Editor’s note: Beacon was created in 1913 from Matteawan and Fishkill Landing.
150 Years Ago (June 1875)
A Matteawan judge fined three drunken young men from Newburgh $25 [about $730 today] for throwing coal at pedestrians.
According to the Matteawan correspondent for The Cold Spring Recorder: “This village is a very peculiar place and most miserably governed. Our people support over 60 gin mills — most of which are running full blast on the Sabbath.”
A Fishkill Landing resident was selling his trotting stallion, Nicotine.
The body of a female newborn was found in the back of the ladies’ waiting room at the Fishkill Landing train depot.
John Falconer, of the Seamless Clothing Co. in Matteawan, was building a second factory to make Brussels-style patterned carpets.
Commodore Thomas Ramsdell installed a buoy between Low Point and the Fishkill Landing dock to mark a sandbar where vessels often went aground.
Three Matteawan boys were brought before Justice Schenck for playing ball in the street. One was fined $1 [$30] and the others were dismissed.
A Fishkill Landing trustee obtained arrest warrants for three men accused of racing their horses on Sunday, in violation of village ordinance.
A bull and three cows died on a farm near Fishkill from an unknown disease. Before dying, the animals threw back their heads and walked in circles for 12 to 14 hours.
Smith Van Buren, a Fishkill Landing resident who was the son of former President Martin Van Buren, was confined to the Hudson River Hospital for the Insane in Poughkeepsie with dementia. [Van Buren died the following year, at age 59, and is buried at St. Luke’s Church.]
George Peattie, while drunk, came into Drewen’s barbershop in Fishkill Landing and attacked James Gogswell as he sat in the chair.
Zebulon Phillips, 80, a farmer near Fishkill, was killed when he fell off his roof, which he was repairing.
125 Years Ago (June 1900)
James W.F. Ruttenber, editor of the Newburgh Sunday Telegram, was found guilty of publishing an obscene newspaper based on gossip printed in his Feb. 4 issue. The jury deliberated for less than 10 minutes. Ruttenber had been indicted in Dutchess County because the Telegram was distributed in Fishkill Landing and Matteawan. The judge sentenced the editor to 15 days in jail and a $15 fine [$575].
The offending paragraphs, by an unnamed Fishkill and Matteawan correspondent, included a report that “a Landing girl sent word to a young man in town that he could see her disrobe for 10 cents. Of course, the young man was unnerved by so sudden and cheap an offer. Still, there is no telling what she will do next if he doesn’t accept her proposition. Take her up, George, before she changes her mind.” He also wrote: “Poker as it is played on Cedar Street does not always require a pocket full of money. I am told that the females in the house are sometimes put up as an equivalent.”
Clarence Chatham Cook (below) died at his home at Fishkill Landing at age 72. The Harvard graduate gained fame in 1863 with critical articles on American art in the New York Tribune. “He treated most of the work of American artists with merciless sarcasm and injured his influence by his extreme verdicts,” according to one obituary. Cook later caused a stir when he suggested that many of the statues from Cyprus in the newly opened Metropolitan Museum of Art were fakes. He created an art periodical, The Studio, and in 1878 published a book, The House Beautiful: Essays on Beds and Tables, Stools and Candlesticks.
Two brickyards at Dutchess Junction employed about 100 Black men who migrated each year from Virginia and North Carolina. They ate in squads of 25, with one man appointed to cook in a camp kettle. Many brought their fiddles and banjos from the South.
The residents of Fishkill Landing voted to install sewers.
James Greene, of Fishkill Landing, was admitted to West Point as an alternate after a candidate from Kingston failed the entrance exam. He was the son of Maj. Henry A. Greene, who was born in Matteawan in 1856 and graduated from West Point in 1879.
Julian Ralph, who had worked as a station agent at Dutchess Junction and as a reporter for the Fishkill Standard, was the chief correspondent for the London Daily Mail covering the Boer War in South Africa. He had written four books, including On Canada’s Frontier and Alone in China.
