Ravena: Ice, Bricks, and a Cement Giant
Near Albany, New York
The land around Ravena was part of the Coeymans Patent, granted to a Dutchman named Barent Pieteres Koijemans in sixteen seventy-three, his name still clings to the neighboring town of Coeymans, pronounced kwee-mans. For most of its history, the economy here ran on what the Hudson River could give: ice harvesting in winter, brickmaking from local clay, and shipbuilding on the riverbank.
The village of Ravena incorporated in nineteen fourteen and remained a small industrial community for decades. Then in nineteen sixty-one, Governor Nelson Rockefeller broke ground on a massive cement plant here for the Atlantic Cement Company, a sixty-four million dollar project that went into full operation in nineteen sixty-two. The plant, now operated under the Holcim name, became the largest employer and largest property taxpayer in southern Albany County. A quarry behind the plant supplies the limestone, and the Hudson River still handles bulk shipments, the same waterway that once carried ice and bricks now carries cement.
