Remarkable Resources Rediscovered

Back in 2014, Gossips assisted in identifying the family whose photo album from the 1910s ended up in an antiques shop in South Burlington, Vermont. Central to that search was this house, which appeared in many of the pictures and was obviously the home of the people who appeared in the album.

After a considerable amount of sleuthing, Gossips was able to identify the house as 38 Chapel Street--a building that was demolished and a street that was obliterated in the 1970s, during Hudson's Urban Renewal Era. The quest was enjoyable, but documents recently unearthed would have made it ever so much easier.

Extensive records were kept of what was destroyed during Urban Renewal. For most of the past fifty years, these have been in the possession of Hudson Community Development and Planning Agency (HCDPA). For more than a decade, they were stored in the basement of 1 North Front Street. At some point, they were moved from there to the Dunn warehouse, where they remained for a number of years in less than ideal conditions. A year or so ago, Sara Black, coordinator for HCDPA, organized a work party to sift through the stacks of documents and salvage those deemed most important. The documents they identified and saved are now with the History Room at the Hudson Area Library, where the task of scanning them has begun. 

Among the documents are maps of the areas targeted by Urban Renewal, such as this street abandonment map of the area west of Front Street.

Even more interesting are the records, which usually include a photograph, for every building demolished during Urban Renewal. Here are a couple of examples. (Click on the images to enlarge.)

Some of these documents will be included in the library's exhibition of Local Historical Maps & Atlases, which opens next Thursday, March 2, with an opening reception at 6:00 p.m. 

The documents are an extraordinary and often poignant record of what was lost during Urban Renewal, and the History Room is working to make them available to the public. But the process is time-consuming and costly. Anyone interested in supporting the effort should contact Brenda Shufelt, History Room coordinator.

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