Cadwallader Colden Was an Important Figure in Hudson Valley History

Well-regarded in his time as an intellectual, this Orange County resident has nearly been lost to history.

Drive west from Newburgh on Route 17K, not far from the site of the 1801 mastodon dig, and it’s easy to miss a pile of ruins hidden among towering trees. These propped-up stone walls are all that remain of a 17-room mansion built in 1767 by Cadwallader Colden, Jr. on land owned by his father: an influential scientist, historian, and politician, and, during the early American Revolution, one of New York’s most prominent Loyalists. Once among the most famous men in America, the elder Cadwallader Colden is now, like the ruins of his son’s mansion, almost entirely forgotten.

Colden lived a long and eventful life. Born in Scotland in 1688, he studied medicine, then moved to New York at the age of 29. Along with his friend Benjamin Franklin, Colden was a leading champion of the American Enlightenment. There were few spheres of intellectual endeavor in which he did not have a hand, from botany to invention to history to physics. Far from modest, Colden criticized Isaac Newton for misunderstanding gravity. (Like Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and other early American scientists, Colden enslaved Black laborers throughout his life, including at his Hudson Valley property.)

Colden’s most influential book was The History of the Five Indian Nations (1727), which offered a detailed and largely positive view of the Iroquois peoples, whom Colden knew from his stint as New York’s chief surveyor. Adopted as an honorary Mohawk, he admired the natives’ ways and bemoaned the influence of white settlers: “Alas! We have reason to be ashamed that these Infidels, by our Conversation and Neighborhood, have become worse than they were before they knew us. Instead of Vertues [sic], we have only taught them Vices, that they were entirely free of before that time.”

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Even while engaged in high-minded pursuits, Colden was also familiar with the grimy world of colonial politics. From his home in Orange County—his own house, since demolished, stood near where his son later built his—Colden wielded enormous influence.

Cadwallader Colden
Matthew Pratt (oil on canvas) 1772, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

But in 1765, when the protests broke out that later turned into the American Revolution, Colden, then New York’s lieutenant governor, sided firmly with the Crown. A fierce defender of royal authority, widely despised as corrupt and pretentious, he tried to enforce the unpopular Stamp Act. Colden thought he was simply defending the legitimate government against a violent mob. Rioters in Manhattan burned him in effigy, then threw his prized coach into the flames.

Colden Sr. died in 1776, as the empire he had tried to hold together broke apart. He was 88 years old—older even than Franklin when he died. Nine years earlier, his son had broken ground on the mansion whose ruins, abandoned now for nearly a century, can be glimpsed just off the state highway. The site is owned by the Town of Montgomery. Plans drafted a few years ago to turn the site into a park with trails, signs, and carefully chosen plantings, to honor Colden’s interest in botany, have not yet come to fruition.

Related: The History Behind Orange County’s 1800s Mastodon Discovery

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