Hike Hackett Hill Trail (U.S. National Park Service)

Length: 1.1 mile loop

Difficulty: Easy

Trailhead Location: Parking is at the Hackett Hill parking lot, on East Market Street.

Terrain: Easy to moderat walking on woodland paths with some rough surface in spots.

History: With a presence in Hyde Park dating back to the mid-1800s, generations of Hacketts earned a name as some of the region’s leading philanthropists. The Hackett Trail takes you on a historic path through farm and forest, on land that was donated by the family for the express purpose of recreation and youth activities. The trail also takes you to the site of an important archeological discovery: a once-thriving African-American community that prospered in the 1700s.

Trail map available here.

Rules & Regulations

Safety first!
Trail is open daily sunrise to sunset.
Bikes are not permitted on any trails at this site.
Garbage cans are not available. This is a Carry In,Carry Out trail.
Stay on marked trails only.
Hunting, trapping, or possession of firearms prohibited.
No Fires, camping, or swimming.
Pets must be leashed; You must clean up after your pet.
Removal or disturbance of flora, fauna, or cultural resources is strictly prohibited.
Motorized vehicles prohibited.

In Case of Emergency Call 911

Report Safety & Security Issues to (845) 229-9380
Report Trail Maintenance Issues to (845) 229-1521

Entrance fees may apply, see Fees & Passes information.

Easy to moderate walking on woodland paths with some rough surface in spots.

The Hyde Park Explorer Podcast

Enjoy these episodes of the Hyde Park Explorer podcast series as you walk the trails.

The Hacketts of Hyde Park
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The Hacketts were Irish immigrants who arrived in the Hudson Valley in 1852. They established themselves as a successful Poughkeepsie merchant family.

Credit / Author:

National Park Service
Audio Transcript

This charming wood frame home with its welcoming porch, sheltered two generations of the Hackett family, who loved the surrounding land, knew its history, and in time, donated the property to the people of Hyde Park.
The Hacketts were Irish immigrants who arrived in the Hudson Valley in 1852. They established themselves as a successful Poughkeepsie merchant family.
Second generation John A. Hackett became an attorney. He purchased this land but before he built the house, he built the hill where it stands! Hackett always wanted a house on a hilltop, so he had wagon-loads of dirt hauled in to provide the elevation where the house was built. The estate, known as “Crum Elbow Farm” and later, Hackett Hill, was built in 1868. One of John’s two sons, John M, lived there next, along with his wife, the attorney Charlotte Cunneen.
John M. and Charlotte were strongly committed to their community It was Charlotte who deeded the property to the Boy Scouts of America, and required that it always be used by a non-profit organization.
In 1997, the community of Hyde Park became a new beneficiary of the Hackett’s gift, as former Town Recreation Director, Tom Meyering, explains…
TOM MEYERING SOUND BITE: The Hackett Foundation is one of the biggest foundations in the county, and they have supported all kinds of organizations in the county – basically, anything to do with young people – anything to do with preserving land. The Hackett property is truly an amazing resource. In the eyes of the town, it’s a place where the town residents can come together. All sorts of activities…and feeling good about being a member of the town. And Hackett has helped bring people together.

Crum Elbow Creek
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Crum Elbow Creek and its streams provided water power that made millworks vital to Hyde Park commerce.

Credit / Author:

