The history of the Hudson River along Bethlehem’s banks is as rich as the men who once harvested its icy waters.
Converted into a museum by the Bethlehem Historical Association, the Little Red School House, which helped shape the once bustling hamlet simply known as Cedar Hill, now houses the very history that was once taught inside its single room.
There was no indoor plumbing in the school, and it was heated by wood stove when first built in 1859. The following year, its first schoolmaster was hired for eight grades and 24 students. The building was expanded and redesigned in 1907 with electricity and plumbing in two rooms for 40 students.
The school eventually closed in 1960.
The vast number of events, notable residents and famous visitors can hardly be contained in a single room, although the town’s historical association certainly does a good job trying.
Cedar Hill’s first famous visitor is thought to be the European explorer Henry Hudson, who came upon the area exactly 400 years ago. There is a marker in the town’s park that bears his name to commemorate where he is thought to have pulled up on the Half Moon in 1609 on the very river that now bares his name.
Looking upon that marker is a bench that bears the name of a Cedar Hill resident who was a pioneer in his own right and helped build the nation’s first nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, the U.S.S. Enterprise.
The late Parker Mathusa grew up along the Hudson banks and attended the Little Red School House before graduating from the Ravena-Coeymans-Selkirk School District.
A commemorative bench with his name on it faces the famous explorer’s river, and although not an explorer himself, Mathusa’s engineering work on the propulsion system for the first Mars space orbiter puts him on par with a different kind of exploration.
Other historical notes from the hamlet include the former home of Gov. Martin Glynn along Barent Winnie Road on the right heading to the town park. The structure was built in 1907 as a summer home for the former governor and was also the former Bethlehem Elks Club Lodge. It is now a private residence that holds a flea market on Sundays.
Further down the road, there are two stone lions, which were the main entrance to the J. B. Lyon’s estate, which was destroyed by fire.
With its important commercial docks, the Cedar Hill section of town was just as important when the river froze over in the winter maybe even more so.
Ice harvesting was big business in the 19th century, and both Bethlehem and Albany prospered from the blocks of ice cut from the Hudson River each year well into the 20th century.
Bethlehem Historian Susan Leath writes that winter ice quickly turned into summer cash.
The shores of the Hudson River in Bethlehem were lined with icehouses. Some, like George Best’s Cedar Hill Ice House were locally owned, and owners shipped their ice to New York City. Others were owned by large companies like the Knickerbocker Ice Company out of NYC,` she wrote in a town article on subject. `In 1855 Hunts Merchant magazine reports that NYC required 285,000 tons of ice, Albany stored up 20,000 tons.
These figures were only to grow, before a steady decline in the 1920s.`
The ice was used for both consumption and food storage and harvesting was practiced on a small scale by early settlers and colonists, but blossomed into a multi-million dollar industry in the mid and late 1800s before dying out in the 1920s, according to Leath.
Best’s home is still off of Berent Winnie Road near the park on the right. He was a lumberman from Saratoga who died in 1918. His widow sold his operation to another ice man named Charles F. Schifferdicker.
Lifelong Cedar Hill resident Dawn Pratt said her hamlet was once the center of Bethlehem, and she recalled her experiences at the one-room schoolhouse as well as the neighborhood itself.
`Cedar Hill was a bustling little town with stores and gas stations, restaurants and the hotel there were all summer homes along the river,` she said. `It was a nice little village. That’s where people would go for quick things instead of Albany.`
Pratt is now a member of the Bethlehem Historical Association and she gives tours inside of the old school house on Sundays from 2 until 4 p.m. This year the museum will be open until Oct. 25 in honor of the Hudson River Quadricentennial and its own 150-year anniversary.
Pratt’s family moved to Cedar Hill in 1794, she said, and her grandfather worked at the ice houses along the Hudson. As for the school house she said two school teachers served the school house for about 20 years each, but it was the substitute teacher that was the stickler.
`Verona Clapper was the substitute teacher and you couldn’t get anything past her,` Pratt joked. `A lot of the people who went to the school had the same teachers for quite a while.`
The Little Red Schoolhouse is located at 1003 River Road, Selkirk.
“