The Gateway’s 50th Anniversary Gala will be Sept. 26, 2024

As we enter summer, we can look back on our nearly completed Burden Iron Works Museum renovation project while also looking ahead to our 50th Anniversary Gala on September 26. In addition, we are pleased to announce that the museum will reopen for tours on July 10.

Stone and brick work for the front steps has been completed

The most visible aspects of the renovation are the refurbishment of all of the main floor museum window sashes and storm windows; the basement windows, grates and sills; refurbishment of exterior doors including the main double entrance and the handicap entrance doors; and the rebuilding of the front entrance and basement dispensary steps. The new cover over the dispensary entrance stairs is nearly complete; the contractor is still waiting on the steel roofing material. Less visible but still important is the insulation of the attic. Translucent insulation panels were installed on the laylight, and other parts of the attic also received insulation. Still awaiting completion is the installation of new stone steps for the front and basement entrances.

This progress has allowed us to reopen the museum for tours starting July 10. Tour hours are Wednesday through Friday, noon to 5 pm, with the last admission at 4 pm. Visitors will enter through the Paymaster’s entrance off the parking lot. A donation of $10 per adult is suggested.

We are very excited about our 50th Anniversary Gala, which will be held September 26 at the Country Club of Troy. Honorary Committee letters will go out in late July, and we hope you’ll be generous! Invitations will be sent in late August. This event will sell out, so be sure to reply quickly. This newsletter includes two articles on Gateway history to help you appreciate how far we have come since 1974.

The Erie Canal, which will celebrate its bicentennial next year, could not have been built without the development of cement that would set under water. Two brothers with Cohoes connections, Canvass and Hugh White, were instrumental in this effort, and that story is told in this newsletter.

Finally, we are excited to report that we are working with another local institution to obtain the loan of an important artifact that will greatly improve our ability to tell Henry Burden’s story. Hopefully we will have more to say about this in our next newsletter.

Tom McGuire was the Gateway’s first executive director

First Executive Director Recalls the Gateway’s Early Years

Tom McGuire was the executive director of the Hudson Mohawk Industrial Gateway when the organization first opened its doors on January 1, 1974. “We began at point zero, with no members.” he said in an interview. On the positive side, the Gateway had the dynamism and connections of Gateway founder, first president and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute Dean of Humanities and Social Studies Rev. Thomas Phelan, the support of a large board of trustees comprised of prominent local figures, and a vision for saving the region’s industrial heritage.

The importance of Tom Phelan’s role in the successful launch of the Gateway cannot be underestimated. “He was a larger-than-life figure in the community,” McGuire said, and a notable fundraiser. He had recently completed the building campaign for the RPI Chapel + Cultural Center, and had also raised money for local public television station WMHT.

Gateway founder and first president Tom Phelan - image by Tom Griffin - RPI

McGuire recalled that the Gateway was founded when the urban renewal ethic still reigned among local politicians and planners. He said that perhaps the Gateway’s most important early accomplishment was helping to change the mindset in local communities from one that viewed old buildings as a burden to one that recognized that they were a unique asset. “Our goal was to preserve and utilize as much of the fabric of the industrial period as possible.”

Early preservation efforts had mixed success. He said the Gateway advocated for adaptive re-use of old buildings when their current use was no longer viable. He regretted that efforts to save the Meneely bell foundry in Watervliet did not prevail, but he also pointed out that saving the Cluett Peabody bleachery building on Peebles Island, which was under threat of demolition, “was a big win.” The New York State Historic Preservation Office located its conservation facilities in part of the bleachery, and the rest of the complex was mothballed. “To see River Street [in Troy] preserved was extremely gratifying,” he added.

McGuire recalls the debate within the Gateway over whether to take the Burden Iron Co. office building from Republic Steel. Phelan stressed the seriousness of the decision. “Once you own the building, the obligation does not go away,” he remembers Phelan saying. In the event, the Gateway purchased the building for a nominal sum, mothballed it and began the search for grants to fund restoration. The first priority was to construct a caretaker’s apartment in the building to protect it from further vandalism. McGuire remembers crawling on the roof trying to secure a tarp to cover the broken skylight.

