Mary McTamaney

This April, students from NFA West joined forces with members of the regional garden club to design and plant attractive new entrance gardens at the corners of Downing Park. The always-generous landscaping firm of Lynn Warren first prepared the planting beds which had become overgrown and weed-filled. Now, visitors will enter the park’s paths cheered by designs of leafy and flowering perennials, and passersby will be encouraged to enter the park and explore.

Appreciating the beauty of nature was the intention of Newburgh’s central park from its inception. This city has always been predominantly blue-collar and its citizens had long urged the mayor and council to provide a beautiful place to enjoy nature – a place where they could escape from their crowded dwellings and neighborhoods. The hills beyond Dubois Street and the “water lot” (planned for a reservoir) beyond were a perfect choice. As land parcels were acquired in the late 1880’s and designs were drawn to make use of the acreage, a name for the park also emerged. It was more than the name by which the park is now known. It was officially Charles and Andrew Downing Memorial Park.

The names of both Downing Brothers appear in council proceedings, in Park Commission minutes and in subsequent documents and reports. As the Shelter House was being designed in the 1930’s, preliminary drawings refer to it as being placed in Charles and Andrew Downing Memorial Park – the two brothers well remembered for bringing world-class horticulture practice and landscape design to their hometown. So how did Charles disappear from signs and from memory?

Charles Downing lived far longer than his younger brother, Andrew. He was born in Newburgh in 1802 and died here in 1886. Throughout that lifetime, he worked as a grower, first at his parents’ plant nursery on Liberty Street at the corner of Broad and then in his own larger nursery just over the city line at Grand Avenue and Beech Street. Like his father Samuel, he grew plants to sell to neighbors. While young Andrew delighted in walking beyond the village through the countryside and seeking out other landscapes and new flowering plants, Charles, 13 years older, worked diligently in the family nursery, particularly at cultivating and hybridizing varieties of fruit. Customers near and far eagerly bought fruit trees and berry plants so they could enjoy the freshest of desserts and snacks with their families.

Charles Downing had a magic touch as a botanist and grower. As his career progressed, he became known as the country’s foremost pomologist (the word for fruit expert that entered the English lexicon the year he was born). Charles consulted with everyone he could meet or correspond with to discover all the varieties of each fruit species. He and Andrew wrote and published a textbook Fruit and Fruit Trees of North America that was a 19th century bestseller.

After Andrew’s early death at age 37, Charles continued to edit and publish new editions for decades. They were long the definitive guide for fruit growers everywhere. The later editions have 4 to 5 pages of credits listed by state and country of all the pomologists who collaborated by sharing their growing experiences with the world-respected Mr. Downing as he codified the growing habits of each variety of plum, apple, pear, cherry and grape. Just as one can drive across country and find homes built in the bracketed cottage architecture style of Andrew Jackson Downing, one can find along each route fruit varieties bearing the names of long-ago growers who followed Charles’ lead. What his books don’t list are the many young people across the nation whom Charles personally endowed with scholarships to agricultural colleges from Iowa State to the Hampton Institute of Virginia.

In the introduction to one edition of Fruit and Fruit Trees of America, the author explains his motivation: “Angry volumes of politics we have written none; but only peaceful books humbly aiming to weave something more into the fair garland of the beautiful and useful that encircles the earth.”