4th at The Fort this Weekend 

Fort Plain Museum

https://fortplainmuseum.org/viewevent.aspx?ID=1078

Summer years ago in Amsterdam

By Bob Cudmore

        In 1896, there was horse racing in Amsterdam in July with the summer meet of the Amsterdam Fair and Driving Association.  According to the web site www.mohawkvalleywev.com, the summer of 1900 did not have an “exceedingly hot day” until July 8. 

In 1912, public concerts began in July near Amsterdam’s Market and Main streets.  A recreation camp for National Guard soldiers was opened in the summer of 1914 in Tribes Hill; 54 students were attending Amsterdam summer school that year. 

The first 1918 pilgrimage to Auriesville Shrine took place August 4 with the faithful coming from Albany and Schenectady. 

SUMMER GOLF

        The first golf course built in the Amsterdam area was the private Antlers Country Club, opened in 1901 on land in Fort Johnson and Tribes Hill off Route 5.  Today, the facility is the Rolling Hills Golf Course.

City residents discussed the idea of an Amsterdam municipal course as early as 1929.  By 1934, the choice was made to build on 200 acres of farmland on the border between the city and town of Amsterdam off Van Dyke Avenue.

Construction was made possible through a $100,000 federal appropriation and $23,000 in city funds.  The course opened in 1938.  Mayor Arthur Carter was instrumental in advocating for the golf course and the facility is named for him. 

The designer was Robert Trent Jones, who went on to be a legend in golf course design.  A native of England who grew up in Rochester, New York, Jones created his own landscape architecture curriculum while attending Cornell University. He began his career by designing six federally funded golf courses, including Amsterdam’s.

VACANT SUMMER STREETS

On warm summer evenings in the 1940s, the streets of Amsterdam’s West End were sometimes deserted.

        To supplement food available under wartime rationing, the Italian-American residents were tending vegetable gardens on the fertile flat land south of their homes between the railroad tracks and Mohawk River.

        They built poles for pole beans and lattices to keep tomatoes off the ground.  They grew lettuce, zucchini and dandelions, much as their ancestors had done in southern Italian communities such as Pisciotta in the province of Campania.

THE BAND PLAYED

        Summertime in the 1940s meant concerts performed by the Mohawk Mills Band, formed from employees of the carpet mill and directed by Frank Musolff until he entered military service in 1942.  Then, Musolff’s brother Harry became band director.

        Reminiscent of issues faced today by the Schenectady Symphony Orchestra at Riverlink Park, the Mohawk Mills Band was once bested by a freight train in an East End performance at Coessens Park in the late 1940s.

        The band played the overture to “Oklahoma” and had the tune down pat, according to Harry Musolff’s son, Harry Irving Musolff.

        A long freight train rumbled by making it impossible for the musicians to hear each other.  When the train finally passed, the trumpets had finished but the trombones were still playing.

PRIDE AND A PARADE 

        In July of 1954, Amsterdam celebrated its 150th birthday with a ten-division parade.  The Vail Mills drive-in float featuring young women in bikinis was a crowd pleaser. 

Celebrations went on for weeks at local taverns and ethnic social clubs, which had chapters of the Brothers of the Brush (who did not shave) and Sisters of the Swish (who wore long dresses).

The Sesquicentennial, as it was called, was a joyous and raucous event that took place at the beginning of the end of the city’s prominence as a carpet-manufacturing center. 

Ironically, one of the floats in the 1954 parade was a flying carpet.  Within a year, Bigelow-Sanford, one of the city’s major carpet makers, was moving out of town.

Saturday, July 1, 2023-From the archives- Episode 121, July 22, 2016- Jack Kelly discusses topics as diverse as the origin of the Mormon religion and how Americans learned how to make cement in his book “Heaven’s Ditch: God, Gold, and Murder on the Erie Canal”

Sunday, July 2, 2023 -Focus on History- Amsterdam man among those rescued from a sunken submarine

As The Historians Podcast makes a path to #500 this fall, we look back... 

Bob Cudmore on YouTube

August 18, 2016

The Jewish View

Bob has authored three books about the Mohawk Valley in which he discusses the area’s connection to Kirk Douglas, Sam Goldwyn, Lucius Littauer and Rabbi Bloom. Two mayors of Amsterdam were Jewish. There were many non-Jewish connections as well that would surprise you such as Ed Sullivan and Fredric Remington. This is a fascinating recollection of the Mohawk Valley communities of Amsterdam, Gloversville and Fonda, yes, Henry, Peter and Jane Fonda’s roots are from the Mohawk Valley.

Tomorrow

Friday, June 30, 2023-Episode 481--Chris Wimmer is author of The Summer of 1876: Outlaws, Lawmen, and Legends in the Season That Defined the American West 

Mohawk Valley Weather, Thursday, June 29, 2023

62 degrees in The City of Amsterdam at 6:17AM

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