quaker Hill. In the spring of 1766 the first actual settlers - Abraham Wing; his son-in-law, Icha- bod Merritt; his apprentice, Truelove Butler; Caleb Powel, Asaph and Banajah Putnam, and their families - arrived on the site after a hazard- ous journey from Quaker Hill over turnpike and military road by oxcart, horseback, and on foot.
Wing built his sawmill at the falls. One log house was erected in a little clearing on the hill above, and other homes were built on or just north of the road to Fort Edward, now Warren Street. No improvements were attempted in the town plot that had been laid out at Halfway Brook, principally because waterpower would draw a growing colony to the falls. It is also likely that Jeffrey Cowper was another reason for Wing's failure to settle on this site, as Cowper's patron, Amherst, held the highest office
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in North America, and this, as Wing expressed it, made him "doubtful of trouble." Today, more than 175 years later, Halfway Brook is still outside the city.
For ten years the colony expanded slowly. In 1770 Wing erected a second sawmill on his riverbank property in partnership with Daniel Jones, a brother of David, the fiance of Jane McCrea, who was killed by Indians at Fort Edward. The brothers allied themselves with the Tory faction at the outbreak of the Revolution, and David was at Sandy Hill with Burgoyne when the golden-tressed scalp of his betrothed was exhib- ited in the English camp.
Because Wing provided mill facilities, the Queensbury patentees soon voted him their common water rights in Lot 29, which bordered on the river at the falls. Soon, settlers began to arrive in small groups. Daniel Parks took up residence across the river from Wing's mill and ran a ferry. Wing provided a community center by erecting a crude tavern where Warren Street now runs into Glen Street in the heart of the city. At this inn Benjamin Franklin and his party stopped in 1775 on their unsuccess- ful mission to enlist Canada on the side of the American rebels. In conversation Wing told Franklin that quitrents in Queensbury had never been collected.
It was not long until repercussions of the Revolution reached the settlement, which was located directly on the warpath to Fort George, Ticonderoga and Crown Point, forts that fell to the Americans in 1775. When Burgoyne overran the country, in 1777, his Tories and Indians forced some of the harassed settlers to flee and burned their homes. Three years later, in 1780, the British, under Sir Guy Carleton, completed the job, and the few remaining pioneers fled to Quaker Hill, leaving the homes and mills of the colony to become piles of ashes in blackened clearings.
Queensbury was resettled shortly after the Revolution. A contempo- rary record describes the colony at this time as "Limited to the hill which rises from the Falls, and in the year 1783 presented only a wheat field with a solitary smoke on its border, and two other dwellings in the vicinity of the forest." In 1788 Abraham Wing rebuilt his mills for the approxi- mately twenty families in the settlement, and, with the help of Quaker pioneers, erected a log meetinghouse and a school on Bay Road beside the Halfway Brook. Later he rebuilt his tavern at or near the same cross- roads where it had originally stood.
Known variously as Wing's Falls, Glenville, Wing's Corners, The Cor- ners and Pearl Village, the name Glen's Falls was adopted in 1788 in tribute to Colonel John Glen, a resident of Schenectady; he had acquired land by patent on the south side of the river opposite Queensbury, and _ water rights at the falls by purchase from the Parks family. Glen built
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a gristmill and a sawmill across from Wing, and lived in comparative elegance in a summer home on the hill above. The apostrophe was later removed from the name.
In the last busy years of the eighteenth century, frame houses began to replace log cabins, while stores and mills were multiplying. Lumbering took on the importance of a major industry, and in 1786 the sawmills of Fuller and Scribner were turning at Long Pond, now Glen Lake, a sum- mer resort five miles north of the city.
Warren Ferris, in 1795, and Micajah Pettit, in 1802, added their saw- mills to the group above the falls. The following year mills were operated on the outlet of Long Pond. Close to the turn of the century men were hewing away at the pine forest that stretched across the plateau and foot- hills, to supply logs for about twenty mills on nearby streams.
A log school was erected in 1795. In the following year, the settlers added a second house of worship, a Methodist Church, on Ridge Road. In 1803, 83 persons subscribed $947 to build a church "somewhere near the Four Corners." It was four years later, however, before an organiza- tion was perfected for the "Union Church of Pearl Village." The church, dedicated in December 1808, became known as "Old White;" it stood on what is now Warren Street, just east of Bank Square.
John A. Ferris, also a Quaker, assumed leadership of the colony upon the death of Abraham Wing in 1795. Ferris, who arrived in the settle- ment about 1794 with $500, probably more actual cash than any of his fellow pioneers possessed, bought land, built a shop, and plied his trade as a hatter. In 1798 he built a tavern and, in 1802, established an inn across the square from Wing's tavern. In 1804 a toll bridge replaced a little span which had been erected in 1795.
While the sawmills were busy, the wide-spread sandy plain was denuded of its tall trees, and the scrub pine that now fringes the city replaced the forest. Other industries, several of them fostered by lumbering, came into being. Sanford's ashery was operating in 1810, Forbes and Johnson's forge. began to make plows in 1811, and Champlain started a tannery in 1820, the same year that Pownal Shaw began burning lime. Another new indus- try, Pease's distillery, is said to have done a flourishing business. In 1813, the Warren Republican, a weekly, the first Glens Falls newspaper, made its appearance.
