by David Flint
This is the year of Hudson 400 – the celebration of 400 years since Henry Hudson’s exploration of the river that bears his name and Samuel de Champlain’s exploration further north and 200 years since Robert Fulton’s maiden voyage up the Hudson in the first commercially successful steamboat. In another celebration 100 years ago, New Yorkers pulled out all the stops commemorating the 300th and 100th anniversaries respectively of those events. Stuart Lehman, Education Coordinator for the NYS Capitol, presented a most detailed and informative illustrated talk about that celebration at the Stephentown Heritage Center on Monday evening.
This was the era of the great expositions, World’s Fairs in London, Paris and Vienna, the Columbian
Exposition in Chicago in 1893, the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition in 1876, the Buffalo World’s Fair and the Louisiana Purchase Exposition in 1904 and the Jamestown Exposition of 1907 among them. The more than 500 Commissioners of the Hudson-Fulton Celebration were not to be outdone. Funding amounted to about $1.2 million which would be about $25 million in today’s money. The festivities stretched from Staten Island up to Cohoes. There were parades, concerts, receptions, banquets and illuminated cities all up and down the river. The theme was progress as well as history, with technological and scientific advancements such as aeronautics, modern steamships and polar exploration being emphasized.
Over a million visitors came to New York City for the start of the celebration.
There were some 1,500 ships and boats in the flotilla that assembled to sail up the river, including 80 warships from all over the world. The flotilla accompanied replicas of both Hudson’s Half Moon and Fulton’s Clermont. In an unfortunate glitch at the outset, the helmsman of the Half Moon lost control of the ship for a moment causing it to ram into the Clermont, taking down the jib on the Half Moon and shearing off the rail of the Clermont. Observers were reported to have found the episode hugely funny, though the sailors and Commissioners did not.
Much of the commemoration was accurate; some of it was not. Who would quibble over the fact that Fulton’s maiden voyage with the Clermont was actually in 1807, not 1809, or about having blacks as stand-ins for Manhattan Indians and Iroquois for Mohicans? What did it matter that some depictions of Hudson’s Half Moon made it look more like a bathtub or that another publicity piece showed the Nina, the Pinta and the Santa Maria instead of the Half Moon? Poking fun aside, it was, according to Lehman, a marvelous and wonderful and even educational celebration. It had the effect of instilling an interest in history in the populace and furthering the cause of historic preservation.
The replicas of the Clermont and the Half Moon, unfortunately, were not preserved. The Clermont replica was sold to the Hudson River Day Line Company and put on exhibit at Poughkeepsie for several years. That not being too successful, she was taken to Kingston where she sat deteriorating for many years, finally being demolished in 1936. The remains can still be seen at low tide sticking up out of the river.
The Half Moon had been built by the people of Holland as a gift to the United States for the 1909 celebration. They spent a fortune researching the original ship, constructing the replica in great detail and transporting it across the ocean. According to Lehman, it was remarkably similar to the current Half Moon replica built in Albany and launched in 1989. The 1909 replica was parked at Palisades Park for some years after the celebration but later was moved up to the city of Cohoes. As it began to deteriorate the mayor fought to get funds to restore it, but it caught fire and burned in 1931. Lehman said that in 1959, New York State’s Year of History, State officials asked the Dutch to build another replica but were faced with the question, “What happened to the old one?”
