On work days, Patricia E. Ploeger”™s organization has helped reshape the skylines of New Rochelle and White Plains into climate controlled comfort, but away from work she toils in Patterson”™s historic Little Red School house built some time around 1840.
Ploeger is executive director of the Hudson Valley Mechanical Contractor”™s Association, affiliated with its national namesake, and here covering the four counties of Dutchess, Ulster, Putnam and Westchester. And she is chairing a committee helping document the history of the town of Patterson, in Putnam County.
The association is comprised of about two-dozen contracting firms and 40 individual contractors who install modern plumbing, heating and cooling infrastructure into new buildings or renovations and upgrades. “My members do the heating and air conditioning and plumbing for all the schools and courthouses, some colleges up in Dutchess, the new skyline of White Plains and New Rochelle,” said Ploeger, who laughs gently and says, “Our members are contracting firms rather than plumbers.”
The association is partnered with Local 21 of the plumbers and steamfitter”™s union, which has about 1,500 members and sets the prevailing wages and other considerations for the mechanical contracting work force.
Ploeger joined the organization in 1987 and has been at its helm since. “What I do is extremely varied,” Ploeger said, with duties ranging from conducting negotiations with Local 21 to advocating Albany and White Plains on behalf of issues contractors care about, to hosting a golf outing to raise money for a hospital, to helping finalize arrangements for contributing materials and labor for a Habitat for Humanity home.
There are still new challenges, such as those arising from oil and energy prices that are forcing rethinking in heating and cooling of buildings. “Our contractors are taking a proactive role with geothermal technology,” she said.
But such notions belong to the work day and about five years ago Ploeger decided to follow her love and look around her home to learn how it came to be there and joined the Patterson Historical Society.
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“My passion for history is just something I”™ve always had,” said Ploeger. “I”™ve always been interested in what came here before, who lived here before. And I just became fascinated with what went on in my little town over the centuries.”
She said projectile points from people living here 5,000 years ago have been found in Patterson and she tells stories of Washington”™s Army in 1777 bivouacked along what is now Route 22, while the great general and his officers were north in what is now Pawling. After hearing of the victory at Saratoga, “So goes the story and we have documents that support it,” Washington”™s officers couldn”™t celebrate with real abandon among the Quakers in that area. So they rode south until they came to Mathew Paterson”™s tavern, where they celebrated with proper enthusiasm.
And like a careful and informative historian, Ploeger notes that Paterson was the original name of the town, but it was changed when confusion with Paterson, N.J., became too vexing. “And now we have zip codes,” she laughed.
Other tales of historic derring-do she recounts with relish include the tale of 16-year-old Sybil Ludington, daughter of Colonel Henry Ludington. “She was our Paul Revere,” said Ploeger. “She literally rode throughout the county from Kent to Putnam Valley warning her father”™s soldiers they needed to get ready to fight the British.” In1961 a statue of Sybil was erected on Route 52 at Gleneida Lake in Carmel. She and her father are interred at the Presbyterian church on Route 311 in Patterson.
Ploeger is a docent at the Little Red Schoolhouse museum, a building built in about 1840 and moved in 1968 to its present location, where it is now open to school groups and the public. Her favorite artifact there, she said, is a school bell used by 19th-century teachers that is still in good enough repair to occasionally call modern school kids to order. “It”™s a precious thing,” she said.
She has also served as treasurer for the Patterson Historical Society and is now chairing a committee of historians and archivists putting records and especially photos into order for appreciation by future generations. There is already an ongoing exhibit of historic photos at the Patterson Town Hall and eventually they will be available online when the Web located at Pattersonhistoricalsociety.org is completely constructed. “They are really wonderful,” Ploeger said. “A picture is worth a thousand words and then some.”
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