Nelson Greene wrote Mohawk Valley history
By Bob Cudmore, Focus on History, Daily Gazette, 08-18-07
According to the late historian Paul Keesler of Newport, no one published more information on the Mohawk Valley than Nelson Greene.
Recently, an inquiry about Greene’s four-volume history came from Amsterdam native Jim Michaelson of Canton. Michaelson is looking for information on these books and Peter Betz, Fulton County historian and Amsterdam native, said Greene’s books are widely known.
Most local libraries have Greene’s three-volume history, according to Betz, and a companion volume of biographies, commissioned by the notables who are described.
Greene published the books that Michaelson owns in 1925, a set called “The Mohawk Valley – Gateway to the West, 1614-1925.”
Historian Keesler at first was put off by some discrepancies in Greene’s volumes but said his appreciation of the Fort Plain writer increased dramatically when he read more of Greene’s work.
Keesler wrote, “Considering the astounding amount of information he gathered and published in 1925 when communications, travel and publishing technologies were relatively primitive, it is amazing how few errors there are in his books.”
Keesler concluded, “It was from Nelson that I learned that if not for the Mohawks and Sir William Johnson, we could well be a part of French speaking Canada, and that the Battle of Oriskany really did affect the outcome of the Revolutionary War.”
Keesler died in 2005 and at last report family and friends were hoping to publish the history book on the Mohawk Valley that he was working on when he died.
According to Keesler, Greene was born in Little Falls in the 19th century. His father Horace Greene moved to Fort Plain and became the owner of the Mohawk Valley Register newspaper in the early 1900s.
Nelson Greene contributed articles on local history to his father's newspaper. Nelson studied art in New York City and was both an artist and writer. In addition to his books on Mohawk Valley history, Greene became editor of the Fort Plain Standard newspaper.
AMSTERDAM’S GRADE SCHOOLS
The Woodrow Wilson School was left off a list of Amsterdam’s elementary schools from the 1930s in a recent column.
City native Richard Ippolito wrote that Woodrow Wilson School, on Clizbe Avenue in the Rockton section, was built in 1931 and he attended it in the 1940s. The structure is now gone.
According to historian Hugh Donlon, 1931 marked the city’s largest school enrollment of over 8,000 with some 6,800 in the public schools. The rest were students in Roman Catholic schools: St. Mary’s, St. Stanislaus, St. Joseph’s and St. Casimir’s.
The other public elementary schools in Amsterdam in the 1930s were Academy, Arnold, Fourth Ward, Fifth Ward, Guy Park, McCleary, Milton, New East Main, Old East Main, West Spring, and Vrooman.
Postcard and picture collector Jerry Snyder has contributed an image of the Fourth Ward School on lower Vrooman Avenue in Amsterdam, built in 1894 and destroyed in a fire in about 1940. Snyder believes the photo was taken around 1899.
The imposing stone structure is fortress-like with a full basement. The back part of the building is three stories. The front section is two stories with two round balls capping the front corners. A peaked roof slopes sharply in the front from the taller part of the building in the rear. A dormer with windows in this front section seems to be at the top of the third floor level of the rear of the building. This top floor was the gymnasium.
The front door is recessed behind a curved stone archway. There are large chimneys on opposite sides of the building and a tower jutting from the middle of the roof is topped with a lightning rod.
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