The Empire State Trail's Maybrook
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The Maybrook Line Welcome to the Empire State Trail’s Maybrook Trailway, which follows the Brewster-to-Hopewell Junction portion of the former New York, New Haven & Hartford Railroad “Maybrook Line,” once an important New England freight rail gateway. POUGHKEEPSIE BRIDGE Completed in 1889, this 6,768-foot-long cantilever truss bridge carried Maybrook Line trains 212 feet above the Hudson River. It burned in 1974, impacting regional freight rail routes. It is now the Walkway Over the Hudson State Park. Source: Kent Cochrane. The Maybrook Rise and Fall “MAYBROOK BOUND” This painting of New Haven Railroad diesel-locomotive-powered freight trains passing at Poughquag, New York, captures the East-west rail traffic south of Albany Like its hilly route, the Maybrook had its spirit of mountain railroading on the Maybrook Line. Source: crossed the Hudson River on freight car ups and downs. It was busy during World Hudson William G. Dulmaine Jr. River ferries between Beacon and Newburgh War I but lost traffic during the Great MA Rail to Trail until 1889, when the railroad bridge across Depression of the 1930s. The Maybrook’s R R L A R T N E C K the river was completed at Poughkeepsie. finest hour was during World War II, when R Today, the Empire State Trail follows the O Y T H W RI E E N M The “New Haven,” then southern New powerful New Haven steam locomotives A route of the former Maybrook Line for Y B R CT R R L O A O R K England’s dominant railroad, consolidated moved record freight tonnage over the T L I N E forty-four miles from Brewster to Highland, PA N E C NEW YORK, NEW HAVEN K R O & Y several existing end-to-end rail lines by line. After the war, traffic declined again, W New York, along the Maybrook Trailway, E HARTFORD RR LINES N Hudson 1904 to create the 125-mile-long Maybrook and diesel locomotives replaced steam River the William R. Steinhaus Dutchess Rail Line. The Maybrook moved freight in 1947. Parallel competition from Penn Trail, the Walkway Over the Hudson, and gathered from five railroads converging Central rail lines after 1968 and Interstate MAYBROOK LINE the Hudson Valley Rail Trail. The Maybrook Line was a key rail freight connection across at a large freight yard west of the Hudson 84 after 1971 further eroded service. the Hudson River. The Maybrook Trailway follows the section in Maybrook, Orange County. From there, A 1974 fire resulted in the permanent between Brewster and Hopewell Junction. Source: Milestone Heritage Consulting. the freight was carried east across the closure of the Poughkeepsie bridge, 750 river at Poughkeepsie, over the mountains ending Maybrook Line long-distance REYNOLDS HOPEWELL JUNCTION WHALEY LAKE HOLMES DYKEMANS BREWSTER 650 POUGHQUAG WEST PATTERSON WEST of Dutchess and Putnam Counties, and freight trains and altering regional freight STORMVILLE 550 GREENHAVEN ultimately to the Cedar Hill freight yard rail patterns. The last freight train ran 450 TOWNERS outside New Haven, Connecticut. on the Brewster-to-Hopewell Junction 350 250 5 10 15 20 25 portion of the line in 1992. SEA LEVEL IN FEET ABOVE ELEVATION DISTANCE IN MILES STEEP GRADES MOUNTAIN RAILROADING The Maybrook Line crossed the Appalachian Mountains in The New Haven Railroad’s powerful steam locomotives Dutchess and Putnam Counties, climbing grades as steep pulled—and pushed—heavy Maybrook Line trains like this as 1.22 percent eastbound and over 1.3 percent westbound. eastbound freight on Depot Hill at Poughquag in 1950. Source: Milestone Heritage Consulting. Source: Kent Cochrane / Thomas J. MacNamara Collection. Tonetta Lake The Maybrook Trailway passes three-quarter-mile-long Tonetta Lake in the town of Southeast. According to local tradition, the lake was named for Tone, an African American slave freed after fighting in the Revolutionary War, and his African- Native American wife Etta, also a freed slave. Tonetta Lake history is tied to George Hine (1834–1914) whose five-hundred-acre farm included the lake. He was one of the first area farmers to import Holstein dairy cows, and sold milk from his hundred-head herd to the local Borden Company milk plant. Hine dammed Tonetta Lake and harvested winter ice to cool his milk in the warm months of the year. TOWN BEACH Swimmers and boaters enjoying the beach at Southeast’s new Residential Development public park at Tonetta Lake in 1965. Source: Office of the Putnam County Historian. Starting around World War I, real estate speculators purchased Putnam County Lakefront Recreation farmland and developed it for summer Early Tonetta Lake recreation included homes easily reached from New York City George Hine’s 1880s Lake Tonetta Outing by train and increasingly by automobile. Club, which was limited