A few months ago I wrote about the Hudson Windmill—a quasi-mythical structure about which I seemed to remember reading a dozen years earlier, but which remained elusive. For the purposes of that piece, I was mainly interested in this Windmill as a symbol of the cyclical nature of Hudson political and social changes.
But in researching a totally different matter related to the Hudson waterfront, I stumbled upon the reference which must have planted this image in my mind:
“In 1789 Joseph Barnard built a wind grist mill upon Prospect Hill. The site undoubtedly furnished the motive power in abundance, but ‘carrying grist to mill,’ must have been far from a desirable task to his customers. The mill was octagonal in shape, two stories in height, built of heavy oak timber, sides shingled, and the wings, which were very strongly constructed, were nearly seventy feet from the ground. In all the approaches to the city it was a very prominent object and visible many miles distant.
“It remained there several years and finally gave place to a house erected as a saloon for refreshments, with the design of making the hill a place of public resort. The undertaking did not succeed, and the building is now occupied as a dwelling at the foot of the hill. The grist mill gave to the hill the name of ‘Wind-mill hill,’ by which it was known for many years.”
This comes from Columbia County at the End of the Century: A Historical Record of Its Formation and Settlement, Its Resources, Its Institutions, Its Industries, Vol. II, “published under the auspices of the Hudson Gazette, The Record printing and publishing Co., Hudson, New York” in 1900. (Note that one of the Barnards was a partner in the whaling industry with Capt. Cyrus Curtiss, builder of 32 Warren Street, and later Mayor of Hudson; Barnard descendants ran a florist shop in Claverack until roughly 10 years ago.)
While the reference to Prospect Hill might appear ambiguous—Hudson today having both a Prospect Street and a Prospect Avenue—the latter is far more likely. Academy Hill (now the site of the City’s water treatment plant and a sprawling housing complex known to detractors as Vinyl Village) was previously referred to by some as Prospect Hill; for example, the title of a 1837 W.H. Bartlett steel engraving is “South Western View of Hudson City N.Y. from Academy Hill, or Prospect Hill.” Likewise, J.H. French’s 1860 Gazetteer of New York State notes that
“from the summit of Prospect Hill an extensive view is obtained of the windings of the Hudson, with the distant Catskills on one side, and the Green Hills of Mass. on the other.”
This can only be Academy Hill. So it would appear that there was in fact a real windmill in Hudson, and it was perched in the late 18th Century on the hill overlooking the City. (Take a drive up Rossmann Avenue or into the upper reaches of Cedar Park Cemetery, and try to imagine it.)
All that remains mysterious about this windmill is that there are no known drawings or engravings of it, besides a tiny and seemingly off-hand sketch on the fringes of the 1799 map commissioned by Daniel Penfield, who had acquired many land-leases in the area from the Van Rensselaer family. One would think that a windmill high on a hill above a newly-built and rapidly-expanding City surely would have caught the attention of at least one itinerant draftsman or Sunday painter.
