There is something quite alluring about the mountains in the Hudson Valley: the history they hold, the beautiful hikes, and the quaint towns dotting the river. It is quite potentially my favorite place on Earth. Always been a fan of hiking and an advocate for geocaches that are not Park and Grab, but rather offer a unique and wonderful experience, I have taken this virtual and crafted it into an "adventure" as best as I can.
This virtual will require a moderate amount of steep hiking, and, if you prefer my suggested route of hiking from the Breakneck Ridge Metro North station, will be a full-day experience (with other caches along the way). If you prefer, however, you can use the shorter hike waypoint for an excursion that will last a few hours. Hopefully, you will see some great views, exotic amphibians, and brazen birds along your way.
All information gathered for this cache can be found here: https://www.mrlocalhistory.org/signal-beacons/
This virtual will take you to North Mount Beacon. Enjoy!
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Welcome to Beacon, New York. What an odd name! What could it possibly be from? Turns out, its namesake is a surprisingly unknown piece of local history, influential in the early American Revolutionary War.
Our story begins with General William Alexander, known locally as the Earl of Stirling, from Basking Ridge, New York. Charged by George Washington with creating a communication network utilizing burning pyres or "beacons" along the Hudson Valley to communicate British army movements.
Stirling engineered a network of Beacons throughout the New York area, stretching from here, Beacon, New York, all the way through the Watchung Mountains in New Jersey. In 1779, when George Washington moved the Continental Army into New Jersey, a total of 23 beacons were erected under Stirling's orders:
Each of the beacons are to be of the following dimensions: at bottom, fourteen feet square, to rise in a pyramidal form to about eighteen or twenty feet high, and then to terminate about six feet square, with a stout sapling in the center of about thirty feet high from the ground.
The following logs to be cut as near the place as possible: twenty logs of fourteen feet long and about one foot diameter; ten logs of about twelve feet long; ten logs of about ten feet long; ten logs of about nine feet long; ten logs of about eight feet long; twenty logs of about seven feet long; twenty logs of about six feet long. He should then sort his longest logs as to diameter, and place the four longest on the ground, parallel to each other, and about three feet apart from each other. He should then place the four next logs in size across these at right angles, and so proceed until all the logs of fourteen feet be placed. Then he is to go on in the same manner with logs of twelve feet long, and when they are all placed, with those of lesser size, till the whole are placed, taking care, as he goes on, to fill the vacancies between the logs with old dry split wood or useless dry rails and brush, not too close, and leaving the fifth tier open for firing and air. In the beginning of his work to place a good stout sapling in the center, with part of its top left, about ten or twelve feet above the whole work. The two upper rows of logs should be fastened in their places with good strong wooden plugs or trunnels.
General Alexander (Lord Stirling Letter) – Benson John Lossing, The Pictorial Field-book of the Revolution (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1852
It took 24 men from the nearest regimen of each beacon to be constructed a total of 1 day to cut the total number of trees needed for the construction of each beacon. The Watchung Mountains became Washington's impenetrable fortress. In June 1780, two British attacks were attempted on Morristown via the Hobart Gap out of Elizabethtown. Both these attacks were doomed to fail from the start, as notification using the beacon network allowed the Washington army to mobilize and swarm the Hobart Gap before the British had even arrived. Following the construction of the beacon network, the British never penetrated Washington's defensive line. Other attempted and failed attacks included at Scotch Plains in 1777, and Springfield in 1780.
On November 25, 2008, to celebrate the 225th anniversary of the evacuation by British Troops, instead of lighting fires, a group of organizations recreated eleven symbolic Xenon light displays that lit up six New Jersey beacon areas and five in the Hudson River Valley National Heritage Area to honor “the beacons” honoring evacuation day, the day the British formally left America back on November 25. 1783. Mount Beacon was one of the sites lit for this event.
The City of Beacon once consisted of two villages, Matteawan and Fishkill Landing. When the villages merged in 1913, the name Beacon was chosen due to its historical significance as the northernmost terminus of the network.
After the war, the signals were mostly forgotten, only a few commemorated with markers, leaving the location of many to be long forgotten. Luckily, the Daughters of the American Revolution were able to reconstruct several beacons out of stone near their original locations, including this one on Mount Beacon.
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To log this cache, please send answers to the following to the CO:
1. From the location of the monument, what is the farthest that you can see (may depend on weather), and where is the closest location of another Beacon that you can see from North Mount Beacon? (The other beacons no longer exist, requires some research on the former locations)
2. Knowing the initial dimensions of Stirling's prescribed beacons, how does the modern DAR memorial differ from these specifications, if at all?
3. What does the DAR plaque refer to the Revolutionary War as?
4. What type of timber is in the vicinity of the DAR memorial that would have been used for the lighting of the beacon? Does it match particularly well with Stirling's specifications on the type and quality of wood?
5. Please take a picture of either your GPS with your name visible on a piece of paper or yourselves (if comfortable with that) in front of the DAR memorial.
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Virtual Rewards 3.0 - 2022-2023
This Virtual Cache is part of a limited release of Virtuals created between March 1, 2022 and March 1, 2023. Only 4,000 cache owners were given the opportunity to hide a Virtual Cache. Learn more about Virtual Rewards 3.0 on the Geocaching Blog.