Col. Edward Clark was in the post office district of Glasco. Glasco is the oldest port locations in Saugerties. It was developed as a terminus of the Ulster and Deleware Turnpike and died in importance when the Erie Canal killed the mountain turnpikes' straight line connection between the farms of mid-state and the population of the Atlantic coast.

We find a complaint or two in Edward Clark's letters about his materials being jettisoned from the freighters bringing them to the Esopus quays. That is probably because it is lead and the weight has shoaled the boat. This doesn't happen at Glasco and he chastises his suppliers for considering him to be in “Ulsterville” instead of “Glasgow” post office.

Above Saugerties or Ulster village is Malden-on-Hudson, or Bristol at this time, with its Bristol Turnpike and most importantly, the Bristol Channel.

The deep channel of the Hudson crosses diagonally after it passes the Esopus Shoals at the Saugerties Lighthouse, where it hugs the east bank, to the opposite, west side of the river where it is over 50 feet deep right at the shore. It remains a deep channel past Bristol Beach, Eaves Point and Wanton Island in a straight run. This is the Malden-on-Hudson Reach. A half dozen or more historical landings supported this freighting channel's closeest point to the continental plateau that any direct line to the Atlantic Ocean comes anywhere in the Hudson Valley. Past this reach the river bends eastward in a course that takes it up to ten miles additional travel away from the Catskill front and the interior. The landings along this shoreline of Saugerties were the most efficient access point to the continent's commerce during the age of early overland transportation by turnpikes.

As a vast variety of enterprises blossomed in the interior, in the mountains and beyond, deep draft vessels increasingly relied on the warehouses, wharf facilities and overland coaches and teamsters along the Bristol Channel for their transfer and business transactions. Its prominence remained as nineteenth century tourism and summer resorts took hold even as overland mods of transportation changed.

Bristol was the most active of these ports. It was founded in 1812 to take advantage of this close relationship between the river and the mountains. It's name was later changed to Malden to be a post office address when Bristol was found to be already taken. A street, River Road, runs along what was once its wharves. Some of the original stores and offices, now residences, can still be identified there. Up the inclines many original houses have been maintained in nineteenth century condition.

North along the channel Eaves Point Road allows access to an original landing feature, owned by the State. Here you can picnic right next to the deep channel. Between Malden and Eaves Point is Bristol Bay and Bristol Beach State Park which is undeveloped. All of this shore line is accessed from the water via a boat launching site at the extreme north end of Malden's River Road.

From sea level in the tide water of the 50 foot deep Bristol Channel the original Malden Turnpike rises up to cross the farmlands of the Bristol Bluffs, pass the stone houses of colonial Kaatsbaan and climbs the foothills of the Catskills to Quarryville. It reaches the base of the mountains at Palenville in the famous Kaaterskill Clove which the road ascends along its north wall to reach the level of the Continental Plateau at Tannersville. Reaching the tanneries in these hemlock forests was the historic destination of this road and the Bristol Channel is the place where that journey has always begun.

The Bristol Channel has bustled with activity since the earliest days of Saugerties history. Bristol Bay was known as Lookerman's Haven in Dutch times. Lookerman is the name of a prominent fur trader. The entire stretch became famous just after 1711 for Queen Anne's settlement of Palatines in the West Camps. The British Navy's interest in the Bristol Channel brought the Crown to own all the land along this shore. These German Palatine refugees were sent there to grow hemp for rope and harvest pitch from pine to make tar. This was called naval stores. When this venture failed some of the refugees cut the first cross country road from here to the Schoharie Valley and moved there. Others cleared adjacent forests to settle some of the earliest homesteads of Saugerties.

An ancient Indian trail from the Chesapeake Bay to Albany that was called the “footpath to Albany” as early as 1677 and the Kings Highway after 1705 ran up the middle of Saugerties and the Palatines settled parallel to it. The roads they created to their farmsteads formed the early east-west routes between the river and the mountains. Their frontier stone houses were structured to defend these early transportation routes and their defensive character became the character of the community.

The face of the Catskill mountains as seen from Saugerties is actually the edge of the continental plateau. Once the 2000 foot elevation is reached all waters flow gently west and the land levels out into fertile valleys from central New York down into northern Pennsylvania. This was all frontier and Indian lands up to the Revolution and that made the Bristol Channel strategically important to the British.

In October of 1777 the whole of the Bristol Channel was filled with the British fleet which anchored there after burning Kingston. Its principal mission was to secure this pinch point between the mountains and the navigable channel for supporting the army approaching from the north. Together with their Indian allies in the inland forests they intended to make the northern front of the war Saugerties. Defeat at Saratoga interrupted this plan.

