Hudson River Maritime Museum

The Hudson River Maritime Museum sits on Kingston's Rondout waterfront, in a cluster of low buildings right on the creek that once serviced one of the busiest ports on the river. The permanent collection traces how the Hudson moved people, ice, brick, bluestone, and coal for two centuries: ship models, steamship china, ice-harvesting tools, a lifeboat off the steamboat Mary Powell (billed as the "Queen of the Hudson" before it was scrapped in the 1920s), and photographs of the tugboats and sloops that worked this stretch of water. It's a small museum but a dense one; give it an hour, more if you catch a guided tour.