National Park Service
Audio Transcript

There are two chapters in the history of this rugged landscape. The first begins where it always does – with nature.
Geologist Russell Urban-Meade tells the story of how this rugged landscape came to be…
RUSSELL URBAN-MEADE SOUND BITE: Well, a lot of people think that glaciers formed Hyde Park – and they didn’t. They are what I like to think of as the sandpaper. They came in long after the interesting geologic activity was long done. The Hudson Valley geology is a function of plate tectonic activity that was between 450 and 250 million years ago.
The tectonic activity compressed a lot of our rock formations up into their strange angles today, which is why you see rock outcrops that look like they are going straight up to the sky.
And the glaciers ground up the easy stuff, and sanded things off, but did not carve the Hudson Valley in any sense of the word.
A lot of the streams follow the ridges and the troughs that follow the compression of the tectonic activity. And so the direction that the Crum Elbow follows is really governed by that hard rock geology.
Glaciers advanced through the Hudson Valley more than one time and the most recent glacial advance melted off about 15-16 thousand years ago. Mastodons were alive through the period when we had glaciations in the Hudson Valley and so today every once and awhile we find semi-intact dead mastodons in ponds. And it’s very exciting and it indicates that the past was teeming with life, just as it is today.
NARRATOR: The second chapter of our landscape story begins as the first settlers arrived. Here is Carney Rhinevault, Hyde Park town historian, to continue the story …
SOUND BITE: CARNEY RHINEVAULT: Well; Hyde Park was settled by Jacobus Stoutenberg, His son in law, Richard D’Cotillion, started the first Hyde Park business – at Stoutenberg Landing – a shipping dock approximately where our train station is now. Local farmers would ship their products – hay, barley, oats, corn, milk, cheese, butter, apples, cider – down to NYC using the river docks. Some of the business at the waterfront – it was a very vibrant area – was shipping, milling, distilling, wholesale and retail mercantile, lumbering, tanning, shipbuilding, cooperage, and hotel enterprises right at the waterfront.
NARRATOR: Crum Elbow Creek and its streams provided water power that made millworks vital to Hyde Park commerce. Hyde Park native John Golden shares his personal recollections of the mills that grew along with the community…
SOUND BITE: JOHN GOLDEN Most of the commerce was developed along the CE Creek with the mills that was the beginning of the settlement of Hyde Park. You can see remnants - If you hiked up the creek, in different spots there’s an old mill wheel. The Cudner Mill – a sawmill; the Dickensons – grain mill – at Trout’s Mill they ground grain, too – The Carters was an edge tool mill, grinding steel...East of the village were all farms in those days, and they grew grain and brought it to the local mills along the creek. Each of the mills had a wagon road giving access to the mills.
NARRATOR: Today, there’s a new chapter being written to continue the history of Crum Elbow Creek. It’s a story of conservation and caretaking, told by a community dedicated to the preservation of the rich natural and cultural histories of Crum Elbow Creek, who respect the past as the foundation for the future.

Gorilla Rock
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Hackett Hill has its own claim to creature fame: a big, bulging boulder aptly named Gorilla Rock.

Credit / Author:

National Park Service
Audio Transcript

YOUTH NARRATION: Boy #1: I’m telling you, I’ve seen it. It’s right over there. Boy #2: I don’t believe you. Boy #1: Well, you’re gonna believe. Because there it is. Girl #1: It’s…a gorilla head! Girl #2: It’s huge. And it’s scary. Boy #2: Not as scary as…where’s the rest of its body?
ADULT NARRATOR/JOE: OK, it’s not quite Bigfoot or even Sasquatch. But Hackett Hill has its own claim to creature fame: a big, bulging boulder aptly named Gorilla Rock. Walk around the rock and look for the shape of a gorilla’s head in the formation. Imagine what the Hackett children thought when they first discovered it while playing here in their woodland backyard!
There’s a reason why this rock is here. Did something bigger set it down? Let geologist Russell Urban-Meade explain…
RUSSELL URBAN-MEADE: Well, Gorilla Rock to a geologist is just a big boulder. But the question is, how did get there, and why does it look the way it does.
If you go just a little further away from the parking lot along the trail, you’ll see that there’s a whole series of rock outcrops where sediment flowed from deep basins and turned into rock.
The sediments were probably 450 million years old. It took many many millions of years getting buried more deeply and deeply and deeply…
And then later forces turned them up on an angle where they look like they’re going straight up to the sky. And then glaciers kind of sanded them off.
But Gorilla Rock isn’t really different from those except that Gorilla Rock is separate from those: Gorilla Rock is a big chunk of that that either tumbled by gravity to its position or was transported a short distance in the post glacial period but it’s one or the other.
When it first tumbled it may not have even looked like a gorilla head. Those are some of the mysteries of geology.
ADULT NARRATOR: Since the 1980s, Boy Scouts from throughout Dutchess County have volunteered hundreds of hours to improve the woodland trails and the area surrounding Gorilla Rock, building an outdoor teaching theater, where kids can reconnect with nature and make their own discoveries. Thanks to their work, this formidable rock became a friendly focal point for hikers and day-campers.

Freedonia Lane
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Flanked by sturdy stone walls, Freedonia Lane see was a vital commercial artery and the focal point for a vibrant early African American community.

Credit / Author:

