Farm Journal

This summer I have been looking at the Farm Journal of Cadwallader Colden. He began the journal in 1727, three years after building a house at Coldengham and when Jane herself would have been 3. He continued until 1736 listing trees, vegetables and livestock, making notes on grafting and planting, and supplying weather reports and financial notes. Mixed in with all of this are regular mentions of the farm layout such as in this detailed entry about fencing the garden:

About the time I pail’d in the Garden The Posts& rails of Chesnut made of trees that had been kill’d about 3 or 4 years & the Clapboards or pails of white oak from trees fell’d about ye 20^th of this month The rails of ye 5^th and 7^th panels from ye Garden door next ye brook were of read oak rails that ad been cut 6 or 7 years

The rails between the Kitchen & the Brook were generally of White Oak

While cataloging some of the trees that had been cut since 1720, presumably to clear the land for the house and surrounding fields, this entry also places the garden behind the house between the kitchen and the brook. The garden door, made of red oak, is next to the brook. Using this and the other descriptions scattered throughout the journal, I have begun a drawing that guesses at the overall plan of the house and surrounding farm circa 1727-28.

Rookeries

Stewart State Forest and Stewart International Airport are both named for the Stewart family who owned a dairy farm called Stony Lonesome at the site of the current day airport. Stony Lonesome was split between the towns of New Windsor and Newburgh and in 1930 the Stewart family donated the farm to the town of Newburgh with the hope that it would become an airport. This didn’t happen in 1930 but with time it became an air training facility for West Point cadets, an Air Force and National Guard base and eventually included a regional airport offering commercial flights. Passenger, cargo and military jets fly over and land on what once was Stony Lonesome and still earlier, part of the original Coldengham property.

Stewart State Forest also has a complicated history that is reflected in what exists there today. Bordered on the north by Interstate 84 and the airport to the east, it is crossed by high power lines and the remnants of former town roads. Abandoned farms are juxtaposed with forest and wetlands and it all forms a peculiar mix of the bucolic and the mundane. A part of the original Coldengham patent lies within the borders of the State Forest although only the Great Swamp has the possibility of looking anything like it did back then. Watching the Great Blue Herons that nest in the swamp can make me feel as if time has stood still but this only lasts until another incoming Fed Ex jet makes it’s final descent to the airport.