Denning’s Point: A Hudson River History

From 4000 BC to the 21st Century

Home to The Beacon Institute for Rivers and Estuaries

by Jim Heron

foreword by John Cronin, prologue by Pete Seeger

This extraordinary book tells a 6,000-year story of an extraordinary 64 acres on the eastern edge of the Hudson River, 60 miles north of New York City. Pete Seeger

Denning’s Point is a remarkable saga that leads from newspaper morgues and back rooms of museums to a hands-on archaeological dig that confirmed the presence of prehistoric American Indians on Denning’s Point as early as 4000 BC. Members of Henry Hudson’s crew may have landed there in 1609, as George Washington certainly did during the Revolutionary War. The most exciting discovery by far, however, was finding proof that it was on Denning’s Point that Alexander Hamilton first set his ideas on paper in a series of editorials that grew to become the Federalist Papers and subsequently were incorporated into the United States Constitution.

Along the way, meet a strong-willed pioneer woman and a ruthless railroad tycoon. Visit a gracious early-1800s mansion and a dusty brickyard providing building materials for a rising New York City. Witness the decline of the Hudson River Valley in the early and mid-1900s, and its rebirth today as a valued watershed of unparalleled beauty -- and now the home of The Beacon Institute for Rivers and Estuaries, destined to become for the rivers and estuaries of the world what the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute is for the oceans of the world

The cacophony of history that reverberates off the Denning’s Point landscape and throughout this book is the sound of a nation’s settlement and construction. From the ancient tribal occupations thousands of years before the first brick was wrought or the Point was called Denning’s, to Alexander Hamilton’s seminal writings on the American economy, to the land’s current incarnation as a park and center for environmental knowledge, this Hudson River peninsula has embraced survival and failure, folly and success, shortsightedness and imagination. John Cronin

6 x 9, 228 pages, 114 maps, photographs & illustrations, paper, $17.95, ISBN: 1-883789-51-6