Mary McTamaney

Newburgh has always been an innovative city but I continue to marvel at its long-standing creativity. Just two years after Alexander Graham Bell invented the first telephone, a local photographer, William Whiddit, built a telephone too, based on what he had read about Bell’s invention. Mr. Whiddit placed his home-made telephone in the Sunday School Room of Union Presbyterian Church to show it off to a meeting of the Newburgh Ladies Aid Society on the evening of March 27, 1878.

The meeting was the monthly “sociable” held by that club which had been raising money for the needy since they formed during the Civil War. Mr. Whiddit ran a wire across Montgomery Street to the home of Aid Society members Cornelia and Gertrude Parmenter where he placed a second home-made telephone. The Parmenter sisters, both local teachers, had rehearsed a few songs to help test his new device. As Cornelia sang “Coming Through the Rye” in her front parlor, the audience that had gathered inside Union Church’s hall applauded enthusiastically as they heard her. Then Cornelia joined with Gertrude and two others and a quartette sang more songs into the receiver of the home-made telephone. The audience in the church declared that they could not only hear the singing clearly but could distinguish the different harmonies and recognize the different singers’ voices. Every word was discernable. All the singers performed “with much acceptance” a newspaper reporter said.

That same evening in March 1878, the Ladies Aid Society also enjoyed another entertainment, a shadow pantomime in the glow of projector light performed by two other Water Street photographers, William Pope and Nathan Schram. No title nor theme for their show was reported by the newspapers so we must imagine what characters danced across a wall and how they created them. What we can imagine is the excited faces of neighbors and friends as they gathered to experience new technology and then the conversations that spread around downtown Newburgh in the following days. What to us is such an old-fashioned means of communication was to the people gathered in that church hall an unexpected marvel.

Not just sound, but clearly discernable voices were moving along wires in the dark around a corner in downtown Newburgh on a winter evening.

Union Church still stands as Ebenezer Baptist Church today. The blocks of adjacent houses, including the home of the Parmenter sisters at 8 Montgomery are long gone, pulled down during the urban renewal frenzy of the late 1960’s. Yet, that busy spot outside SUNY’s Kaplan Hall may still carry the emotional echoes of the excitement from 150 years ago.

That excitement lives on each time Newburghers attend events that our forebearers called “sociables.” I participated in one last week when folks gathered in the backyard of 208 Montgomery Street for a showing of the 1954 film Rear Window.

That classic thriller movie was chosen as a fun event offering for Newburgh’s Archtober festival because, in addition to great suspense, it depicted how much can be seen and learned looking closely out on an urban landscape. Like neighbors witnessing voices coming out of wires and devices one nineteenth century evening, we were also captivated by the giant rear-projection screen hosted by the “Lights Camera Newburgh Pavilion” bringing us a thrilling story in the deepening darkness of a Newburgh night.