Portal:Hudson Valley

U.S. Route 44 in the state of New York is a major east–west thoroughfare in the Hudson Valley region of the state. Its entire 65.98-mile (106.18 km) length is maintained by the New York State Department of Transportation, with the exception of the Mid-Hudson Bridge, which is maintained by the New York State Bridge Authority. The portion of the route in New York begins at an intersection with US 209 and New York State Route 55 (NY 55) near the hamlet of Kerhonkson and ends at the Connecticut state line near the village of Millerton. The road passes through rural parts of Ulster and Dutchess Counties before crossing into Litchfield County, Connecticut.

• ... that Ward's Castle (pictured), on the state line between Rye Brook, New York and Greenwich, Connecticut, is believed to be the first reinforced concrete building in the United States?
• ... that the Bergh-Stoutenburgh House, one of only two remaining Dutch Colonial stone houses in Hyde Park, New York, has been converted into a Japanese restaurant?
• ... that the Peter C. DuBois House in Beacon, New York was reused as a sanatorium for much of the 20th century?

William Henry Seward, Sr. (May 16, 1801 – October 10, 1872) was the 12th Governor of New York, United States Senator and the United States Secretary of State under Abraham Lincoln and Andrew Johnson. An outspoken opponent of the spread of slavery in the years leading up to the American Civil War, he was a dominant figure in the Republican Party in its formative years, and was widely regarded as the leading contender for the party's presidential nomination in 1860 – yet his very outspokenness may have cost him the nomination. Despite his loss, he became a loyal member of Lincoln's wartime cabinet, and played a role in preventing foreign intervention early in the war. On the night of Lincoln's assassination, he survived an attempt on his life in the conspirators' effort to decapitate the Union government. As Johnson's Secretary of State, he engineered the purchase of Alaska from Russia in an act that was ridiculed at the time as "Seward's Folly", but which somehow exemplified his character. His contemporary Carl Schurz described Seward as "one of those spirits who sometimes will go ahead of public opinion instead of tamely following its footprints."