Discovering the Cohoes Mastodon
The colorful history of the famous Cohoes Mastodon will be told by the Spindle City Historic Society at the Cohoes Public Library on Monday, November 17 at 6:30 p.m. This free program will include a slide show led by President Paul Dunleavy and the unveiling of a new exhibit on the Cohoes Mastodon.
In late September of 1866, when excavation for Mill No. 3 of the Harmony Mills was begun, the bones of a Mastodon were found embedded in peat in two potholes at a depth of sixty feet. For a year the bone hunt was on, and amateur paleontologists found more remains, some sixty feet distant and all well above the level of the modern Mohawk River. This event became the talk of the town and was quite vividly described in one issue of the Cataract Newspaper. Notorious cynics and some newspapers published several discrediting accounts.
The 11,000-year-old bones of the Cohoes Mastodon were kept at the Harmony Mills for a time where many tourists and scientists visited them. The relics were then placed on exhibition in Troy, and then at the county fair, and finally at Harmony Hall in Cohoes. There were many offers to buy the remains but Harmony Company decided to present them to the state .The bones were mounted for the first time when they stood in the Hall of Vertebrate Paleontology in 1915 on the fifth floor of the New York State Museum that is now the State Education building. More than fifty years later Noah T. Clarke of Albany completed a replica of the Mastodon that originally stood alongside the skeleton but now stands at the Cohoes Public Library. The NYS Museum had moved by 1976 and the famous bones were put in storage. The mastodon now stands as a main exhibit in the New York State Museum.
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