Text from William WadeText from William WadeMuch trade is carried on at the important city of Hudson, one hundred and sixteen miles from New York, on the east side of the river. It is twenty-eight miles from West Stockbridge, Massachusetts, and is connected with it by a railroad, which goes two miles further to connect with the Massachusetts Great Western Railroad. This communication makes a route of three hundred miles from Boston to New York, through one of the most delightful and characteristic sections of our country. The city was founded in 1783, by some of the enterprising sons of New England. In three years the population increased from twenty to fifteen hundred. As early as 1795, Mr. Ashbel Stoddard removed from Connecticut and established a weekly paper, the Hudson Gazette. The enterprising inhabitants soon engaged in the West India trade, until the French Revolution and the wars which followed it, when they embarked their vessels in the carrying trade, which was very lucrative on account of the great demand for neutral vessels, and the hire prices of freight. The British orders in council and the French decrees, however, soon swept many of the vessels from their owners. The commercial troubles and war which followed, destroyed the prosperity of the town by producing multiplied embarrassments and failures. But it has gone on steadily increasing under all circumstances, and now contains nearly six thousand inhabitants and more than eight hundred houses Among the many schools, the Hudson Academy and the Hudson Female Seminary deserve especial notice. Two of the most remarkable features of the town are the Franklin Library Association, with its large library and philosophical apparatus, and the Hudson Lunatic Asylum. A chartered aqueduct company supplies the city with pure and wholesome water, brought in iron pipes from a spring two miles distant.
Benson Lossing describes Hudson in 1866:
" It was founded in 1784 by thirty proprietors, chiefly Quakers from New England. Never in the history of the rapid growth of cities has there been a more remarkable example than that of Hudson. Within three years from the time that the farm on which it stands was purchased, and only a solitary storehouse stood up the bank of the river at the foot of the bluff, one hundred and fifty dwellings, with wharves, storehouses, workshops, barns &c., were erected and a population of over fifteen hundred souls had settled there, and become possessed of a city charter."