Bottoms Up: New York's Distilling History

John Morrissey was known as a drinker, a habit that got him into a number of tussles in his youth and may have contributed, in part, to his early death. So what was his poison? He tended to drink wine and brandy, but wasn't above imbibing in whiskey and later, as his star began to rise, champagne.

While much of the wine and related inebriates were imported from Europe during Morrissey's time, distilled alcohol was mostly produced stateside and quite a lot was produced in New York, which had a long distilling history.

The distilling of grains and fruits to produce alcohol has been intimately entwined with the history of America, from George Washington plying his soldiers with spirits to the rise of a national movement that temporarily banned alcohol across the country in the 1920s and gave rise to the bootlegger. New York State once had a thriving distilling industry, but it was the temperance movement and prohibition that helped kill it.

Beginning in the early-1600s with the Dutch colonization of what is now New York State, alcohol played an important part in the lives of the settlers. The Dutch in particular enjoyed their tippling and drank heartily of beer, brandy and eventually, rum.

“Weddings and funerals and all occasions of feasts and merry-making were opportunities for hard drinking, of which the guests took full advantage,” wrote Esther Singleton in her 1909 book “Dutch New York.”

Alcohol, and the tavern, played such a central role in the lives of the colonists that the law took drunkenness into consideration in contractual agreements and even criminal cases. A man had 24-hours to sober up after making a drunken deal, repudiating his actions the day after they were made.

While the Dutch West India Company, the chartered Dutch trade organization that held dominion over part of North America, imported much of the hard liquor to the colony, It didn’t take long for the newcomers to begin distilling their own alcohol.

Willem Kieft, the director general for the colony from 1638 to 1647, before being fired for mismanagement, was distilling brandy in Long Island, apparently encroaching on his employer’s privilege to control the product.

According to Harvey W. Wiley, writing in 1919, it was likely that what was referred to as brandy during this period in North America was not distilled from grapes, but rather from grain and would be considered a whiskey today.

By the mid-1600s New Amsterdam (New York City) and the Hudson Valley saw a number of distilleries of both brandy and gin begin production.

Gin was considered to be a drink of the lower classes, but was none-the-less popular. Home-grown liquor was also plentiful, and inventive, being made from peaches, pears, sweet potatoes and apples.

Dutch colonist Adrian Van der Donck, writing in the mid-1600s, claimed that the English even made a liquor from watermelons. But all these would soon be eclipsed by a product being produced in the neighboring English colony to the east—“that cussed liquor, Rhum, rumbullion, or kill-devil.”

The above was how 17th century New England colonist John Josselyn described rum, distilled from molasses, which began to be produced in huge quantities in New England by the 1670s.

Molasses from the West Indies came to New England where it was converted to rum, shipped to Africa and traded for slaves.

By this time New Netherland was firmly in the hands of the British, and as such, rum became popular, and rum production, although small in comparison with Massachusetts, came to New York.

If gin and brandy defined the Dutch era in New York and rum that of the revolutionary period, it was whiskey that exemplified the young country, and New York.

By the early-1800s the continued strife with England, specifically the War of 1812, dried up the country’s supply of molasses and so Americans turned to whiskey produced from native grains and corn.

Early whiskey distilling used water power to grind the grains or corn, with the stills nearby. Creating the mash used to produce the final product was mixed by hand. Most whiskey at the time was raw, unaged and fiery.

George Washington helped the whiskey industry take off in America by becoming a distiller himself after retiring from public life. He operated the largest distillery in America at the time, producing 11,000 gallons of whiskey in 1799 at his farm at Mount Vernon.

By 1825, New York State had more than a thousand small distilleries, and produced a large quantity of the nation's whiskey. But the country’s thirst appeared to be on the wane.

Hunt’s merchant magazine of 1842 decried the decline in the whiskey trade that year.
“A most remarkable reduction has taken place in the demand for this article during the past twelve months. The demand was much reduced a year ago; but now it is not half what it was then,” wrote Freeman Hunt. “The distillers, four or five years since, were running their works night and day, pressed with the demand for whiskey, and consuming rye and corn in immense quantities; at one time four thousand five hundred bushels daily. Now the consumption is less than two thousand bushels daily, and is rapidly diminishing.”

