PHOTO: Patriots Path
By Bond Brungard for MidHudson News
WARWICK – The Village of Warwick’s Memorial Park will be enhanced with Patriot’s Path, a new way to honor veterans through the fruition of a $734,500 state grant.
State Senator James Skoufis (D, Cornwall) announced the grant Monday at a gathering with veterans and local elected officials. The grant will cover the first phase of the project, which is expected to start construction this fall.
Patriot’s Path will be a corridor, about 10-feet wide, that will connect nine rooms, or stations, about 40 feet in diameter, that will explain the local citizenry’s role in nine conflicts, dating back prior to the Revolutionary War with Native-Americans and onward to Operation Desert Storm.
Joe Inserra, a member of American Legion Post 214 and VFW Post 4662, was part of a committee that helped plan the pathway.
When it’s finished, he said, the pathway will be a nice addition to the community. “It’s going to be beautiful,” he said. “We can have a nice path going, flowers around them, bushes around them.”
The iron chain, which was stretched across the Hudson River from West Point to prevent the British from dividing the colonies during the Revolutionary War, was manufactured in Warwick.
“It’s going to be unique by definition. There will be no place like it in New York or in the Hudson Valley,” said Skoufis. “It’s going to memorialize and honor every era, every conflict and how local veterans contributed to our democracy.”
