III.

Discovery and Points of Interest

The Florentine navigator Giovanni da Verrazzano in 1524 became the first European to sail on the Hudson. The river was first explored in 1609 by the English navigator Henry Hudson, for whom it is named. The Hudson Valley was settled early in the 17th century by the Dutch and was of great commercial and military importance during the pre-Revolutionary period. During the American Revolution the Hudson was a strategic waterway and the site of many historic events, especially in the region around Newburgh and West Point. In 1807 the U.S. inventor Robert Fulton launched the Clermont, one of the first practical steamboats, on the Hudson. Trade on the river flourished after the completion of the Erie Canal in 1825. The Holland (1927) and Lincoln (completed 1957) vehicular tunnels and railroad tubes were built under the river as means to enter Manhattan (New York City). Among the Hudson bridges are the Rip Van Winkle Bridge (1935), at Catskill; the Kingston-Rhinecliff Bridge (1957), near Kingston; the Mid-Hudson Bridge (1930), at Poughkeepsie; the Newburgh-Beacon Bridge (1963), at Newburgh; the Bear Mountain Bridge (1924), near Peekskill; the Tappan Zee Bridge (1955), at Tarrytown; and the George Washington Bridge, at New York City. Points of interest along the Hudson include the U.S. Military Academy, at West Point, and the estate of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, at Hyde Park. A noted movement of 19th-century U.S. landscape painting that included Thomas Cole and Asher B. Durand is known as the Hudson River School.