POUGHKEEPSIE, a city of the United States, capital of Duchess county, New York, lies on the east bank of the Hudson river, 73 miles north of New York. It is on the New York Central and Hudson River Railroad, and communicates with the New York, West Shore, and Buffalo Railway by ferry from Highland, and with the Hartford and Connecticut Western Railroad by the Poughkeepsie, Hartford, and Boston Railroad (37 miles). The site consists for the most part of a tableland which rises from 150 to 200 feet above the river, and is backed towards the east by College Hill, 300 feet in height. Well laid out with regular and shaded streets and abundantly supplied with water (pumped from the river to a reservoir on College Hill), Poughkeepsie is a pleasant place of residence, and it enjoys a special reputation for its educational institutions. Vassar College (2 miles east of the city), the earliest and one of the greatest women’s colleges in the world, was founded and endowed in 1861 by Matthew Vassar, a wealthy Poughkeepsie brewer; in 1884 it had 300 students, and possessed a library of 14,150 volumes, together with collections of water-colours and of American birds, both of great value, an astronomical observatory, and a chemical laboratory. Two miles north of the city, on an eminence above the Hudson, stands the Hudson River State Hospital for the Insane, an immense building erected between 1867 and 1871, with 300 acres of ground attached. Within the city are an opera-house, a free public library, a large young men’s Christian association building with a free reading-room, St Barnabas and Vassar Brothers Hospital, and homes for aged men and women. It also contains iron-furnaces, breweries, and manufactories of shoes, glass, mowing machines, pottery, hardware, and various minor ...