Discover about Newburgh’s Past

At the Newburgh Illuminated Festival

JOIN US ON JUNE 3rd for a historical moment!

From Noon to 5 p.m. the 1884 Montgomery Street Station powerplant designed by Thomas Edison, located at 59-69 Montgomery Street, will be open. The Office of the Orange County Historian and Central Hudson Gas and Electric Corp. are partnering to share this chapter of Newburgh’s history and will be onsite to talk about the history.

At 1p.m., 2p.m., 3p.m. and 4p.m. there will be a free history bus tour of the city of Newburgh. Knowledgeable guides will explain highlights about Newburgh’s Historic District (the largest contiguous historic district in New York State) and answer questions about the city’s past. Look for the yellow umbrella at the corner of Broadway and Grand Street to queue up for the tour fifteen minutes before the hour.

Why do we call it the Newburgh “Illuminated” Festival?

The name takes inspiration from Newburgh’s legacy as the second electrified municipality in the world! 

On March 31, 1884, the Montgomery Street Station, a direct current generating station designed by Thomas Edison was opened at 59-69 Montgomery Street in Newburgh.

The people of Newburgh gathered along Water Street and Broadway to admire the storefronts, expressing awe at the seven glittering lights in the window of W.H. Lyons’ jewelry store and at the reflection of light from Charles Lawson’s hardware store, which he had painted white that afternoon in anticipation of seeing it glow. The power station had a 1,600 light capacity and the bulbs themselves gave out only as much as a gas lantern. But to those who wandered along the commercial streets of Newburgh on that first night, the arrival of electric light was on the cutting edge of innovation – after New York City’s one-mile radius around Pearl Street, Newburgh was the second municipality in the world to wire a city neighborhood to an electric power plant.

 By the time Thomas Edison arrived back in Newburgh on April 24, 1884, to do a final inspection of the system, the downtown area of the city was lit up with 500 electric lamps and the Calvary Presbyterian Church at 210 Grand Street was wired for electricity.

The Montgomery Street Station is now owned by Central Hudson Gas & Electric Corp. and for the Newburgh Illuminated Festival on June 4, 2022, they have partnered with the Office of the Orange County Historian Johanna Yaun to open Thomas Edison’s Montgomery Street Station to the public. Stop by to learn more about Thomas Edison in Newburgh and the early history of Central Hudson which was founded in Newburgh in 1900.