The Destruction of a Steeple

The weather this holiday season has been freakishly warm. A hundred years ago, Hudson also experienced "freakish weather" of a different sort. On the day after Christmas in 1915, there was a blizzard in Hudson with winds so strong that they toppled the steeple on the Baptist Church on Union Street at City Hall Place (now the Rock Solid Church). The disaster occurred just before noon on Sunday, December 26, but mercifully, because of the severe weather, no one had come out for Sunday services, and there was no one in the church when the steeple came down. The next day, on Monday, December 27, a full account of what happened appeared in the Hudson Evening Register.

At Christ Church and the Universalist Church at 448 Warren Street—two Hudson churches that also lost their steeples, to weather and excessive wariness respectively—towers remain as reminders of the steeples that once were. At the Baptist Church, the steeple seems to have disappeared without a trace.

No pictures of the church with its steeple have been found, but the steeple appears in the background of these historic pictures.

Looking west from the 400 block of Union Street

The First Presbyterian Church before its Gothic expansion

The view over the rooftops, looking west, from somewhere in the 400 block of Warren Street

Oscar S. Way, whose occupation is given in the Hudson city directory as "pianos," lived with his family at 344 Union Street. It is not known if an effort was made to rebuilt the house after the steeple fell on it, but there is no house at 344 Union Street today.

COPYRIGHT 2015 CAROLE OSTERINK