This decline coincided with the rise of the temperance movement.

As early as the Dutch period, people complained of the drunkenness prevalent in the colony and it only got worse.

The government cracked down on drunkenness, forcing taverns to close at nine at night and shuttering them during church services.

In Massachusetts, Increase Mather, a Puritan minister influential in the colony’s government, complained in 1686 that “it is an unhappy thing that in later years a kind of drink called Rum has been common among us. They that are poor, and wicked too, can for a penny or two-pence make themselves drunk.”

That colony also took steps to try and stave the inebriation, with little result.

The mid-19th century saw the strongest backlash against drinking with a number of New England ministers and reformers take up the teetotaling banner, with barnstorming lectures across the country.

Soon a number of well-organized groups were formed—The Prohibition Party in 1869, the Women's Christian Temperance Foundation in 1874 and the Anti-Saloon League of America in 1893, among many.

In fiscal year 1917 New York State was in the top seven producers of distilled spirits in the country, but two years later, with the passing of the 18th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, Prohibition began and New York’s distilling industry died.

Happy 179th birthday J.M. You're a lucky man to have the same birthday as my lovely wife!

How we played: A look back at the history of winter sports in New York

Editors note: This originally appeared in the Register-Star in a different form. I've edited the piece to only include winter activities that would have been popular during John Morrissey's lifetime. I've also included a different introduction.

New York City in the mid-19th century was often a place of abject despair, filled with disease and death. But even the poorer classes weren't above a snowball fight after a snow storm to enliven a desultory existence. Winter sports such as ice skating became hugely popular during Morrissey's lifetime, but had their beginnings years before.

When the Dutch settled New York they brought with them a number of winter sports, including ice skating and hockey.17th century skates were made of iron and wood and were often attached to the wearer’s shoes by leather straps. Skating matches were common, but in some areas skating was used as much for business as pleasure. Charles Wooley, an Englishman who visited New York in the 1670s said he found it admirable “to see men and women as it were flying upon their skates from place to place with markets upon their Heads and Backs.”

A form of ice hockey was also brought over from the Netherlands as well and, according to some, the word hockey is derived from the Dutch slang word for a goal—hokkie—which roughly translates as “doghouse.”

Ice skating had been around for thousands of years by the time the Dutch brought the sport to New York, but it would take the Industrial Revolution to popularize the sport. By the mid-19th century ice skating was becoming a craze among the middle and upper classes, so much so that many American artists began to paint images depicting the sport.

While some of the Dutch sports became part of the American fabric, other died out over the years, including a game that involved rolling a disk across the ice. “Cleverly thrown, it would roll a long distance. When it fell, it was thrown again. He who covered the most ground, in a certain number of throws, while the disc rolled upright won the game,” wrote Esther Singleton in her 1909 book “Dutch New York.”

Another game, brought to America by Scottish immigrants in the early 19th century, continues to be popular in many parts of the world and even parts of the United States, but has nearly died out in the Hudson Valley. The sport’s history goes back to the 1500s where it was played in Scotland and Holland, with the Scottish codifying its rules around 1807. According to the Ardsley Curling Club Web site, the game involves members of the team sliding 42 pound polished granite stones down a 146 foot long sheet of ice helped by the sweeping of teammates to melt the ice and control the distance and direction of the stone. The closest stones to the target score points. The typical game consists of eight innings. Located in Irvington, in Westchester County, the Ardsley Curling Club was formed in 1932 and is one of only a few clubs left in the region. Both New York City and Albany were centers for curling, both having large populations of Scottish stone masons, and small clubs remain in both cities today.

The late 1800s were curling’s heyday in New York with clubs up and down the state. But, according to John Kerr, writing in “Curling in Canada and the United States,” in 1909, the sport was beginning to wane within the state by the turn of the century.

