Some of the world’s greatest cities originated on river banks. In spite of individual histories, there is one common pattern. These were all “hydraulic” communities that developed creative skills to control the elements and open up the access to waterways.
Environmental intervention facilitated their adaptation to the habitat. They engineered techniques to dig canals, drain swamps, reclaim land and build on marshy ground by using mud banks to produce stylish brick. The transition of Venice, Antwerp or Amsterdam from soggy settlements to iconic port cities symbolized man’s ability to master his surroundings. New York City joined that list.
Settlers designed vessels to transport people, cattle and goods. Long before Henry Hudson sailed up the channel that now bears his name in 1609, dozens of Indigenous tribes lived along its banks and used it as a highway.
The means of transporting quantities of cargo however, did not materialize until a ship was crafted that could handle the Hudson River’s navigational challenges of unpredictable currents, capricious winds, powerful tides and shifting sands.
Once that vessel was designed and built, the river became a vast commercial waterway. Cargoes of agricultural products and building materials were transported from the Hudson Valley to the emerging and all-consuming metropolis.
Hudson River Sloops
The Dutch sloep (sloop – same pronunciation) was developed during the seventeenth century and designed for practical purposes. As these vessels were primarily used for transporting goods and passengers on inland rivers and canals (during their earliest period), sloops were fitted with a low bowsprit and a single headsail suited the navigation of shallow waterways.
The first ships sailing in New Netherland had been deep-draft keelboats with high sides that could also be used for crossing the Atlantic, but they were almost impossible to handle on the Hudson River. Early settlers were forced to modify these cumbersome vessels.
The Hudson River sloop that evolved was an adaptation from the Dutch sloep. A flat-bottomed (for passing over shoals and sand bars) and low-sided wide vessel, it featured a single mast located near the front of the craft (allowing sails to be lowered quickly if needed) from which up to three sails could be hoisted.
Some twenty-five meters long, the sloops were constructed of Hudson Valley woods, typically rot-resistant cedar, for the sides and harder oak for the bottom. They were built virtually everywhere along the river. Among the vessels registered between 1789 and 1867, Nyack built 170, followed by Marlboro (in Marlborough, Ulster County) with 112, and Albany with 106. Settlers from the Low Countries were involved in almost all of these ventures.
The Hudson River sloop would become the mainstay of the Valley’s maritime transportation from the early days of Dutch settlement until the advent of the steamboat. At the peak of its popularity around 1830, every town and village along the river had its own fleet of brightly painted sloops, ranging from a half dozen to as many as fifty or sixty. Large anchorages resembled a forest of masts and provided a festive and colorful spectacle. The Hudson scenery seemed a celebration of sloops, an “impressionistic” painting.
From 1807 onward, the Hudson River Steam Boat (later Clermont) – designed by Robert Fulton – started steamboat operations on the Hudson River. Although steam offered growing competition, sloops remained an important means of transport. Regular breakdowns made steam seem an unreliable mode of travel. Passenger sloops also offered services to and from smaller river towns and across seasonal shallow areas that steamers could not reach.
Eventually, the introduction of barge traffic (towboats and tugs pulling as many as forty barges carrying various types of cargoes) doomed the sloop’s status as “Queen of the Hudson.”
Competition from the railroads (especially the Hudson River Railroad which opened in 1851 from New York to Albany) meant that the transport of freight and passengers would increasingly take place over land rather than on water. The last chorus of the “Song of Sloops” had finally been sung.
Sloops of Freedom
Called “freight sloops” or “market boats,” these vessels had no regular time of departure or fixed destination, but they played a crucial role in the commercial network. Sloops could carry as much as 125 tons of commodities.
Food produced in the Hudson Valley was important to the city of New York’s exploding population. Cargoes varied. Flour, grain, hay, lumber, live animals and furs were brought downriver to Manhattan; manufactured goods and imports such as earthenware, fabrics, hardware, whale oil, rum, salt, sugar and tobacco went upriver.
Passenger sloops carried twenty-five or thirty travelers from New York to Albany or stops in between. The full trip could take from twenty-four hours (a fast trip) to several days as speed was dependent on wind and weather conditions. Passengers carried food and drink with them to supplement what was offered on board and brought books or needle work with them to pass the time in relative comfort.
Without a fixed schedule, sloops set sail when the hold was full and the travel conditions were favorable. Often in the course of the voyage the crew were forced to anchor when either strong currents or strong or lack of wind made a smooth passage impossible.
Given an opportunity, passengers would be helped to go ashore for a picnic or a stroll, patiently waiting for conditions to improve. They were prepared for the “travail of travel.” (New York Almanack has published descriptions of such trips from 1800 and 1801.)
In its heyday some 1,200 sloops sailed the Hudson River. The average vessel on the river carried a captain, three or four sailors and a cabin boy. The crew often included enslaved Black men who, over time, gained crucial experience on the waterway.
When in September 1850 the Fugitive Slave Act was passed by Congress, requiring the return of runaway slaves with severe penalties for those who refused to cooperate, the Hudson River became a favored route for escapees. Sloops offered a promise of freedom.
