Always Present, Never Seen: A Response

Editor’s Note: Born in South Carolina, Daniel Pruitt attended school in Brockway, Beacon and Glenham before graduating from Beacon High School in 1965 and earning degrees from SUNY Stony Brook and The New School for Social Research in New York City. Retired from IBM, he lives in Dunedin, Florida.

Below are excerpts from an article that Pruitt researched and wrote in response to our five-part series on the history of Black people in the Highlands, Always Present, Never Seen, published in 2022. Pruitt felt the series could have included more about local Black history from 1850 to 1930. “I felt a personal need to connect the present, which I knew, with the past, which I did not,” he wrote. “This past history was never present and never seen as such over my lifetime.” His full report, which he describes as part memoir and part scholarship, is available here as a PDF.

My parents were South Carolina emigrants to Beacon, arriving in 1946. I thought the history of the local Black community had come with us from the South. No anecdotal evidence or civics lessons suggested we weren’t the first Black inhabitants of Beacon. I wasn’t alone in thinking this.

Although most of my friends were born in Beacon, they all had families from somewhere else, predominantly the South. Until recently, Mickey Reed thought his sister, Dot, was in the first class of Beacon High School in 1951 that had Black graduates. In truth, the first Black graduate was William Howes Jr. in 1925, but he lived in Baxtertown, according to census records, which was in the Town of Fishkill. Were Mickey’s sister and her classmates the first Black graduates who lived in the city proper?

I had heard that the kids from Baxtertown walked to the Little Red Schoolhouse for their primary education — not the easiest of treks but not the miles more required to reach Beacon High. Howes had to want that degree, even if it probably was of no use to him, as a Black man, finding a job. So kudos to William Howes, Class of 1925, and Dorothy Reed, Audrey Myrick, Leonard Morgan and Eugene Sims in 1951.

When I was growing up, the Black community lived in Brockway, the brickyard community in the Town of Fishkill, or in the west end of Beacon, formerly part of Fishkill Landing (which merged with Matteawan in 1913 to form Beacon). My family lived in both. We followed the Germans, Irish, Jews and Italians into the West End, not necessarily in that order. Nothing came after us except urban renewal.

The river baptized, fed and played with us. The dump was always on fire; a southeastern wind brought it to the front door like the mail. There were as many as five beer gardens in the 1950s between Bank Square and Beekman Street. Few white people walked through the West End. City parades bypassed us, starting at the fire station a block east on Main Street.

Surprisingly, the Black churches were elsewhere until Springfield Baptist opened in the former Central Hudson gas building on Beekman Street in 1946 under Mattie Cooper, formerly an associate pastor at Beulah Baptist in Brockway. Black people filled the homes and apartments on Beekman, River and Ferry streets and Wolcott Avenue. There were a few white families still living in the West End into the 1950s: the Cimorellis and Cervones on lower Ferry; the Russells, Gromkos and Petterossis on Chandler; and the Carmichaels on Beekman. But they were not there long, and Black families lucky enough to get the few available IBM jobs left, too. However, unlike white flight, Black flight didn’t have the East End as a destination. They moved outside the city limits.

Bank Square — more like a tuning fork than a square — was the hub of the West End, what we called “up the street.” The white-owned businesses weren’t going anywhere. Two beer gardens, Bank Square Tavern and Modern Cafe (Vinnie’s and Jimmy’s) were anchors. There was Ike’s, a grocer who begrudgingly gave credit and kept a watchful eye with his charge, known affectionately as Lil White Bobby, on the penny candy. There was Jimmy Johnson’s pool room and Mr. Lewis’ Fish and Chips, both Black-owned. Klay’s gas station had a busy milk machine and phone booth. My dad bought his first car, a light green 1951 convertible, at Hoffmann Ford, across North Avenue from Klay’s.

Lower Main, known as “Back Street,” was home to factories. Over time, they filled with Black and then Puerto Rican employees. Most Black folk worked at the Brockway brickyard or Castle Point, the veterans’ hospital in Chelsea, both on Route 9D just outside the city.

In 1941, Manet Helen Fowler, the first Black woman to receive a doctorate in cultural anthropology, visited Beacon to interview Black residents. I believe she stationed herself at the Beacon Inn (later Davis’ Bar and Grill), a fixture on Beekman Street. Halfway “up the street,” at the top of Beekman, was the Bluebird Lounge (aka Horton’s), which Fowler dubbed the Congo Inn. It appealed to a younger crowd and was the second of two Black bars on Beekman, which Fowler referred to as the “Negro” street.

As The Current’s series documented, the history of Black people in Beacon began with slavery. I was surprised to see that, in the 1790 federal census, New York had 21,324 slaves, compared to Georgia’s 29,264 — much closer than I imagined. My primary education suggested that slaves, cotton and the bright bandanas worn by the women were a product of the South, but it was the slaves in New York who cleared the fields of trees that created postcard views of the Hudson, cultivated those fields, built the stone walls and harvested the crops.

