Hurley (CDP), New York

The first people known to have lived in the vicinity of the hamlet of Hurley were Esopus Indians, a northern branch of the Delaware. Dutch and Huguenot settlers moved there from Wiltwyck in the spring of 1662.[2] It was given the Dutch name, Nieu Dorp, (new village). Dissatisfied with their treatment by the Dutch, the Delaware attacked the villages of Hurley and Kingston in June 1663 in what is called the Second Esopus War. The village of eight houses was destroyed and several women and children were taken as captives. It was a year before all the captives were returned to their families.[3] Although the village was soon rebuilt some Huguenot settlers moved from Hurley to found New Paltz.

In September 1664 the Dutch colony of New Netherland Colony was taken over by the English. In 1669, Governor Francis Lovelace renamed some of the Dutch settlements with English names. Nieu Dorp became Horley, (pronounce Hurley) after the Lovelace ancestral home in Horley, England. He also relocated the troublesome English garrison into Marbletown, greatly easing tensions in the area.[3] Nonetheless, Hurley remained a Dutch provincial town in language, customs, and architecture, located along the Old Mine Road, which linked Dutch settlements in the Upper Delaware Valley with Kingston.

During the American Revolutionary War, British led by Generals John Burgoyne and Henry Clinton attempted to split the colonies in two by taking control of the Hudson River Valley. Burgoyne marched south from Canada while Clinton sailed north. On October 16, 1777, a British force under the command of General John Vaughan burned the village of Kingston, which was at that time New York's capital. Many people from Kingston fled to Hurley. With the burning of Kingston, the old stone Van Deusen House in neighboring Hurley served for a brief time as the state capital.

British troops were called back to Ponck Hockie to board their ships before they reached Hurley. The grain crop was saved from destruction in part by a four-hour artillery barrage made by the militia of the first Ulster regimen under Colonel Johannes Snyder and Major Adrian Wynkoop, which had delayed the British advance. As the British fleet moved upriver, General George Clinton encamped his troops at the village of Marbletown and moved his command to the Houghtaling House in Hurley in order to better monitor the British. Hurley was an ideal location for a military outpost, with roads providing access to the Kingston, the Strand on Rondout Creek and back roads to Saugerties and Katsbaan.

On October 10, 1777, Lt. Daniel Taylor of Captain Stewart's Company of the 9th Royal Regiment was captured at Little Britain in southern Ulster County, carrying an innocuous note from General Henry Clinton to General John Burgoyne. He was a loyalist junior officer who traveled in civilian clothes on horseback carrying messages between various units of the British Army. As was customary, the note was concealed in a small silver capsule screwed together in the middle.[4] Ordinarily, such messengers from either army were not considered spies of such a nature that their conviction would call for the death sentence. However, Nathan Hale of Connecticut had been captured by the British a year earlier and hanged as a spy. Lieutenant Taylor was tried in New Windsor by a Courts Martial composed largely of Connecticut officers and was condemned to be hanged "at such time and place as the General shall direct."[5]

American troops, trying to reach and defend Kingston from the British, set out from new Windsor and took Taylor with them. They reached Hurley on October 17, where Taylor was held in the Dumond House.[4] On the morning of October 18, Lt. Taylor was moved by horse and wagon to the sweet apple tree on the side of Schoolhouse Lane, where he was hanged.

After leaving Kingston, the British fleet sailed upriver to Saugerties where a raiding party crossed the river and burned the Livingston Estates at Clermont and Belvedere. Upon learning of Burgoyne's surrender at Saratoga, the British force set sail to the south and on the 24th, rejoined the British forces at Fort Clinton. Once the British threat had passed, General Clinton left Hurley and moved his troops south to their original base at Little Britain.

After the Civil War until the early 1900s, the largest industry was bluestone quarrying. In 1871 Hurley contained a Reformed church, two hotels, a store, a school-house, two wagon shops, two blacksmith shops, a shoe shop and about thirty dwellings. A wire suspension bridge, 160 feet long, crossed the creek at this place.[6]