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What, exactly, is “Poughkeepsie?” Many times this question has been asked and many times it has been answered – usually wrongly.
The name Poughkeepsie is a mispronunciation of a Native American word that once referred to the location of a specific spring of fresh water that was used by the first travelers to the area as a rest stop on the trail that ran from south to north along the river.
Every town has a history and every name has an origin. In the United States, most towns have common names. “Union” can be found all over, as well as “Riverview,” “Fairview” and “Centerville,” but “Poughkeepsie” is unique in all the nation – indeed the world; except apparently for some copycat little 300-person town in the Ozarks of northern Arkansas, which doesn’t count. You might think the City of Poughkeepsie would be very proud of its name. It’s written hundreds of thousands of times a day by people and machines. It is spelled out in signs, on stationery and statues and is seen by anyone in the city hundreds of times in a day. It is as omnipresent as holiday music. Outside the area, the moniker may now be the best-known attribute of the city.
Most Americans couldn’t find Poughkeepsie on a map. Many have heard of the place called Poughkeepsie, but few really know where it is or what it is, including its residents and those of the surrounding town. Because the real meaning of the name refers to a specific, forgotten place that still exists and is no more than 10 feet square.
The site indicated by the name Poughkeepsie is not even in the city that bears its name. It’s in the Town of Poughkeepsie, just south of the city line. It is and has always been a peaceful spot from which a clear water spring has been issuing up longer than recorded history. In fact, that spring, the Lost Spring of Poughkeepsie, was known to the Native Americans who built a shelter out of the cattail reeds, or uppuqui, which grew there in the eternally wet area on the downhill side of a spring where fresh water and the materials to build a shelter were always present.
That is the place which is evoked by the name Poughkeepsie. In the 1920s the staff of the Museum of the American Indian suggested that Poughkeepsie was a clumsy Anglicization of “uppuqui ipis ing”— “uppuqui” pronounced oo-poo-kee and meaning “lodge covering” (the name of the cattail reed); “ipis” meaning “little water” and “ing” meaning “place.” The compound word was literally translated as: “the reed-covered lodge by the little water-place.”
So what happened to the spring? That’s what I set out to discover, in a circuitous journey that began three weeks ago at the Dutchess County Health Department, where a scholarly man mused that he might in fact know where the spring was and that it still existed. The health department is on Main Street, and bristles with so many signs warning of communicable diseases that you want to wash your hands when you leave. Standing next to a fold-up decontamination shower, this erudite civil servant explained that a spring, or aquifer, is evidence of a fissure in the bedrock that leads to an underground region of fractured rock that holds water in the spaces between the stones.
If the stones are very small, like grains of clay, not much water will be held; but if the grains are large like coarse sand or pebbles, then the volume of water held will be greater.
When a spring dries up during drought conditions, what was once a spring may just be a conduit for recent rainwater — dirty slush that has in its solution all the detritus of modern life, anything that falls to the ground or has been dumped and gets rained on, flows underground and then erupts from the side of a hill; innocent-looking but laden with poison.
On the other hand, when a spring flows consistently regardless of conditions on the surface, it is likely that the source is an ancient one. Water gushing from a true spring would have been deposited long before industry gave birth to the city on the Hudson that took its name. Crisp, crystal-clear, clean, cool water, imprisoned deep below ground in saturated rock layers whose only outlet is a series of fractures in the overlying rock and which, here and there, pushes upwards, flowing through gravel filters, picking up minerals and eventually emerging as pure, healthy refreshment and a perfect choice to quench the thirst of a weary traveler on a journey from Manhattan to settlements in the north.
In fact, as I was later to find out, the spring at Poughkeepsie or “Pooghkepesingh” (as it was written in 1683) was almost certainly once bottled and sold as a health drink. Many are the testimonials from the 1870s singing the praises of Captain Lloyd’s Crystal Mineral Spring Water, a.k.a. water from the spring at Poughkeepsie, for $5 a barrel.
Here are some of the testimonials:
“These curative waters:”
“The Crystal Mineral Spring is located one and a quarter miles from the Hudson River and is elevated two hundred feet above it. The water is transparent and brilliant, has no odor or taste. The temperature varies only four or five degrees during the year and has a constant flow of six to eight gallons”
“Three years ago the doctors gave her just one month to live. All the medicine they could give had no effect and she grew weaker. At last she gave up doctors and medicine and took nothing but Spring Water, now she is as well as anyone and looks better than she has in years.”
“I was paralyzed with kidney complaint and dropsy – after taking it constantly for two weeks – I was entirely relieved of my kidney and dropsy troubles” (the testimony of “James Wilson, No. 12 Perry St. 1877.”
“I consider it the same class as the Gettysburg, Bethesda, and Poland waters, perfectly pure, inodorous and invaluable.” – Geo. Upton MD, 1877.
Fresh prints
The next stop on my journey to find the Lost Spring of Poughkeepsie was just up the street from the health department at the Dutchess County Historical Society. Here I found the society’s director, Stephanie Mauri, whose kind presence and graceful demeanor added to the character of the organization’s office, which is located in the Clinton House on Main Street – an edifice in which the famous first governor (George Clinton) of New York State never lived or worked. In a large room at a large desk, documents had been prepared for me.
