Overview
From the Dutch colonial era until the early 21st century, the clay deposits in the Hudson Valley were harvested to create the building blocks of American cities. New York City—sometimes referred to as the “Capital of the World”—was built locally from Catskill Mountain timber, Connecticut brownstone, and above all, Hudson River bricks.
In New York, local bricks were used to construct roads, bridges, sewers, apartments, and many of the city’s greatest civic landmarks. At their peak around 1900, more than 130 brickyards in Hudson River towns like Haverstraw, Beacon, and Kingston employed thousands of migrant and immigrant laborers to produce more than a billion bricks per year—more than any other region on earth. But within a few decades, economics, globalization, and the exhaustion of the region’s natural resources all contributed to the industry’s demise. The last Hudson River brickyard closed in 2001, marking the end of 350 years of brickmaking on the Hudson.
James Malchow is a New York–area historian whose other Arcadia Publishing titles—New Jersey Cider and Applejack and Hudson River Sailing—highlight other little-known subjects of the region’s history. Images in this book are primarily drawn from local museums, libraries, and historical societies.
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