Want to understand Hudson Valley history? At the Hudson River Maritime Museum (HRMM), on the Strand in Kingston, the connection between humans and the glorious river Herself is celebrated in numerous ways. Guests can check out a vast collection of artifacts: paintings, prints, photographs, ship models, memorabilia, ephemera, ice yachts, and a shad fishing boat that’s over 100 years old. There are exhibits on the steamboat Mary Powell, ferries, Hudson River Day Line, tugboats, ice boats, river industries and ecology, and lighthouses. Boats you’ll meet in person include an 1898 steam tug, Mathilda, and her 21st-century sister, the Solaris, the first solar-powered tour boat ever licensed as a passenger vessel by the US Coast Guard.
It’s fitting that the first solar tour boat’s home port is right here on the Hudson. The first-ever commercial steamboat ran her maiden passenger journey here in 1807, making a 32-hour run from New York City to Albany with a 24-horsepower engine propelling a 136-foot boat. (They had sails, just in case.) People stopped calling it Fulton’s Folly after that, and steam travel was soon the way to go. In 1925, the Hudson River Day Line carried nearly 2 million people aboard sidewheel steamers fitted out with bespoke woodwork and Tiffany glass, amid cargo steamers—tugboats pulling barges laden with coal, brick, glass, lumber, stone, and whatever else could be sold to the growing city to the south. Rail and automobiles ended the era, but lives had been defined by it.
Boats you’ll meet in person include an 1898 steam tug, Mathilda, and her 21st-century sister, the Solaris, the first solar-powered tour boat ever licensed as a passenger vessel by the US Coast Guard.
“A group of preservationists, several of them men who’d worked on the river, got together in 1979 and started a museum about it all,” HRMM executive director Lisa Cline says. “They celebrated the steamboats mostly, but the sloops too, and the industries on the river—the stuff that created the Hudson Valley as we know it today,”
Amid the economic struggles of the mid-2000s, the small storefront museum faced an existential threat. The old guard was ready to close down and sell the building to a developer—but it turned out that maritime history could still stoke local passion, decades after the last Day Liner blew its final whistle.
In 1925, the Hudson River Day Line carried nearly 2 million people aboard sidewheel steamers fitted out with bespoke woodwork and Tiffany glass, amid cargo steamers—tugboats pulling barges laden with coal, brick, glass, lumber, stone, and whatever else could be sold to the growing city to the south.
“A local doctor had joined the board, and he got really motivated,” Cline says. “He brought in a bunch of new board members and they voted down the sale, and it was a great infusion of new energy. They started talking about ways to grow.”
The group built an adjacent barn and started using it for summer programs, renting the space to Hudson River Sloop Clearwater in the winter months. You couldn’t miss it: something new was happening down on the waterfront. The Rondout Rowing Club, the Kingston High School varsity rowing team, and the Kingston Sailing Club were soon operating out of the museum campus, and other community groups of all ages started coming by.
“We’ve opened up our minds to what the HRMM mission means, and it all started with that barn,” Cline says. “Then it was, ‘Let’s start a wooden boat school,’ which is now the Woodworking School, because we wanted to open it up to people who wanted to build something besides a boat, so we do that as well.”
"This is a blue collar museum, a museum about hardworking people, and that’s the kind of history that defines Ulster County’s success story,” Cline says. “The Rondout area right now is a wealth of learning.”
Cline became director in 2015. “The Wooden Boat School created a lot of excitement and a lot of work,” she says. “From there, we just kept riffing on new ideas. People love doing things with their hands and learning that the same skills were used 200 years ago, and we deepened the kind of layered, experiential learning we love to do here. We added another layer with the Sailing and Rowing School, and that’s really thriving now too. We had to teach ourselves how to do each of these things as we went along, and we learned some parts the hard way.”
The Solaris was originally built for a private client, but when Cline fell in love with the idea of using it as the museum’s tour boat, the client agreed. “The vessel was getting the finishing touches and the owner was about to come pick it up, and I said, ‘Wait! We need a tour boat!’ and he was very nice about selling to HRMM, even held the mortgage for us,” she recalls. “That boat, like the barn and the schools, have changed everything. Solaris is the perfect learning platform—kids love it, adults love it, everyone loves it. All tour boats are fun, but when you’re on the larger tour boats you’re 20 feet off the water. Solaris is closer to the water and everything feels more intimate and quiet—even the music cruises.”
Making friends and educating people is a mission that the HRMM of today takes on with passion, on land and water alike. HRMM is composed of three schools, really,” Cline says. “We have the maritime history of the river that we teach in the museum tours, exhibits, walking tours, lectures, and documentaries. With the Woodworking School and the Sailing and Rowing schools, we get people involved with hands-on experiences. And we teach kids how to build a boat that they can either sail or row, so we teach them both skills at the same time.”
The HRMM collaborates with other treasure troves of local lore—like the Century House Historical Society museum and the D&H Canal Museum, to offer driving tours and boost one another’s signals. “HRMM is a blue collar museum, a museum about hardworking people, and that’s the kind of history that defines Ulster County’s success story,” Cline says. “The Rondout area right now is a wealth of learning. You can visit us, visit our neighbors at the Trolley Museum, go to the Reher Center up the street, and learn about the immigrant experience here in the Hudson Valley.”
Aboard Solaris, lighthouse tours, history tours—including one focused on indigenous lifeways along the Hudson and others exploring Rondout Creek shipwrecks—wine tasting tours, and sunset tours are ongoing through October, as are the sailing classes. And this October, the HRMM will welcome a replica canal boat, the Erie Canal boat Seneca Chief, for two nights of its journey from Buffalo to New York City.
The celebration will include a documentary in advance of a two-night visit, October 21-22, that will feature open boat hours, lectures, presentations, and school trips. An October lecture at the museum will focus on the river’s Prohibition-era history, rich in rum runners and their exploits.Looking ahead, the HRMM is actively collaborating with the City of Kingston to mitigate the effects of climate change on its flood-prone waterfront location and on the rest of the Strand. “We’re looking at ways to be proactive—maybe raising some of our buildings, maybe floating spaces,” Cline says. “We had a couple of years with two or three floods. We’ve been lucky so far this year, but that’s how climate change goes—it’s intermittent and difficult to handle. We’re not yet sure how to solve every problem, but we intend to end up with a beautiful raised campus.”
Cline loves welcoming guests with the message that our waterways connect us all. Nothing beats the awe on a child’s face when they understand that “you can go out of the creek in front of our campus to our lighthouse, make a right, and go to New York City and then anywhere in the world. Or you can make a left and go to the Erie Canal and then down the Mississippi and then anywhere in the world. This river is just amazing. We’ve used it and abused it, and it just keeps coming back, keeps carrying us along.”
hudson river maritime museum
50 Rondout Landing, Kingston
845-338-0071,
hrmm.org