Mauri provided me with some documents to peruse, and in those papers I found that the name of Rust Platz given to the site by two Dutch boys supplanted the native name and became the label on maps of the spring site. The trail that ran from Albany to Manhattan was known to them and was still being utilized by its native creators at the time. That old thoroughfare, part of a complex of trails called the Great Path, was about two feet wide and six inches below grade, beaten down by countless pedestrians. Those boys, Johannes Van Kleeck (born 1680) and Myndert Van Den Bogaerdt (born 1682), were exploring one day when they came upon some native travelers using the spot to rest. “Rust Platz” or “Rest Place,” is how they described it to their parents when they returned, and the name stuck. Eventually the spring became known as Rust Platz and the old name “Poughkeepsie” became associated with the burgeoning town to the north.
The origin of the city’s name was lost until more than a century later when, while looking through an old deed dated 1751, a man named George Overocker found this description of the site of Rust Platz: “Beginning at the east bank of Hudson River at a place formally called by the natives Apokeepsink where a small run of water empties into the Hudson River, which run of water was known by the name of Rest Place Creek.”
From that piece of information the spring was again found, just east of the rural cemetery and the South Road.
Still, this knowledge isn’t doing the venerable spring any good, as it has been completely ignored in the development of the area since the construction of a six-lane highway in the 1960s to service the residential, commercial and retail needs of IBM’s workforce. No signs or arrows point to the spring now, and I was told it would probably take a hike through overgrown brush and soggy, squishy wetland to find the point from which it flows. A marker that once stood on South Road indicating the general vicinity was stolen back in the 1970s, around the time that criminal “feet picking” became associated with the city named for the lost spring in the movie The French Connection. Old maps do not indicate the exact location and the best clue was a valley shown on some maps descending towards Route 9.
With copies of those maps and a camera I parked at the Holiday Inn Express and walked along Route 9 toward the area on the map. My first clue was a newly built complex of bright yellow townhouses identified by a large sign proclaiming it to be “Spring Manor.”
I was close, and I knew it.
The cars and trucks sped by close enough to keep me off balance as I walked on the snow piled up from the storm of New Year’s Eve 2008. As I continued farther down Route 9, I came to a piece of undeveloped land with a small stream and cattail reeds growing wild. This was it; in the snow I could clearly see the stream coming from somewhere up the hill. The cattails I saw must be descendants of the very plants used to build the first shelter here before recorded history. I found a gap in the fence and no signs warning me away as I tramped down from the road through the foot-deep snow into a clearing. Even in the bitterly cold weather the stream was not frozen over and flowed past my boots as I followed it uphill.
As I passed some young trees, I found a large flat area of grass clumps and frozen mud about a quarter-acre in area. There the stream spread out just below a small hill surrounded by running water on both sides. It was then that I noticed that I was not alone. Although I was only 200 feet from the road and in sight of a line of small houses, I was being watched by a group of 10 deer who were doing their I’m-a-statue thing. I continued up around the small hill that split the stream and began to see another housing development and parking lot in the distance.
This one was a 1970s-era brick apartment building. The two streams joined up again above the hill and, just as I approached the parking lot, I found it. Issuing forth through half a plastic culvert pipe and covered in brush was the source of the Lost Spring of Poughkeepsie. Clear and brilliant, just like the claims of Captain Lloyd, pumping out about six to eight gallons a minute, less than 20 feet from a parking lot. I looked around for a sign, something to tell me that I had arrived, but only its placement, color and volume gave away this historic spring.
When I returned a few days later the snow was mostly gone and things had warmed up. It was then that I met Linda Nolen. She had just been visiting her mother Mavis, a resident who lives on a waitress’s pension. Having worked all her life in restaurants since the age of 16, Mavis had joined the waitress union in California and is now retired and living only feet from the most important historical site in town. I discussed the spring just behind her mother’s apartment and that’s when she said: “I wonder if they know about the spring? Because they’re getting ready to build another section right on that spot.”
The land on which the spring sits is, as far as can be determined, owned by St. Simeon Properties, builders of the senior housing to the east, and is probably a former part of Maple Grove, which is also owned by St. Simeon. An expansion of the senior housing is being proposed, which has engendered a minor flurry of protest.
Controversy over what happens on this forgotten swatch of land is nothing new. The reason the testimony of those two boys – Van Kleeck and Van Den Bogaerdt – even got written down in the first place was because they were called into court as old men in 1742 to search their fading memories to help settle a major boundary dispute between Henry Vanderburgh and Jacob Low, whom Vanderburgh had accused of pilfering lumber. The dispute eventually was settled in a manner to the advantage of the acquisitive Henry Livingston Sr., who bought it to protect his vast property from “undesirable neighbors immediately to the south of his own home.” He eventually kept buying southward, gobbling up what is now Locust Grove as well before his heirs began selling off pieces of the real estate empire.
Anyway, in the next report, I’ll check on the status of the proposed senior development expansion. I’ll also give directions and take suggestions for monuments. Is the spring still pristine? Are the waters curative? Does Poughkeepsie care where it came from? Does it matter?
The author can be reached at: paul@ccdproductions.com
