Editor's note: Beacon was created in 1913 from Matteawan and Fishkill Landing.

150 Years Ago (June 1875)

A Matteawan judge fined three drunken young men from Newburgh $25 [about $730 today] for throwing coal at pedestrians.

According to the Matteawan correspondent for The Cold Spring Recorder: "This village is a very peculiar place and most miserably governed. Our people support over 60 gin mills - most of which are running full blast on the Sabbath."

A Fishkill Landing resident was selling his trotting stallion, Nicotine.

The body of a female newborn was found in the back of the ladies' waiting room at the Fishkill Landing train depot.

John Falconer, of the Seamless Clothing Co. in Matteawan, was building a second factory to make Brussels-style patterned carpets.

Commodore Thomas Ramsdell installed a buoy between Low Point and the Fishkill Landing dock to mark a sandbar where vessels often went aground.

Three Matteawan boys were brought before Justice Schenck for playing ball in the street. One was fined $1 [$30] and the others were dismissed.

A Fishkill Landing trustee obtained arrest warrants for three men accused of racing their horses on Sunday, in violation of village ordinance.

A bull and three cows died on a farm near Fishkill from an unknown disease. Before dying, the animals threw back their heads and walked in circles for 12 to 14 hours.

Smith Van Buren, a Fishkill Landing resident who was the son of former President Martin Van Buren, was confined to the Hudson River Hospital for the Insane in Poughkeepsie with dementia. [Van Buren died the following year, at age 59, and is buried at St. Luke's Church.]

George Peattie, while drunk, came into Drewen's barbershop in Fishkill Landing and attacked James Gogswell as he sat in the chair.

Zebulon Phillips, 80, a farmer near Fishkill, was killed when he fell off his roof, which he was repairing.

125 Years Ago (June 1900)

James W.F. Ruttenber, editor of the Newburgh Sunday Telegram, was found guilty of publishing an obscene newspaper based on gossip printed in his Feb. 4 issue. The jury deliberated for less than 10 minutes. Ruttenber had been indicted in Dutchess County because the Telegram was distributed in Fishkill Landing and Matteawan. The judge sentenced the editor to 15 days in jail and a $15 fine [$575].

The offending paragraphs, by an unnamed Fishkill and Matteawan correspondent, included a report that "a Landing girl sent word to a young man in town that he could see her disrobe for 10 cents. Of course, the young man was unnerved by so sudden and cheap an offer. Still, there is no telling what she will do next if he doesn't accept her proposition. Take her up, George, before she changes her mind." He also wrote: "Poker as it is played on Cedar Street does not always require a pocket full of money. I am told that the females in the house are sometimes put up as an equivalent."

Clarence Chatham Cook (below) died at his home at Fishkill Landing at age 72. The Harvard graduate gained fame in 1863 with critical articles on American art in the New York Tribune. "He treated most of the work of American artists with merciless sarcasm and injured his influence by his extreme verdicts," according to one obituary. Cook later caused a stir when he suggested that many of the statues from Cyprus in the newly opened Metropolitan Museum of Art were fakes. He created an art periodical, The Studio, and in 1878 published a book, The House Beautiful: Essays on Beds and Tables, Stools and Candlesticks.

Two brickyards at Dutchess Junction employed about 100 Black men who migrated each year from Virginia and North Carolina. They ate in squads of 25, with one man appointed to cook in a camp kettle. Many brought their fiddles and banjos from the South.

The residents of Fishkill Landing voted to install sewers.

James Greene, of Fishkill Landing, was admitted to West Point as an alternate after a candidate from Kingston failed the entrance exam. He was the son of Maj. Henry A. Greene, w...