A Glimpse into Beacon's Past

City clerk rescues 19th-century records from dump
You never know what you're going to find at the dump. Just ask Amanda Caputo.
Last fall, the Beacon city clerk discovered the handwritten articles of incorporation for the Village of Matteawan buried under decades of dirt, dust and who knows what else at the city's Transfer Station.
Dated May 28, 1886, and recorded by Fishkill Town Clerk G.W. Bradshaw, the articles are in remarkably good condition. They signify the formation of Matteawan, a manufacturing hub of about 4,400 residents centered around Fishkill Creek. Matteawan was 1½ miles east of Fishkill Landing, the neighboring village with which it would merge in 1913 to create Beacon.
A follow-up meeting was held on June 29, 1886, at Fishkill Town Hall, where town officials voted to approve Matteawan's secession. Records show that village leaders expected to spend $2,500 (about $86,500 today) on "ordinary expenses" in the first year.
The articles were the most significant find inside seven hardbound books discovered by Caputo. The books, which also contain records from Fishkill Landing, were recovered from Beacon's incinerator building, a brick structure with an adjacent smokestack that's next to the wastewater treatment plant on Dennings Avenue. Once the destination for the city's wastewater sludge and trash, it has been — aside from a first-floor office — largely vacant for years.

"No one expected anything useful to be in there," said Caputo. "Why would you keep valuable records at the dump for 30 years?"
The best guess is that the books — along with an assortment of urban renewal and community development documents, property assessments and financial and court records — were stashed at the three-story building in the mid-1990s, when the current City Hall was under construction. Some of the documents were transported in filing cabinets. Loose materials, including the seven books, were taken upstairs, where scores of pigeons would later enter through broken windows and take roost.
In 2024, city workers replaced the windows, and a private company helped clean out 30 years of bird waste. "Then we were like, 'There's all those records — I wonder what's in there?' " said City Administrator Chris White, who served on the City Council in 1996 and 1997. White said he recalled the building being "in really bad shape" even then.
While the structure had been cleaned out, it wasn't spotless when Caputo got to it. The top layer of boxes and loose paper "was just covered in grime," she said. "Once you started moving stuff, the dust started flying. Thankfully, these books were covered by records that were much less remarkable."
Although the covers and spines of the books have deteriorated, the inside pages are nearly all intact, still white with numbers printed in blue in the upper corners.

Flipping through them, one gets a glimpse into the world 140 years ago. The Aug. 18, 1886, meeting of the Matteawan Board of Trustees was held at 7:15 p.m. in the office of a hat factory, the Matteawan Manufacturing Co. (now The Roundhouse). Its superintendent was Willard H. Mase, the village president, who would later that year be elected to the first of five terms in the state Assembly. In 1887, Mase financed a volunteer fire company that was named for him.
One of the first orders of business on Aug. 18 was approving the minutes of the previous meeting. Another was the appointment of Sherwood Phillips as the village clerk. His salary was left "open-carried."
In a list of village ordinances, the first prohibited "amusement, such as playing ball, shinny, the discharge of firearms, fireworks," or any other act "by which person or property is endangered." The second notes that the peace and quiet of the village shall not be disturbed on Sunday, under threat of a $10 penalty.
The records reflect attention to detail, Caputo noted. A letter from February 1903 advised Miss Van Rensselaer that the Matteawan Board of Trustees had noticed the "flag walk" i...