It is a long way from the South Bronx to the Central Adirondacks, not only in miles, but in culture and environment as well. This past weekend there was also a goose-bump raising difference in temperature as Blue Mountain Lake, New York experienced its first hard freeze and the Bronx continued to swelter in big city heat.
In spite of many differences, city and hamlet were connected when a brand new hand-made boat – a replica of an Adirondack logging bateau — was christened and launched on the pond at the Adirondack Museum. Snuggled in fleece and sweatshirts, nine young people from the Bronx (the boat builders) joined cheering museum staff and visitors as the graceful little bateau slid into the water.
The bateau is the end product of more than a year of collaboration among three institutions.
The Project
For the past three years, students and apprentices from Rocking the Boat, a non-profit youth development organization located in the Bronx, have spent their summers building traditional wooden boats at Philipsburg Manor on the Pocantico River, one of six properties owned or operated by Historic Hudson Valley.
This year Rocking the Boat and Philipsburg Manor agreed to build a logging bateau for the Adirondack Museum at Blue Mountain Lake. The boat is a scaled-down replica of a 23-foot logging bateau that the museum has in its collection.
Conversation between museum Curator Hallie Bond and Thom Thacker, Director of Philipsburg Manor generated the Adirondack Museum project.
The project was underwritten, in part, through the generosity of Naomi Levine, a resident of New York City and Long Lake, New York, who grew up in the Bronx. Ms. Levine, a longtime friend and supporter of the museum, was excited to see the museum reach out to young people from the Bronx and be able to introduce the Adirondacks and the idea of wilderness to them as part of the program.
The finished bateau will be used to provide museum visitors with an "on-the-water" experience, complementing the extraordinary exhibit "Boats and Boating in the Adirondacks, 1850 to 1950." The Adirondack Museum has the second largest collection of inland wooden watercraft in the United States.
The museum received a letter from Congressman John H. McHugh (R-NY) congratulating all involved in the boat building partnership on the success of the project. McHugh observed that, "The bateau will be an excellent addition to the museum's boat exhibit "Boats and Boating in the Adirondacks," providing visitors with an example of the heritage and culture of the Adirondack region and its waterways."
Rocking the Boat
Rocking the Boat is a traditional wooden boat building and environmental education program based in the southwest Bronx, New York City. Through an alternative multi-faceted hands-on approach to education and youth development, Rocking the Boat addresses the need for inner city youth to achieve practical and tangible goals, relevant to both everyday life and future aspirations. During the process of building a traditional wooden boat, Rocking the Boat students create something not only beautiful, but also practical in their own lives.
According to Adam Green, who founded Rocking the Boat in 1995, the organization's method of interconnecting every activity – building boats by hand, learning how to row and sail them, and using them to restore the Bronx and East Rivers – enables Rocking the Boat to reach students at successively deeper levels.
Young people enrolled in the program have built more than twenty boats over time and Rocking the Boat is recognized as one of the most dynamic after school and summer programs in New York City.
Philipsburg Manor
Philipsburg Manor is a nationally significant survival of a late 17th and early 18th century milling and trading complex that was owned by an Anglo-Dutch family of merchants, rented in small plots by tenant farmers of diverse European backgrounds, and operated by a community of enslaved individuals of African descent.
In pre-Revolutionary times, Philipsburg Manor was the seat of a 52,000-acre commercial empire owned by the Philipse family, one of the most powerful in New York. The family also had one of the largest slave-holdings in the colonial north.
In 2001, Philipsburg Manor underwent a massive reinterpretation. Costumed interpreters now tell the story of the manor from the perspective of those who toiled there. This is not "first-person" role-playing. Evidence in the historical record is used to talk about specific individuals who lived and worked on the site. In 1750, twenty-three enslaved men, women, and children lived and worked at Philipsburg Manor, providing the skilled labor necessary to operate a milling complex, bake house, farm, and dairy, and the expertise to pilot sloops up and down the Hudson River.
Adirondack Museum
In 2007 the Adirondack Museum celebrates fifty years of collecting, preserving, and interpreting the history of the Adirondack region. The museum believes in the power of that history to ignite the imagination, stimulate thought, and shape the future.
Museum collections, programs, and classes for schools reflect stories of life, work, and play in the Adirondack Park and northern New York State. The museum collects broadly: from rustic furniture to landscape paintings, from fishing flies to chainsaws, from quilts to carriages. The museum's boat collection of 226 small craft is one of the finest in the country and is used extensively to help visitors explore the ways in which people have used the region's many waterways for work and for pleasure.
Building the Bateau – the Process
The Rocking the Boat program at Philipsburg Manor included 16 students, who came to the site four days a week for six weeks this summer. All students are paid a stipend.
The students were divided into four teams. Each day, one team would practice coopering (barrel making), one team would work on the boat, one team would work on a fence restoration project, and one team would learn water skills (swimming and boating). The teams would rotate each day, so each student participated in each activity one day a week.
This is the fourth year that Philipsburg Manor hosted the program. They now display two boats made by Rocking the Boat students at Philipsburg Manor, while the third is moored at Van Cortlandt Manor in Croton-on-Hudson, N.Y., another historic site.
The logging bateau project delighted all, as there is no more space at Philipsburg Manor to display boats. The latest project, will of course, remain in the Adirondacks.
While on site, the students wear period clothing (as do other interpreters) and interact with visitors, answering questions about the particular skills they are demonstrating. They use only hand tools authentic to the period.
The relationship between Philipsburg Manor and Rocking the Boat began in the summer of 2004, when a group of Rocking the Boat students built a colonial bateau. The 21-foot bateau, based on a boat recovered from Lake George that dated back to the colonial period, is a simple flat-bottomed boat that was used in nearly all of the North American colonies. The bateau, which made its maiden voyage out to the Hudson and has been rowed as far north as Croton, is permanently on exhibition at Philipsburg Manor's wharf.
In 2006, Rocking the Boat students built an 18-foot cargo scow for Philipsburg Manor. Dating back to the colonial period, cargo scows were simple flat-bottomed boats with square or blunt ends, which, for the purposes of loading or unloading, could be raised or lowered to correspond to the slope of the riverbank.
The Launch
About half of the team of students who built the Adirondack Museum's new bateau made the trip to Blue Mountain Lake to launch the boat. They were accompanied by Adam Green, Thom Thacker, and others involved in the program.
The group camped in freezing temperatures at the Lake Durant campsite operated by DEC. They joined local students at the museum for a cookout.
The bateau was christened "Naomi" in honor of Naomi Levine. Water from the Bronx River, the Pocantico, and Blue Mountain Lake was mingled in a handmade wooden bucket and poured over the bow of the pale blue boat before it was gently placed in the museum pond, Bronx craftsmanship in an Adirondack setting. -- www.adkmuseum.org
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