Luykas Van Alen House

Once you start something, never look back; I did and I found out things I didn’t want to know. Now I need a major revision to the premise of my new story. Ignorance can certainly be bliss.

On a more positive note, Sue and I had a really enjoyable trip. I got to poke around in a library with records that date back to the early seventeen hundreds. I found some maps that were dated prior to 1800 as well as some records that noted land transactions as early as 1640.

We wanted to visit the site of the first sawmill on the Saw Mill River in Hastings-on-the-Hudson, but the river mouth has been buried underground for many years. Then we toured the Old Sawmill River Road (not the parkway). What an eye opener. The terrain is incredibly rugged with many very steep drumlins scattered throughout the area. The roads all wind and twist and seem to go straight up or down.

On the way home we did our best to follow the route of the Old New York-Albany Post Road which was officially established in 1672. Needless to say, there is very little of it left to follow, although we did find several remnants. When we went through Kinderhook, we stopped and took a picture of the Van Allen homestead, built about 1734 and made famous by Washington Irving in his tale of Ichabod Crane and “The Headless Horseman”.