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.”

We printed an earlier installment in August. Both are excerpted from his book, Lost and Found: Beacon’s Black Community 1850-1930, which will be published in June.

I grew up in Brockway, a company town for a brickyard that didn’t roll out its first products until 1888, 50 years late to the brickmaking party in the Hudson Valley. Edwin Brockway earned his reputation for brick manufacturing in Haverstraw; his purchase of William Mortimer’s country seat in 1886 in Fishkill was supposedly for retirement, but his sons pushed him to open another brickyard.

Likely inspired by what Homer Ramsdell was doing with the excavation, landfill and physical plant construction at Denning’s Point, Brockway built a peninsula on 48 acres of Hudson River surface, using New York City garbage as landfill, and topped it with clay pits, brick machines, kilns and drying yards.

He likely filled his workforce with seasonal Black sharecroppers and tenant farmers from North Carolina and Virginia. After brickmaking became year-round, he coaxed those workers to work year-round. He limited their interaction with the white residents of Fishkill Landing (which was combined in 1913 with Matteawan to create Beacon) by building a village to house and tend to their basic needs (school, store, post office).

Today, nothing remains of Brockway except the railway trestle that once brought excavated clay drawn by a small locomotive (we called it a “dinky”) into the brickyard. Brockway’s beginning was secretive, its existence plantation-like and its end by bankruptcy a loss for owner and worker alike.

My parents came to Beacon in 1946 to work at the Castle Point VA hospital. My dad’s parents, losing the family home in Spartanburg, South Carolina, to a suspicious fire, joined them shortly after. Brockway provided not only Black jobs but Black housing in those duplexes with small areas to garden for the industrious. Pregnant with me, my mom went back to her home in Helena, South Carolina, in 1947 for my midwife birth and first months of life.

When my family arrived, Brockway was full of chamber pots and outhouses where toilets were flushed — not often enough — with lye. Water was gathered by the pail from a pipe protruding from a hill and drank at home from dippers. The main road turned to dirt as it snaked down from Route 9D. Clothes were washed in tubs and hung on lines, leaving them with a pinkish tint from the brick dust. Saturday night baths were taken outside in galvanized tubs, heated with kettle water; showers were taken in the rain with a bar of soap.

On my first day of kindergarten, my dad gave me a Mickey Mouse watch that, under no circumstances, was I to take off my wrist. He told me I would be late for school once Mickey’s big hand got to the 12 (I was not yet able to tell time). After a playmate asked whether the watch was waterproof, I found myself sticking my arm in the bucket that caught water at the spring that afternoon. Mickey was not waterproof.

The school in Brockway was not a one-room schoolhouse, although I thought so for most of my life. There were three rooms manned by three teachers at an earlier time. When I attended, there was only one room in use, overseen by Mrs. Sarah Taylor, future mayor of Fishkill. All the big and small kids were in that room, grouped by class or ability. A paddle or brush wasn’t required to maintain order, but that was to change at the South Avenue school.

The families living in the nine brick duplexes provided most of the students at the Brockway school, with a few from the closed Martin brickyard. The school sat in the middle of a natural playground with walnuts to crack with bricks, although the delicious nuts left stains on your hands. A wooded stream disappeared into a shaded marsh, with frogs, snakes and skunk cabbage. Clay banks were through the woods to the left, with crystal-blue ponds of rainwater, and the clapboard housing of the Martin Yard a way to the right. Sounds and sights were all around: the caw of crows, the scamper of squirrels, the gliding of hawks. There were strawberries, blackberries and mulberry trees that served snacks.

The school itself was on the verge of closing. Mrs. Taylor, in her fight to keep it open, pleaded her case to the parents. My dad was one of the few who kept their children at Brockway the following year, and I basically had Mrs. Taylor as a private teacher for the second grade. I suffered momentarily every morning as the bus to the South Avenue school pulled off with my classmates. The next year, the Brockway school closed. My dad bought into a small store on Beekman Street and moved us to Beacon and me to South Avenue.

