Peter Gibson

I first met Peter Gibson when I sued his company, Capital Tractor Company, Inc., on behalf of the owner of Latham Village Apartments in the early 1970s.  The litigation involved some lawn equipment, and I settled the case directly with him.  Peter owned and managed the company, a large John Deere farm equipment dealer located east of Troy.  Soon thereafter, when my family moved to our Boyntonville home, I traded an old John Deere tractor for a new garden tractor and then bought a snowmobile from his company.

Peter was born in 1935 and grew up on a dairy farm in western New York.  He had extensive knowledge of farming and farm equipment.  After working as a farm equipment salesman, he purchased and expanded Capital Tractor Company, Inc., and secured franchises for John Deere and other major equipment manufacturers.  He once told me that his father's advice was to have a Jewish lawyer and a Jewish accountant.  Sidney Roth was his accountant, and I eventually became his lawyer.   

On Thanksgiving Day in 1979, Peter appeared unexpectedly at our home with a business proposition.  Through a connection he had with Niagara Mohawk Power Corporation, he was offered the opportunity to construct a garage to serve the Hoosick Falls area and lease it to the company for a ten-year term with favorable terms.  The utility had identified its preferred location, which was for sale at a reasonable price.  Peter wanted to take advantage of the opportunity but needed a lawyer partner who could handle the property purchase, the lease documents, and financing.  He knew that I lived just a short distance from the proposed location and thought that, since I was then the Rensselaer County Attorney, I could handle any necessary county 

approvals.  Peter said he could handle the actual construction as he had built some of the buildings for his farm equipment business that were similar to the one that the utility company wanted.  He was also aware that I, individually, and together with Jim Reilly, the attorney with whom I practiced law, had obtained tax titles to properties and resold them to one of his equipment customers.

Niagara Mohawk promptly sent me a proposed lease, and by the end of December, we had purchased the land and had a binding lease contract.  I arranged financing with a Syracuse lender who had supplied financing for my business clients.  Fortunately, January 1980 was very mild, and we started construction in mid-winter, and Peter had the garage completed by May.  Niagara Mohawk was so impressed that they contracted with us to build and lease similar garages in Hadley, Saratoga County, and Moriah, Essex County, both of which were located at a considerable distance from each other.  However, Peter managed the construction of both projects.

Peter was extremely knowledgeable about properties in northern Rensselaer County and had done business with most of the farmers, many of whom were facing financial difficulties and putting their land for sale.  At the same time, there was an increasing demand for land for new, low and moderate-priced home construction.  We started purchasing and subdividing properties, originally in Pittstown, but later in the adjoining towns of Schaghticoke, Brunswick, and Hoosick.  Initially, we purchased property in our own names, but I soon decided that we should incorporate.  We had a series of corporations and limited liability companies, including Renssco Farms, Inc., HG Realty, Inc., GH Realty, Inc., HG Properties, Inc., and Tomhannock, LLC.  I obtained lines of credit from local banks, enabling us to quickly purchase properties as opportunities arose.  We employed surveyors and engineers to determine the most efficient subdivision of the properties and to design the septic systems to obtain the necessary governmental approvals.  We were able to obtain discounted pricing on well drilling and septic system construction because we would complete all the work in a subdivision at once, and we always paid our bills immediately upon receipt.  We even purchased a gravel bank in Hoosick Falls to supply gravel for septic systems, and when the gravel was exhausted, we subdivided the property into a residential subdivision.  Nedda managed the checkbooks for our businesses. 

While there was immediate demand for the subdivided lots, local opposition developed, as some were concerned that we were altering the character of the rural towns and converting farmland into concentrated communities that would put a strain on the school districts, even though we significantly increased the tax base.  Pittstown, where we had the most activity, began placing the most obstacles in our path, utilizing driveway separations to limit the number of lots and requiring us to obtain waivers from the Corps of Engineers if any streams were on the property.  If the subdivision had a common private road, I had to get approval from the New York Department of State's New York City office.  One Pittstown Planning Board Chairman even said that he was trying to obstruct our subdivisions because "You are making too much money."

In fact, our real property ventures had become lucrative.  The majority of lot buyers planned to build a home but did not have the funds to do so immediately.  We offered to sell the lots to qualified buyers and took back a mortgage until the buyers could obtain a loan to pay off our mortgage and construct a home.  In total, we created approximately 300 lots, some of which we sold for up to $250,000, and greatly increased the town's tax base.  We were able to use these mortgages as collateral for our bank lines of credit.  Eventually, we began purchasing and reselling homes and other improved properties, and we also offered mortgages to financially distressed property owners who were unable to obtain loans from banks or other conventional sources.  We bought and sold a rural apartment project in Green County and a strip mall.  

