forty years, and during that time, I worked with my seventh graders a lot on backyard history. One of the themes that I focused upon was the history of the NYC water supply system. People always ask me, “Well, how did you get interested in the water supply system, of all topics?” And I guess it goes back to my childhood because when I was born and raised in downtown Ossining, my father worked as the baker in the Sing-Sing Correctional Facility—then Sing-Sing Prison—and we lived right across the street. kind of started to come out. (...) When I was teaching at Ossining at the middle school, my curriculum was simply backyard history, or local history, and one of my themes was to try to get the kids out of school, and get them into the streets to study architecture, to study a variety of things. The Hudson River, restoration of downtown Ossining, because we were going through in the 1970s, 80s, even into the early 90s, going through some urban removal—urban renewal—whatever you wanted to call it. So the kids were always working on projects, etc. One of the key times of the year, we took the kids on the aqueduct in the spring and in the fall, and we walked over a period of five school days, not successive but throughout the year. We would take them from Croton all the way down to Van Cortlandt Park in Yonkers, using buses; we would do, oh, five to six miles each trip. Lunch was planned; I had chaperones of course going with us, etc. And what I would do is, I would teach that particular part of the aqueduct, let’s say the Tarrytown-Irvington-Dobb’s Ferry portion. I would show them slides and show them photographs and teach them about that particular Oral Histories The Croton Waterworks’ century-and-a-half and forty-one miles have left a trail of not only structures but also stories. As it wends its way, both seen and unseen, through varying communities, the Waterworks creates different senses of place and types of human interaction. Remnants of the system’s conclusion in Manhattan are quiet: fragments of the Murray Hill Reservoir lie generally unvisited in the New York Public Library, and it is easy to walk past a gatehouse and, without knowing its significance, perceive it as simply one more handsome structure fading into the crowded city’s built landscape. For residents of Westchester County, where the system originates, the Aqueduct has a louder presence. They might not be acquainted with the history of the Waterworks—although a number of residents at least know of its underground existence—but at some point, they have likely walked or biked along the Aqueduct’s path marked by periodic ventilators and culverts; its raised berm might even run through their backyards. To supplement our interpretation plan, we have conducted oral histories with longtime residents of Croton-on-Hudson and Ossining, two towns where the Waterworks are integrated into everyday life. We hope that the following oral histories are only the beginning of an ongoing collection of memories from residents in the diverse communities traversed by the Aqueduct. Oral history is a vital tool for discovering and recording the human impact of the structures we are working to preserve. By safeguarding and sharing the stories of people’s experiences with the Waterworks, we can convey the importance of protecting these structures and cultivate a more widespread connection to them at a personal level. So I had to walk to school—it was about four blocks to my elementary school—and I walked on this kind of dirt pathway. I never knew what it was, and I do remember that there were stones on both sides of this pathway, and that along the path was this stone figure that came out. It was like a monstrous stone structure that came out of the bottom of the path. Never really looked at it, never really noticed it for the most part. So, that was the Old Croton Aqueduct that actually still runs today through the middle of the Village of Ossining. So I think one of the motivating factors was, when I went through the Ossining schools, none of my teachers—through no fault of their own— ever mentioned the history of the Hudson River Valley, never mentioned the history of the Hudson River, never mentioned the history of Sing-Sing Prison, never mentioned Andre and Arnold and West Point, and they certainly never really talked about the water system. So when I graduated from college and went to the United States Army and came back, got a job as a teacher in Ossining, I think it was kind of my genealogy. It was kind of my background and desire to not only find out more about local history itself, but it was my childhood that Section 4: