When icicles hang by the wall,And Tom bears logs into the hall,When blood is nipt and ways be foul,Then nightly sings the staring owl,Tu-whoo! Tu-whit; tu-whoo!— Shakespeare We are starting to develop quite a nice collection of 19th- and 20th-century greeting cards here at the Historical Society. This is one […]

In 1982 Algernon Gordon Smith, known to his Hastings friends as Gordon, gave the Historical Society a small scrapbook of greeting cards, two of which you see here. Gordon was a third generation Hastings-ite, and he and his wife were charter members of the society when it was founded back […]

Gus Wagner’s goat cart with Ed Rohrbach at the reins, ca. 1910 By now you will have received your new Hastings Historian with the lead article by Bob Russell on the 1950s Hastings car club called the Driftin’ Shifters. The young mechanics in that club rebuilt and souped up old […]

Children from the New York Orphan Asylum in Hastings-on-Hudson with their donkey cart pulled by “Jack”, the school donkey. (All the pictures in this post are from Dr. Reeder’s 1909 book on the orphanage.) One hundred years ago, in the very southwest corner of Hastings, there was a model orphanage. […]

Cover of Hastings House Restaurant’s Thanksgiving menu, ca. 1974 With money as tight as it is these days, wouldn’t it be nice to be able to step into a time machine that would take you back to an era when you could have a full Thanksgiving dinner in a restaurant […]

Parade on Main Street during or just after World War I, possibly on Armistice Day, November 11th, 1918 Parades matter. And Joseph Semberger reminds veterans why in the “Commander’s Message” from a booklet produced in 1969 for the 50th anniversary of the James Daley Post No. 200 of the V.F.W.:“Each […]

Editor’s Note: Bob Russell, a regular contributor to this blog and to the Hastings Historian, left a fascinating comment on Judy Chamberlain’s post last week about the history of the local A&P. I asked him to tell me more about what he remembered of the former Chrystie property, and he […]

By Judy Chamberlain During a recent trip to the A & P, I purchased some house blend coffee that came in a commemorative tin. The can’s copy heralds the dates 1859-2009 because the self-service chain is celebrating 150 years of service. The photo imprinted on the can reminded me of […]

On September 21st we posted an article about Robert Fulton’s submarine called the Nautilus, which he built in Paris in the year 1800. Here is an article about one her descendents, the USS Nautilus, the world’s first operational nuclear-powered submarine, commissioned in 1954. Like Fulton’s ship, the new Nautilus was […]