Mary McTamaney

April is the month of new beginnings. Spring takes hold and, as new growth shows in nature, people turn to new ways to grow as well. Communities are also inspired as our hometown was in 1865.

That is the year the Village of Newburgh sprang ahead and became the City of Newburgh. A new charter was drafted on April 4th and the city’s incorporation was complete, made official by New York State on April 22nd. The graduation from village to city happened 152 years after this land on the west shore of the Hudson River was officially surveyed to create settlement lots and 156 years after the first Europeans stepped ashore in April 1709. There was a steady growth of this mid-Hudson community through that century and a half that prompted the new incorporation.

The original 52 refugees that came ashore in 1709 simply hoped for a fresh start away from the holocaust in the lower Rhine River valley that made them flee for their lives. They were a band of neighbors with a variety of skills and former trades and no sense of what their talents would produce here in the New World. If they could stay alive in a wilderness and feed and clothe their families in peace, they would be satisfied and hopeful that their children would build a new society. Never could those few farmers and vintners and weavers and carpenters have envisioned a bustling port at this harbor location where ships would be bringing in goods and carrying off industrial products each day.

By 1865, this community was a tightly built hillside of intersecting streets and row houses with big warehouses lining the shore. From the initial log church built by the first Lutheran settlers, Newburgh as a young city offered a skyline that showed spires and columns of big churches and public buildings.

Up until 1864, there was only one Newburgh, a town that ran from the Quassaick Creek to Marlboro and from the Hudson River to Montgomery. The village was a community within that land mass just as Coldenham or Balmville or Little Britain was. Yet, the village center had become so busy, it felt it needed to manage its own affairs and petitioned the state to advance to city status, making it independent of the government of the larger town surrounding it.

Approval by New York State marked a crossroads moment for this region.

Newburgh became the first full-fledged city in Orange County and the second on this stretch of the Hudson, following Poughkeepsie that incorporated in 1857. Yet, the separation of Newburgh governments also began the separation of planning and slowly the investment in a commercial center at the river port divided the two municipalities and the Town of Newburgh began to develop its own interests, economy and trade.

Yet, in April 1865, Newburgh was in celebration mode. Pride in the community’s growth and importance was almost eclipsed by joy at the end of the great Civil War.

Failing to capture the railroad depot at Appomattox, Virginia, General Robert E. Lee famously surrendered to General Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Courthouse on April 9, 1865. Word of that surrender reached Newburgh and our village rang its church and civic bells and literally danced in the streets. The week our full incorporation was approved, the remainder of the Confederate Army surrendered under General Johnson and the great war was over.

Newburgh men began returning home by train and steamboat and took up their roles in leading a revived community. Medal of Honor recipient Dennis Hickey, for example, a great hero of the 2nd N.Y. Cavalry, returned to 125 Chambers Street and started working for the city Water Department. Sergeant Hickey became Assistant Superintendent Hickey and oversaw Newburgh’s water supply for years, despite the horrific leg injuries he sustained at Stony Creek, Virginia. It was a new day and a new community and everything was focused on the future.