“The younger generation don't seem to have the same sentiment, nor are they imbued with the same love for the traditions of the game, or the grand old land that has given to the whole world the best, the cleanest, and manliest of sports that is played outdoors,” he wrote. “There are a few of us left yet who are ready to make any reasonable sacrifice to the end that curling in the States is to go on and progress.”

Curling remains hugely popular in Minnesota and Wisconsin as well as Scotland and Canada and became an Olympic medal sport in 1998.

A winter sport that has risen in the United States from an obscure activity of California Gold Rush minors to a national pastime is snow skiing, especially the Alpine or down hill variety.
Skiing had been a part of Nordic cultures for thousands of years before making its way to the United States with Nordic and German immigrants.

In the 1850s skis were in use on the West Coast during the gold rush, but didn’t catch on until the next century.

Ice yachting, the sport of the Robber Barons, came into the fore during Morrissey's time. These wooden hulled machines were the apex of speed and style in the mid-19th century, able to reach speeds of 70 mph or more. The Hudson River Ice Yacht Club, formed in 1885 by John Aspinwall Roosevelt, uncle of 32nd U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, still exists today with around 60 members.

While not a sport per se, sleigh riding was popular in the area since the time of the founding of New Amsterdam. While sleighs served as transport they also served as a means to an end, with people taking rides out into the country for entertainment.

Sarah Kemble Knight writing of her visit to New York in 1707 commented on the variety and number of sleighs that were present on one excursion. “I believe we mett 50 or 60 slays that day — they fly with great swiftness and some are so furious that they’le turn out of the path for none except a Loaden Cart,” she wrote. According to Singleton, the Dutch often made their sleighs into fantastic shapes, “such as animals, ships, fabulous monsters, or shells, carved, gilded, and brightly painted.”And while it has almost completely passed away every winter around the holidays the sounds and images of this pastime come to life through the classic carol that begins “dashing through the snow...”

Samuel Tilden and the 1876 race for president

Editor's Note
This originally appeared in the Hudson Register-Star Aug.29, 2009.

NEW LEBANON — Samuel Tilden couldn’t believe it. He had beaten Rutherford Hayes fair and square by more than 250,000 votes, but now it was all slipping through his fingers.

Down South they were still fighting it out over the remaining 19 electoral votes. Tilden had secured 184; one shy of a guaranteed win, but Hayes only had 165.

The 20th electoral vote was from Oregon, was first deemed illegal, but eventually went to Hayes.

Democrats and Republicans had poured down to Louisiana, South Carolina and Florida to ensure that their candidate would get a fair shake, but the news that floated back north was of voting fraud from Republicans and the intimidation of African American voters by the Democrats.

Eventually these three states sent two different electoral votes to Congress, one indicating a win for Tilden, the other for Hayes.

In late January, with the inauguration date inching closer, Congress passed a law forming a 15-member Electoral Commission to pick a winner. Five Republicans and five Democrats were on the board with one neutral party, Supreme Court Justice David Davis, who later bowed out and was replaced by a Republican. Two days before the inauguration the committee gave all the disputed votes to Hayes.

The decision may have been due to a concerted effort at finding the truth or, more likely, to a back-room deal, now termed the “compromise of 1877.”

The deal between Republicans and Southern Democrats put Hayes in the White House and helped end Reconstruction by withdrawing federal troops from the South. With that the new Republican state governments were voted out and African Americans were quickly disenfranchised.

According to the Brooklyn Daily Eagle in a contemporary editorial, Tilden hadn’t been a party to the compromise.

Thomas Hendricks, who was Tilden’s running mate, would eventually attain the position of vice president in 1884 under President Grover Cleveland and would die in office the next year.

Hayes, who only served one term as president, hadn’t been his party’s first choice for the job, but was elected as a compromise to James G. Blaine, who they believed couldn’t win the general election.

Tilden, on the other hand, had won the Democratic nomination handily and did so on a reform ticket based on his dealings with New York City’s Tweed gang of Tammany Hall. But the truth was far from being black and white.

William “Boss” Tweed and his cohorts had been bilking the public for years, managing to steal between $30 million and $200 million in six years, by some estimates.

