Panning for gold

After we dug out the rear path we have a huge pile of soil on the drive and surprisingly it looks pretty good. Combined with the fact that our last dumpster/skip cost us over $1100 (due to excess weight), we decided to sieve all the soil to get rid of the roots, large stones and general rubbish and reuse it in the garden. The homemade wheelbarrow sieve came from youtube. I used a 1/4″ mesh initially but it took too long and I ended up with a 1/2″ mesh.

The first video you will see is the making of the sieve. I cocked up the pieces of wood which held the mesh in place and as I didn’t have any extra wood I stopped filming. This is a common mistake I make and there must be a name for this kind of mistake as I have heard of other people making the same mistake. The mistake is when I am making something that has mirrored left and right parts, I often forget to flip the template over so I end up with two lefts or two rights. Dickhead springs to mind.

I do plan on getting a 4×8′ sheet of ply for the saw stands and this will be our general work table.

It will take a while to get through this pile of soil but it’s not really hard work and I did find an artifact amongst the soil, which is my next quiz. What is this artifact. My only clue is that it a part of something and it’s shape is a good clue. It’s about 2″ heigh.

mystery object

TT + TT = H

I know this branch of mathematics may be a little difficult to grasp, but it’s true TT + TT = H. This Sunday, whilst staring at the two TT stones, Aimee, Giovanna and Derrick figured it out. Great job.

Derrick thinks the stone was split on purpose, which is a shame, but at least we have the two halves. It would have been nice if it was a “G” for Gill. We are now definitely sure that it’s a carriage step and the mystery of the TT stones has been solved. We will probably mortar it back together at some point. We will use it as a bench of some sort. If we are careful we may be able to dye the mortar and do a half decent job. Note the mechanically polished front face, Derrick thinks they achieved this with sand, water and a lot of elbow grease.

There was a Hutton living around the corner as you can see from this 1870 map, maybe it belonged to that family? Note that in this map our house is on Prospect Street. It was renamed Gill Street a few years later when the Rondout was incorporated into Kingston. Kingston already has a Prospect Street so they couldn’t have two.

If you’re unfamiliar with the TT stone, you may want to read some previous posts starting with “we find another TT stone“.

F.W. Devoe and Co

While I was digging out the back path I did find an old bottle embossed with F.W. Devoe & Co. New York. It was about a foot under ground and luckily I didn’t break it. F.W Devoe made paints, pigments and inks. My guess was that this bottle contained some powered pigment for an artist, but it could have equally have been a paint sample for the house. This bottle could be late 1800’s or early 1900’s. Sometimes littering is a good thing.

The bottle has twelve sides and would have taken a cork stopper. It is about three inches tall. There is an identical one for sale on ebay.

We find another TT stone

In the post Mysterious TT stone blocks rear passage I asked readers whether they spotted anything unusual in the time lapse. Eventually Mr. Invader from England spotted it, another TT stone standing in plain site. Congratulations Mr. Invader!

The “TT” was partially covered in soil and roots but the top part of it caught my eye. It’s the same width and the height only differs by 1/2″. Still no idea where they came from. Be nice to find a third, but I doubt it. Will have to find a good use for them eventually.

Anyone lose a Gyroscope, sixty years ago?

Did anyone lose a Gyroscope, sixty years ago? I found it when we were digging away the soil at the back. It must have been under the concrete path which I think was built at the same time as the garage. Not sure how old the garage is but I think it was already there in 1958.

I thought it was spinning top at first but then I noticed the concave ends and the hole in the shaft to put a string in it to spin it. The rest must have rusted away. I thought it was cast zinc but as it has some verdigris on it it’s probably brass.

I’m going to clean it up and see how it comes out.

We found some 100 year graffiti!!!

Today we were clearing away the back path and we had the garage door open as we had kept the wheelbarrow in there overnight. Halfway through the day, I got a call from Aimee, “hey look at this” and Aimee pointed out an old door with signatures from the Gill family. I’m surprised we hadn’t seen it before, but then again the garage is dark and without electricity. All the historical literature said the Gill family lived here, but it felt special to find this personal evidence of the Gill’s.

The old door had the name “Walter N. Gill”, “T.M. Gill” and also the initials, “T.G”. We both thought this was pretty cool.

Stepping back a few weeks ago, as part of our mission to track down old pictures and history of the house, we had written to all the local Gills asking for any information. We did get a reply from Walt(er) Gill (his Dad was also called Walter) and Walt thought his dad’s sisters had lived in Ponckhockie. Still not a solid connection but it does look like Walter was a popular Gill family name and I feel we are getting closer.

Later that day we had visitors and we took them onto the roof. On the way down Aimee pointed out some engraved graffiti from Bessie Tyler’s family (photos to come) who lived in the house in the 1950s. See Giovanna visits the public records office. I stayed a minute longer, looking around, and I was amazed to see some more graffiti from the Gills, one from T.M. Gill (1883) and Earl Gill (1912). The T.M Gill is very likely the same T.M. Gill who wrote on the door (note how similar the letter “T” is).

I also found mention of Walter N. Gill in a book on Ulster history. It looks like David Gill Sr. was the Gill who built our house, David Gill Sr. had a son called David Gill Jr. who in turn was father to Earl Gill. David Gill Jr. and Walter N. Gill appear to be brothers.

We will preserve all these signatures even if we make modifications to the house. This weekend we will take some floodlights up into the cupola and look for any other graffiti.

Notes on David and Walter Gill.

Remnants of the Once Mighty Hudson Valley Brick Industry

I’m pretty sure any home excavation in the Hudson Valley will reveal old bricks. We have found about 5 or 6 different bricks each with the makers’ name. They are rather attractive and we will keep them, I will include some photos, but first a bit of history. By the way, most of this is new to me and I find it fascinating, I hope you do too.

