About the Orange County Historical Society
The Orange County Historical Society was formed as an umbrella organization for the preservation and restoration of the history of Orange County and the Hudson Valley, and it is based at the site of the Clove (Greenwood) Furnace and Iron Works in the hamlet of Arden, in the Ramapo Valley that early settlers called "the Clove." The Society's museum there is devoted to the iron industry that dominated this corner of the county in the 1800s. A board of trustees oversees the work, most of which is carried out by volunteer committees.
The ironworks story begins in 1811, when James Cunningham of Warwick built a charcoal furnace, Greenwood Furnace, whose crumbling remains still stand about half a mile from the later works; iron from it was cast into cannonballs during the War of 1812. In 1827 Gouverneur Kemble, owner of the West Point Foundry at Cold Spring, and William Kemble of New York City bought 2,839 acres of the Greenwood property and soon controlled most of the region's mines. The larger Clove Furnace was built in 1854 by Robert and Peter Parrott, who ran the Greenwood Iron Works and sent its iron to the West Point Foundry, where Robert Parrott's rifled cannon, the Parrott rifle, was made for the Union army during the Civil War. The furnace shut down for good shortly after Robert Parrott's death in 1877. The Society also publishes an annual OCHS Journal of original research on Orange County and the Hudson Valley, which comes with membership, and sponsors a lecture series and an annual dinner.
Collections and Research Services
The archives, open to members and qualified researchers, hold what the Society describes as one of the most comprehensive collections of original documents on the Sterling Iron Railroad and iron mining in Orange County, along with records of other economic activity in the region. Named holdings listed on the Collections page include the Arden Farms Dairy Company records, the Rodney Johnson Collection on the Sterling Ironworks, the register of St. John's Church at Arden (the Greenwood Ironworks church), the Goodwill Church register, the Cadwallader Colden store daybook, and the 1779 tax assessments for the Hanover and Shawangunk precincts of Ulster County. An indexed Society Library collection and a digital collection on CatalogIt are searchable online, and the number of indexed items grows continually. The Society licenses images to publishers and offers custom research for a fee; the schedule of fees is on its website, and questions go to info@orangecountyhistoricalsociety.org or the Society's Facebook page, which it says gets the faster response. The church registers and tax lists are the kind of record covered in our guide to free family history research; for a burial in one of the old ironworks communities, see how to find where someone is buried.
Planning Your Visit
The Society is at 21 Clove Furnace Drive, Arden, NY 10910, on Arden Station Road just east of the New York State Thruway. The museum is currently open only by appointment on Wednesday mornings, so arrange a visit by email first; there is no public phone number on the website. Membership dues can be paid online, and the calendar at orangecountyhistoricalsociety.org lists lectures and the annual dinner. Across the county line to the south, the Historical Society of Rockland County in New City covers the neighboring Hudson Valley communities.
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