The Collyer Family

The Collyer Family. A Shipbuilding Dynasty on the Hudson. The Collyer name dates back to medieval England. In the early 1800s, Moses Wakeman Collyer married Elizabeth Ferris (Betsy) Lyon in Connecticut. They moved to the village of Sing Sing (now Ossining) and had ten children in 20 years, eight boys and two girls. Moses died in 1841, at age 56, and is buried in Sparta Cemetery. , Of the eight sons, five were well-known shipbuilders who learned their craft on the Sing Sing waterfront. The most successful were William and Thomas, who owned a Manhattan shipyard together. In 1847, Thomas, the prodigy, struck out on his own and produced fast vessels for clients from West Troy to China. On July 28, 1852, while racing another steamboat, he ran the Henry Clay aground at Riverdale, killing 50 people, including landscape architect A.J. Downing. The accident led to the Steamboat Safety act of 1852. , Another Collyer son, Stephen, owned lumberyards at Sing Sing's Middle and Upper Docks. In 1865, he built the memorial arch that spanned the tracks when Abraham Lincoln's death train passed by. (He and his family are buried in section C.) One of the daughters, Sarah Elizabeth, is memorialized on this obelisk with her mother, Thomas and brother George, also a shipbuilder, for whom she kept house in the city. , Betsy Collyer died in 1865, leaving a family legacy that influenced Ossining for generations. There are 29 Collyers buried in Dale, including Jesse Collyer, Jr., a popular mayor in the 1950s who is also on the Dale Cemetery Heritage Trail. He is a direct descendent of Stephen.