The house was originally the home of Captain John Hathaway, and it remained in the Hathaway family for a couple of generations. In 1867, it was, according to the Hudson Evening Register, the home of Theophilus E. Beekman, who had married John Hathaway's daughter Phoebe. It seems that in 1867 Henry Skinner and his family also lived in the house. Skinner was married to Phoebe Bailey Hathaway, who was the daughter Captain John Hathaway's brother Bailey. It was in this house that Cornelia and Sarah Skinner, the daughters of Henry and Phoebe, started their School for Young Ladies, which moved to Union Street in 1870.
Writing in 1907, Anna Bradbury recounted that the house "was highly prized as one of our choicest survivals of the Colonial period, but it was recently metamorphosed into something new and strange." A clue about what was happening to the house was discovered in an article that appeared in the Hudson Evening Register early in 1914, inventorying the changes that had taken place the previous year. Among them was that Joseph Palazzini had opened a shoe repairing shop in the building.
Today, I discovered this article, which appeared in the Columbia Republican for December 9, 1919. It confirms the legend that one of Hudson's "choicest survivals of the Colonial period" was ultimately turned into a garage.
The property in question--"situated on Warren street, opposite the Hotel Lincoln and now used as a garage by Cornelius A. Lucey"--can only be the grand Federal house with Anglo-Palladian influences that was once the home of Captain John Hathaway. Hotel Lincoln (shown below) stood at 309-311 Warren Street, where there is now a municipal parking lot, the hotel having been destroyed by fire in the 1950s.
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I’m guessing the word “garage” meant something slightly different in the period between 1907-1919 than the word suggests to us today.
ReplyDeleteThe first “affordable” car, the Model T, was not introduced until 1908.
If you define "garage" as "parking garage," you are right. But if it is defined, as I defined in the post, as a place where vehicles are sold and serviced, I expect this is exactly what was purposed for Captain John Hathaway's house. By 1919, there were at least two other such establishments in Hudson.
DeleteBy 1915, William Petry had established such a business in the building that had been the Gifford-Word Company at the intersection of Columbia, State, and Green streets. And there was also the Crescent Garage, at the corner of Warren and Eighth streets, which already existed in 1915.
In addition to selling and servicing automobiles, these garages were also places where you could hire a car and driver. George Duguay once told me that his father, the chauffeur for Mrs. Collier who lived in the Greek Revival house at Second and Partition (now St. Michael's Greek Orthodox church), worked at the garage that was located in what had been the Captain John Hathaway house.
Before the model-T took grip of auto manufacturing, there were dozens of small NY based auto makers.
DeleteGarage is from an early French word that means "to shelter or dock ships." The French word came from a German word that meant "to take care."
ReplyDelete