Ramapo River
Although this photograph taken in 1900 is labeled “Falls at Ramapo, New York,” probably what we’re looking at is Sloat’s Dam a few miles upstream in Rockland County. It was constructed in 1792 by Isaac Sloat, built of stone and then faced with concrete; it was refurbished a couple of times and still is standing today. In 2000 this dam, the mill pond it created, and the ruins of a few buildings were listed on the National Register of Historic Places. And this is just one of many dams built along the river.
It’s about fifteen miles upstream from here to the Ramapo’s headwaters near the village of Monroe, and definitely a mixed bag in terms of ecology. Alongside the river are both NY Route 17 and the New York State Thruway, some of the traffic headed to a large outlet mall at Harriman. About a mile away from that is the former headquarters of the Nepera Chemical Company; between 1953 and 1967, every day 50,000 gallons of wastewater from the plant were sent to “lagoons” in nearby Maybrook contaminating the soil and groundwater (EPA).
Yet on either side of the freeways are picturesque mountains in Sterling Forest and Harriman state parks; the Appalachian Trail crosses this stretch of the Ramapo. There are still a few people fly fishing the river. You only need to go back a century to read descriptions of the area as a natural wonderland. And the same is true for the entire length of the Ramapo watershed, as it joins the Pompton and then the Passaic Rivers in New Jersey: there’s a lot of environmental restoration to be done, but it’s impossible without first imagining that it can happen.
From the Gazetteer: “The Ramapo Mountains, extending along the northwest border, are the connecting link between the Blue Ridge of Eastern Pennsylvania and New Jersey and the Matteawan Mountains of Putnam county, east of the Hudson.....They are generally steep, rocky, and barren. The look of the country from the Hudson river is forbidding to the agriculturist. He sees scarcely anything but naked, precipitous rocks, with a stinted growth of forest trees from the thin soil on their summits, and among the broken debris that form a steep slope at the base of the cliffs. When the slopes are gentle, the soil is rich and productive....The Ramapo, a main branch of Passaic, rising in Orange, crosses the W. part of Rockland County, through the town of Hampstead, and supplies several extensive works there. There are some small ponds, most romatically situated on the mountains, abounding with fish for the angler. The Niak Hills, and the fine sand-stone they yield in vast abundance, must not be forgotten. Its colour is a reddish brown, quarries well, and is wrought with great ease and facility. The Capitol, or Government House at Albany, is principally built of this stone, the cost of which building was 115,000 dollars....The very situation of [Ramapo], crossed by the only direct road from Kings Ferry to Morristown and the south, and containing, between the Hudson and the Delaware Rivers, the only pass through which access could be had to the interior of New York, would render it certain that Ramapo must have been the arena of stirring scenes in Revolutionary days...It was from the top of the Torne Mountain in the clove that General Washington is said to have watched the movements of the British fleet in New York Bay” (Spafford 98; Cole 17, 267). Major tributaries: Ramapo River, Hackensack River. Major lakes: Greenwood Lake, DeForest Lake. Highest Point: Harriman Observatory (1,430 ft). Area: 211 square miles in New York state.
Fred (“Snoozy”) Powell, “The Ramapo Mountains (1974)
In the Ramapo Mountains of northern New Jersey and southern New York a multiracial, linguistically distinct culture evolved under the derogative name of “Jackson Whites.” Supposedly their lineage involved migrating Tuscaroras; Hessian mercenaries; English or West Indian women from the 18th-century sex trade; and free or runaway slaves. The poet William Carlos Williams recounts this dubious story about them in his epic poem Patterson. A historian named David Stephen Cohen, who lived a year among the Mountain People (their preferred name) argues they were Afro-Dutch freemen. A different indigenous history is argued by the Ramapough Lenape Indian Nation, recognized by the state of New Jersey but not by New York or the United States. Whatever the case, it’s agreed the Mountain People have lived in the Ramapo River area for a long time, and the story here is a deeply felt oral history that morphs into a tall tale, recounted by a Hillburn, NY resident to Cohen in the early 1970s.
But anybody that would ever want to see the beautiful terrain that the Lord has put here on earth, they got to come to Hillburn....Well, you walk these hills, and I’ll guarantee you, when you come down, regardless where you come out—you come out in Suffern, Sloatsburg, Ramapo, Tuxedo, or even Harriman—you’ve walked a good distance, ‘cause everything you’ve seen was experienced. Everything. You’ll see turtles walking around that you wouldn’t believe. You’ll see mosquitoes with buck teeth. You got owls that look at you and smile at you right away. They’re right here ‘cause the Lord put ‘em here. But everything you see from the time you leave Hillburn ‘til the time you get to Tuxedo Park, you’ll see every kind of animal—other than what I’m talking about, like piranha fish and things of that nature—alligators and things like that—that’s down the road. That’s down South. You’ll see that all here, and this’ll be the prettiest country you ever walked through.
Jasper Cropsey, Greenwood Lake (1875). The Ramapo Valley is fortunate to have had a talented artist who lived nearby, rendering many of its distinctive locations including High Torne Mountain and the Ramapo River. Cropsey was one of the most famous of the Hudson Valley School of painters during the 1850s-60s (he was introduced to Queen Victoria), whose income enabled him to build a mansion near the hometown of his wife in Warwick, NY. Greenwood Lake was a subject he returned to often; there are more than two dozen known paintings by Cropsey of its waters and shoreline shared with New Jersey. You can view a larger image of the painting here by following this link.
Here we see why a travel guide of the time called it a “miniature Lake George” (Appleton’s), with dramatic wooded hillsides during early autumn; in the foreground a group of people behold this view along with us. Human transformations of the landscape remain pretty minimal: a house and barn at left, another one along the right shoreline, and a few little white specks in the distance. As it happens, however, Cropsey was painting Greenwood Lake at a moment of change. In addition to a sailboat we also see a steamship near the center of his canvas. Just two years before, the first ones had started operation in response to a growing tourist industry facilitated by railroads and grand hotels.
Cropsey, too, was in the midst of an upheaval. Following the Civil War his type of art had fallen from favor and he was forced to sell his mansion named “Aladdin.” The pristine landscapes he painted have had a mixed legacy; some areas of Greenwood Lake have sprouted outrageous luxury homes, others have been preserved as state forests.
Works Consulted
—Appleton’s Illustrated Hand-book of American Summer Resorts, Including Tours and Excursions. D. Appleton, 1880. Web version available at Internet Archive.
—Cohen, David Stephen. The Ramapo Mountain People. Rutgers University Press, 1974.
—Cole, David. History of Rockland County, New York: With Biographical Sketches of Its Prominent Men. J. B. Beers & Co., 1884.
—Environmental Protection Agency. “Superfund Site: Nepera Chemical Co., Inc., Maybrook, NY.” Web.
—Genader, Ann. “Greenwood Lake Tourism Dates Back to 1878.” 20 July 2017. NorthJersey.com. Web.
—Johnson, Kirk. “A Sight That Remains And Inspires; Landscapes of 19th Century Join Generations in Warwick.” New York Times 27 May 2001. Weblink here.
—Spafford, Horatio Gates. A Gazetteer of the State of New York. H.C. Southwick, 1813.