The Daily Catch

19th-Century Black Master Gardener of Montgomery Place to be Honored with Cemetery Marker



Montgomery Place at Bard College.

The 19th-century Black master gardener who tended hundreds of plants and an arboretum at Montgomery Place, who hybridized two flower species, and who mentored white gardeners in Rhinebeck will soon be recognized with a plaque astride his burial place at the Methodist Church Cemetery on Cherry Street.

Alexander Gilson, whose birth is placed sometime before 1824 and whose death is listed as 1889, may or may not have been a slave during his life in Red Hook, but his accomplishments were remarkable regardless, in the eyes of Prof. Myra Armstead, the Lyford Paterson Edwards and Helen Gray Edwards Professor of Historical Studies at Bard College and an expert on Gilson.

Prof. Myra Armstead has studied the life of Alexander Gilson in detail.

Honoring his life, she says, is a turning point for Red Hook and for the Hudson Valley.

“It’s important for Red Hook residents to understand that the history of their town is more than the history of the elites along the banks of the Hudson River, which is often the way the Hudson Valley is celebrated,” Armstead said in an in-depth interview about her work on Gilson’s biography. “The Valley is generally seen only as the inspiration for the Hudson River School of landscape painters or for early American literature, such as Washington Irving’s Legend of Sleepy Hollow. Montgomery Place itself is generally recognized mainly as a prime example of early American architecture and landscape design, and that’s all. But there is more to the history of Montgomery Place because there is more to the history of the Hudson Valley.”

A panel describing Alexander Gilson’s accomplishments at Montgomery Place has been hung at the visitor center.

The Hudson Valley, Armstead notes, depended heavily on slave labor in the Colonial period because there was a strong need for farmhands and unskilled labor. Gilson had until recently been thought to have been a slave or born into slavery, as New York State did not abolish slavery until 1827. But New York had a manumission protocol that may have released Gilson’s mother from slavery and hence, freed him, too, before that date, Armstead said.

Even if he was not a slave, he is remarkable in other ways, said Armstead, author of Freedom’s Gardener: James F. Brown, Horticulture, and the Hudson Valley in Antebellum America (New York University Press, 2012), a lengthy study of another Black gardener in the area.

“He would have been exceptional as a craftsman and an independent businessman, as a property owner and in his recognition by the horticultural world,” Armstead said. “For a Black man in the early 1820s, each of those is an accomplishment of note. Most freed African-Americans did not have similar connections or capital upon which he was able to build a career.”

A small exhibition about Gilson was held at the Historic Red Hook Story Studio, behind the Elmendorph Inn, in 2019. Students enrolled in one of Armstead’s Bard courses helped mount the exhibit and discovered the connection to the Methodist Cemetery on Cherry Street because of the prior work of Historic Red Hook along with that of the former managing director of Montgomery Place, Amy Husten.

In 1874, while still working at Montgomery Place, Gilson bought land in Red Hook on the west side of River Road, just south of Barrytown Corners, where he eventually set up a nursery business, Armstead said. Around the same time, he also bought property in nearby Rhinebeck. When he retired from managing the Montgomery Place Nursery in 1885, he moved into a house he bought in the village of Red Hook at the northwest corner of Church and Fraleigh streets, Armstead said.

Alexander Gilson’s gravemarker at the Cherry Street Methodist Burial Ground in Red Hook Village.

Records from contemporaneous gardening journals show Gilson also was credited with the creation of two plants: a pink double-flowering begonia (Begonia ‘Gilsoni’) and a red-leafed iresine (iresine herbstii ‘Gilsoni’). The gardens also drew the admiration of Andrew Jackson Downing, the leading landscape architect in antebellum America.

The lingering question about whether Gilson was a slave while at Montgomery Place is centered in his supposed birth date, 1824, and records showing the number of slaves owned by Janet Livingston Montgomery, who owned the property in the early 19th century. In 1820, she is listed as owning 12 slaves. Armstead said that, for several years, the assumption has been that Gilson was among those. Supporting this presumption is that, in 1810, Montgomery bought a 2-year-old boy named Alexander and placed him into slavery.

But it is not clear today that this “Alexander” was Gilson, Armstead said, and there are no records listing the names of the slaves Montgomery owned. The 1824 birth date also now seems suspect because Gilson managed the gardens from 1835 until 1885. It seems unlikely that an 11-year-old, the age Gilson would have been had he been born in 1824, was the garden manager. Additionally, State and Federal census records vary in assigning his year of birth to 1818, 1819, 1820, or 1823.

“There’s no smoking gun and there were all sorts of gradations along the way to gradual manumission,” Armstead said. “We continue to puzzle over this question and hope to find evidence one way or another.”

In his final years, Gilson lived with his sister, Cornelia, and his mother, Sarah, who also spent many years employed by the Livingstons while living at Montgomery Place.

The new cemetery marker is being paid for with a $1,400 grant from the William G. Pomeroy Foundation, according to Elisabeth Tatum, executive director of Historic Red Hook. It will be commemorated on Oct. 9, the date for the kickoff of Historic Red Hook’s first month-long scavenger hunt cemetery crawl. New York State stopped funding roadside markers in 1939, so the foundation’s marker program, honoring people, places, things or events from 1740 to 1921, fills a gap. Since 2006, the Foundation has funded more than 700 markers in 58 New York State counties.


The commemorative ceremony at the Gilson gravesite, to celebrate the placement of a plaque in his honor, will take place at 3 p.m. on Oct. 9 at the Cherry Street Methodist Cemetery. Parking is available behind the Elmendorph Inn at 7562 North Broadway.

One response to “19th-Century Black Master Gardener of Montgomery Place to be Honored with Cemetery Marker”

  1. Brian Foran says:

    We bought the property on Church last year and had a neighbor tell us this history. It was really inspiring as we had set out that very day to begin replanting all of the gardens and landscaping that had been removed over time. I hope we did him proud. As we started interior renovations, it was really amazing to find the little remaining 1800’s hiding behind the 1950’s and later work.

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