The dramatic features of the Hudson River at Palmer Falls have inspired artists and photographers for nearly two hundred years. The earliest representations of the River depict an unspoiled landscape where the privileged classes could be seen enjoying their leisure, or contemplating the spiritual meanings in Nature. The industrial development of the Hudson River in the last quarter of the 19th century, however, dramatically transformed the natural landscape of Palmer Falls. With the arrival of the paper industry in 1869, the cultural idea of the "picturesque" - the notion of what was an aesthetically pleasing natural landscape - had to be redefined by image-makers to accommodate and embrace the presence of the human-made structures that were the substance of industrial culture. Lithographs, drawings, photographs and postcards mirrored these changes over time and served as the media through which the world viewed the Hudson River at Palmer Falls.

Beginning from the original site of Jessup's Landing - now the location of the Corinth Free Library - the quarter-mile, downriver stretch of the Hudson River features a three-hundred-foot high rocky palisades and two waterfalls that have a combined drop of over one hundred twenty feet. The second of these represents the highest natural falls on the entire Hudson River. Jacques Gérard Milbert and William Guy Wall were the first to render the area in two of the earliest illustrated books published on the Hudson River.

Milbert, "Jessup's Landing" (1816)	Wall, "Jessup's Landing" (1820)

The publishers of these books must have believed that viewers would be moved by the picturesque appeal of this stretch of the Hudson, for Milbert included four lithographs of the quarter-mile section in his Itinéraire pittoresque du fleuve Hudson (1818-29), and Wall featured three in his Hudson River Port Folio (1821-25).

Wall, "Hudson River Rapids" (1820)

Both Milbert and Wall rendered this remote stretch of the Hudson as a site for the privileged to commune with Nature. Wall was the more accomplished artist, and his color lithographs are more visually compelling. His work, which has been linked to the Hudson River School artists, tends to be more romantically evocative through the placement of figures that appear isolated within a grand natural setting. Milbert is more notable for his depiction of small groups of well-dressed, genteel figures that permit a class reading of the sites that he rendered. Of the seven total images of the Hudson River and the Falls created by the two artists, only Milbert's lithograph, "General View of the Hudson at (H)Adley's," admitted to the commercial use of the River by showing two small mills at the falls and logs left from a river drive. Even then, the placement of a small group in the right foreground of the image codes the view of the Falls as a privileged one.

Wall, "Hadley's Falls" (1820)	Milbert, "Hadley's Falls" (2nd version, 1816)

Other than the Wall and Milbert images from the 1820's, only a few other non-photographic representations of the Hudson River and Palmer Falls from before 1869 are known. Three sketches appeared in the 1858 prospectus of the Palmer Water Power Company: one of Jessup's Landing and another of what is know known as Curtis Falls. The third image, "Palmer Falls," was included in the Company prospectus to persuade potential industrialists that sufficient water was available from the Hudson at the site to power their factories.

The close focus of the Palmer Falls sketch from the Prospectus accurately renders the rugged features of the gorge upstream from the brink of the Falls and the verdant fauna alongside the still undisturbed River. But the cascading character of the real falls was transformed in the sketch into a one whose precipitous drop looked more like Niagra Falls than the true cascading character of Palmer Falls. 

"Kah-che-bon-cook, Jesup's Great Falls" (1866)

Several 19th century Adirondack guidebooks mention Palmer Falls, but only Benson Lossing rendered it his 1867 book, The Hudson River From the Adirondacks to the Sea. The small image that accompanies his text provides a faithful representation of the size and character of the Falls, although his picturesque depiction of river drivers working to remove a log jam on the north side of the River obscures the opposite bank where an edge-tool factory and woolen mill were in operation.

Lossing's image title, "Kah-che-bon-cook, or Jesup's Great Falls," provides an important historical footnote to suggest that locally the name "Hadley's Falls" was no longer being used in 1866, and the name "Palmer Falls" was not universally in service. Lossing provides directions on how to reach the Falls, but he also gives a cryptic warning of the ambitious industrial plans of the Palmer Water Power Company which was then seeking to transform the area into an industrial community.

The earliest known photographs of Palmer Falls were taken in the late 1860's and appeared as stereographs that captured the Falls, the adjacent ledges, and the timber remaining from river drives. In the best view - a stereograph which shows the entire expanse of the Falls from below - viewers can vaguely discern two small industrial structures at the upper left that would have been present in the 1860's. The second stereograph shows a family picnicing amid the rocks below the Falls.

Stereograph by Woodward (ca. 18680)

Woodward Stereograph (detail)

A stereograph by C.W. Woodward must have appealed to 19th century viewers for it appeared in a least four different commercial stereograph series. In the Woodward stereograph, a man and two children can be seen sitting on the rocky bottom of a virtually dry Hudson River, just above the brink of Palmer Falls. No doubt made during in late summer, the photograph invokes a variation on the picturesque by depciting beauty in the irregular, randomness of Nature. The image also provided graphic evidence that contradicted the claims made by the Palmer Water Power Company that the Hudson River could provide predictable, year-around supply of water to power industrial production. The River in this image is but a stream.

The renowned Adirondack photographer Seneca Ray Stoddard visited Palmer Falls, most likely in 1870, and created at least five separate images that may have been intended as stereographs. His images show the Hudson River and Palmer Falls after the Hudson River Pulp Company had begun operations in 1869, but before the crib dam was built at Palmer Falls in 1877.

Stoddard, "Up the River from Palmer's Falls" (1870)

Stoddard's photographs of Palmer Falls are distinctive in two ways. Aesthetically, Stoddard's framing of the Falls includes randomly scattered logs that suggest his interest in the picturesque aesthetic that emphasized Nature's irregular beauty, and his careful positioning of posed figures shows the influence that 19th century painterly traditions had on his work. The imaging of a reclining meditative figure in "Up the River from Palmer's Falls," for example, suggests that for Stoddard, Palmer Falls was still a place where one might contemplate the spiritual values to be found in Nature, despite the industrial operations that were located just outside of the photograph's frame.

Stoddard's photographs also provide important historical information in their disclosure of how the early industrial sites at Palmer Falls were powered by the Hudson. Two of his photographs show the narrow raceway that had been used to channel water from the River to the early mills at the Falls. It is not known, however, whether the same system was in use by the Hudson River Pulp and Paper Company to power wood grinders that were operating at the time Stoddard took the photographs.

Stoddard, "The Flume, Palmer's Falls." (1870)

One of these photographs, "The Flume, Palmer Falls," is particularly interesting for it may have been Stoddard's inadvertent expression of the "industrial picturesque," an emerging aesthetic view that sought to reconcile the opposing forces of Nature and Culture. In this image, Stoddard captures water flowing down a rocky ledge on the south side of Palmer Falls that is being contained by a scattered, but continuous wall of small logs. While at first glimpse the logs appear randomly situated - perhaps the remains of a river drive - at the top of the Falls a human-constructed fence of logs can be seen. A different perspective of the same structure is visible at the top of the photograph entitled, "Palmer Falls, near Luzerne from below."

Together these photographs provide the only documentary evidence of how the Hudson River was used to power early industry at Palmer Falls, as logs were used to channel water from the River down the natural rock ledge to where it could be used to power machinery. It is curious, it should be noted, that Stoddard failed to identify these sites as being in Corinth, and rather described them as being "near Luzerne" which was five miles upriver.

[go to Part II: Postcard Images]