A new play, Traitor to the Flag, was presented at the Academy of Music at Fishkill Landing, with electric fans promised for the audience.
C. Smith Lee, a handyman at Timoney’s brickyard in Dutchess Junction, and a widower with six children, was married at Fishkill Landing to Maggie Matthews of Cornwall. They met after Lee advertised for five weeks in a local newspaper for a wife, and Matthews and about 900 other women responded (including 80 who sent photos). Margaret arrived to meet Lee dressed in white. After greeting each other, they asked the Rev. McPherson of the Methodist Episcopal Church to marry them.
Weldon Weston, a former mayor of Matteawan, organized a group of investors from his native New Hampshire to purchase 200 acres on Mount Beacon from the Schenck family to build a hotel 1,000 feet above the river.
100 Years Ago (June 1925)
Frederick Goodfriend, 12, died at his home. It was reported he had been poisoned by impurities in the water while swimming.
Nicholas Anthony, 80, who lived at the Veteran Firemen’s Home, died after falling down a flight of stairs.
Police searched for Josh Williams after he cut off a woman’s ear with a razor at the Brockway brickyard when she refused his advances.
Ten brickyards at Dutchess Junction and Brockway closed when 1,000 workers went on strike for 10 days. The men, who were earning $3.75 to $4.25 [$70 to $78] a day, wanted more money, but one owner said the price of bricks was so low it was impossible to pay more. The strike was settled when owners agreed to pay per brick and raise wages if prices rose.
Eight men riding in two cars held up an auto truck with pistols on the state road near Beacon. They claimed to be revenue agents in search of illegal alcohol.
There was no opposition at a state hearing to a plan by Central Hudson to buy three Beacon public utilities — Citizens Railroad Light and Power, Southern Dutchess Gas and Electric and Fishkill Electric — for $398,500 [$7.3 million].
A 47-year-old Ralph Street woman died of heart failure brought on, doctors said, by shock she suffered during a lightning storm two weeks earlier.
A group of boys who went for a swim in Fishkill Creek near the Green Fuel Co. discovered the body of a newborn in the bushes.
Two men were arrested and charged with kidnapping a 14-year-old domestic helper. She was found bound and gagged in bushes near Albany Post Road.
A 53-year-old Ferry Street woman died after her clothing caught fire from a bonfire she built in her yard. She was blind in one eye, and neighbors suggested she had not seen the sparks land on her dress.
Beacon police feared a man had drowned in the river after two women found a pair of overalls and underclothing in a neat pile at the end of Long Dock. Neighbors said they had heard a splash shortly after midnight.
Henrietta Gillespie, a Black resident of Brockway, was sentenced to six months in St. Ann’s Home in Albany after being found guilty of intoxication, profanity and disorderly conduct.
An oak tree that measured 5 feet in diameter and stood for more than a century beside the entrance to Mount Gulian was marked for removal because of the construction of the new state road.
Arthur Way, 40, of Chelsea, suffered only a dislocated shoulder after being struck by a train and tossed 35 feet by its cowcatcher.
75 Years Ago (June 1950)
Richard Monroe of St. John’s School won an essay contest sponsored by the Dutchess-Putnam Division of the Archdiocesan Holy Name Union. He was invited to read his entry, “Serving God in Religion is Life’s Greatest Adventure,” on the Catholic Hour Program on WKIP and WHVA.
Burglars stole $500 [$6,700] from a safe inside a restaurant on Beekman Street operated by Clarence Horton. Two Beacon men were arrested.
A jury dismissed a lawsuit filed by Benjamin Kissam of Newburgh, who claimed that three Beacon police officers had beaten him following his arrest in 1946 for disorderly conduct. He sued in 1948 for $25,000 [$330,000] and a jury awarded him $6,000 [$80,000]. But an appeals court ordered a new trial.