There was something magnetic about Brockway. There were always visitors, especially on weekends: brickyard workers, former residents and such, hanging out. While Brockway wasn’t patrolled, behavior was scrutinized but maybe not severely judged. The river and woods were at our fingertips, not to mention a few home gardens and chicken coops and Mr. Baxter’s pigsty and cow. There was always a bottle of Fleischmann’s or some other brown liquor to be passed around a fire or burn barrel after dark.

Fire was Brockway’s garbage disposal, a fire pit in every yard. Clambakes brought crowds, gambling and more brown liquor. Weekly paychecks gave these sons of sharecroppers easy access to booze, if not much else. Cars weren’t a necessity but a source of pride. In the 1950s, a group of Brockway’s young men formed a social club around their love for cars, with pink satin jackets that read “The Rickshaws” and “Brockway, NY.” The west end of Beacon, when necessary, was a short walk down the tracks through a makeshift hobo village.

We had a softball diamond with a boulder in left field. It was the era of Jackie Robinson. A decade earlier, Brockway would have been filled with makeshift punching bags. That was Joe Louis’s time. The Black kids in Brockway, like Black kids all over, were trying to punch or swing their way out of poverty.

At the time, the City of Beacon recreation leagues were segregated, up until Castle Point would no longer field teams without their Black workers. This would have been after 1948, the year President Truman desegregated the military. Brockway fielded a men’s fast-pitch team known as the Setters. Its best players were coveted by other teams, especially pitcher Skippy Eggleston. My dad and uncles played, but the softball stars of the family were my mom and my aunt Ellen, who played for the Brockway Lassies. My aunt pitched and my mom caught and roamed the infield and outfield. She was smooth on the bases and never an easy out.

The difficulty for most Brockway students at South Avenue wasn’t learning the lessons but the micro-aggressions endured from other students and teachers. An uncombed head, an unwashed face, high-water pants, a wrinkled dress or a torn shirt were daily occurrences in Brockway that didn’t go unnoticed at South Avenue. Many Brockway students quit to help their families or take jobs at the brickyard, but three of the four Black graduates in the Beacon High School Class of 1951 were from Brockway.

There was at least one Brockway brick worker — there may have been more — who survived the brickyard bankruptcy, the Depression and the relief rolls, and came out still a Brockway brick worker, even after the purchase of the yard by David Strickland of Denning’s Point Brick Works, who in 1925 instituted a no-Blacks policy. According to census records, Roscoe Vaughn worked at Brockway from 1920 to 1940. In 1944, his son, Roscoe Jr., was killed in action during World War II in North Africa. He sent his son to war from 86 North Ave.

There’s another noted Brockway veteran of World War II, perhaps the least known and the most heroic. He was Frank Cochrane Jr., a member of the 761st tank battalion. The Black battalion was destined to spend the war training in Louisiana and Texas, but in the summer of 1944, following heavy American casualties in France, it was called into action. The authors of a history titled Brothers in Arms recount:

“In the tank commanded by Staff Sgt. Frank Cochrane, a direct artillery strike killed driver James Welborn. A second armor-piercing 88 blasted through one side of the turret and out the other,” injuring gunner Frank Greenwood. “Greenwood didn’t feel any immediate pain but looked down at a slight tickling sensation to see that both his feet were gone.” Cochrane pulled Greenwood out of the tank and, stumbling, carried him to a roadside ditch. “Greenwood had lost consciousness from shock; Cochrane rested Greenwood’s head on his boot to keep it from being submerged in the cold, muddy water.”

German artillery observers spotted the ditch where Cochrane, Greenwood and dozens of infantrymen had fled. “Mortar teams began ‘walking’ [blasting] the ditch at evenly spaced intervals. They walked up the line to within 30 yards of Cochrane and Greenwood.”

The more I look back, the more I get it: Black folks battered by a past that they had little control over, continuing to play the game, knowing the game was rigged; trying to make the best of their present situation (little money with mouths to feed, little education when getting more didn’t help, little mobility when the only help may have been to head back home, to the South). They wanted to live the lives seen in Jet and Ebony magazines, and those in Life.

All that remains of my childhood is that rusted, dinky trestle. It’s like Brockway never existed. Was it real?