Cluett Peabody bleachery on Peebles Island

In the early days, the Gateway was largely funded by grants and tour revenue. The Gateway received early grants from the New York State Council on the Arts and a $30,000 grant for the National Endowment for the Arts. The latter grant was for the “City Edges” study, which focused on the interplay between urban development and historic preservation. This study resulted in the preparation of an inventory of historic industrial sites and the development of a Heritage Trail map; some of the trail markers are still visible today around the region.

The Gateway had its early offices in the Rice Building, Troy, N.Y.

Phelan conducted almost weekly bus and boat tours, McGuire said, which was another source of revenue. Tour Director Patricia Troiano was hired through the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act of 1973, which allowed public sector and non-profit employers to hire employees for a year or two using CETA grants of $10,000 per employee. “We didn’t have the money, and the employees we were able to hire under CETA were worth many times that to the Gateway,” he said. Other CETA-paid staff included Albany City and County Historian Tony Opalka and Gateway logo designer and railroad historian (and first resident of the caretaker apartment in the Burden Iron Works Building) Steve Draper.

Looking back on his seven years as executive director, McGuire said he was proud that the Gateway was able to successfully convey to a broad audience the significance of the region’s industrial history and landscape and the value of adaptive re-use and heritage tourism. He commended the Gateway for “keeping this vision alive for 50 years.”

Gateway History as Related Through the Newsletters

The Gateway started off with a very ambitious mindset. The first newsletter (actually just a report to members on the discussions at the inaugural board meeting in 1974), stated that the Gateway’s objective was to turn Troy into an “industrial tourism center like Ironbridge in the UK.” Interest was also expressed in a project to reconstruct the Burden Water Wheel at a cost of $1 million, possibly funded by Troy’s Bicentennial Commission.

Later, in 1977, the Gateway publicly announced its intention “to establish a museum of technology and history and suggested that downtown Troy would be a preferred site.” This concept was discussed with the Smithsonian Institution and local companies (presumably for funding) and with the region’s Congressman Ned Pattison (husband of Gateway Founder Ellie Pattison). This effort did not succeed, but eventually in 2016 the National Industrial History Museum opened in Bethlehem, Pa. The core of this collection is the Smithsonian Institution’s former display of machinery of the type exhibited at the 1876 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia.

Bill Moyers, host of PBS show “America’s First River”

Another initiative pursued early on was the production of a major television film highlighting the Hudson-Mohawk region’s role as an important cradle of the American Industrial Revolution, “using regional structures and sites, neighborhoods, and cities as locations and visual assets.” Apparently, discussions were held with local PBS affiliate WMHT, but the film was never made. However, several decades later, an entire episode of the 2002 two-part Bill Moyers PBS series on the Hudson River, “America’s First River,” was dedicated to Troy – our “22 minutes of fame.” In addition, a scene in the movie “The Age of Innocence” was filmed in the Burden Iron Works Museum, and an industrial stretch of Front Street in Troy and worker housing in Cohoes were used in the HBO series “The Gilded Age.”

One of the themes stressed in early newsletters was the importance of the adaptive reuse of historic buildings, especially those with an industrial connection. The newsletters urged adaptive reuse as an alternative to demolition and discussed several successful projects. One of these was the conversion of a small office building at the Harmony Mills complex in Cohoes into a bank branch. Little could it have been foreseen at the time that the entire complex would later be converted into an award-winning residential development.

Another adaptive reuse success, and one that the Gateway was actively involved in, was saving the Woodside Presbyterian Church in Troy. This was the Burden family church, and when it was announced that the church would be closed and possibly demolished, the Gateway assisted some Burden descendants to purchase the church to save it until new owners could be found. Fortunately, the church was fairly quickly sold to Contemporary Arts at Woodside for a gallery and artist-in-residence program.

According to the newsletters, the Gateway promoted social events back in the 1970s and 1980s. After the Gateway moved to the Burden Iron Works Museum in 1988, a number of events were held in the largely vacant building and on the grounds. For example, the newsletters reported that the Gateway held square dances in the museum, and sponsored picnic reunions for textile workers and iron workers. In addition, the Gateway offered local community groups the opportunity to rent space in the museum’s basement, which was described as “in excellent condition.” Apparently, there were no takers.

