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History of Orange County
Towns of Goshen, Hamptonburgh and Chester
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TOWN OF GOSHEN.
East Division- West Division.-The east part of the town is called East Division, and the west, West Division. If you enquire of a citizen of the town, where such a man lives, he will answer, in east or west division. This is wholly unmeaning, to a stranger, and is an answer that you will not receive in any other town in the state.
The origin and explanation of it is this: when the village of Goshen was laid out, there were four lots of 80 acres each, run off on each side of the main street which ran north and south; as a settler located or resided east or west of the street, he was in east or west division of the village plot. In time the names were appropriated to the town.
Goshen Village.-The name of the town and village were coetaneous, and so called from Goshen of the Scriptures, of which there were two, one in Egypt, the other in Canaan.- We think Pokoke, the traveller, says that in the language of Egypt, it means the “best of the land.” In Hebrew it means 'approaching.' The village is in the north part of the town, and in the centre of the county of which it is the capitol, though Newburgh is a half shire with it. The buildings in the old part are chiefly on one street, and round the triangle at the south, which incloses the Presbyterian and Episcopal churches, the male and female academies, and monument to those killed at the battle of Minisink, &c. Those in the new part, and along the tract of the N.Y. and Erie railroad, are less formal and regular in location. The ground is not well calculated for dry and permanent streets, without paving, being upon a meadow soil. For many years previous to building the railroad, the village was stationary in growth, since which however it has largely increased in business and population, and a new era dawned upon it with bright and promising hopes for the future.
We assume, occasionally to give counsel to our fellow citizens, somewhat regardless of opinion and consequences.- As this town has but one village, she ought to exhaust her parental power and garnish it with that rich adornment, with which a father, in doating kindness, arrays an only daughter. That Goshen is the capitol of the county, imposes additional obligations upon her citizens, from which they cannot free themselves without fully satisfying public expectation. In the exercise of a sound discretion, they will of course build no faster than the legitimate wants of business demands, but in the matter of side walks, streets and public ways, which beauty or convenience requires, the village must always be a step in advance of the times. Then again as to beautifying and adorning this only child, we remark: that there is no locality in the county more appropriate to grow the wide spreading and pendent branching elm, the very monarch of American shade trees. These repay the owner by a long life and grateful shade. The weeping willow, that most femenine and graceful of the woody tribe, loves a low soil and damp location. Hence she draws her tears, her thin elongated boughs, which in clustering tassels wave so beautifully in the evening breeze. Though they may remind us of death and the grave, no matter, we cannot always be laughing from the cradle to the grave. Our welfare often consists in the absence of mirth, for the proverb is, “it is better to go to the house of mourning than to the house of feasting." Besides, the yew will not flourish in this latitude, and we must nourish some plant to shelter the grave of the dead and admonish the living. How like man is this beautiful plant; it springs from the earth, towers up towards heaven and attains its physical altitude, and then as if it had ran out its concentrated power, bursts into a thousand branches, each one of which, like a pain or ailment of the human body, tends slowly from year to year, not only to the ground from which it sprung, but to exhaust the vigor of the aged trunk.
The pines, those evergreens, emblematical of eternal life, pant for a locality like this, to point their bristling arrows and warm their sluggish blood in the broad beams of the summer sun, and when winter sweeps over the land and disrobes all others of leafy beauty, they still live and flourish in the verdant adornment of sunny May. Each contains a thousand harps, uttering delicious music in the storm and in the breeze. Akin to this, a summer relative at least, is the fur-clad tamarack of our swamps and low lands. Sprinkled over and adorned with gay blossoms, as if snatched from a passing sunbeam, this pushes its more enfeebled roots through a moist locality and throws abroad its verdant branches to variegate the scene, amidst its fellows, adorned with leaves of greater pretension. But enough, for a word to the wise is sufficient, and we dismiss this train of thought by saying that few trees in the country surpass the unpretending bass-wood (the English linden) in the depth of its foliage or in the regularity and beauty of its general outline. While these, with the horse chestnut, oak, walnut, &c. are to be selected and cherished for a few years after being planted, like so many children, reject as for your life, the poplar and button wood; but reserve a place for the maple, for it is eminently leafy and lives without an enemy.