By The Red Hook WaterStories team
Hundreds of canal boats traveled down the Erie Canal bringing grain and other produce to Red Hook's Erie Basin during the early years of the 1900s. Each canal boat was both storage and a proper home for not just the skipper but a family. ...
A History of Red Hook Norman Brouwer, noted maritime historian - the man who basically wrote THE guides to historic ships and some of our national preservation standards for them - graciously wrote this maritime history of Red Hook for...
By The Red Hook WaterStories team
From the mid-1800s, lots of kinds of cargo were carried by canal boats from the U.S. inland to Red Hook to be shipped out around the world or to be used in local manufacturing. Grain was one of the largest imports, but some canal boats regularly...
By The Red Hook WaterStories team
May 30 1868, was the first Decoration Day, a day to remember the many soldiers who died in the American Civil War by decorating their graves with flowers. It officially became a national holiday called Memorial Day in 1971. Particularly, in periods...
By The Red Hook WaterStories team
Huge waves crashing down on the deck as hail, steamers burning through their coal just to stay in place against the wind, ships being thrashed by the storm and everything, and everyone, frozen and encrusted in ice. These are the stories that the...
By The Red Hook WaterStories team
All day and into the night Captain Benn made his rounds of Brooklyn's piers supplying newly arrived vessels with something that he said could keep sailors sane and captains ethical: reading material. Benn had been spreading words for 11 years by...
By The Red Hook WaterStories team
"The Bridge, Erie Basin, N.Y.," is an etching Henry B. Shope (1862 - 1929). Tall masted ships, barges, horses and telegraph poles would have been a common site in Broolyn's Erie Basin from its construction in 1864 through the begining of...
By The Red Hook WaterStories team
William Yorke was an artist who lived on a boat in the Erie Basin with his wife, son, and two dogs in 1882. After his boat was destroyed in a steamboat accident and Yorke was found living in a hut by the waterfront with his family, his story was...
By The Red Hook WaterStories team
A Cruise in the Erie Basin , an article by Don C. Seitz, and published in Frank Leslie's magazines in 1892, relates the story of Red Hook's Erie Basin. It grew from a scene with “hardly a building to be seen south of Atlantic Street, and not...
By The Red Hook WaterStories team
The discovery of germ theory at the second end of the 19th century, following the close of the industrial revolution, brought hygiene to the front of people’s minds. As a result, when they organized committees and groups to keep their communities...
