Hudson River

The Hudson River, one of America's richest historical sites, has its source in the Adirondack Mountains in New York State. It flows 507 kilometers from Mount Marcy to the southern tip of Manhattan, where it empties into the Atlantic Ocean. The Hudson River's history in many ways represents America's military, industrial, artistic, and environmental endeavors.

English explorer Henry Hudson "discovered" the Hudson River valley in 1609 while searching for a quick passage to China. He found a beautiful, wooded valley populated by Algonquin Native Americans and wild animals. Dutch colonists later settled the area, which became known as New Amsterdam. The Hudson highlands played an important role during the Revolutionary War when Americans stretched a chain across the river near West Point to prevent British ships from sailing up the Hudson from New York City.

It was not until the early 1800s, the age of the steamboat, that the river gained national economic importance. The Erie Canal, completed in 1825, linked Lake Erie with the Hudson River, the nation's only commercial artery through the Appalachian Mountains. By 1850 more than 150 steamboats carried approximately a million passengers annually along the river.

The Hudson River had more than economic importance. Its forested landscape inspired the nation's first indigenous school of painting, known as the Hudson River School of landscape painting (1825-1870). A group of artists including Thomas Cole, Asher Durand, Albert Bierstadt, and Frederic E. Church painted the river valley's natural grandeur for the world. Contemporaneous writers and poets, including Washington Irving, James Fenimore Cooper, and William Cullen Bryant, also romanticized the landscape.

But the sublime pen and brush barely masked the region's rapid industrialization prior to and after the French and Indian Wars and Revolutionary War. By 1830 most of the river valley had been deforested to supply timber to the local mines, tanning factories, and forges along the river. Troy, Hudson, Cold Spring, and Peekskill became major industrial towns. The mountain valleys above Thomas Cole's studio in Catskill village, for example, supported the largest tannery industry in the country.

Despite this rapid industrialization, health resorts in the Catskills cropped up along the river in the mid- 1800s as retreats for urbanites. Hiking, rowing, swimming, and fishing popularized outdoor recreation. Wealthy New York businessmen, including financier J. Pierpont Morgan and railroad baron Edward H. Harriman, built opulent mansions in the hills. By the 1880s railroad lines from New York facilitated access to the Hudson Valley.

Yet, pollution and declining water levels in the Erie Canal and Hudson River generated widespread concern, and the region became the site of one of the nation's first wilderness conservation movements. Adirondack State Park opened in 1891, and Bear Mountain State Park in 1910. The modern era of environmental activism did not start until half a century later, when Consolidated Edison electric company proposed building a giant hydroelectric plant on the river near Cornwall.

The federal government decided that protection of natural resources was just as important as economic development, and in 1980 Consolidated Edison designated its purchased land as a park.

Although the Hudson River supports a diversity of wildlife and an estuary in its lower half, pollution still threatens the river's health. But during the past twenty years, local and national legislation has helped to ensure that the Hudson remains a national treasure.