Neversink Valley Museum
Cuddebackville, NY - January 10, 2010
The D&H Canal is an artificial waterway built in the 1820s so coal can be efficiently transported from the mines in Pennsylvania to New York City. Being a man-made river, the D&H Canal required a constant source of water to flow through it. As such, aqueducts (used heavily by the ancient Romans to transport water to the city of Rome) were built to deliver water from nearby rivers. One such river was the Neversink River in Cuddebackville, NY. It is about 15 miles away from our home in Middletown or a 27-minute drive.
Coal from Pennsylvania brought energy and industrialization to New York City. And in places that used to be uninhabited wilderness, settlements sprouted along the D&H Canal to form today’s towns and villages.
Industrialization eventually brought the locomotive. And when railroads were completed in the Delaware Valley in the 1850s, the D&H Canal became obsolete. It is now a National Historical Landmark. Museums and parks sprouted along the canal. One such museum is the Neversink Valley Museum beside the Neversink River.
Anyway, to cut a long introduction short, that’s where Vi and I went for our photo-trip this past weekend.
If you drive around our county in what I call "slightly-upstate New York", you'd find many unused old barns and buildings derelict and dilapidated that all belong to another era. From a photography enthusiast's perspective, they are a treasure to capture.
But tempting as they are, we cannot just stop by, walk around, and take pictures. Even though no one seems to be maintaining them, they’re still on private property. We would be guilty of trespassing if we do.
This is why when planning our photo-trips, Vi and I look for parks on the map labeled as "county" or "state". In such places we can freely walk around and take pictures to our hearts' content.
Neversink Valley Museum sits on the D&H Canal County Park. We were not aware of the museum when we decided to go there this weekend. We left home a few minutes past noon, and being that our stomachs were hungry, we decided to locate the park first then find a place to eat. We would do our photography after lunch and with full stomachs.
But when we arrived at the park, we saw the old buildings along the left side of the narrow country road. There was the tourist gift shop which was closed for the season, a barn, a shed, a blacksmith's rough shack, and other wooden structures of odd shapes and sizes. Just opposite and below the road were the slopes of the Neversink riverbank. Large sections of the river's surface were frozen. Where water flowed the current was strong. And the flowing river’s surface was densely covered with small chunks of ice floating downstream.
When we saw all this we decided that, no, we'll postpone lunch and do photography now. Once our gears were ready and we opened our car doors to go outside, we immediately heard the soothing sound of gushing of water and were instantly transported to another place. From our cramped quarters to the open outdoors, Nature can give a liberating feeling.
We wasted no time in going down the river and photographing it. Then we went back up to the museum and took pictures of the "historic canal-era buildings" there. We only stopped photographing not because our stomachs were beginning to grumble again, but because our hearts were by then fully content.
We hope we captured the beauty of the river, the park, and the museum. We hope that the photographs we took will throw you back -- as they did to us -- to a time of as then the untamed frontiers of America.
Thank you for looking.
Click on a picture to enlarge.
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