As the Democratic chairman of the New York state, Tilden was slow to act against them, taking five years to do so. It took Tweed’s former allies—including the boxing champion turned politician John Morrissey—a number of reform-minded newspaper editors, like Horace Greeley of the New York Tribune and a cartoonist named Thomas Nast to push Tilden to act.

In a New York Times editorial from 1870, Tilden is decried as a “fugleman” or wing-man “for Tweed” at a Democratic convention filled with “city thieves and bullies.”

In 1871, Tilden finally acted and began the process that would eventually send Tweed to prison, breaking him both financially and physically.

The governorship of New York came after that in 1875 and the Democratic nomination for president a year later.

Tilden was born in New Lebanon in 1814 to Elam Tilden and Polly Younglove Jones. The elder Tilden had come from Connecticut with his family when he was young and would eventually make his fortune with a pharmaceutical company based in his hometown.

Tilden graduated from New York University Law School in 1841 and became a corporate lawyer who represented nearly every major railroad at the time.

Following his loss on the national stage, Tilden retired from politics, turning down the 1880 run at the White House, due, he said, to ill health.

He lived in New York City at 15 Gramercy Park South in a house remodeled by Calvert Vaux, Frederick Law Olmsted’s collaborator on Central Park.

When he died in 1886, he bequeathed $4 million for a free public library and reading-room in New York City. This was combined with the Astor and Lenox libraries to found the New York Public Library.

He was buried in New Lebanon. And on his grave, written, one would guess, in regard to the 1876 election, are the words “I Still Trust in The People”.

The firemen’s riot of August 21, 1865

The boy hoisted the old straw mattress onto the roof, lit a match and quickly scampered down the way he had come. A few moments later a bell began clanging loudly, waking the neighborhood. The firefighters from Company No. 6 jumped into action, pulling on their boots, leather helmets and wool jackets and began hauling their pumper towards the scene of the blaze. And that’s when the fight broke out.
Their long-time rivals Engine Company No. 41 were waiting for them at Ridge Street, near the intersection with Delancey St. The fire had been a ruse to draw them out and settle their differences once and for all. This was to be achieved through guns, clubs, axes, fists and even the metal fire horns used to amplify the fire fighters’ voices during operations.

When Big Six, as they were known, reached Ridge Street all the gaslights had been extinguished. Suddenly No. 41’s pumper pulled up from behind them and stopped slightly ahead and to their right. “Give it to them! Kill the sons of bitches,” someone shouted and the sound of gunfire smashed the unnatural quiet. According to Anthony Burk, the foremen of No. 6, the shots came from near No. 41’s pumper. He was hit three times by bullets. One struck him near his right eye; another on the right cheek and a third grazed his ear. He claimed he hadn’t fired back, but several firemen from No. 41 said they had seen him with a gun that night, and they said, he started firing first.

The Metropolitan Police didn’t seem to be of much help that night. They allegedly stayed out of the fight until the shooting died down and there were enough of them to make a dent in the escalating fracas. Platoons began pouring in from all over the eastside. They poured in from Ridge, Delancey and Grand Streets surrounding the combatants. According to members of both fire companies, the police used their nightsticks with wild abandon to disburse the crowd, bloodying a number of firemen that morning.

Later in court the police were unable to say who or how the fight began. Officer Robert Gray arrived just before the fight broke out. “I heard a cheer,” he remembered,” but I don’t know from which company it came.” He did recall that the gunfire seemed to be coming from both companies, which was apparent when the smoke cleared 25 minutes later and two firemen from No. 41 lay dying, while others from both companies suffered from bullet wounds, knife slashes and head injuries. Mathias Bettman, a runner, lay with a bullet wound in his abdomen, while James Quigley, a bunker, suffered a bullet wound in his chest. Bunkers slept at the firehouse, while runners would come to the fires from their houses when the alarm sounded. Harry Howard, one of the last Chief Engineers of the volunteer fire department, had put the bunking system in place a few years earlier.

