Rondout. Rondout, is situated in Ulster County, New York on the Hudson River at the mouth of Rondout Creek. Originally a maritime village, the arrival of the Delaware and Hudson Canal helped create a city that dwarfed nearby Kingston. Rondout became the third largest port on the Hudson River. Rondout merged with Kingston in 1872. It now includes the Rondout-West Strand Historic District. Rondout stands at the mouth of Rondout Creek, which empties into the Hudson through a large, protected tidal area. It was established by the Dutch in the seventeenth century as an Indian trading post. Furs brought from inland areas down the Rondout, Wallkill River and Esopus Creek were sent by boat down the Hudson River to New York City. The name derives from the fort, or redoubt, that was erected near the mouth of the creek. In the Dutch records of Wildwyck, however, the spelling used to designate this same fort is invariably Ronduyt during the earliest period, with the present form rondout appearing as early as November 22, 1666. As late as the 1820s, Rondout was a small hamlet. As the Philadelphia coal market was saturated with Lehigh coal, bringing the price down, William and Maurice Wurts developed the Delaware and Hudson Canal as a way to deliver their anthracite from Carbondale, Pennsylvania to New York City. After the opening of the canal in 1828, the area of Rondout rapidly transformed from farmland into a thriving maritime village. The last several miles of the canal, which linked coal mines in northeastern Pennsylvania to the Hudson River and markets beyond, followed Rondout Creek to reach the Hudson River. Irish laborers came to dig the canal and many of them stayed to work on it after its completion. Businessmen established stores to serve the workers. Steamboats, sloops, schooners, and barges loaded with passengers and cargo regularly left the port bound for New York City. New industries developed such as brick and cement manufacturing, bluestone shipping, and ice-making. As canal traffic increased, homes and commercial businesses were built along the slope upward from the Rondout Creek. By 1840, the village had a population of fifteen hundred, two hundred residences, two churches, six hotels and taverns, twenty-five stores, three freighting establishments, a tobacco factory, a gristmill, four boat yards, two dry docks, and the office and dock of the Delaware and Hudson Canal Company. Rondout Creek was the home of the Cornell Steamboat Company tugboat fleet, the dominant towing company on the Hudson from 1880 to the 1930s. The company was started in 1847. At one time it had a fleet of as many as sixty-two tugboats towing barges of coal and many other materials on the Hudson River to New York and other ports. Eventually Cornell had a virtual monopoly of towing on the Hudson River and employed hundreds of workers on their boats and in their workshops along the Rondout Creek. By 1872 more than thirty steamboats were based in Rondout, many of which, as well as a large number of barges and sailing vessels, were engaged in the transportation of stone, coal, cement, brick, and ice. Steamboats such as the sidewheel "Queen of the River", Kingston's Mary Powell, regularly plied between Rondout, New York, and points on the river. The little sidewheeler Norwich, was built in New York in 1836 by Lawrence & Sneeden of New York for the New York and Norwich Steamboat Co. Named for the City of Norwich, Connecticut, she was not big enough to compete with the large steamboats coming into service on the sound, and was sold to the New York & Rondout Line for passenger and freight service on the Hudson. Converted to towboat service, in which she from 1850 to 1923, the Norwich was known as "the Ice King". She was unexcelled as an ice-breaker, opening up the channels in the spring. The Erie Railroad paid her to clear a passage through the ice for its barge and steamboat traffic from the rail terminal at Piermont to New York. Verplanck and Collyer, in Sloops on the Hudson, write that Capt. Jacob Dubois required one week to work the Norwich 20 miles through heavy ice to New York City from Piermont. One of the longest-lived steamboats, the Norwich worked the Hudson until 1917 and survived until 1924.