The 27th Conference on New York State History Will Include Presentation of Paper on Pelham Manor & Huguenot Heights Association

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The 27th Conference on New York State History will be held June 1 - 3, 2006 at the Herbert H. Lehman Center for American History, Columbia University. The conference is sponsored by the Herbert H. Lehman Center for American History and the New York State Archives Partnership Trust in conjunction with The Association of Public Historians of New York State.

Below are a series of links relating to the conference, including:

Conference Web Page and Program.

Conference Program Adobe PDF.

Conference Program, Microsoft Word Format.

Registration Form.

On Saturday, June 3rd I will present a paper between 10:15 a.m. and 12:15 p.m. as a member of panel session 702 entitled "The Suburb". The paper is entitled: "The Pelham Manor & Huguenot Heights Association: An Analysis of the Effects on Today's Village of Pelham Manor of a 'Failed' Effort to Develop a New York City Railroad Suburb During the 1870s".

The panel will be moderated by Dr. Kenneth T. Jackson, Jacques Barzun Professor of History and the Social Sciences at Columbia University and Dr. Lisa Keller, Associate Professor of History and Director of the Journalism Program in the School of Humanities, Purchase College, State University of New York.

With the coming of the so-called “branch line” of the New York, New Haven & Hartford Railroad in 1873, a group of enterprising men who lived in New York City and the Town of Pelham created “The Pelham Manor & Huguenot Heights Association”. They capitalized the Association by contributing 500 acres for development as an elegant bedroom community – an early “railroad suburb” as Kenneth T. Jackson, author of Crabgrass Frontier (Oxford University Press, Inc. 1985) has labeled such communities. Only twelve weeks later the failure of the Philadelphia financial firm Jay Cooke and Company touched off the Financial Panic of 1873. A prolonged financial depression followed the panic. Though the Association continued its development efforts for several years, it failed and entered receivership. The brief work of the Association, however, had a profound influence on the makeup of the budding settlement that, fifteen years later, was incorporated as the Village of Pelham Manor.

The paper that I will present traces the history of the Association and provides biographical sketches of its principals. The paper further traces the influence of the Association on the area that became today’s Village of Pelham Manor. The paper argues that the Association failed due not simply to the depression that followed the Panic of 1873, but due to a complex set of interrelated factors that included the difficulty of commuting on the branch line at the time. The paper further argues that those who put together the Association played a major role in subsequent informal efforts to achieve their original objectives for development of the area. These informal efforts were the driving force behind the incorporation of the Village of Pelham Manor and substantively influenced the layout and makeup of the Village today.

The methodology for preparation of the paper included an exhaustive survey of original 19th century maps, advertisements, photographs, papers and other such materials supplemented with a careful use of secondary resources designed to support the arguments specified above.

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Located at http://www.historicpelham.com/
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