Let’s meander along Benson Road in Wassaic

Down in the Steelworks section of Wassaic, just to the east of the junction of routes 81, 3 and Old Route 22, is the easterly entrance to what we know as Benson Road as it makes an ascent up the southern end of what was called the Oblong Mountain on an 1876 map (Amenia Historical Society [AHS]). Benson is a family name whose history goes back to the mid 1700s of Colonial America; and, who had two signers: John Benson and Joseph Benson, ​on the Roll of Honor of loyalty to the colonies in 1775, according to Newton Reed in his “Early History of Amenia.”Reed further says that “Joseph Benson was an early resident of the south part of the town where the family has remained in considerable numbers.” James H. Smith’s “History of Duchess County, 1683-1882” writes that a Joseph H Benson, born in 1815, was a Wassaic farmer with 900 acres of land. AHS archival maps with dates from 1850 through 1930 show a J. Benson family on the road. Hadley H. Benson, born in 1882, resided there through the mid-20th century and held many acres of ancestral land extending southward. Joyce Ghee and Joan Spence, in their Harlem Valley Pathways series (1998), state that part of the lands bought by New York state in 1925 as the site for the Wassaic State School was from Hadley’s farm land. This road passes a small cemetery, ​The Steelworks Burying Ground, ​where our first settler Richard Sackett was buried “somewhere” in 1746 said Reed. In 2004 AHS placed a commemorative stone there as part of the 300th anniversary of his land grant by the British government in 1704. And on June 12, 2014, the gravestone of Hannah Judson was replaced by her descendant, James Buckley, and his family, of Columbia County. AHS helped with both the stone and the ceremony. Reed tells us that a Samuel Judson settled here around 1769 and that “his grave is near the Steelworks.”In the 20th century, besides Hadley Benson’s, there were the farms of Albert Mandel and Harry Bly, said Julian Strauss in his “A Year in the Life” (2009). There is a great picture of Harry Sr. enjoying a respite from farm duties in the AHS Cookbook of 2004; Bly tended the Sackett burying ground for years. The former Bly residence still proudly has the name “First Settler Farm” on one of its buildings. Also in the late 1900s to ​early 2000s there was, on the easterly end of this road, the Box Canyon Farm with its great horses. Today the residences, along the road that follows its historic route, are handsome and well kept, as is the cemetery.The Aug. 28, 1991, edition of the Harlem Valley Times headlined that an Amenia man was charged with murder following a year-long investigation by the then Dutchess County district attorney. A resident of Benson Road, Frances Feldman, was the homicide victim; she was reportedly beaten by her husband, Herbert Feldman, a chiropractor who practiced out of their home on the easterly section of the road as it proceeded to rejoin with County Route 3. They were in their 60s, had been married nine years and lived in Amenia for eight of those years. He pleaded not guilty but was convicted of criminally negligent homicide.Arlene Iuliano is the Amenia town historian.