The Poughkeepsie Journal profiled George Reiche, a 1935 Beacon High School graduate who was the “crier” for the Dutchess County Court who announced, “All arise…” and “Hear ye, hear ye, hear ye” when court began each day.
A lab assistant was seriously injured when a “reaction bomb” exploded in the Synthetic Fuels Research department at the Beacon laboratories of the Texas Co. The device was a pressure vessel in which chemicals were mixed.
A 15-year-old boy who lived on Rombout Avenue was struck by a train when he tried to get his dog off the tracks. The pet did not survive, and the boy was admitted to Highland Hospital with leg abrasions.
50 Years Ago (June 1975)
Daniel O’Keefe, 22, who represented the Town of Poughkeepsie on the county Legislature, proposed spending $350,000 [$2 million] to create a youth conservation corps. He warned that teen unemployment would likely lead to unrest over the summer in Beacon and Poughkeepsie.
A state police investigator working undercover testified that he purchased $80 [$480] for 12 packets of heroin on Christmas Eve from a suspect at a gas station at Main Street and Fishkill Avenue. An informant set up the transaction.
The city said it would crack down on 20 delinquent water-district users who lived just outside Beacon. The city was stymied because, while it could put liens on the property of city residents, its only recourse otherwise was to shut off the water.
Mount Gulian was dedicated on June 14 as a historic site. The home, built in 1740, had been destroyed by fire in 1931 but rebuilt on its foundation.
The chair of the Dutchess Legislature said he would introduce a resolution to study opening a satellite social services office in Beacon, noting that 20 percent of the county’s welfare recipients lived there.
The federal government charged Tuck Industries, a manufacturer of adhesive tapes, with 24 violations of federal pollution laws. The indictment was the result of an investigation by the Environmental Protection Agency using information supplied by People’s Pipewatch, a citizens’ group founded in 1974 by John Harris-Cronin and Riverkeeper Thomas Whyatt. The group took 150 samples from 57 pipes emptying from the plant into Fishkill Creek, including 15 that had not been registered with the EPA.
About 50 white and Black students brawled in the Grand Union parking lot on Main Street at 11:30 p.m. on a Monday. There were no arrests, but police said some students were burned by potassium chloride. It was the first major confrontation since November, when a fight touched off a week of racial unrest.
25 Years Ago (June 2000)
Gov. George Pataki visited Beacon to break ground for the $50 million Dia Beacon at a former factory on Beekman Street that had been empty since 1991. He was joined by Leonard Riggio, chair of the Dia Center for the Arts.
A team of South Avenue Elementary students placed 45th of 2,491 teams nationally in News Bowl 2000, a current-events competition.
Matt Sheers was named to the first team of the boys’ high school tennis all-stars by the Poughkeepsie Journal, and Dave Ryley was named coach of the year.
WSPK-FM, based in Beacon, hosted K104 Fest V at Dutchess Stadium with performances by Michael Fredo, Anastacia, Westlife, Eiffel 65, Sonique and Olive, Shannon, and Mr. Big.
La’Shawn Martinez, a senior at Beacon High School, qualified for the state 100-meter dash semifinals near Syracuse on a Friday, drove home to attend prom, then returned to Syracuse the next morning to race again. She finished 13th overall in 12.67 seconds.
Police arrested a young couple and a 17-year-old following a raid on a home on Sycamore Drive where officers said they seized 11 ounces of cocaine with a street value of about $30,000 [$56,000], a loaded 9mm handgun, cash and drug paraphernalia. A 7-year-old child in the home was released to relatives.
In partnership with the Beacon Soccer Club, Tami and Scott Pryor founded Challenge 2000, a two-week camp for disabled players, such as their 7-year-old son, T.J.
City police were looking for nearly $15,000 that a Town of Wappinger man claimed he lost at the Metro-North station. He said he was loading a Jet Ski onto a vehicle at 7 p.m. on a Wednesday when he dropped the money.