When the State, in 1812, required that a public school be established "within walking distance of every home," commissioners divided Queens- bury into districts, Glens Falls becoming District 2. There is no indication that District 2 immediately built the public school required by law. The War of 1812 was bringing the town's first depression, and money remained tight until 1821. Besides, there were three private schools. One of these,
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the Academy, occupying a large frame building erected in 1813 on Ridge Street to replace one built in 1803 on Elm Street, was the property of John A. Ferris, who desired to keep it rented to persons "such as will totally abstain from the use of ardent spirits." The Academy, twice moved into new buildings, survived as a private school until 1937.
In 1820 the eastern section of the community, determined to form its own school district, built a one-room schoolhouse at the corner of the present Warren Street and Oakland Avenue. In 1823 the west end did likewise, establishing its tiny school at the intersection of what are now South and Broad Streets. In the same year District 2 built a brick school on Ridge Street.
As Glens Falls approached the 1830's an economic crisis threatened to make it a ghost town of the vanishing lumber trade. The local timber was gone; people were moving north and west to follow the receding forests. Business men and property owners decided that the usefulness of water- power and mills was passing. Then two things happened that dispelled these gloomy forebodings: the feeder canal from Glens Falls to Fort Edward, developed as a branch of the Champlain-Hudson Canal, was opened to navigation, and Abraham Wing III and his partners developed the system of driving loose logs down the Hudson from the Adirondack highlands to the sawmills at Glens Falls.
The canal supplied a transportation artery to metropolitan centers, and lumbering grew from a local industry into big business. The manufacture of lime also received a tremendous stimulus. Wagons loaded with hides from northern tanneries rolled up to warehouses that opened on Canal Street. Canal boating fast became an important business, with Glens Falls the distributing center for the southern Adirondacks. The old toll bridge was replaced by a free bridge.
On May 31, 1831, The Messenger, successor to The Warren Republican, boasted editorially that the community "contains a population of about 1,000 inhabitants and supports four lawyers, three physicians, and one minister." It portrayed the self-sufficiency of frontier towns by pointing out that in Glens Falls were "to be found the shops of two cabinet makers, two hatters, three wagonmakers, one chairmaker, four shoemakers, three saddle and harness makers, and four milliners." The paper might also have claimed a growing civic consciousness, for in 1835 a public meeting resolved that "the interest and safety of the village require that each householder procure one or more fire buckets."
On April 12, 1839, Glens Falls was incorporated as a village, with John A. Ferris as first president. One of the first moves of the new government was to appropriate money to dig two wells for better fire protection. One - of these, located in the present Bank Square, was subsequently fitted with
.
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a large red-handled pump on a raised platform six feet square. This be- came the town pump, which supplied most of the water for stores and homes in the business district of Main Street, now Glen Street, and pro- vided a rostrum for political speakers during election campaigns.
As the 1840's clicked away, Glens Falls was known chiefly for its lum- ber and lime and as a transportation center. Teamsters and "canawlers" made the hotels and bars at the foot of the hill their stamping ground. Sawmills and lime kilns lined the river banks. The "wide open" suburbs of Big Bend, Feeder Dam, and Goodspeedville welcomed the log drivers, lumberjacks, and rivermen. Walter Geer, George Sanford, Albert Cheney, James Morgan, Keyes Cool, John Keenan, Halsey Wing, and others were among the leaders of industry.
The villages of Sandy Hill and Fort Edward soon linked their drives with those of Glens Falls, and the river above the falls was often filled with 13-foot logs. To imprison these logs the Hudson River Boom Asso- ciation, in 1849, strung the Big Boom, a gigantic barricade of timbers, iron, and chains, across the river near the Big Bend. It is still used to catch the annual spring drive of 4-foot pulpwood logs, a mere shadow of the mighty log drives when the tireless saws droned night and day, turning out in the eight months of canal navigation upwards of 50,000,000 feet of lumber.
In the same period the lime companies of Keyes Cool, John Keenan, and Halsey Wing stepped up their output to a half million barrels annually. Their extensive quarry operations produced a lucrative by-product, black marble. The New York State block of black marble at the 160-foot landing of the Washington Monument, inscribed "New York - Excelsior," came from a Glens Falls limestone quarry. Until about 1848 black marble mantel pieces, then very fashionable, sold at fancy prices at the Glens Falls quarries. Hearths to match came from Swanton, Vermont. The impor- tation of Italian marble, and a sudden change in fashions, eliminated this part of the industry, but quarrying continued for some years thereafter.
The village contained 2,5 00 inhabitants in 1855, and was growing more cosmopolitan with a variety of nationalities and creeds represented. Per- haps the most notable influx was that of the Irish and French-Canadians, who established churches in 1849 and 1853, respectively. Previously the Baptists, in 1834, and the Episcopalians, in 1840, had added their congre- gations to those of the Quakers from Dutchess County and the Methodists and Presbyterians from New England. In 1847 the first permanent fra- ternal organization, the Glens Falls Lodge of the Masonic Order, came into being.
Transportation facilities improved with the building of a plank toll road to Lake George in 1848, and with the opening of a railroad from
City and Village
THE HUDSON SUPPLIES LIGHT AND POWER FOR GLENS FALLS
Photo by John J. Vrooman
A BACKDROP OF WOODED HILLS AT LAKE GEORGE
SAIL BOAT HAVEN, LAKE GEORGE
Mobilgas
CHT SHOP |RESTAURANT
ANEZ
LAKE GEORGE'S SHOPPING DISTRICT
CITY PARK, GLENS FALLS
B.P
J.J.
SHOPPING DISTRICT, GLENS FALLS
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