roses, it was one of milk, butter, cheese and apples, peaches , pears and grapes. During that period , when a steamboat accident occurred, the local newspaper would note the principal cargo being carried in its account. For instance, when the night steamer Thomas Cornell met its end by running up on Danskammer Point (north of Newburgh) in March 1882, mention was made that her main cargo had been Delaware County butter. In June 1886, the Cornell's successor, City of Kingston, ran down and sank a darkened sloop off Manitou. The paper mentioned that the principal item on the steamer's freight deck was Hudson Valley strawberries. The new railroad-steamboat connection to the Catskills also gave rise to the building of hotels in the mountains. The stifling heat of summer caused New Yorkers to seek relief at either the seashore or the mountains , and the Catskills were the closest, most readily accessible mountains. Passengers in large numbers journeyed to and from their mountain retreat via the Rondout night boats, or the Rondout day steamer Mary Powell, with connections via the Ulster & Delaware Railroad. In 1896 , the Hudson River Day Line moved their landing from Rhinecliff to the newly built landing at Kingston Point, to which the railroad's tracks were extended to make a dockside connection with the Day Liners. Over the next three decades, the flow of passengers reached floodlike proportions. These diverse maritime activites naturally required vessels of a variety of types . Shortly after the opening of D &
H Canal in the late 1820s , shipyards--0r boatyards as they were called Iocallycame into being on both the north and south shores of Rondout Creek for the building and repair of the canal boats, barges, scows, lighters, sloops, schooners and tugboats used to transport Rondout or Hudson River cargoes. For a full century, a prodigious number of vessels first became waterborne on the Rondout. The ring of the caulker's mallet, the whine of the band saw, the thud of the bull gang's mauls against wedges on launching day , the smell of freshly cut yellow pine, the odor of oakum and hot pitch, and the humid aroma of steam escaping from the large steam boxes used to make timbers pliable were sounds and smells that were once as common along Roundout Creek as the rise and fa ll of the tide. Since most of the cargoes that made the Rondout a major Hudson River port were ones that required towage, towboats and tugboats became a major local industry. In an age of unbridled free enterprise, probably Rondout's most successful entrepreneur was the earlier mentioned Thomas Cornell. Although he engaged in a variety of commercial activities, including railroading, his most enduring enterprize was undoubtedly the Cornell Steamboat Company. Starting in 1839, Thomas Cornell engaged in ever widening activities in the operation of both steamboats and towing vessels out of Rondout. Cornell, later with his son-in-law Samuel D. Coykendall, eventually concentrated exclusively on towing and in time had a virtual
monopoly of towing on the Hudson River. At its peak, their enterprise had a fleet of over sixty towboats and tugboats, extensive maintenance shops on Rondout Creek, and it was the largest marine towing company in the nation . Although not by design, the company also became a sort of preparatory school for would-be steamboat captains, pilots and engineers, most of whom started their steamboat careers as deckhands or firemen on a Cornell towboat or tugboat. All things come to an end. So did the glory days of Rondout as a port of consequence. High noon probably took place shortly after the Civil War, with twilight setting in a decade later. Following the War between the States, the rapid growth of railroads soon made the transportation of coal by rail both more economical and efficient. The carrying of coal via the D & H Canal diminished year by year, and the canal was sold in 1899. It was kept operable as far as Rosendale for a few years more and then closed altogether. With the introduction of electricity , the manufacture of artificial ice became possible; and starting in the 1920s, the home electric refrigerator rendered the old-fashioned icebox obsolete. By the end of World War I, gone were the familiar Hudson River tows of ice barges with their windmill-driven pumps for removing the melted ice from the bilge, as the tow moved downriver. Most of the huge icehouses were either dismantled or went up in spectacular conflagrations. The brickyards vani shed one by one due to changing methods of construction , the use of cinder blocks and ready-mixed
Part of the Cornell Steamboat Company fleet , including the towboats Pittston and Silas 0. Pierce (see also photo on page 15 ), laid up on the ice-bound Rondout Creek . The multi-story building with porches is the Daily Freeman Building, which housed the offices of the D & H Canal Company, and which is today part of the restored Rondout. Photo Hudson River Maritime Center, Saulpaugh Collection.