At the turn of the 20th century, the Hudson Valley was the brickmaking capital of the world, producing more than a billion bricks a year and employing nearly 10,000 people in more than 120 brickyards. By the late 1970s, the once-mighty molded-brick industry was no more. How and why did this industry become so mighty in the Hudson Valley and why the decline?

I have found what I think to be the major reason for the Hudson Valley brick boom, they are:

  • The raw materials. The raw materials for clay are found in abundance in Hudson Valley. During the last Ice Age in the Hudson Valley area, blankets of ice weighing millions of tons crushed the rocks of many of the mountains into a deposit of flour-textured, rich blue clay. This came to rest in the bays and coves of the newly carved Hudson River. In 1928, test borings made in the Hudson off the old Cofferdam in southern Haverstraw, drilled 100 feet deep and still did not drill through the clay. The Hudson valley clay deposits were known to be the most extensive in America.

  • James Wood’s revolutionary practice. In 1829 James Wood introduced a revolutionary practice into the production of Hudson River bricks. In that year Wood patented the use of crushed coal as a new ingredient in the brick clay mixture. This innovation had the result of reducing the brick firing time as well as fuel consumption by half.

  • Easy access to coal. The Rondout Creek in Kingston is part of the Delaware & Hudson Canal which was the main route for anthracite coal from the Carbondale coalfields in Pennsylvania. As mentioned above coal was an important ingredient to the clay recipe as well fueling the kilns.

  • The great fire of New York city. New York city’s demand for brick skyrocketed after a night watchman noticed smoke coming out of a dry-goods store in the city’s business district on December 16, 1835. Although 56 engines and 1,000 firemen fought the blaze for 16 hours, the Great Fire of 1835 burned more than 52 acres, destroying 674 buildings and driving 14 of the City’s 25 fire insurance companies into insolvency. It was the largest, most costly fire America had ever seen.

    Lawmakers unwilling to risk another such tragedy passed a series of building codes requiring fireproofing. Although marble, brownstone, cut stone and brick all played major roles in New York construction after wood dwellings were outlawed, brick was the least expensive. It became the most frequent choice of architects and builders. As the City’s population increased, the demand for brick also rose. Hudson Valley brickmakers rushed to heed the contractors’ calls, and the local brickyards prospered.

And then the decline (from the hudsonvalleyone.com).

New materials, new standards.

The good times for Hudson Valley brickmakers came to an end around the advent of World War I. New construction material such as steel and concrete began to cut into the brick market. The market price of brick hovered slightly higher than the cost of production. To combat the slump, the brickmakers modernized their plants, cutting down on their labour needs. Only technologically progressive plants with new marketing strategies survived. By the end of World War II, only ten brick plants were left in the Hudson Valley.

Attempts by the industry to hold on ultimately failed. By the 1940s, new transportation options meant that New Yorkers could live in the suburbs and still work in the City. The suburban single-family dwellings they built weren’t subject to the City’s stringent fire codes, and brick was no longer required.

The Hudson Valley brick industry lost its transportation edge, too, and designers and architects became more precise when ordering building materials. The high compression standards handed down from the American Society for Testing Materials – unnecessarily high, local brickmakers insisted – were generally beyond the reach of Hudson Valley molded brick. That was the final blow.

Ponckhockie housed a lot or the European migrant workers for the Hutton Brickyard which is half a mile away. If you visit the nearby beaches they are littered with bricks.

Below are some of the bricks which we dug up in the garden. The history of all these local brickworks can be found at brickcollecting.com. Sorry, I can’t give you links to direct links for each brick, still, it’s a very useful and informative site.

Travelling in and around Kingston there are many relics from both the brick and the cement works. I hope some of these can be preserved, I know I have my eye on a beautiful chimney stack on the Rondout which desperately needs some TLC. So if there is anyone out there with more money than sense, come talk to me.

These facts were cobbled together from these far more informative data sources:

HV1
Never Sink Museum
Wikipedia
brickcollecting.com

Giovanna visits the Public Records Office

Our friend and advisor Giovanna went to Kingston Public Record Department and requested the property record cards for our house. The cards are quite small so the photographs are probably 2″ square, hence why the quality isn’t that great when enlarged. That said it’s great to see the house looking finer in earlier years. Thank you Giovanna.

By 1994 the house is looking a little sad and it’s pretty much been downhill from there 🙁 I feel we are still going downhill but Aimee and I have our heels down and dug in [spfx: sparks flying] and are trying to decelerate the decline.

The date of the photograph with all the sun shades is unknown, the 1956 and 1994 property cards all have a list of owners and dates, so maybe this card is a precursor.

Update 5-28-18 I was talking to the Mama Dot who is the lady who lives opposite. Mama Dot has been living in the same house for 60 odd years and she remembers the house when it has sun shades, which is around 1958.

The sun shades in the undated photograph were probably installed to keep the rooms cool and it would be interesting to know how well they worked. I like this simple approach that people had before electrical AC took over. Maybe we can try something similar.

We are appealing for any photographs people may have of this house. One of next projects is an enquiring letter to all people with the surname of Gill listed in our local public property tax roll.

Hard as old nails

I love the nails used in our house. We’ve probably thrown a lot away but I’m sure we still have hundreds left in the wood we saved.

Our nails, which are rectangular, look like the Type B cut nails, Circa 1810 – 1900 which fits in with when the house was made. I believe these were made by cutting a thin tapered slice from a steel plate. I presume they had a machine that could hammer the end of the nail to make the head.

Manufacture of these nails came about due to steel plate being widely available, again this ties in with the industrial revolution, which in the USA was roughly between 1760 and 1840.

We’ll keep a bunch as I feel they must have a use somewhere and I like how they look.