By DAVID LEE
GREENPORT–Conrad and Claudia Vispo founded the Hawthorne Valley Farmscape Ecology Program in 2003 as a research and outreach program.
The Vispos have led a series of walks in the county they titled History as Ecology. They tour and talk about how various industries intersect with the local ecology, from railroads to charcoaling to farming and, in this final walk of the series, brick-making in Greenport just north of Hudson.
Brick making was a major industry in the Hudson Valley from the last decades of the 19th century through the early decades of the 20th century, employing hundreds of laborers in the Hudson brickyard alone. Foundations and other artifacts of the brickyard can still be seen at the end of one of the many trails that thread through the Greenport Conservation Area.
After a mile walk through the upper meadows and woodlands, the group arrived down near the edge of the river where one can see the steep banks from which the clay was mined to make the bricks. The group skirted the edge of what had once been the drying field and kiln shed to the jetty that connected the kilns to the railroad track and dock.
The Farmscape Ecology Program is announcing the upcoming publication of a new book titled “From the Hudson to the Taconics: An Ecological and Cultural Field Guide to the Habitats of Columbia County, New York.” The book will be released in April.
