Jessup's Landing (1858)

The earliest known use the Hudson River at Jessup's Landing to generate power dates to 1804 when a sawmill owned by Ira Haskins was constructed adjacent to Hadley's Falls on the River's southern bank. Over the next thirty years the grist and woolen mills that were operated at the margins of the River utilized only a faction of waterpower available from the Fall's eighty-seven foot drop. This industrial activity at Hadley's Falls was less than a half-mile downriver from the commercial center at Jessup's Landing. The community's business and residential center continued to be called Jessup's Landing until 1888 when the Village of Corinth was incorporated and Corinth replaced Jessup's Landing became the official name for the community.

In 1829 Beriah Palmer purchased 700 acres of land on both sides of the Hudson River adjacent to the Falls. He appears not to have attempted to develop the site until 1858 when he began to actively seek investors for the Palmer Water Power Company. The Company proposed to divert a portion of the Hudson's flow through a canal to a point below the Falls where mill sites would be sold or leased. A map of the proposed development shows dozens of proposed mill lots located below the canal on three parallel streets set on a steep slope to the River. Neither the propsectus nor its accompanying map provides a clear indication of how the water from the Hudson would actually power all of the industries that the plan suggested could be located at the site.

The grand industrial vision of the Palmer Water Power Company most certainly would have failed on its own accord even if the onset of the Civil War had not dampened the region's entrepreneurial spirit. In spite of both visual and written claims in the Company's prospectus that Hadley's Falls was capable of producing 15,000 horsepower - even at the lowest seasonal stage of the river - photographs of the Hudson from just above the falls taken around 1870 show that in mid-summer the river was sometimes reduced to a mere trickle. Seasonal flows of the Hudson, in fact, would prevent predictable industrial operations at the Falls until the Sacandaga Reservoir was completed in the early 1930's.

Early Woolen Mill at Palmer Falls (n.d.)

Only Thomas Brown, a trustee of the Palmer Water Power Company, operated an industry on one of the mill sites at the Falls with a woolen mill and edge tool factory that he started around 1866. Other mill sites described in the Company's prospectus remained unsold and unleased. A revised Company map shows that by 1869 development plans of the Company had been sharply scaled back.

The most remarkable aspect of the Palmer Water Power Company's original vision was its plan for an industrial community adjacent to the factory sites at Hadley's Falls. The map that was drawn by Captain L.M. Wright, an engineer from Niagra Falls and one of the Company's four trustees, featured a fully plotted community that stretched across nearly 700 acres of the undeveloped, eastern part of the Village of Jessup's Landing. The plan included a public park and hotel grounds above the River's palisades, an outdoor market place and small building lots reserved specifically for workers' homes, churches, town hall and a school. An appealing component of the plan must have been the proposed railroad that would have pased through the center of the village.

Inherent in the plan was the expectation that industrial development below Hadley's Falls would shift the locus of the community's public life from its present upriver commercial center to an area surrounding a planned public park that included a pond and fountains. Just as the revised 1869 Company map showed significantly more modest expectations for industrial development at the Falls, it also eliminated the public features of the 1858 plan. Nonetheless, at some point after 1870 the Town of Corinth adopted the Company's residential plan for the undeveloped section of the village to serve as its own vision for future community development. The formation of the Hudson River Pulp Company in 1869 and its establishment of pulp and paper manfuacturing at the Falls put an end to Beriah Palmer's plan for a multi-industry community on the Hudson River at Jessup's Landing.