Mary McTamaney

Weather has blessed the Hudson Valley as the summer of 2025 comes to a close. It is rare to have many clear and comfortable days in late August when the outdoors beckons.

As we walk along paved and unpaved paths through our communities, we rarely think of all the feet that walked that same ground before us. There were people tilling the soil on farms or in home gardens who followed the furrows beside their precious plants; people making their way to market on dirt roads and then macadam ones; people walking to work in factories and shops; children chasing each other along the open yards between dwellings; adults taking their babies out to see and breathe the world from the inside of a carriage.

We think far less of the animal feet that trod the paths we walk. Horses and mules were all around, of course, adding to the noise, smells, dirt and confusion. Yet, we never imagine going back additional centuries to envision Newburgh with giant prehistoric creatures passing along traffic lanes. Yet they were here.

Native peoples (in our west shore region they were the Lenape of the Algonquin nation) were here by the second century A.D. But those Lenape also followed ancient paths created by those they never met. The first feet crossing our soil were really big feet. They were the feet of the great beasts that evolved slowly and occupied this valley ages after the ice retreated from the landscape almost 10,000 years ago. A great beast is one that is supersized compared to the same species today and they once roamed Newburgh. They were creatures much larger than their descendant species that we encounter today: moose-elk, giant beavers, and the monster of them all, the mastodon.

Much larger than elephants, mastodon’s big feet and bodies once tramped through the local woodlands and grasslands moving between water sources. Thus, they created trails where they trampled the underbrush and those trails are what the Lenape found when they came to this valley. Like a moose, a man needs to find fresh water and the natural resources like fish that water provides.

Scholars who study this pre-historic era and the hydrology of the region, believe that the Newburgh municipal boat launch was likely one gathering place on the river for the big beasts. From there, today’s Washington Street corridor made a natural route through this area to additional watering holes: brooks and ponds and springs once filled the Washington Street hillside route and then out to what we came to call Swallow Hole, Trout Hole and Washington Lake or diagonally across Dupont Avenue and out along other streams to Algonquin Lake and Orange Lake.

In 1922, the New York State Museum studied the extent of the territory occupied by great beasts, especially the mastodon. They compiled all the reports of skeleton discoveries and no place on earth had more mastodon discoveries than Orange County, New York. Since the 1920’s far more discoveries have been made and research done. The last time I checked, there were forty sites within Orange County that had unearthed mastodon bones from distinct animals.

It would have been some sight and some sound if we could see and hear these behemoths walk our earliest trails. Skeletons of local mastodons found and carefully reassembled can be seen today at Orange County Community College in Middletown and at Museum Village in Monroe. One of the earliest and most intact mastodon skeletons found way back in 1801 in Montgomery NY was carefully saved and sold by its owner back in the 19th century. It was taken to a museum in Germany where it is reconstructed and still stands many thousands of miles from home impressing new generations with the biodiversity of our still relatively young continent.