That spring the state legislature had passed an act creating a "Metropolitan Fire Department,” spelling the demise of the volunteer companies in New York City. The attorney general, John Martindale, believed the law was illegal and fought on behalf of the volunteers. It went before the State Supreme Court and was found constitutional just two months before the riot. Throughout this time the battles between rival fire companies continued to rage and in fact escalated, probably due to the pressures the men were experiencing as they became pawns in a political game between Albany and Tammany Hall, the political machine controlling the city. The companies were pushed to the breaking point and with tempers flaring violence was the outcome.

The month before the New York Times had railed against the territorial and sometimes politically motivated brawls that all too often erupted at fires, slowing down rescue operations and leading to more property damage. It was the insurance companies that first put forth the idea of a paid fire department. They were tired of paying out on blaze after blaze. From there it became a political chess game between the Tammany Hall Democrats who had deep ties with the fire companies and the Republicans in Albany who were interested in resting any kind of political control they could from Tammany.

Fire companies had been brawling each other for years, but this fight pushed the city over the edge and ended with a coroner’s inquest jury censuring the fire commissioners for “not being more efficient with organizing a proper fire department.”It wasn’t until 1866 that the new department was fully in place and it was the brave volunteers who had agreed to continue to battle blaze after blaze in the city until that time. These men made up the core of the new fire department that would eventually become the Fire Department City of New York.

The Belgian paupers

The police herded the 12 men onto the ship headed for New York City. They were from a local beggars’ colony and had asked for and received the help of the provincial government in getting to America. They were going to get a chance to start over, but before that happened, these 12 poverty stricken Belgians would help set off an international scandal and a debate in Congress.

There were 351 passengers on board the ship that October 1854 day, but these 12 men happened to arouse the suspicion of the packet ship Rochambeau’s captain, Harris Stackpole. Due to their meager baggage he assumed they were “paupers.” He asked the American counsel whether he could throw them off. The counsel, according to the captain, told Stackpole he would have to take them and could not put them ashore without violating the contract.

Stackpole had heard the rumors of the Belgian government shipping paupers and criminals to America, but couldn't prove that these men were of either class. “It was spoken of by American captains that there were going to be a lot of paupers shipped, but it was impossible to find out about it,” he said in court. “I did hear the interpreter say the passage of these men had been paid by the Burgomaster.”

Stackpole, born in 1816, was a highly respected captain from Maine who would later retire from the sea and become a merchant in Thomaston, where he had was born, raised and eventually died in 1896.

An internal government letter from that time (that ended up published in every major American newspaper) gives a glimpse of the Belgian government’s plans for shipping the poor to America.

“The transports for immigrants for the United States will take their
departure from Antwerp,” it reads. “A large number of vessels are prepared already to leave at various periods of this month…The departure will take place during the year, every fortnight.”

Liberated prisoners and the poor were to be sent to Antwerp at the cost of 180 francs each, which was paid by the municipal government sending them.

Belgium, only a little more than 15 years after being recognized as a legitimate nation, was just coming out of what was known as the "hunger years,” which lasted from 1843 to 1850.

Industrialization and its centralization in urban centers came early to the country, helping to destroy the rural, home based industry of flax weaving. When combined with the potato blight that swept across Europe, devastating the staple crop of the rural poor—and which was responsible for between 40,000 to 50,000 deaths in Belgium alone—the government was soon dealing with a huge influx of country people into its cities.

The government response was to put these people into beggar’s colonies and when the poor kept pouring in, the government, at least in the province of Antwerp, decided on another strategy, that is, they sent them packing to other countries including France, Canada and the United States.

The plan worked for a little while, until the word spread among American ship captains who vigorously tried to keep those they considered beggars from coming aboard. Stackpole went so far as to post handbills offering a reward to anyone who could, or would, confirm when the beggars would be shipped to America.

Stackpole's suspicions were confirmed after they put ashore in New York harbor.

Sgt. William Bell of the Emigrant squad attached to New York City Mayor Fernando Wood’s office, along with several officers, went on board the Rochambeau before the passengers could disembark and secured the "convicts" and intercepted some correspondence for the Belgian Consul related to the men, who were taken to the Tombs, as the city’s jail is known.

