Unattended Death and Biohazard Cleanup in Beacon, NY

Beacon is a city in Dutchess County on the east bank of the Hudson River, in New York's Hudson Valley.

Beacon was settled in 1709 as the twin villages of Matteawan and Fishkill Landing, making them among the first colonial communities in Dutchess County.

The land under Beacon was purchased from the Wappinger people in 1683 by Francis Rombout and Gulian Verplanck, decades before the villages took shape.

The two villages finally merged and incorporated as the City of Beacon in 1913.

Beacon takes its name from the signal beacon fires that were lit atop neighboring Mount Beacon during the Revolutionary War to warn the Continental Army of British movements.

During the Revolution, Beacon served the patriot cause as a fort site, a signaling point, and a center for manufacturing war supplies.

The Mount Beacon Incline Railway, which climbed the mountain at a 65 percent grade — among the steepest railways ever built — operated from 1902 to 1975 and carried an estimated 3 million people to the 1,540-foot summit.

Beacon grew into a factory town known for bricks and hats: the Dennings Point Brickworks produced some 300,000 bricks a day at its 1920s height, and about 11 hat manufacturers called Beacon home between the 1920s and the 1940s.

The 2020 census counted 13,769 residents in Beacon, and Census Bureau estimates for 2020-2024 put the city at 6,507 households.

After decades of decline that began around 1970, Beacon's revival was ignited in 2003 by the opening of Dia Beacon, one of the largest museums of contemporary art in the United States, installed in a 1929 Nabisco box-printing factory that International Paper had donated in 1999.