Folklore
Anthony's Nose
The Hudson Highlands are suggestively named Bear Mountain, Sugar Loaf, Cro' Nest, Storm King, called by the Dutch Boterberg, or Butter Hill, from its likeness to a pat of butter; Beacon Hill, where the fires blazed to tell the country that the Revolutionary war was over;…
The Hudson Highlands are suggestively named Bear Mountain, Sugar Loaf, Cro' Nest, Storm King, called by the Dutch Boterberg, or Butter Hill, from its likeness to a pat of butter; Beacon Hill, where the fires blazed to tell the country that the Revolutionary war was over;…
Work
- Type
- folk narrative
- Creator
- Charles M. Skinner
- Created, as stated
- 1896
The tale
The Hudson Highlands are suggestively named Bear Mountain, Sugar Loaf, Cro' Nest, Storm King, called by the Dutch Boterberg, or Butter Hill, from its likeness to a pat of butter; Beacon Hill, where the fires blazed to tell the country that the Revolutionary war was over; Dunderberg, Mount Taurus, so called because a wild bull that had terrorized the Highlands was chased out of his haunts on this height, and was killed by falling from a cliff on an eminence to the northward, known, in consequence, as Breakneck Hill. These, with Anthony's Nose, are the principal points of interest in the lovely and impressive panorama that unfolds before the view as the boats fly onward. Concerning the last-named elevation, the aquiline promontory that abuts on the Hudson opposite Dunderberg, it takes title from no resemblance to the human feature, but is so named because Anthony Van Corlaer, the trumpeter, who afterwards left a reason for calling the upper boundary of Manhattan Island Spuyten Duyvil Creek, killed the first sturgeon ever eaten at the foot of this mountain. It happened in this wise: By assiduous devotion to keg and flagon Anthony had begotten a nose that was the wonder and…
- Narrative type
- ghost story
- Set at
- Boston and eastern Massachusetts
- First attestation in print
- Charles M. Skinner, Myths and Legends of Our Own Land (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1896) (1896)
Tellings
A tale told several ways is one record and several tellings. Each is given whole, with its teller named — or recorded as unattributed where the collector left them unnamed, which is itself a fact about the collection.
As printed in Charles M. Skinner (1896)
Told by unattributed — the collector names no informant · collected by Charles M. Skinner · 1896 · Boston and eastern Massachusetts
The Hudson Highlands are suggestively named Bear Mountain, Sugar Loaf, Cro' Nest, Storm King, called by the Dutch Boterberg, or Butter Hill, from its likeness to a pat of butter; Beacon Hill, where the fires blazed to tell the country that the Revolutionary war was over; Dunderberg, Mount Taurus, so called because a wild bull that had terrorized the Highlands was chased out of his haunts on this height, and was killed by falling from a cliff on an eminence to the northward, known, in consequence, as Breakneck Hill. These, with Anthony's Nose, are the principal points of interest in the lovely and impressive panorama that unfolds before the view as the boats fly onward. Concerning the last-named elevation, the aquiline promontory that abuts on the Hudson opposite Dunderberg, it takes title from no resemblance to the human feature, but is so named because Anthony Van Corlaer, the trumpeter, who afterwards left a reason for calling the upper boundary of Manhattan Island Spuyten Duyvil Creek, killed the first sturgeon ever eaten at the foot of this mountain. It happened in this wise: By assiduous devotion to keg and flagon Anthony had begotten a nose that was the wonder and admiration of all who knew it, for its size was prodigious; in color it rivalled the carbuncle, and it shone like polished copper. As Anthony was lounging over the quarter of Peter Stuyvesant's galley one summer morning this nose caught a ray from the sun and reflected it hissing into the water, where it killed a sturgeon that was rising beside the vessel. The fish was pulled aboard, eaten, and declared good, though the singed place savored of brimstone, and in commemoration of the event Stuyvesant dubbed the mountain that rose above his vessel Anthony's Nose.
Charles M. Skinner, Myths and Legends of Our Own Land (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1896)
Related records
- documents — Myths and Legends of Our Own Land
Identity
- Identifier
- urn:lemay:boston:entity:anthony-s-nose
- Canonical URL
- https://boston.fyi/work/anthony-s-nose
- As JSON
- https://boston.fyi/work/anthony-s-nose.json
- Version
- 1 · last changed 2 September 2026
Provenance
- Source
- Skinner, Myths and Legends of Our Own Land (1896) — source of record
- Licence
- Public domain — published before 1929 (public_domain)
- Retrieved
- 2 September 2026
- Source identifier
- ANTHONY'S NOSE
- Attribution
- Charles M. Skinner
- Rights as stated
- Published 1896 and in the public domain in the United States.
Transform ladder
| # | Operation | Description | Tool |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | fetch | retrieved the full text of the collection from its public-domain holding institution | archive-ingest 0.1.0 |
| 2 | segment | split the volume into chapters at its own printed headings; the first occurrence of a heading opens the chapter and later occurrences are the running header, which is discarded | archive-ingest 0.1.0 |
| 3 | corroborate | matched each heading against the book's own table of contents and took the index's spelling as the title; a heading the index does not carry was refused as a caption, a byline, or scanner noise | archive-ingest 0.1.0 |
| 4 | filter | retained the chapters that name a Boston-area place, by the tale's own words | archive-ingest 0.1.0 |
| 5 | normalize | collapsed the scan's line breaks; not one word of the telling was altered, added, or removed | archive-ingest 0.1.0 |