Quote Of The Day

"The Hudson Valley is not a place you pass through — it is a place that passes through you, settling somewhere between the ribs and staying there."

— John Burroughs

Interesting Facts

Kingston, New York is far more historically layered than most people realize. Here are a few facts that tend to surprise even longtime residents:

• First capital, first burned: Kingston served as New York State's first capital in 1777, but its tenure was brief and violent — British forces under General John Vaughan torched nearly the entire city just weeks after the state constitution was first read aloud there.
  
  
• A cement empire: Kingston was once the natural cement capital of the world. The Hudson Valley's abundant deposits of rosendale cement — a naturally occurring hydraulic cement — were so prized that the material was used in the foundations of the Statue of Liberty and the Washington Monument.
  
  
• Two downtowns, one city: Kingston is unusual in having two distinct historic commercial centers — the Stockade District uptown and the Rondout waterfront district — that were originally separate communities and were only consolidated into a single city in 1872.
  
  
• A trolley that outlasted its era: Kingston's trolley system, which once connected its two downtowns, ran until 1929, and remnants of the original brick-paved trolley tracks have occasionally been uncovered beneath road repaving projects in the Stockade area.
  
  
• Bob Dylan's creative refuge: After his 1966 motorcycle accident, Dylan retreated to the Woodstock and Kingston area, where he and the Band secretly recorded what became known as The Basement Tapes — one of the most influential unofficial recordings in rock history.

Ulster County legislators are pushing back against the federal government's repeated cancellation of local naturalization ceremonies. Eighteen lawmakers — 17 Democrats and one Republican — signed a letter to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services urging the reinstatement of the ceremonies, which have now been scrapped for the second consecutive year.

The ceremonies, traditionally held at the historic Ulster County Courthouse in Kingston, N.Y., mark the final step in the citizenship journey — the swearing of the Oath of Allegiance after years of forms, interviews, and testing. Officials say canceling them forces new Americans to celebrate elsewhere, away from the communities they call home.

The fate of a planned December ceremony remains unknown until at least November.