KINGSTON – The City of Kingston will mark its 150th anniversary with a celebration on May 13 at 5:30 p.m. in Council Chambers at City Hall.
The event will include the burial of a time capsule filled with projects completed by Kingston City School District students that will be opened in 150 years, in the year 2172. There will be a musical performance by the Bruderhof, a display of original 19th-century archival documents relating to the history of Kingston and Rondout, and a special theatrical performance by Theater on the Road, which will portray the merger debate between Kingston’s first two mayors; James G. Lindsley from Rondout and William Lounsbery from the Village of Kingston.
“The City of Kingston is reaching an enormous milestone this year – celebrating 150 years since the villages of Kingston, Rondout and Wilbur joined together to form what we now know of as our City,” said Mayor Steven Noble. “It was a bold action, and we celebrate the vision and forethought that brought our great city into being.”
“Many Kingstonians know that Kingston dates back to the 1600s, but we don’t often think about the Village of Kingston and Villages of Rondout and Wilbur as three separate entities,” said Taylor Bruck, City of Kingston historian. “This celebration focuses on the merger of the villages into the unified City that we have today. Without this merger, it’s not certain we would have basic municipal functionality that we have today – things like a police force, hospitals, water department, high school, and our beautiful City Hall.”
In 1872, the villages of Kingston, Rondout, and Wilbur merged to form the City of Kingston. The original village of Kingston was settled in 1652 and became the first Capital of New York State by 1777 before it was burned by the British during the Revolutionary War that same year. The village of Rondout was officially incorporated in 1849 after experiencing an explosion of growth in both population and wealth due to the completion of the D&H Canal in 1828. The hamlet of Wilbur similarly experienced a period of rapid growth in the early 1800s due to the lucrative bluestone trade which lined New York City sidewalks.
With their downtown neighbors thriving, the old guard of uptown Kingston began to feel a bit alienated by their burgeoning and often rowdy rivals on the Strand. The village of Kingston proposed a merger into a consolidated city. Rondout and Wilbur were resistant at first, but after some back-and-forth over what the name of the new city should be, the newly formed City of Kingston was incorporated in 1872.
