author

Edward Manning Ruttenber

1825–1907

A longtime newspaperman turned local historian, this 19th-century writer helped preserve the stories of Newburgh, Orange County, and the wider Hudson River Valley. His books remain a rich window into regional history and the ways people of his era tried to understand the past.

1 Audiobook

Footprints of the Red Men Indian geographical names in the valley of Hudson's river, the valley of the Mohawk, and on the Delaware: their location and the probable meaning of some of them.

Footprints of the Red Men Indian geographical names in the valley of Hudson's river, the valley of the Mohawk, and on the Delaware: their location and the probable meaning of some of them.

by Edward Manning Ruttenber

About the author

Born in Bennington, Vermont, in 1825, he moved to Newburgh, New York, as a boy and built his career in printing and journalism. Sources from New York Heritage describe him as an apprentice in local newspaper offices who later bought the Newburgh Telegraph and went on to consolidate several papers, eventually publishing what became the Newburgh Evening News.

He is best remembered as a historian of the Hudson River Valley, often publishing as E. M. Ruttenber. His noted works include History of the Indian Tribes of Hudson's River (1872), History of the County of Orange (1875), and Footprints of the Red Men (1906), along with other histories connected to Newburgh and Washington's Headquarters.

Ruttenber died in December 1907. A charter member of the Newburgh Historical Society, he left behind a body of work that still matters to readers interested in regional history, early New York, and the nineteenth-century effort to document local communities and Indigenous place names.