A little bit of history...

Jim and I spent the day visiting some of the historical sites in Kinderhook and Stuyvesant NY.  If you remember Washington Irving's story, "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow", you might recollect that the school teacher in the story was named Ichabod Crane.  Part of the setting for the Sleepy Hollow story took place in this part of upstate NY and the high school I graduated from all those years ago was "Ichabod Crane Central."  In our travels today, we took a picture of the original Ichabod Crane School House - ICC is a little bit bigger than this one. 

This area was also the home of Martin Van Buren, 8th President of the United States.  His home, Lindenwald, is just a few miles from where we are staying so we stopped in to walk the grounds.  Tours will begin next Monday and if we have time, we might go back.  Besides his involvement in politics of the time, Van Buren was an avid farmer with large orchards of pears and apples  as well as field and row crops.  He also experimented with growing hops used in brewing.

From Lindenwald, we headed down to the Sand Bar.  As a boy, my dad used to dive off the rocks by the waterfall and later taught us how to swim here.  This is one of my favorite places to visit whenever we come home because I love to listen to the sound of the water rushing over the falls.  It brings back lots of memories of when we were kids. 

Our next stop took us to an old power mill that was built in 1900 and for the last several years has been dormant.  However, it is now in the process of being refurbished and is generating 2800 Kw per hour by each of the two turbines.  It is good to know that this old mill is now in operation and providing electricity to the local power company with no harm to the environment - using the water flowing over the waterfall that has been there for a thousand years.

The last stop of the day took us down to the Hudson River in Stuyvesant (the small town located approx. 125 miles north of NY City right on the river and where I grew up).  When Henry Hudson sailed up the Hudson River back in the early 1600's, Stuyvesant is one of the places he landed.  There's an old train depot no longer in use next to the railroad tracks.  And at the bottom of the hill stands the Post Office with an apartment over it -  the first place Jim and I lived after we got married almost 38 years ago.  Today, Amtrak trains whiz by hitting speeds of close to 100 mph. 

It was nice to spend the day visiting some of the places I remember as a kid.  Maybe tomorrow we will head to Albany where Jim grew up and I worked for many years.