Editor’s note: Beacon was created in 1913 from Matteawan and Fishkill Landing.
150 Years Ago (November 1874)
According to The Cold Spring Recorder, a Fishkill Landing family killed a pig, hung it up and went off. When they returned, two-thirds of the pig had disappeared. Searching a neighbor’s home, Officer Sandford found a piece of pork hidden in a dinner pot.
After two dogs began fighting at Fishkill Landing, a stranger kicked Martin Hines’ dog to break them apart. Seeing this, Hines punched the man. He was charged with assault and fined $8 [about $220 today].
According to The Fishkill Standard, three women had their pockets picked over two days at the Fishkill Landing depot while waiting for trains.
Daniel Manning, 7, was taking dinner to his father in Matteawan when he was knocked down by a passing merchant wagon. A wheel passed over his face, causing a gash from forehead to chin, and he was picked up and carried home.
George Washington Winfield Scott Schofield, the “original bill poster” in Matteawan, sued an interloper from Newburgh for using his spaces.
The Howland Library reported it had 3,168 books.
The American Express office in Matteawan closed for lack of business.
The Empire Baseball Club of Matteawan traveled to Peekskill for a game, losing 35-23. Several Empire players got drunk and, while traveling home by train, quarreled with the brakeman, who “thrashed them all soundly.”
A sand bank collapsed on the Rumsey property at Fishkill Landing and revealed a human skull. Mr. Rumsey notified the coroner, who concluded the skeleton found 2½ feet down belonged to a large man who apparently had been interred about a century earlier.
George Lane of Matteawan cut off his right toe while chopping down a tree.
Justice Schenck heard a lawsuit at Fishkill Landing by a New York City cigar supplier against a Wappingers Falls retailer who had accepted shipment with a 10-day return and 60-day payment policy. Two months later, the buyer said he wasn’t satisfied with the quality and sent only a token payment. The Newburgh Telegraph reported that a jury tested the cigars and ruled for the plaintiff.
John Nice, a scissors grinder from Newburgh, received six months in jail for busting through a door at Matteawan in pursuit of a shop owner, for reasons not stated.
125 Years Ago (November 1899)
Four prisoners who led an uprising at the House of Refuge for Women at Hudson were transferred to the Matteawan State Hospital for Insane Criminals.
Edward Boland, imprisoned in Albany for attempting to kill his wife with a pair of shears, was sent to the asylum after he grabbed a handful of hot coals from a stove and threw it into the face of another prisoner. Both were badly burned.
Byron Harding, a New York Central towerman, was killed by the “Flyer” as he stepped across the track at Fishkill Landing on his way to work. The train was the same one that went into the river at Garrison two years earlier.
100 Years Ago (November 1924)
Real estate agent Pierre Scheneck sold the Timoney brickyard to a New York corporation. The property had 42 acres of clay and sand, 1,000 feet of river frontage, two sheds, 10 houses, two barns and two concrete tunnels under the New York Central tracks.
Augustus Carter, 19, died at Highland Hospital after being shot by Frank Clark, 26, who told police the gun went off accidentally when the hammer caught on a car door. He said the two men were drinking together after a pheasant hunt.
A wildfire atop Mount Beacon that burned for nearly a week destroyed 2,500 acres and two cottages in the summer colony and threatened the casino. Firefighters struggled through hours-long shifts with wet bags and brooms.
William Jones, 80, who owned a Beacon insurance agency, married Evadne Nash, 26.
A judge released Vincent O’Brien, 15, on $2,000 [$37,000] bail to the custody of his father, who agreed to take his son to Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore for evaluation. The teen had attempted to burn down the Marist Brothers school at Beacon because he was unprepared for his exams. Two doctors who examined Vincent attributed his psychopathy to the fact that, at age 13, he had lost 70 pounds in a year.
The family of John Lee, who was stationed aboard the USS Camden, received a postcard announcing he would be home for Thanksgiving. But a second dispatch soon after relayed the news that he had been killed by a train while taking a shortcut at a Connecticut station. Lee had twice earlier been granted furlough but was recalled at the last minute. He was survived by his father and five sisters.
75 Years Ago (November 1949)
A 40-year-old woman was charged with assault after slapping another woman on Main Street. She was released on $25 [$332] bail.
Florence Schrader, the widow of hat manufacturer Gus Schrader, left $5,000 [$66,000] of her $400,000 [$5.3 million] estate to St. Luke’s Episcopal Church and $5,000 to Highland Hospital. She left her late husband’s niece $30,000 [$400,000], a diamond ring, an automobile and a home at 545 Wolcott Ave.
