A History of Hudson
/CityOfHudson.org
Official City of Hudson Historian: Pat Fenoff
email: cityhistorian@cityofhudson.org
PHOTO COURTESY CITYOFHUDSON.ORG
“The little city of Hudson has the distinction of being the first city in the United States—that is, it was the first city to be incorporated after the thirteen colonies became the United States.
The idea of Hudson started even before the Treaty of Paris was signed. A group of men from Nantucket and New Bedford—seafarers, owners of whaling ships—were convinced that King George would not be content to let the American colonies go, and the British would be back to recapture what they’d lost. Their location made them and their livelihood especially vulnerable, so early in 1783, two brothers, Thomas and Seth Jenkins, representing an association of men involved in maritime commerce, set out to find and purchase a safe harbor where they could relocate their families and their ships. Sailing up the Hudson, they found what they were looking for about a hundred miles north of New York Harbor: a high bluff on the east bank of the river with a natural harbor on either side. They bought the land on the bluff and along the river from Dutch families whose ancestors had purchased it from the Mohicans generations before, and they set about to create there a seaport far from the sea”. READ MORE