Captain Abraham Johnson was a freed African-American who, along with his wife and five children, owned and operated two sloops on the Hudson River dubbed The Miriam and The Jane of Albany.
He put his son John in charge of the Miriam to deal with trade and cargoes. A skilled navigator, the latter broke all records on March 17, 1849, when he completed the 150-mile trip from New York to Albany in a mere seventeen hours.
John Johnson built a house that was occupied by his sister Harriet and her husband Stephen Myers, a former slave and articulate abolitionist. In the mid-1850s the property became headquarters of Albany’s Vigilance Committee, a group that was active in organizing the Underground Railroad from the early 1840s up into the Civil War and assisted hundreds of men and women in their pursuit of liberty in the northern United States and Canada.
Brick City
Bulk cargoes of lumber, stone and bricks to the city of New York’s building sites were transported over the Hudson River. As late as the 1890s, sloops were being used to ship heavy materials as the vessel was the most economical means of transfer when speed of delivery was not essential.
New York’s rectangular street grid was codified by the Common Council in 1811. Before the system was implemented, streets were laid down unplanned and haphazardly, following the natural contours of the hilly terrain. Most of New Amsterdam’s earliest buildings were timber constructions. Recurrent fires (and arson attacks) forced the use of alternative materials.
Civic pride in Flemish and Dutch cities had been expressed in iconic brick buildings. Citizens of New Amsterdam were driven by a similar passion. From the early 1630s onwards, bricks were imported from the Low Countries.
Washington Irving’s fictional narrator Dietrich Knickerbocker described the houses of Rip Van Winkle’s village at the foot of the Catskill Mountains as built of “yellow bricks brought from Holland.”
In 1642, the West India Company (WIC) commissioned the construction of the Stadt Herbergh at Broad Street. A decade later, the tavern was converted into a City Hall (“Stadt Huys”). Excavations have shown that its builders used Dutch-made bricks.
The desire to create a home from home was manifest in the city’s planning. In 1646, the colonial government decided to dig a network of canals wide enough for small boats to navigate through New Amsterdam’s mercantile center.
The largest canal was the Heere Gracht (Gentleman’s Canal), running from Broad Street to Beaver Street. Its continuation was called Prinzen Gracht. Both were named after the mother city’s elegant canals. Soon after the handover in 1664, they deteriorated into open sewers and were drained by the English authorities three years later.
The exploitation of large deposits of yellow and blue clay along the banks of the Hudson River made it unnecessary to transport building materials across the Atlantic. In 1771 Dutch settler Jacob van Dyke began producing bricks in a rapidly expanding business.
A breakthrough in production occurred in June 1852, when another Dutch immigrant by the name of Richard VerValen invented and patented a machine for molding bricks. Local industry exploded.
By the mid-century, there were over forty brickyards located in the Haverstraw area (now in Rockland County and home to the Haverstraw Brick Museum), employing some 2,500 workers. Old bricks continue to litter the river’s edge.
The industry furnished the materials that would transform the city. A staggering number of bricks was transported to Manhattan (at its heyday over a billion bricks annually), mainly by Hudson River sloops known as “brickers.”
The brick business was booming, but the unprecedented demand created an unregulated rush of delivery that was not without risks. On September 5, 1857, the Rockland County Journal reported on one of the many serious sloop accidents when on a dark and stormy night the Hoboken ferry boat Paterson ran into the sloop Aurora.
The sloop was sailing at “reckless” speed in a fast running tide. Having no lights up, its presence was observed at the very last moment by pilot Cornelius Van Riper who was unable to take evading action.
In the collision the ferry ripped off the sloop’s entire stern. She keeled over and sank within two minutes. Its crew members were saved. Owned by the Haverstraw firm of Lot Onderdonk (another Dutch-sounding name), the Aurora carried thirty thousand fine faced bricks.
Haverstraw turned the metropolis into a haven of bricks. New Amsterdam was built on an irregular pattern of yellow brick roads lined with houses that showed a variety of stepped gables and stylish stoops.
It became a feature of New York’s cityscape as Dutch architecture continued to persevere until the mid-eighteenth century. It was only then that wealthy residents began opting for the fashionable Georgian style.
Read more about Hudson River sloops.
Illustrations, from above: James Edward Buttersworth, “Hudson River Sloop Phillip R. Paulding”, ca. 1885 (Private Collection); Claes Jansz. Visscher II’s “Sloops near a Dutch Estate,” undated; Sidewheel steamer tow boat pulling canal boats, barges and sloops (Donald C Ringwald collection, Hudson River Maritime Museum); “Sail and Steam At Anthony’s Nose” by Ray Crane showing two sloops on the Hudson River; “Sloops on the Hudson at Tappan Zee” by Francis Silva; New Amsterdam’s brick built city hall, once one of Manhattan’s first taverns; and HUTTON brick fragments on Kingston Point Beach (courtesy BrickCollecting.com).
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