Portal:Hudson Valley

The Rosendale trestle is a 940-foot (290 m) continuous truss bridge and former railroad trestle in Rosendale Village, a hamlet in the town of Rosendale in Ulster County, New York. Originally constructed by the Wallkill Valley Railroad to continue its rail line from New Paltz to Kingston, the bridge rises 150 feet (46 m) above Rondout Creek, spanning both Route 213 and the former Delaware and Hudson Canal. Construction on the trestle began in late 1870, and continued until early 1872. When it opened to rail traffic on April 6, 1872, the Rosendale trestle was the highest span bridge in the United States.

The trestle was rebuilt in 1895 by the King Bridge Company to address public concerns regarding its stability, and it has been repeatedly reinforced throughout its existence. Concern over the sturdiness of the trestle has persisted since its opening, and was a major reason Conrail closed the Wallkill Valley rail line in 1977. After the rail line's closure, Conrail sold the bridge in 1986 for one dollar to a private businessman who tried unsuccessfully to operate the trestle as a bungee jumping platform in the 1990s. A similar attempt was made the following decade. The trestle was seized by the county in 2009 for tax nonpayment, and is being renovated as a pedestrian walkway for the Wallkill Valley Rail Trail.

• ... that St. James Episcopal Church in Hyde Park, New York held Sunday services for nearly 100 years in its chapel (pictured) during wintertime because it was too difficult to heat the main church building?
• ... that the Rushmore Memorial Library in Highland Mills, New York, takes its name from Charles E. Rushmore, the same man Mount Rushmore is named for?
• ... that Benedict Arnold learned about the capture of his fellow-conspirator John André while living on Sugarloaf Hill, from which he then fled?

William Henry Seward, Sr. (May 16, 1801 – October 10, 1872) was the 12th Governor of New York, United States Senator and the United States Secretary of State under Abraham Lincoln and Andrew Johnson. An outspoken opponent of the spread of slavery in the years leading up to the American Civil War, he was a dominant figure in the Republican Party in its formative years, and was widely regarded as the leading contender for the party's presidential nomination in 1860 – yet his very outspokenness may have cost him the nomination. Despite his loss, he became a loyal member of Lincoln's wartime cabinet, and played a role in preventing foreign intervention early in the war. On the night of Lincoln's assassination, he survived an attempt on his life in the conspirators' effort to decapitate the Union government. As Johnson's Secretary of State, he engineered the purchase of Alaska from Russia in an act that was ridiculed at the time as "Seward's Folly", but which somehow exemplified his character. His contemporary Carl Schurz described Seward as "one of those spirits who sometimes will go ahead of public opinion instead of tamely following its footprints."