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General View of the County

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In the County are many thousands acres of peat bog, the most extensive quantities of which are found in the Drowned Lands, the Gray Court and Black Meadows. The amount is not only millions of cords, but thought to be inexhaustible, and found abundantly in every town except Deerpark, where the quantity is small. No County in the State has a larger supply of the article; and should it ever be brought into general use for fuel, as it has been in different parts of Europe, every peat bog locality will become a mine of wealth to its owner. And will that day not come? We have no pleasure in contemplating the course of its coming, nor actual advent; for sorrow, lamentation and woe, may be found in the numerous and bloody train of its coming. Whether living under one or twenty governments; ruled by the iron sceptre of one man, or crushed to the earth by the conflicting and cruel rivalry of twenty; looking down the stream of time, as it flows on a thousand years and again a thousand years more, the period will come when this wide domain, with the hills and vallies around us, shall be crowded with a dense population, struggling for honest yet precarious support. Man’s eternal wants and consumption's in these cold regions of the north, will then, as in the oldest portions of the globe, have destroyed every shrub and tree, and the hills and mountains divested of the waving forests which now adorn and crown them with vegetable life a beauty, shall become old and worn out, and stand denuded and hoary.— God in his providence saw the result, and in wisdom treasured up these essential requisites for man’s extreme necessities, and in the meantime covered them up with stagnant pools of water, and the green, deep sward of the valley.

We believe this article has been used for fuel for many years past by several families in Poughkeepsie. We have seen it burnt there twenty-five years ago, in a close stove, and gave an intense heat. This, if we recollect right, was dug out and brought to the village from Amenia. We saw it in the house of John Brush, Esq., who owned the locality from which it was taken.

The villages of the County are very numerous, and they, with the mountains, hills and other localities of any note or celebrity, will be treated of in their proper places.

During the war of the Revolution this County bore its share of the public burden, and suffered largely in the common cause. At the battle of Minisink, 22nd July, 1779, fell the very flower of her sons. Her western borders were then frontier settlements, and continually exposed to the sudden attacks and murderous incursions of the Indians and Tories. No one was safe by night or day, and the ordinary business of life was frequently performed with weapons of defence in the hand. Oftentimes—in the absence of husbands and sons, hastily called into service—mothers and daughters, unused to the hardship and drudgery of out-door labor, dressed the cornfields and reaped the grain harvests. We claim the privilege of stating here, that our mothers, like the chief of Grecian matrons, felt equally with our fathers the bright and burning flame of patriotism, and with a firm reliance on heaven sent their sons to battle with willing hearts. These indeed were the times which tried men's souls, and well and nobly did the hardy sons of the land sustain themselves and meet the shock of war, increased in severity from the fact of being partly intestine.