Slavery in New York ended early in the 19th century. Beginning in the 1830s, an important source of jobs in the Hudson Valley for Blacks was the manufacture of bricks. As Martha Collins Bayne writes in County at Large, before the introduction of steam machinery in the early 1840s, bricks were “mixed by mules and pressed by hand” and the industry “employed entirely Negro labor at extremely low wages.” In Within These Gates, Daniel DeNoyelles notes that “to do this with any degree of rapidity, it required great strength.” There would soon be competitors for these low-paid and exhausting jobs: Irish immigrants.

By 1880, there were seven brick manufacturers in the Town of Fishkill. Twenty years later, there were 38 along the six-mile stretch between Dutchess Junction and Chelsea. The Dennings Point Brick Works and Brockway were the largest. Brockway hired seasonal and local Black workers even when white immigrants were available. By the turn of the century, the brickyard had housing, the school that I attended in 1952, a company store and a post office.

In 1897 Brockway extended its holdings to Dutchess Junction, buying a yard there and naming it and the original site as the Brockway Brothers Co. Next door to the original site was a brickyard owned by J. Martin. This brickyard had vanished by the time my family reached Brockway in the 1940s, but the Black community of Martin Yard was still there, taking advantage of the cheap housing. The children were among my classmates.

I suspect the brickyard owners realized that these Black workers from the South were the long-term solution to their labor needs. I also suspect they realized that these men, for all the wrong reasons, would make bricks their life’s work, that they would be tied to bricks in the North like they were tied to the land belonging to Southern planters. In the 1910 census, there were 27 Black miners (waterworks), mostly from Virginia and North Carolina, who were probably employed to build the aqueduct project between the Catskills and New York City. It wasn’t just the brickyards looking southward for cheap labor.

The original Star of Bethlehem Baptist Church, founded in 1900, sat uncomfortably on North Cedar Street in a white community farther away than a Sunday morning walk from the West End. The early Black residents were primarily Methodists. I suspect the Baptist faith came with the seasonal brick workers; the Beulah church in Brockway opened around 1920. The first Baptist pastor I knew, the Rev. E.B. Carpenter, preached Sunday mornings and earned a living Monday mornings setting bricks.

There were no Black voters in the presidential election of 1916, the first vote to include the newly created city of Beacon, or 1920, the first for women. The local Black community appears to have settled for what historian Michael Groth calls “life on the margins.” For the seasonal workers from the South, this would be business as usual. They would have never really known the taste of citizenship.

By 1930, the Black population was on the rise in the Town of Fishkill, which included the villages of Brockway, Chelsea, Dutchess Junction and Glenham. Brickmaking jobs were no longer seasonal and, on Sept. 15, 1924, the Castle Point Veterans Hospital opened in Chelsea. Both Castle Point and the Brockway brickyard actively sought Black employees, but brickwork was dirty, dusty, hot and dangerous, not to mention the low pay and the less than reputable activities of the employed, on and off the job. The VA hospital cared for veterans with tuberculosis. The threat of catching TB in the greater community left open the door for Black workers from the South. They did not hesitate to come.

The daughter of my mother’s midwife, Georgia Thompson, found her way to Chelsea from our birthplace in Helena, South Carolina, through her husband’s acceptance of a VA offer. The Morgans, the Whiteners, the Pickens, the Bryers, the Pruitts and the Galloways all reach back to South Carolina via Castle Point.

In 1930 there were 105 Black brick workers in the Town of Fishkill, and the VA employed 102 Black people. There were nine Black gardeners, including William Howes Jr., the first Black graduate of Beacon High, who had joined his father in the endeavor. Finding the families of many of my Black friends in the 1930 census brought elation. It was like a time capsule.

Their world crashed with the stock market, leaving the Black brick workers stranded and as wards of the state when Brockway filed for bankruptcy. The lucky few found jobs at Castle Point. The unlucky found ways to return to the South, but most were captive to bricks no longer being made. They bet their lives and their families’ lives on a career in bricks in the North and lost.

Henry MacCracken, who wrote a history of the county, called this one of the most distressful episodes in Dutchess history. Eleanor Roosevelt was summoned to gather support for the plight of these Black families marooned in Dutchess Junction and Brockway. A few folks l knew called the abandoned brickyards in Dutchess Junction home through the 1950s.

I began this endeavor after reading The Current series; I thought some precipitous event had caused the lightening of Beacon’s complexion before my family arrived in 1946. I suppose the flood of white immigrants could be that event. Beacon is undergoing a second lightening as the number of Black residents slowly recedes from census to census, but bricks and TB won’t add color this time.