Editor's Note: Born in South Carolina, Daniel Pruitt attended school in Brockway, Beacon and Glenham before graduating from Beacon High School in 1965 and earning degrees from SUNY Stony Brook and The New School for Social Research in New York City. Retired from IBM, he lives in Dunedin, Florida.

Below are excerpts from an article that Pruitt researched and wrote in response to our five-part series on the history of Black people in the Highlands, Always Present, Never Seen, published in 2022. Pruitt felt the series could have included more about local Black history from 1850 to 1930. "I felt a personal need to connect the present, which I knew, with the past, which I did not," he wrote. "This past history was never present and never seen as such over my lifetime."

We printed an earlier installment in August. Both are excerpted from his book, Lost and Found: Beacon's Black Community 1850-1930, which will be published in June.

I grew up in Brockway, a company town for a brickyard that didn't roll out its first products until 1888, 50 years late to the brickmaking party in the Hudson Valley. Edwin Brockway earned his reputation for brick manufacturing in Haverstraw; his purchase of William Mortimer's country seat in 1886 in Fishkill was supposedly for retirement, but his sons pushed him to open another brickyard.

Likely inspired by what Homer Ramsdell was doing with the excavation, landfill and physical plant construction at Denning's Point, Brockway built a peninsula on 48 acres of Hudson River surface, using New York City garbage as landfill, and topped it with clay pits, brick machines, kilns and drying yards.

He likely filled his workforce with seasonal Black sharecroppers and tenant farmers from North Carolina and Virginia. After brickmaking became year-round, he coaxed those workers to work year-round. He limited their interaction with the white residents of Fishkill Landing (which was combined in 1913 with Matteawan to create Beacon) by building a village to house and tend to their basic needs (school, store, post office).

Today, nothing remains of Brockway except the railway trestle that once brought excavated clay drawn by a small locomotive (we called it a "dinky") into the brickyard. Brockway's beginning was secretive, its existence plantation-like and its end by bankruptcy a loss for owner and worker alike.

My parents came to Beacon in 1946 to work at the Castle Point VA hospital. My dad's parents, losing the family home in Spartanburg, South Carolina, to a suspicious fire, joined them shortly after. Brockway provided not only Black jobs but Black housing in those duplexes with small areas to garden for the industrious. Pregnant with me, my mom went back to her home in Helena, South Carolina, in 1947 for my midwife birth and first months of life.

When my family arrived, Brockway was full of chamber pots and outhouses where toilets were flushed - not often enough - with lye. Water was gathered by the pail from a pipe protruding from a hill and drank at home from dippers. The main road turned to dirt as it snaked down from Route 9D. Clothes were washed in tubs and hung on lines, leaving them with a pinkish tint from the brick dust. Saturday night baths were taken outside in galvanized tubs, heated with kettle water; showers were taken in the rain with a bar of soap.

On my first day of kindergarten, my dad gave me a Mickey Mouse watch that, under no circumstances, was I to take off my wrist. He told me I would be late for school once Mickey's big hand got to the 12 (I was not yet able to tell time). After a playmate asked whether the watch was waterproof, I found myself sticking my arm in the bucket that caught water at the spring that afternoon. Mickey was not waterproof.

The school in Brockway was not a one-room schoolhouse, although I thought so for most of my life. There were three rooms manned by three teachers at an earlier time. When I attended, there was only one room in use, overseen by Mrs. Sarah Taylor, fu...