In the 1980s and early 1990s the Gateway had an extensive tour program. The tours not only visited local industrial and historic sites, but also went as far afield as New York City. One newsletter reported that the 1990 tour season included 36 Gateway-sponsored tours, plus 10 more done for specific groups such as RPI alumni and the American Society of Forgemen. These tours had 879 total attendees and netted $9,000 in profit for the Gateway.

Since Covid our tour program has been quite limited. We would like to expand the number and range of Gateway tours, but we will need to find the resources. Until recently the tour program was managed by our part-time deputy executive director; that position is currently vacant.

Finally, how we referred to ourselves changed over the years. In the first “news of the Gateway” in March 1976 we were the Hudson-Mohawk Industrial Gateway. By around 1999, as attested to by the first “Burden’s Best” newsletter, the hyphen was retired, and our public name became the Hudson Mohawk Industrial Gateway.

Hydraulic Cement Was Key to the Building of the Erie Canal

One of the early challenges facing the construction of the Erie Canal (1817-1825) was that existing types of mortar could not withstand long-term immersion in water and were therefore unsatisfactory for use in most aspects of canal construction. As described by Peter Bernstein in his classic history of the Erie Canal, Wedding of the Waters, “The available common quicklime [a key ingredient of mortar] in use was unstable, breaking down under any sustained pressure. As a consequence, leaks as well as rot were already making their appearance in the canal walls and the sides of the locks, requiring constant relining of the surfaces. Without a replacement for the quicklime, the canal could conceivably end up as nothing more than a pile of mush.”

Ironically, the Romans had overcome this problem a millennium earlier, as demonstrated by their spectacular aqueducts, but their solution was lost after the fall of Rome. Fortunately, by the end of the 18th century Dutch and English engineers rediscovered the formula for hydraulic cement, which was obviously critical for the success of the coming boom in canal construction. They learned that the critical element was a special kind of limestone.

Canvass White, resident engineer for the section of the Erie Canal around Utica, noticed that contractors working between Syracuse and Rome were not having trouble with their mortar. He investigated further and discovered that they were using limestone from a quarry near Chittenango. According to Bernstein, “White conducted … experiments with the Chittenango cement until he was satisfied that he had the perfect mixture to make it waterproof under all conditions.” Then he set up a factory outside Chittenango to manufacture the material for the Erie Canal. White patented his process, but many people made the products without paying him royalties. Eventually the State of New York paid him $10,000 as compensation.

At about the same time, the construction of the Delaware & Hudson Canal (1825-1828) was running into the same issue. The canal was projected to send anthracite coal from Carbondale, Pa., to the Hudson River at Rondout, N.Y., primarily for the New York City market. By then, engineers for the D&H Canal were aware of the hydraulic cement made in Chittenango. However, they did not want to pay to transport the product such a long distance, so instead they searched for a similar limestone nearer the route of their canal. Luckily, they discovered the “right” limestone at High Falls, N.Y., not too far from the canal’s route. This was used to complete the canal, and afterwards the region around High Falls, particularly the Rosendale area, became a major center for the production of hydraulic cement. Canvass White and his younger brother Hugh started a hydraulic cement works near Rosendale, and modestly named the village that grew up around it Whiteport. The last Rosendale limestone quarry closed in 1970.

The Preservation League of New York State recently awarded a Technical Assistance Grant to the Delaware & Hudson Canal Historical Society to determine the composition of the hydraulic mortar used in the construction of the 1825-era canal’s High Falls locks. This will allow the locks to be restored using the same mortar that was used in their original construction.

Although not an engineer, Hugh White was the main person responsible for the development of the Cohoes Co. power canal system in Cohoes, and he owned several manufacturing companies. His home still stands in Waterford, and currently serves as the Waterford Historical Museum and Cultural Center.

Bill Merchant, historian for the D&H Canal Historical Society, provided information for this article.

Newsletter - Summer 2024