The American government assumed the men were either convicts or beggars, neither of which were tolerated stateside.

It’s highly probable that Lewis Baker, the man who would be charged with the murder of Bill “The Butcher” Poole the next year also came aboard that day, as he had been a member of the Emigrant Squad since its formation two years earlier. This was the same case in which champion bare-knuckle boxer John Morrissey would be named as accessory to the killing.

Bell would later act as a defense witness for his old comrade, telling the jury that he had known Baker since childhood and could vouch for his good character.

The 12 Belgians from the Rochambeau remained in jail while the case made its way through the legal and political worlds of New York.

In the following months two inquests were held to try and get to the bottom of the situation, as much in the name of justice as for the fact that the 12 men were being housed and fed on the city’s dime.

The first was held before Judge Abraham Bogart Jr. and began on Christmas day. Stackpole and the first mate, Christian Hildebrand, both related their belief that the men were convicts, but neither could present any proof backing it up. One of the 12 men also spoke at the hearing, the first time the public had heard from them.
J. Baptist Stour, a native of Forest, Belgium, told the judge he had been confined in the Workhouse at Lavine and that he and nine others made application to the mayor of Antwerp to be transported to the United States. The application was accepted, he said, and each man was given 10 francs to defray their expenses.

The case was kicked upstairs to a higher court and the men remained in the Tombs.

As a side note a year later Judge Bogart was convicted of a misdemeanor while in office for taking bail from a defendant without giving notice to the DA, as required by law. The conviction was later upheld by the Supreme Court

After the fist hearing in city court Mayor Fernando Wood, on Valentine’s Day, addressed a letter to Henry W. T. Mali, the Belgian consul in New York, in which he stated that he believed the 12 men were not of a “character to be permitted to go at large in this city or in this country.”

He suggested that they be returned to their own country
at the cost of the Belgian government, citing his belief the men had arrived there the same way and that they were indeed criminals. “While we cannot set them at liberty, we can no longer retain them in custody,” Wood told the consul, but hold them they did.

The Belgian government remained moot on the subject, following the lead of other countries such as England and Germany and biding its time.

That same month the case came before Judge James Roosevelt, the man who presided over the Lew Baker murder trial.

Two of the 12 accused, Joseph Poismanns, 30, a native of Louvain, and 40-year-old Jean Waggemanns, of Ghent, were there to plead for their release since they had now been in jail for more than two months.

According to a NY Times reporter the men appeared to be in good health and looked to be of a “respectable appearance” like “the majority of adult male emigrants from the working classes of Europe who land in this country.”

Poismanns, who was a tanner by trade, told the court he had been in a poor house voluntarily for six months before coming to America because he had been unable to find work.

He said he wasn’t a convict and had never even been in a courtroom before now. Waggemanns told a similar tale and with this information in hand the judge said that it all seemed to be a matter of a translation problem, in the sense that what was meant by a poor house in Belgium was different then what it meant in America and that the men were not paupers in the same sense of the word. “This ‘depot’ as it had been called, [is] like a Home of Industry with us,” he concluded, adding that he could not assent to the doctrine that “the law looks on a man as a pauper because he has not a cent in his pocket.” He set the men free.

But other wheels had been set in motion. The case of the 12 Belgians had become fodder for the larger national debate concerning immigration as well as the fiery dispute on state’s rights.

As soon as the case hit the papers the Know Nothings, an anti-immigrant political party also called Nativists or Native Americans, bandied the story about in the halls of Congress saying that this was just another reason to keep immigrants out of America. Members of the party authored legislation that would do just that.

Legislation was introduced in January 1855 to keep “foreign paupers, criminals, idiots, lunatics, and insane and blind persons” out of America. It was tabled.

The next month a bill was introduced that would allow the states to legislate any matters concerning immigration. It too was tabled.

Again, in March a bill to exclude foreign paupers and criminals was introduced.
The report that accompanied this bill contained the correspondence concerning the Belgian paupers as well as other similar cases.

According to the report “the immigration of foreign paupers and criminals is the chief source of intemperance, the fruitful source of pauperism, and the prolific source of crime; it has brought upon the country a large juvenile vagrant population; the mother of crimes, it has flooded our country with irreligion, immorality, and licentiousness.”

The report recommended the adoption of a state policy that would discourage the “esprit du corps” that bound immigrants together; banning the sale of liquor licenses to immigrants who were not citizens; prompt conviction of criminals and establishing institutions “to take charge of all juvenile delinquents and vagrants,” among other reforms.

The Know Nothings were a voice in the wilderness, so to speak, in contrast to the vast majority of politicians who were pro-emigration, reflected in the tabling of every piece of ant-immigration legislation introduced by the Nativists.

More importantly, the issue of who was able to control the flow of foreigners into port cities, the state or the federal government, a debate wasn’t fully settled until the smoke had cleared from the war that tore the country apart and remade it into a unified nation.

Sometimes you get lucky

Sometimes you get lucky.
I recently wrote an article (which I’m including below) about a screenwriter named Richard Rosenzweig who is working on a screenplay that revolves around Morrissey’s 1853 prizefight at Boston Corners.

We met at a local bar after the article came out and discussed all things Morrissey. He provided me with a copy of some notes taken by a turn of the 19th century reporter who spoke with several locals that witnessed the fight. The first person accounts provide a new perspective on the fight, told from the point of view of the country people who were literally overrun by thousands of crazed fans mostly from New York City.

Here’s the article that originally appeared in the Register-Star Newspaper.

Oct. 12, 1853 was a fine fall day in Boston Corners and the perfect setting for an illegal bare-knuckle boxing match between John Morrissey and James “Yankee” Sullivan. At that time Boston Corners, more colorfully known as Hell’s Acres, was a tiny hamlet of 120 inhabitants located on the border between Massachusetts and New York.

The hamlet and surrounding 1,016-acre triangle of land was part of Massachusetts, having been incorporated as a district in 1838 — but in name only. There was no post office or police department, and the residents didn’t vote or pay taxes to the state. To the east of Boston Corners, the Berkshire Mountains presented a formidable barrier for law enforcement from Massachusetts. Connecticut to the south and New York to the north and west also acted to insulate the area from Massachusetts’ law.

Between 4,000 and 10,000 fight fans overran the hamlet for the match that ended with Morrissey winning in 37 rounds.

The strange history of the hamlet of Boston Corners and the illicit bare-knuckle prize fight held there in 1853 have caught the imagination of many people through the years and continue to do so today. One of those is Richard Rosenzweig, a jazz drummer by profession and screenwriter by avocation, who has spent three years researching and writing a script, “Hell’s Acres,” based on a somewhat obscure 1938 novel of the same name.

According to Rosenzweig, his fascination with the story of the hamlet began when he bought a house in Hillsdale four years ago. After visiting friends in Boston Corners he learned about the area’s history and when his brother, an artist who head been living in the county for several years, introduced him to the novel “Hell’s Acres” by Clay Perry and John Pell, he couldn’t resist.

“I fell in love with it,” he said, adding that he had never intended to write an historical drama, but felt the story was too good to pass up.

The story revolves around James Grayson, a horse breeder in Saratoga who goes undercover to break up a gang of horse thieves from Boston Corners. The climax of the story takes place during the Morrissey-Sullivan fight.

“It reads like a boy’s adventure story,” said Rosenzweig.

According to him, many of the novel’s characters and settings were based on fact, but the main character and the story itself are fictional.

Rosenzweig said he read the book once and skimmed through it from time to time in order to make the story his own.

“I loved doing the research,” he said. “And it was cool that I got to write most of it here.”

He said he would often drive by many of the locations where the story took place.

Rosenzweig recently had the chance to hear his words come alive at Time and Space Limited in Hudson, during the March 2 read-through of “Hell’s Acres.” The event was part of the Movies Without Pictures program by Upstate Independents, an organization that acts as a resource for independent filmmakers in the Northeast.

There are plans for a similar event in April.