A 71-year-old Ferry Street woman was taken to the hospital after being knocked down by a car backing out of a Bank Square service station. The 25-year-old driver insisted he hadn’t struck her but that she walked into his car.
A court fined two brothers $10 [$134] each for disorderly conduct. They had banged on the front door of a home at 2 a.m. that turned out to belong to a Beacon police officer, who found them in his hall. They told him they were looking for someone and questioned his authority to arrest them since he was off duty.
A box was placed in front of Schoonmaker’s store to collect items for Pieces for Peace, a project organized by the Beacon Council of Church Women to collect yarn, needles, thread and other sewing materials to be sent overseas.
Sixty-three percent of registered voters cast ballots in the Nov. 8 election in the 20 towns of Dutchess County where registration was not required. In Beacon, which required registration, the turnout was 96.4 percent. Mayor Lewis Bolton was reelected by 91 votes and Carleton Jones, the first-ward supervisor, won by six.
50 Years Ago (November 1974)
Seven Beacon High School students were suspended on Nov. 1 after a hallway fight at 8:45 a.m. The principal said it was “a carryover from Halloween.”
The USS Beacon, a Navy patrol gunboat, visited the city for a weekend public inspection. The Elks hosted a party for the crew.
The Fishkill Correctional Facility moved its showroom for inmate arts, crafts, paintings and furniture so visitors no longer had to go through security to browse.
Ken Hall, a fast-pitch softball pitcher in the 1920s and ’30s who worked at Texaco in Glenham, was inducted into the Dutchess County Old Timers’ Baseball Association Hall of Fame.
Mayor Robert Cahill said that, despite the state Freedom of Information Law, he would go to jail before he allowed access to certain, unspecified police records.
Police arrested a 43-year-old Beacon man on morals charges after a traffic stop on Interstate 84. The officer questioned the two passengers, who turned out to be runaways from Poughkeepsie, ages 12 and 16, who had been hitchhiking.
Ruth Polhill donated to the Howland library a copy of a guide to Dutchess County compiled in 1937 by the Federal Writers’ Project of the Works Progress Administration. Its previous copies had been lost or fallen apart from use.
The 2-4-1 Beacon High School football team defeated winless Kingston, 20-13, in a game that featured 12 fumbles and four interceptions.
A fight that began in a movie theater on Friday night (Nov. 15) between two teenage girls, one Black and one white, spilled outside, where a group of at least 50 adolescents broke windows on Main Street. The next day, fights broke out after the Saturday football game. On the following Monday, police made 26 arrests during brawls between roaming bands of Black and white students. The Dutchess County sheriff sent 40 deputies to help Beacon police restore order.
In an emergency session that evening, the City Council established a 7 p.m. curfew for anyone aged 18 and younger. Officers stopped vehicles and confiscated clubs and baseball bats. Two Peekskill High School students were among those arrested, along with a Cold Spring man who had a 4½-foot machete in his car.
On Tuesday, city officials, school officials, community leaders and residents met for 3½ hours to discuss the unrest. Mayor Cahill told the Poughkeepsie Journal: “What we have is a bunch of white and Black kids who really don’t like each other and, every now and then, fight it out…. Interracial dating between the white girls and Black boys is part of it. But maybe the more serious problem is that nobody, the Blacks or whites involved, is listening.”
Leon Cochrane, a Black member of the school board, said the students he saw in the streets weren’t old enough to date. “These were young kids,” he said. The Rev. Richard Ryley, pastor of the Methodist Church, believed the disturbances were the result of “racist feelings on both sides that have been there for years.”
On Wednesday, about 40 percent of students were absent at Beacon High School, where parents and clergy members patrolled the halls. After a night of relative calm, Cahill lifted the curfew on Thursday.
25 Years Ago (November 1999)
Sen. Chuck Schumer and Rep. Maurice Hinchey visited the Dutchess Democratic Committee headquarters on Main Street to endorse Lou Amoroso, who was challenging three-term incumbent Mayor Clara Lou Gould. (Gould won with 57 percent of the vote.)
Peter Forman, 44, was elected to his first full term as Dutchess County Family Court judge. He had been appointed after James Pagones was elected county surrogate.
The 24-bed McClelland’s Home for Adults on Old Castle Point Road began a 40-bed expansion.
Residents asked the Town of Fishkill to limit parking on Van Ness Road because so many people left their cars there to walk on the Newburgh-Beacon Bridge.
The City Council voted to reopen an environmental review of Scenic Hudson’s proposal to build a 15-acre park at Mount Beacon. A company whose application to mine on Fishkill Ridge had been held up by a state study of whether it would harm endangered timber rattlesnakes objected that the same standard had not been applied to the Scenic Hudson application.
