When I was working on my most recent article on the Ormsby Textile Mill and Ursula of Switzerland, I went to one of my most faithful resources, the Sanborn Insurance Maps. Long unavailable to the general public, the Library of Congress (that still exists, right?) made many of the maps available a few years back, and they have proven invaluable in the kind of research I do here. I worry that there simply are no resources like them for the present time, and that all the things we rely on to verify and tell stories of the past – maps, city directories, even telephone books – that have gone by the wayside mean that future historians will have almost nothing to base their work on. Websites are privately held, ephemeral, and subject to disappearing.
In looking at the Cohoes map from 1910, I was really surprised to find that the mapmaker designated individual branches of the Mohawk River where it flows into the Hudson, giving them numbered designations. For my entire life, I have simply thought of this rather mixed-up area where the Mohawk takes many different paths to the Hudson as “The Confluence,” and haven’t worried too much about which branch is where, unless I happen to be paddling within one of those branches and need to keep track of falls or riffles. I’ve seen all kinds of other maps, and to my memory, none of them ever numbered the branches of the Mohawk like this one did.
So let’s look at this beauty bit by bit, shall we?
This segment shows the Mohawk River, flowing from northwest to southeast. At the upper left, the epic Cohoes Falls, a natural wonder that for ages was known as the Cohoes Cataract (so was Niagara – why did we give up the word “cataract”?1) Right alongside the falls is the Cataract House, a well-regarded hotel that attracted visitors to the falls beginning in 1830. Fire and death of the original owner in 1867 led to a larger, grander inn under the management of Col. William Glynn, an Englishman who “had made a great deal of money as a gambler on the luxury liners.” I’m going to have to give the Cataract House its own entry, but for now I’ll note that just after this map was made, in 1911, the Cohoes Company, which owned the land, was pressing the closure of the hotel in favor of building a park there. Glynn did them the favor of falling ill, closing the hotel, and then dying while on a trip to England. And then the vacant hotel did them the favor of catching fire in 1912. The site is now roughly the location of the transformer yard for the Brookfield hydro project.
From the cataract, the river flowed, as it flows today, underneath a railroad bridge, a road bridge, and over a major state-owned dam. After the dam, the river seems to scatter in every direction on its way to the Hudson.
Once the river crosses the state dam that connects Cohoes to Waterford, it flows seemingly every which way. There are a number of other dams in the river in this area, presumably to keep water levels up for industry below the main dam. It would be hard to overstate how much industry there used to be in this area, and much of it was served by water power that was diverted from the main falls – by 1911, what actually flowed over the falls had been reduced to a trickle – and run through a series of hydraulic canals. Someday I’ll work out how these dams played into that whole scheme…