Portal:Hudson Valley

Fishkill Creek is a tributary of the Hudson River in Dutchess County, New York, United States. At 38 miles (61 km)[1] it is the longest stream in the county. It rises in the town of Union Vale and flowing generally southwest to a small estuary just south of Beacon. Part of its 193-square-mile (500 km²) watershed is in Putnam County to the south. Sprout Creek, the county's third-longest creek is its most significant tributary. and Whaley and Sylvan lakes and Beacon Reservoir, its largest, deepest and highest lakes, are among the bodies of water within it.

While the creek is not impounded for use in any local water supply, it remains a focus of regional conservation efforts as a recreational and aesthetic resource, especially since the lower Fishkill watershed has been extensively developed in the last two decades. It flows through several local parks and is a popular trout stream. Industries and mills along it helped spur the settlement of the region.

• ... that even though Kaaterskill High Peak (pictured) was the first Catskill High Peak to be climbed, there is no official trail to its summit?
• ... that the Bain Commercial Building is the only intact Second Empire–style building in Wappingers Falls, New York?
• ... that Stony Clove Notch, a pass in the Catskill Mountains, was once so narrow that it could only be traversed by people walking in single file?

William Henry Seward, Sr. (May 16, 1801 – October 10, 1872) was the 12th Governor of New York, United States Senator and the United States Secretary of State under Abraham Lincoln and Andrew Johnson. An outspoken opponent of the spread of slavery in the years leading up to the American Civil War, he was a dominant figure in the Republican Party in its formative years, and was widely regarded as the leading contender for the party's presidential nomination in 1860 – yet his very outspokenness may have cost him the nomination. Despite his loss, he became a loyal member of Lincoln's wartime cabinet, and played a role in preventing foreign intervention early in the war. On the night of Lincoln's assassination, he survived an attempt on his life in the conspirators' effort to decapitate the Union government. As Johnson's Secretary of State, he engineered the purchase of Alaska from Russia in an act that was ridiculed at the time as "Seward's Folly", but which somehow exemplified his character. His contemporary Carl Schurz described Seward as "one of those spirits who sometimes will go ahead of public opinion instead of tamely following its footprints."