How Pearl River got its name. History of the Rockland County area from the 1870's through Prohibition.
Copyright 2011 A.W. Dawson
Chapter 1.
Where to begin my story? I guess the best place would be at the beginning. At sixty nine years old, it’s a task to try to remember all the facts of the 1940’s and 1950’s. These were good and bad years to grow up in Muddy Brook, or better known as Pearl River, in New York State. During these early years of my life, in nineteen hundred and forty one, the year that I was born, we lived in Bardonia. NY. When I was in my second year, age two, we moved to this small town. I was the younger of two children. My brother was born in 1935 and was six years older than me. When I was born, he had already started school and was going into the first grade. It was a big step for my mother and father to make this move, it was just a short time after the attack on Pearl Harbor and our country was at war.
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Back in the early twenty’s, my grandmother had the foresight to buy the family burial plot at New Hempstead Cemetery for the large sum of about four dollars a grave and she bought ten grave sights on the same plot, which at today’s prices would be worth about three thousand a grave or about thirty thousand dollars for the whole plot. She did this when my grandfather John Dawson was killed in 1921 on the railroad. She also lies to rest there next to her husband John, her sons, Rob, Bill and George who passed in 1955, and my father Frank M. Dawson Sr., who died in 1975. Also buried in the plot is my mother, Anna M. Dawson who died in 1984 and is next to her husband Frank. My grandmother Elsie Runge who passed away in 1937 is there also.
I will go there as well, but not yet, I hope. My brother Frank Jr. also, if he so desires.
[Note from Brian Dawson: With regard to our family Cemetery Plot at Brick Church Cemetery in New Hempstead, upon dad’s passing, his ashes were interred there next to his mother last October (2015) after the subsequent cremation and Memorial Service in Pearl River. His brother Frank however, was not buried there with the rest of the family. It was decided by his wife to have other arrangements made in a cemetery in New Jersey.]
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CHAPTER 2.
I’m getting ahead of myself, so let’s go back to before my father and his brothers were born to 1842 when Spring Valley was known as Pascack and a small area was called Scotland, after a lot of the immigrants that settled there. The name of the town was changed to Spring Valley when some original settlers noticed a fresh water spring, feeding a large pond in the lower part of the town. Hence the name changes. There were other small towns sprouting fourth around this time of the century, close to Spring Valley, there was an area called Pamona, to the north, Nanuet and West Nyack, to the south, and then there was Muddy Brook, a small hamlet, south east ,about seven miles from the new named town of Spring Valley. The main thing that put the Valley as we called the town, on the map was the Lackawanna Rail Road, which in them days was the main source of transportation to Hoboken New Jersey, where ferry boats would take people to New York City across the Hudson River. The commuter trains left the Valley early in the morning and return up till nine o’clock at night. A lot of people worked in the city and the trains ran through the small towns like Nanuet and Muddy Brook, and small Jersey towns on the way to the ferries. This is where Grandpa Dawson worked, the railroad and shortly getting that job, he met and married Mary Wood, my grandmother around the 1890s.
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Back in 1841, there was a small hamlet four miles to the south east called Nannawitts Meadow, named after a Kakiat Indian, named Nannawitt who settled there. In 1856 the name of the hamlet was changed to Nanuet New York and remains that way today.
The Erie Railroad started service through this town in 1869 and it was known as The Pascack Line and ran through Nanuet, south towards Muddy Brook, and on into New Jersey. For the neighboring areas such as West Nyack and Bardonia, New York, This was good and many people utilized the rail to get to work. One of the first buildings constructed in this town was a railroad station building. Travel in these times was difficult, all the roads were dirt, full of pot holes and getting from place to place was either walk, or horse and wagon. Needless to say this method took a long time, but you did what you had to do. Close to the turn of the century the invention of the automobile made it somewhat easier to say the least. This town was located in the township or area known as Clarkstown, all part of Rockland County, New York. Travel to Spring Valley, four miles away or to Muddy Brook, two miles to the south was not that hard. This could be walked or done by horseback or horse and wagon, which ever was available to you at the time.
Muddy Brook was another small hamlet in 1841 with some small bordering areas such as Naurashaun after the Indians that settled there and Orangeburg, New York. The small town was nothing much to speak of in those days. A fellow named Julius Brauensdorff came here in the late 1860s, bought up a lot of property, which was pretty cheap back then because most of it was wet lands, with a small river or brook running through the middle of the land. Julius did a lot of planning for his property during those years and in 1869 when the railroad came through his land, it was time for bigger and better things to happen to Muddy Brook.
In 1872 a young doctor came to town and was working around some property he had bought along the small brook of which the town was named. He noticed something in the water and bent down to get a better look and found that there were some mussels in the stream. He picked about a half a dozen out of the water and opened them all and most of them were empty, but two of them contained small pearls. His name was Dr. Ves Bogert. In that year, that was the end of Muddy Brook and the new name of the town was changed to Pearl River, New York.
Pearl River was a border town with Mountvale, New Jersey and being a border town there was a lot of wagon traffic between the two states. This small town was only two miles south on the main dirt road or by railroad.
