Toll House

With only 27,496 people in all of Columbia County in 1790, it is little wonder the roads were abysmal. Usually, just one-lane tracks hewed by the woodsman’s axe, roads had stumps protruding in their centers, turned to quagmires in spring and were full of drifted snow in winter.

That situation prevailed until 1799, when the New York Assembly authorized creation of the Columbia Turnpike Corporation for “improving the road from the city of Hudson to the line of Massachusetts on the route to Hartford.”

The corporation sold shares of stock to finance the construction of the Columbia Turnpike. Today, Route 23/23B follows the path of the old turnpike. The stockholders recouped their investment by collecting tolls along the road over the next 107 years. Three toll houses were built: West Gate, a limestone building still standing in Greenport; the now-gone Middle Gate in Martindale near the Taconic Parkway and East Gate, shown here, a wood frame building in East Hillsdale.

The tolls collected reflected the economy of the time. A “score” (20) of cattle could pass for 18 cents while it was only 5 cents for the same number of pigs. A four-wheeled carriage cost 18 cents while a sulkey with one horse was reduced to 10 cents. And so it went … “Every stagecoach or stage waggon, 16 cents, Every waggon or cart drawn by two horses or oxen, 10 cents, Every wagon drawn by one horse, 6 cents”

They sound like modest enough charges, but 18 cents in 1800 would be equivalent to $4.50 today, a heavy burden if a traveler had to pass the point regularly in an era when a farm laborer made 25 to 50 cents a day.

The toll houses operated until 1907, when the county bought the rights from the Columbia Turnpike Corporation. East Gate became a private residence but was largely abandoned by the 1980s and ’90s. Today it has been placed on both the State and National Historic Registers and a group of local residents, Friends of East Gate, are working to restore it as a reminder of the role the Columbia Turnpike played in the development of America in the early years of the Republic.