Beacon's Historic Buildings Then and Now: 139 Rombout Avenue

Today, the nondescript, out-of-proportion appearance of the brick building at 139 Rombout Avenue belies the importance of its long reach back into Beacon’s past. That history includes four different private schools, “each an influential educational  institution of its day,” that once occupied this building in the stretch of years from 1885 to about 1920. And in the early 1920s, before the disastrous fire of January 1924 (which caused the loss of the third story in its rebuilding), 139 Rombout was reconfigured from school house to manufactory, with the Genuine Panama Hat Company producing straw hats there.

To sort out the tortuous history of the building we begin in 1885, when principal James Frederick Smith moved his small private school from Main Street in Fishkill Landing to a new expansive school house located in the undeveloped neighborhood of Wiltsie (now Rombout) Avenue. His school was called the “Mount Beacon Academy,” a preparatory boarding school for young men who planned to go onto higher education. Smith advertised (see above) the academy in big city (Chicago, Des Moines, St. Louis) newspapers across America, touting the school’s able instructors and beautiful comfortable home. The academy caught the attention of Professor James DeGarmo of Rhinebeck who had run a highly successful preparatory school in that village since 1860. Professor DeGarmo bought out Smith’s interest and opened his DeGarmo Institute at 139 Rombout in 1890. DeGarmo’s school attracted local and boarding students and lasted until his retirement in 1898. About 1900, Colonel Vasa Stolbrand, an educator and graduate of West Point, opened his Mount Beacon Military Academy at 139 Rombout. Stolbrand’s military school here attracted cadets from points national and international, including cadet Carmelo Castro, brother of the president of Venezuela. The fourth and final school to occupy 139 Rombout was the Caswell Academy, run by the Kennedy brothers, Thomas and James Kennedy. Brother James was a champion swimmer, a medalist winner in the backstroke, who ran the physical education at the academy. Thomas, the superintendent of the school, hired his two sisters, Lotta and Robin Kennedy, as teachers at the school. Among the alumni of the Caswell Academy, was Percy Helton, a Broadway star as a child and a character actor in dozens of movies. Rupert Hughes, novelist and screenwriter, and brother of Howard Hughes, was friends to the Kennedy brothers and stayed at the school several summers (when all the boarding students were home on vacation) where he wrote some of his most important works. Today the building is an apartment house. Such is the widely varied and interesting history of an otherwise bland looking building.

Photos: A postcard view of the Caswell Academy, c. 1908. The building as it is today. The open spaces of Rombout Avenue (then named Wiltsie Avenue) and the school as it looked in the 1890s.