Another area close to Pearl River was Blauvelt, New York, about five miles east of town. After the town was renamed Mr. Braunsdorf started to plan out the roads of the town, of which was on most of his land. He made the main thoroughfare Central Avenue and two streets parallel to that were Washington Avenue on the north side and Franklin Avenue on the south side. Main Street ran across all three streets, he named the streets after President Washington and Ben Franklin, both men whom he admired greatly. Mr. Braunsdorf became known as the Father of Pearl River and rightfully so.
He also built a factory in town that built sewing machines about the late 1880s or so. He was an inventor of some of the machines the factory turned out. It also produced some kinds of printing machines. The business grew rapidly and employed most of the people that moved to his town of Pearl River. Buildings were going up rapidly in town and new homes were being built and new streets were being made all over the town. His company was called the Aetna Sewing Machine Company and later on in years became the Dexter Folder Company. This factory and these companies employed many of the residents of the town. It was located on Central Avenue just over the train tracks and it had its own railroad siding for shipping and receiving materials for the factory. Mr. Braunsdorf was no dummy and planned everything out for his town very well.
While Mr. Braunsdorf was busy with his factories and helping to lay out more of the town a young man named Ernest Lederle came to the area north of town towards Nanuet and bough a large parcel of land to build his pharmaceutical plant. He also wanted to take advantage of the railroad for shipping and getting supplies. The plant started to be built in 1906 and when finished at the point they wanted at that time, hired many people from both Pearl River and Nanuet to work there. Towns grew very fast, housing boomed, schools had to be built and food stores had to supply the many people that were coming into this area. Things were going well for both towns; it was too good to be true. The railroad station was built in town as well as many other buildings which still stand today.
Times were good until the early 1914’s; the First World War started and many of our young men went in the different armed forces. They went to fight and die for their wonderful country, the United States of America. This was to be the war to end all wars and it ended in 1918. We lost many fine men and woman. Lederle Laboratories made a lot of plasma and medicine for the war and was working overtime to keep up with the demand. After the war was over, over there, like George M Cohen sang, the Yankee Doodle Dandy’s were coming home. The returning veterans needed care and jobs to support their families and get the country back in shape.
Chapter 4 (Chapter 3 does not exist.)
Now that I have talked about the Spring Valley side of the family, the Dawson side, let’s talk about Mom side, the Runge side. My Grandfather, William Runge Sr., was born in a small town outside Hamburg, Germany in 1872. Not much is known about his early life except that he came to America by ship, in 1887, when he was fifteen years old. His family was poor in Germany and he did not have that much schooling and went to work in the town’s small brewery and worked with the brew meister there at the age of twelve. He was a good worker and learned the art of brewing fairly well. The land of golden opportunity was calling him and with his meager savings he caught a ship to New York City.
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Not knowing much English he was very nervous the first few days in the new land. The only job he knew was brewing beer and he thought he would try to get that kind of work. There was not that kind of work to be had at that time. Most of the breweries were located in Brooklyn, another borough of the city and he did not know of this fact, and wouldn’t know how to get there if he did. He had a little money left and he found a boarding house, which gave him a room and at least a roof over his head. Being only fifteen years old, he had a tough time finding a job.
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A few years after Giggy was born, in May 1909 my Mother was born into the Runge family. Anna Marie Runge, a very pretty baby as my Grandmother would always brag. Before she came along, the family had moved to a much bigger apartment, not far away from the first one, still on Tremont Avenue, still in the Bronx. It was a nice neighborhood and it was easy for Pop to take the trolley car down to work at the hotel. After working there for many years he became the head waiter in the main dining room and was well respected.
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Pop had a lot of friends and connections at the Waldorf Astoria and he knew the ins and outs of a lot of things. He knew where people could go to have a good time, get tickets to all the shows on Broadway, and sporting events, baseball games and prize fights. He had the ways and means to get the so called big shots what they wanted and needed. He knew Lillian Russell and the Ziegfield Follies and J. P. Morgan, the banker and some of the Rockefeller family. This was the roaring twenty’s and the whole city and the country was one big party. The big war was over and everybody was making a buck. Where ever and whatever they had to do to make it. Then the bottom fell out of everything, the Stock Market crashed in 1928 and the whole country went belly up. Big investors lost millions, businesses went bankrupt and there were banks in big trouble. People that had savings in banks lost everything, work in the country stopped and the bread lines were all over the city. Times were hard and I mean hard.
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Prohibition did not hurt the three Runge brothers, to the contrary, Uncle Whitey was in the girl business, the big girl business and I think they called it prostitution. He knew where to get girls for parties for the right people and brother Giggy was running illegal whiskey for the same parties and Uncle al was the driver that delivered the girls and the booze to this many affairs all around the city, even to the Waldorf where their Father worked. Pop even set up some of the parties for his most important and rich people that he had served in the hotel dining room.
They had quite a good thing going on and they made a lot of money and of course, Mama and little Anna, knew nothing of what was going on. By this time Anna was almost finished with school and she had a part time job as an operator in the phone company and was helping Mama with the laundry. Mama always had a clean pressed white shirt for Pop to go to work at the hotel.