Hudson River Valley tour -- warning lot's of cannon pix

[emike123]

This past weekend I went to see my daughter who lives in the Hudson River Valley.  She humored me and we toured sights I wanted to see!

First stop was West Point.  Went out to Trophy Point to see the cannon, of course.  Man have they got lots of them!   

This shot includes three super rare 3.3” CS tubes.  They may all be Leeds, but at least 2 are:

These howitzers are like bulldogs, they are so ugly they are almost cute:

A lot of the guns have battle damage like this one missing a trunion:

7” Brooke from Tredegar:

More:




Row after row of them:


This is one of the most famous, the 8” Armstrong from Fort Fisher:

From here you can lob a mortar to Bannerman’s Island (see red arrow)


Storm King Mountain is on the left.
From the lower right to the left across the river in the picture above, the “great chain” was stretched to keep British ships from coming up river during the revolution

What’s on display in the actual museum at West Point  is generally unimpressive for artillery folks, but this bad boy is there so they do have a type of finned Archer John B.  They have so much free stuff I guess they don’t even know what they have and don’t have.

Beyond the great chain upriver was Washington’s HQ.  That is the Tower of Victory beside it.

You have to take a boat to Bannerman’s Island:


After a fire in 1969 that burned for 3 days, the building has been unstable.  Lately walls have been falling down so no going inside the castle :-(

I did not realize the family had a separate house on the 6.7 acre island:

I don’t know who those two people are photobombing the above picture but a couple in our group got engaged while we were at this house. 

I was well behaved but I did get queries from one forum member about the possibilities of relic hunting.

It’s not allowed and they have this crack surveillance system to back it up:

Here are some dubious dudes headed there.  Are they going night hunting?
http://www.hudsonvalleyalmanacweekly.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/pollepel-@.jpg
Oh, it’s the X-Men.  If they are there, relic hunters better stay away:
http://static.comicvine.com/uploads/scale_small/3/31666/667084-bannerman_castle.jpg
Sorry, in this picture the characters and their comments are cropped out, but trust me, they were super heroes and anyway those guys are hard to spot.  Just stay away (but if you were to go , the water by the castle looks promising).
Except this chick from the movie “Paranormal Asylum” is also there:
http://www.paranormalasylum.com/o_48070c0bb9a88f12_html_2f611210.jpg
Its supposed to be Typhoid Mary in exile.  Eek
It was getting scary with all the proposals, super heroes/villains and Typhoid Mary so we skedaddled like Yankees at First Manassas…

Next stop was the site of the West Point Foundry in Cold Spring, NY.  Now they have spent some serious bucks fixing up this site.  Maybe they siphoned off some of the $100M the EPA spent cleaning up Foundry Cove.  It was a Super Fund site because of nasty stuff associated with a former battery plant on the other side of the cove.  I think Joe Vann worked on some of that and maybe he glows if you see him.

This gun deck looks across Foundry Cove at the spot where the test shots were fired in what used to be Storm King State Park. 

Unfortunately that part of the land was handed over to West Point so entry there is verboten.  More detail:

The site is 87 acres and this little guy is the watchman:

This is the office building.  The cupola is stored beside it.  A bit of hubris in that they were flush with their $40M of war profits and built this office in 1865 at the peak of their operation.  They continues on for a while doing rail work as well as military, but business was never the same and eventually they went kaput:


Interestingly they do not have a Parrott gun there, but there is a nice half scale model one at the riverfront park nearby.  There is a museum (was closed by time I got there) and another museum nearby is mentioned that has Parrott projectiles, but I have seen enough of them so did not go there. 

I have not done this park justice.  If you want to see what we saw, take this tour:
http://foundrytour.org.s3-website-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/

[Roy A]

Nice pictures.

How do you go about going to Bannerman's Island?
My godfather took over the overstock from a the NYC store when it closed and there was the fire on the island. My father and him used to take a row boat (I believe) over to the island to load up on stuff and bring back and I remember them talking about how strong the current was on the river. Really wish I got to talk to my father more about it, but he passed away before I was as interested in that stuff as I am now.

[emike123]

The current on the near side of the river is strong, and the water is the color of chocolate milk.  The water is not very  deep near the island on that side.

To get there like we did, you book a seat on one of these tours:

http://www.prideofthehudson.com/pollepel-tours.shtml

[divedigger]

Thanks for the tour. It makes me sweat seeing all that great stuff