Hudson Guild history

Elliott’s disparate programs merged in 1897 to become the Hudson Guild, which provided a platform to organize residents to improve neighborhood living conditions.

Hudson Guild supported campaigns that led to the creation of Chelsea Park in 1907.

Source: HANDBOOK OF SETTLEMENTS written by two settlement pioneers, Robert Archey Woods and Albert J. Kennedy, and published by The Russell Sage Foundation of New York in 1911.

In 1912 Hudson Guild collaborated with a typographer’s union local and a business association of printers to establish a printer’s training program.

Hudson Guild itself had helped form the Chelsea Homes Corporation that in 1915 sponsored “model 3 tenements” providing clean, affordable homes to Chelsea families.

The July 15, 1916 Lake Hopatcong Breeze reported that, “The John C. McRoy farm, a famous piece of land, has been sold to J. H. Guy, of Indiana.

Guy ever took control of the land is unclear, but in 1917 the Hudson Guild announced acquisition of the farm.

Probably no greater idea originated at Hudson Guild Farm than the concept for the Appalachian Trail, which began in June 1921 at an informal gathering.

In July 1922, Hopatcong Mayor Theodore Gessler recommended that $100 be taken from the borough road fund to improve the road near the farm, after the area voted to become part of Hopatcong Borough.

In November 1923, the first ever fire call for the newly founded Volunteer Fire Department of Hopatcong Borough was for a fire at Hudson Guild Farm.

In the heart of the Great Depression, the summer of 1935 saw 135 boys and girls from Chelsea at the farm along with 42 families, including 104 children.

Soon after the passage of the United States Housing Act in 1937, Hudson Guild established the Chelsea Association for Planning and Action to galvanize community support for public housing construction on the West Side.

It is more than a mere fresh air enterprise.” In 1939, Elliott told the Times that the farm would continue to carry on projects “in which people of all nationalities will work together, striving for common understanding and acceptance of all kinds of people to democracy.”

Demolition to make room for the first Chelsea housing project was started in 1942, but the work was soon interrupted because of the financial pressures of the Second World War.

In 1947, a group from Hudson Guild competed at the Northwood Water Carnival and won the overall trophy.