National Park Service
Audio Transcript

For just a moment, let your imagination guide your senses. Look straight down this trail and gaze back into the late 1700s. It’s a typical workday on Guinea Lane, later to become Freedonia Lane, a major thoroughfare, connecting to mills on the Crum Elbow Creek. Stone and lumber head off to market, replaced by bartered goods. Feel the rhythm of this road, the wide, straight path providing room for the smooth, simultaneous passage of large wagons, heavy ox carts, and people walking. Flanked by sturdy stone walls, the Freedonia Lane you see with your mind’s eye is a vital commercial artery - and the focal point for a vibrant early African American community, the Guinea Community of Freedonia Lane.
The Black History Committee of Dutchess County Historical Society, began research into the community in 2001, led by Guinea Community Project Education Consultant and Historian Susan Lindner…
SOUNDBITE SUSAN LINDNER: Almost immediately, in the FDR Library I found documents that attested to the fact that not only was had this been community –it was a sizeable community of freed and fugitive slaves. Luckily for us, we discovered that this land was undisturbed, it had never been plowed – even though it became the John Hackett estate – the land the people of Guinea lived on wasn’t disturbed. We walked into an archaeologist’s dream, and a historian’s dream because the records of the St. James Church - this church kept its records – I found the books that had the records of the people in the church – the founders of the church – bringing their slaves in for baptism…it was an amazing experience just to read. So I was able to look at these records and trace families over generations.
NARRATOR: From the 1790s through the 1820s, the Guinea Community, or Guineatown, was a neighborhood, filled with families. Many in the Community farmed, worked in the mills that dotted Crum Elbow Creek, or entered into trades such as shoemaking. Others worked for “The River People”, wealthy white settlers who lived on the banks of the Hudson. Susan Lindner…
SOUND BITE SUSAN: The primary relationship between the people of Guinea was with the river families – people in Guinea worked on the estates, they supported the river people by doing their laundry, by cleaning their houses, by doing their gardening, most likely helping to raise their children – some of this work was done by slaves prior to 1829 but it was still done by the free people, who were living in Guinea also.
NARRATOR: As more is learned about the Guinea Community, the more it is treasured by the people of Hyde Park…
SOUND BITE SUSAN: The community of Hyde Park has embraced the Guinea Community. There’ve been so many elders in the community who have sought me out to say, “We never ever knew- never suspected- that it could have been a community of freed and fugitive African American people who created their own town with this road running through it – and to think that it was the main thoroughfare through this really active African American community.”

Primus Martin of the Guinea Community
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In the late 1700s this landscape was a thriving neighborhood. And one of the most notable residents was Primus Martin, an African American whose name appears frequently in town records.

Credit / Author:

National Park Service
Audio Transcript

In the late 1700s this landscape was a thriving neighborhood. And one of the most notable residents was Primus Martin, an African American whose name appears frequently in town records.
Christopher Lindner, Archaeologist in Residence at Bard College, and the Director of the Guinea Community Archaeology Project, shares what his field studies have revealed about Primus Martin…
SOUND BITE CHRIS LINDNER: We focused on the Martin site because we know that the Martins were the leaders of the community – they’re identified years later – 50 years later – in notebooks of oral histories that are at the FDR library as being respected, as having quite a farm, as being industrious, and that Primus was recognized as the leader of the African American community.
Primus Martin is known as a “Bard Negro” in the historic record. Meaning not that he was a slave, but that he worked for the Bard family, and that he was African American.
The only description we have of the dwellings comes from archeology, where in two instances we can see the foundation walls of the houses we’ve excavated to confirm. In one case, the Primus Martin site, the foundation is 9x11 feet on the inside of stone walls.
The thing about 9x11 feet that is so intriguing as a size, is that it matches very closely African American houses in the southeast and in west Africa in Guinea, in fact.
In terms of the artifacts we’ve found at the Primus Martin site in particular, almost everything is fragmented – small pieces.
We’ll continue to excavate around the house to determine if there was another room, or porches, we began to find this year concentrations of artifacts and what we call eco-facts – bones and teeth and shell. Every item is important to us – we never know what we can learn from a particular piece
NARRATOR: Susan Lindner, as the Education Consultant and Historian for the Guinea Community Project has also been carefully researching Primus Martin, from a historic perspective…
SOUND BITE SUSAN LINDNER: Very early on in my research I discovered a map that was (EDIT) the land where the Guinea Community had settled. This land showed that Primus Martin owned three acres. We knew that he was a free man from the 1790 census. Then we find out that he owns land. I stumbled upon a deed that shows that Primus Martin in 1825 sold half of his acreage to his daughter Eliza and her husband James Phoenix. He sold them the land for $3.00, with the stipulation that Primus and his wife, Elizabeth, could live there till he died.
We don’t know what Primus did for a living – the records just talk about him being the leader of the community, of being revered. But no one ever talks about what Primus actually did other than own this land, and have a farm.
NARRATOR: With each future discovery, Hyde Park is drawn deeper into its past.

Hike Hackett Hill Trail

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The Hyde Park Explorer Podcast

The Hacketts of Hyde Park

Crum Elbow Creek

Gorilla Rock

Freedonia Lane

Primus Martin of the Guinea Community

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The Hyde Park Explorer Podcast

The Hacketts of Hyde Park

Crum Elbow Creek

Gorilla Rock

Freedonia Lane

Primus Martin of the Guinea Community

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