The most enduring impression left of the investments that went into the mills of Saugerties is their water power earthworks: the dams; the reservoirs; the mill pond; the canals; the raceways; the flumes. This was all the work of Henry Barclay.

Henry Barclay owned all the rights to the Esopus Creek from where the high tide mark of Hudson River waters belong to the people of New York State to the 46 ft.+ flood line his dam of his mill pond raised the water of the creek to above this tide. Every drop of it was built into a system for driving the water powered industry he introduced to Saugerties in 1825.

For nearly two centuries deeds that originated from Henry Barclay's time have carried in them rights for using this water. They memorialize a running tally of the ways this power was used in the earliest decades of the Early Industrial Revolution in America. The engineering requirements, the manufacturing processes, and every equipment specification for water power in these deeds traces a historic standard for this most valuable asset of a nineteenth century industrial site.

The importance of Barclay's mill pond's bedrock base as it continued through the rock cut and canal #1 was explicit in every level of deed, contract, agreement and in every record of professional discourse. The canal taped the bottom of the pond and every bit of that water pressure was calculated in the energy it produced. Property values were based on those water rights and not only the calculations of the amount of water but the horsepower rating of the mill wheels it drove were the measure of value for these early industrial sites. By the last years of the nineteenth century this measure had reached a state of science where calculations of the ecology of the entire Catskill Mountains' eastern front was broken down into the equations of these legal instruments.

By this time, by the end of the nineteenth century, water power was entering a new era of use. The great asset in the deed to the land now called Cantine's Island; its right to first use of the water power; was no longer used since the iron works and its successor, the pulp mill had not operated for a decade. In a 1903 agreement that right was transferred to the north side of Barclay's dam which was formerly excluded from the earlier rights to use the water. This extinguished the rights this property had been famous for since 1826.

The narrative of creating water power in Saugerties begins in the year 1825, in early fall. Men are clearing trees down to the stumps and earth down to bedrock behind the cliff seen today from the bridge. The workers are nameless but the guess is they are the same Scots-Irish that had most recently worked on the Erie Canal. In a surviving ledger book of Henry Barclay are listed the accounts of names like Bolton and Wurts and others associated with the management of that work. The same names will be found a year later constructing the Delaware and Hudson canal.

The job Henry Barclay has planned is to cut blocks of stone the size of steamer trunks from this wall of solid rock to take it down seventy feet in a twenty foot wide slice, hundreds of feet long, and form a level extension of the bedrock base of the Esopus Creek through the base of a canal, continuing to cut more blocks of stone at this lowest level of the canal base for a large flat shelf twenty feet above sea level, creating a bed of a reservoir.

These blocks of stone are finished into the material to build two massive stone dams. The first is for containing the reservoir on the leveled shelf area cut into the back side of the ridge. The second will dam the Esopus Creek and divert its water through the canal into the reservoir.

Henry Barclay's plan is to put all the water pressure of the Esopus Creek into the reservoir and use it to power the huge water wheels of an iron mill's hammers and rollers and also a paper mill's machinery. He is engineering a generator to power a mill complex. This is a new idea in 1825.

Maps from the early 1850s show the layout of this power system. Contracts and deeds describe the water power, and the waterwheels and buildings that are being installed and constructed at the same time as these waterworks. That system is to work as soon as the water is harnessed. This is a grand experiment in production development.

Of that early system detailed on those early maps there is today only the rock cut seen from the bridge and the corner of the reservoir wall at the parking lot of The Mill. These are the only clues to a story of an experienced foreman from the Erie canal that measured the height of the land and calculated all the earth that had to be moved; of over the winter the rock cut being sliced by men down to the bed level of the Esopus above its rapids; of after the first flood that passed water through this cut in the spring this nascent engineer able to measure up the new work year by calculating what the reservoir could hold; of the blocks sliced from the rock cut used to build up the corner where the two arms of the reservoir meet capping this lowest point in the direction of those first spring floods to ever touch that side of the great rock formation that for eons had diverted the flow of the Esopus but where now they are allowed to seep incessantly through to this very day.

Those walls that began to be built out from this corner eventually reached a height of twenty feet. When this was done everything quarried from the reservoir's bed was carried through the rock cut to build the twenty foot high stone wall across the Esopus. By the time both stone walls were complete it would have been fall of 1826 and the calculated volume of an average fourteen foot deep pond in the Esopus and at this reservoir held back by these dams was ready to supply power at an elevation of twenty feet above two mill sites already constructed and equipped with machines.

All that incredible amount of planning and labor that went into filling this reservoir is today lost in the landscape changes it made, now overgrown by trees. But in 1826 it was a powerful, shinny new attraction for everyone wanting see what the industrial future looked like. The word got out and spectators arrived to watch every advance of the workers right up to that first filling with the Esopus Creek's waters.

This was the beginning of Saugerties. Shortly after water first flowed through the rock cut a population of hundreds began busily building the walls, roofs and docks of more mills and then an entire village. The builders of the waterworks moved on but factory workers, their families and all the merchants of a village to feed, outfit and entertain rapidly replaced them. For the next hundred years the story of these first builders was such a part of the life of this new village that they remained in its common memory. There was an appreciation of the Herculean work that created a power source that became all the work done by every generation in Saugerties over that century.