to thirty members In 1925, the Tonetta Lake Corporation and offered boating and ice skating. In purchased 110 acres of Hine family 1963, the town of Southeast purchased farmland southwest of the lake and 167 acres of Tonetta Lake Park’s developed Tonetta Lake Park, the first recreation land for a public town park. residential subdivision in the Brewster Today, this park is a popular destination HINE HOUSE Village area. The new neighborhood This house on Tonetta Lake Road was built in 1862 and was for Southeast residents, offering picnic included a beach for boating, swimming, home to farmer and former owner of Tonetta Lake, George areas, a playground, a hiking trail, baseball Hine. The house was a wedding present from his family and water sports, and a recreation Source: Town of Southeast Bicentennial Commission. diamonds, tennis courts, and the town’s pavilion featuring public dances, boxing only public beach. matches, and clambakes. TONETTA LAKE PARK This 1933 aerial view of Tonetta Lake shows summer cottages on quarter-acre lots on the oval road at the south end of the lake. Source: Office of the Putnam County Historian. TONETTA LAKE ICE The Palmer family built an icehouse on the lake in 1924 and was known for giving ice chips from their carriage to children on hot days. Source: Town of Southeast Bicentennial Commission EARLY RECREATION Tonetta Lake was a late nineteenth-century destination for summer boating and winter ice skating. Source: Southeast Museum. The Great Swamp This part of the Maybrook Trailway at Ice Pond follows Muddy Book, a tributary of the Great Swamp, a 6,000-acre wetland that gathers waters from a 62,000-acre watershed in a twenty-mile-long valley stretching from Dover to Southeast. ICE POND OVERLOOK WOOD DUCKS (Aix sponsa) This view from the trail on the 400-foot-high rock knob above Ice The Great Swamp is a major spring and fall migratory flyway Pond shows the New York & New England Railroad embankment, for mallards, green-winged teal, and wood ducks, one of North now the Maybrook Trailway, crossing the mouth of a Muddy America’s most colorful waterfowl. Source: Gary Kramer ATLANTIC COAST LEOPARD FROG (Lithobates kauffeldi) Brook tributary, dividing marsh and open water. Source: Judy This newly recognized species, identified here in 2012, was Kelley-Moberg. previously mistaken for the common southern leopard frog. It is a “cryptic species,” hard to distinguish by eye, but with a unique mating call. Source: Brian Zarate. DOVER RAILROAD IMPACTS E N This 1905 photo shows the New Haven Railroad burying I L the 1881 New York & New England trestle with fill, forming M E L an embankment across the swamp. Muddy Brook was R A H placed in a culvert, altering swamp drainage. Source: H T Patterson Historical Society. R O N O R T E Conservation Efforts Watershed Geography M Although the Great Swamp has been About 20,000 years ago, this valley PAWLING recognized for its environmental and was carved by glaciers from soft Human Impacts recreational value, it still needs protection. marble bedrock. At the end of the last Natural processes that formed the Great M A The preserves surrounding Ice Pond ice age, the valley depression flooded Y B R Swamp created resources useful to O O resulted from grants from the US Wildlife with meltwater to form a massive lake. K T R humans. At Ice Pond, peat was cut and A I L Service, obtained by Friends of the Great Great Swamp waters flow north to the W A dried for horticulture and agriculture Y Swamp, donations to the Putnam County Housatonic River and then into Long industries, and the Croton Brick Company Land Trust, and parcels acquired by the Island Sound, and south into the Hudson PATTERSON dug clay from the pond’s banks. Ice was You Westchester County Land Trust, the New River via the Croton River, part of New Are cut for local use, and after railroads arrived Here York State Department of Environmental York City’s water supply. in the mid-1800s, a large commercial Conservation, Putnam County, and the icehouse served New York City. Railroad Town of Patterson. Natural Habitats construction affected Ice Pond drainage Ice Pond’s wetlands are a refuge for BREWSTER after the New York & Harlem Railroad migrating waterfowl, and its waters are built across the west side of Muddy Brook home to bass, bluegill, and perch. The in the 1840s and the New York & New THE GREAT SWAMP WATERSHED swamp hosts mink, muskrat, and otter. This map shows the 20-mile-long, 62,000-acre Great Swamp England Railroad, now the Maybrook Beaver, trapped for pelts in colonial times, watershed and wetlands, Metro-North Harlem Line commuter Trailway, built across the east side in 1881. rail tracks, and New York & New England / New Haven Railroad have returned, damming streams and line, now the Maybrook Trailway.