After the Revolution the land-based economy of the Palatine and early Dutch settlers went through a proto-entrepreneurial stage as they created riverfront market outlets along the Bristol Channel. There were many roads crossing the Sawyerkill in the late eighteenth century, each one maintained by a different family and each terminating at a different landing. A number of boat building yards sprung up and a large number of vessels were operated by these original families from their landings.

Commercial interest in the relationship of the Catskill mountains to the Hudson River wasn't a concern of these farm-to-market ventures. It took the enterprising character of Connecticut Yankees to productively develop this use of the shore line. In 1810 a group laid out Glasco and the Glasco turnpike as a branch of the Ulster and Delaware turnpike. This was for a more direct route to cross the Hudson and extend the road into Connecticut. In this era every venture that formed along the river was centered on moving goods teamed in from the newly productive farms of the interior to feed the now semi-urban population of old New England. The turnpikes with the shortest routes to the Hudson River were the prime investment opportunities of the day.

Malden was founded shortly after Glasco. Asa Bigelow came from Connecticut to settle in Glasco and take advantage of the turnpike for his business plan but he was not able to buy into the company developing it. He found after setting up business in Saugerties that the Esopus Shoals made navigating to the river too difficult so he purchased the Godfried DeWolven patent and the VanSteenberg farm and established a village, known in 1812 as Bristol and now Malden, where the Bristol Channel first touches the western shore.

A whole bevy of Bigelow relatives soon settled in Bristol to help the business build and run its turnpike to the tanneries in the mountains. The business bought cargoes of sides, transported and sold them to the tanneries, and then purchased them as finished hides to sell to manufacturers. From 1815 into the 1830's tanning solidified Malden's reputation as a port.

For a brief fifteen years entrepreneurial transportation systems represented by turnpikes controlled the economy of Saugerties. Most of the early families became teamsters on the turnpikes and a concept of the use of roads for sustenance became part of the common sense of the general population. This instilled a belief that involvement in any growth potential that utilized turnpike and related roads would be profitable.

So after 1825 when the Erie Canal had cut the cost of freight from a hundred dollars a ton to nine and long haul turnpikes were made unprofitable the routes within Saugerties quickly became busy supporting the construction and commerce opportunity of the new industrial population. The flurry of activity around the creation of water power and mills and setting them in production guaranteed that all ports north and south of the village of Ulster profited greatly before the deep channel and bridge for the village could be completed.

Once the innovativeness of this industrial community registering as a place for the intellectual and the curious to visit, the ports and roads into the scenic countryside became increasingly popular as destinations for artists and naturalists. Along with them came a fresh look at the potential of materials of the countryside. The idea that products from the mountains could find ready transport to the cities of the coast by the Hudson River and far inland by the Erie Canal promised great profit potential to discoveries found just three miles inland or right on the Hudson River shoreline. By mid century the already established forwarding enterprises that lined the Bristol Channel had taken on new identities as centers for shipping the product of bluestone quarries, brick manufacturers and other extraction industries that the countryside's population suddenly found its lands brought forth. This kept the shoreline, turnpikes and homegrown businesses in the hamlets bustling well into the early twentieth century.

With steady activity from the steamboats along the shoreline feeding the turnpikes, even in the years of the decline of local industry, summer boarders continued to keep alive an economy based on the draw of this versatile environment. The mystique of the river to mountains connection that originated with the Bristol Channel began to falter only with the coming of the railroad and automobile.

Now, two hundred years after the first turnpikes, a connection between river and mountains is literally one that has not been connected with for generations. Rarely does anyone see the mountains in the context of arriving from the river, the only way it was possible to experience them for hundreds of year before.

From the Bristol shore where majestic oceangoing freighters are only yards away in its channel, a car can travel on essentially the same route that in 1815 would have reached the same 2,500 foot elevation and looked down on the same river, only today it would take less than half an hour. That would be the same place of departure taken by the earliest of the Hudson River school of painters, heading toward the same destination... but they usually walked.

That point on the river has a boat ramp, and kayaks can launch there. Either standing on the bank or venturing to mid river across the Bristol Channel at the Green Flats, the experience of thousands or maybe millions of dreamers and seekers of revelation of the past can be sensed in this view. Their anticipation of that destination just a sloop or steamboat ride from the smoky city was of fresh air and the wonders of mountain trails with the long views from up there. It was the cinematic experience of the day. The idea of journeying toward destination was the draw of this shoreline for over a century and a feeling that something great is attainable from here is the impression it conveys yet today.