Greenport

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The Hudson River. Sweeping grasslands. Several kinds of forests. All of these different types of habitats combine to make Greenport a great place for many kinds of animals to call home.

The Hudson River makes Greenport a very attractive place for a large variety of birds – in fact, an area just north of the site has been designated an Important Bird Area. Water-loving birds like Osprey, Bald Eagles, Mallards, and Double-Crested Cormorants have been spotted here. Below the surface of the water is another important species – the Atlantic Sturgeon. This fish continues to have great cultural significance for the Stockbridge-Munsee, whose reservation is located near a Lake Sturgeon fishing area in Wisconsin. Traditionally, they would have hunted for the sturgeon in the Hudson River at night using spears and torches made of Pine. The Sturgeon shares the waters of the Hudson with other fish including Striped Bass, Shad, Alewives and Herring.

The grasslands at Greenport provide important nesting and breeding sites for regionally-rare birds like the Savannah Sparrow, Eastern Meadowlark, and the Bobolink, called the “shkaakws-awehleeshoosh” or “skunk bird” by the Munsee (the Mohican word has been lost). CLC mows the fields at Greenport seasonally in order to continue providing habitat for these special birds.

Hundreds of years ago, a visitor to Greenport may have encountered a much larger animal lumbering through the grasslands – the Mastodon! In the 18th century, a farmer in the Claverack area dug up what he thought was the tooth of a giant. The Mohican, Catskill, and Esopus people would have known exactly whose bones the farmer had found – a giant culture hero called “Maughkompos.” Written records describe Maughkompos as being “as tall as the tall Pine trees,” and someone who “would hunt bears till they were treed and then take them with his hands.” He would even “wade into [the Hudson River] 12 or 14 feet deep & catch Sturgeons 3, 4, or 5 at a time and broile them on the Fire for his food.”

The forests and fields at Greenport include some uncommon species, including the Northern White Cedar. This tree grows only along the banks of the Hudson River, and is prized by the Mohican people. The bark is easily peeled from the tree trunks, creating straight, flexible poles that can be used for structures or building canoes. The leaves are used in medicine, and burned to create smoke that wards off ghosts and illness.

The Hudson river is an estuary, a body of water where sea water meets fresh water. This means that the river feels the oceans’ tides, with two high tides and two low tides every day. The Hudson River is brackish south of Poughkeepsie, but is freshwater here. This tidal flow creates wetlands where plants like Spat-leaved Arrowhead, Water Nymph, Kidney-leaved Mud Plantain, and Nuttall’s Waterweed can thrive.

The area around the wetland is known as a floodplain forest, another important ecosystem. This forest includes large Eastern Cottonwoods, White Oak, Green Ash, Slippery Elm, Black Locust, and some White Pine.

Bur Oaks, another uncommon species, are also found at Greenport, and may have once had great cultural significance. This tree, a species of White Oak, has the largest acorns of any oak species in North America. It’s found in four unconnected locations in the Northeast – all of which are Northeastern Algonquian groups that were connected to another until the mid-late 18th century. It’s entirely possible that these forests were spread among and planted by these groups, shaping the forests we see today.

The clay bluffs at Greenport have been important to people through time, though they were much taller in the pre-colonial landscape than they are today. The Mohicans would have mined the clay to create ceremonial pipes, pottery, and utilitarian objects like cooking pots. Clay pipes are frequently smoked and sometimes exchanged as gifts during meetings between leaders – the mingling of the pipe smoke symbolizes thoughts coming together.  When the Dutch colonists traveled the Hudson River, they named the clay cliffs “Clavers,” which became the namesake for the nearby town of Claverack.

By the first half of the 18th century, the Livingston and Van Rensselaer families claimed much of Columbia County in large tracts of land. They, and other Dutch patroons, relied on the labor of indentured people and enslaved Africans to manage these large tracts of land. Ships from the West India Company used the Hudson River as a way to transport enslaved peoples. Once manumitted, those original Black families continued to live, work, and create a vibrant community that survives to this day.

The land claims were hotly contested by the nearby Mohican descendants of the original sellers. They rightfully believed that the boundaries had been grossly exaggerated. The Mohican people were subject to genocide, coerced into assimilation, and forcibly removed from their homelands to what is now known as Wisconsin. They continue to retain their unbroken status as a Sovereign Native Nation. Despite removal, they continue to hold relationships with their homelands and settler communities.

What happened to the clavers? After the Great Fire in New York City in 1835 burned down over 600 buildings, the demand for bricks grew as building material. By 1906, there were 131 brickyards along the Hudson River producing 1.3 billion bricks annually. One of these brickyards, the Bartlett Brick Company, was located at Greenport. It’s estimated that the factories may have used 4,800,000 tons of clay to meet this demand. The demand for brick decreased by the 1970’s with the introduction of concrete as a lower-cost building material.

Greenport and places like it with views of the Hudson River inspired an art movement known as the Hudson River School, active from about 1825 to 1870. This movement featured detailed, romantic, idealized paintings of landscapes like the one you can view from the Gazebo at the end of the Access for All Trail. Painters who were part of this movement included Frederick Church (whose home at Olana is a few miles from Greenport), Thomas Cole (whose home is across the river in Catskill), Asher B. Durand, and Albert Bierstadt.

In 1992, CLC and the Open Space Institute purchased an initial portion of Greenport, opening it to the public in 1994 – the first of all Columbia Land Conservancy properties!  The site was expanded with additional land purchases in 1999 and 2000.