While I was able to engage in the real property business without interrupting my law practice because I could handle the legal end from my office, and town planning board meetings were always held in the evening, Peter became increasingly engaged in the real estate and less interested in operating his farm equipment business, which required supervising employees.  He had purchased a second similar equipment business in the adjacent Washington County.  Finally, he sold Capital Tractor Company in 1990 to a competitor and the Washington County facility to one of his sons, allowing him to devote himself to real property development.  He found one property for which I did not share his enthusiasm, and he bought and developed it himself, but had a difficult time doing so, as I had predicted.  He also started building new expensive homes for himself and his wife in our premier community, The Meadows, and then reselling them after building another for himself.  He also started buying some rental properties.   

Eventually, Peter began experiencing financial difficulties.  In addition to his own real estate ventures, some of which were financed in part by loans from our joint companies and later by personal mortgages from Nedda's trust, he also financed businesses for his son, Peter Jeffrey Gibson.  "Jeff" had been a used-car salesman and believed he could build a business buying and selling used car parts with financial assistance from Peter.  He then started buying and selling used car parts online, and Peter financed that business, which he said was going very well until it crashed.  Then he financed Jeff’s purchase of a dairy farm, but that too went broke, and its mortgage was foreclosed.  Additionally, Jeff had some serious medical problems.

By the mid-1990s, our subdivision business had slowed as we were no longer able to find suitable land that was economically feasible to subdivide.  I closed my law practice, and Nedda and I began spending time in Florida, eventually becoming full-time residents there.  As Peter needed more funds to continue his business and became unable to repay loans made to him by Tomhannock, LLC, which we jointly owned, or the debts to Nedda's trust, he eventually sold his 50% interest in Tomhannock, LLC to Nedda's trust, and our business relationship came to an end.  Our friendship continued, and I sold him two parcels owned by Tomhannock, LLC at prices well below market value.

Then, without warning and to my surprise and chagrin, Peter sued Tomhannock, LLC, and Nedda, as well as me personally, claiming that we had cheated him by not disclosing the true financial value of the property held by Tomhannock, LLC, or by failing to give him his share of the profits.  There was no truth to his allegations, particularly since he was involved in every transaction and received a monthly financial statement from Nedda throughout our years in business.

I retained a prominent law firm to defend me in the litigation.  In retaliation, I commenced an action against Peter to foreclose a mortgage held by Nedda's trust on an apartment building in Waterford, Saratoga County.  

After months of expensive litigation, the court dismissed the lawsuit he had brought, and his apartment property was sold pursuant to a judgment of foreclosure. 

Peter died in December 2020.  He had been a great friend throughout our joint business ventures.  He assisted when we built our homes on Tamarac Road in Brunswick and in The Meadows subdivision in Pittstown.  During the late 1990s, when Nedda and I were in Florida, he checked our Pittstown home daily. 

Pittstown in Wikipedia

 I always enjoyed injecting a bit of humor about the Town of Pittstown, Rensselaer County, where Nedda and I lived for several years in two homes we built.  Pittstown is a very rural and small town in its thinking.  Our company, Tomhannock, LLC, owned by Nedda, Peter Gibson, and me, added hundreds of home sites here and substantially increased the town’s tax base, frequently over the objection of natives who dislike our changing unused land into productive housing opportunities for families.

Once I happened upon the Wikipedia entry for the town and decided to have a bit of fun by adding to its demographic description that the average IQ was 68. I used the name of a local junk dealer who the town government was battling over his violations of town law.   That modification prompted the following entry, later deleted but still available:

Talk: Pittstown, New York

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“The current page lists the average IQ of this town as 68. Assuming this IQ is the "Intelligence quotient" discussed in a Wikipedia article of the same name, this puts the average IQ of this town in the "mildly retarded" range, which is difficult to believe. No reference is cited for this data. I recommend its deletion.

"(D. Clippinger (a proud resident of Pittstown).”

“D. Clippinger obviously has not carefully researched the unusual 20th-century history of Pittstown. Sparsely populated by many Hessian mercenaries who defected after the Battle of Bennington (actually fought in the adjacent town of Hoosick, in northern Rensselaer County, New York), the town’s industry and sparse population greatly declined with the end of stove manufacturing toward the end of the 19th century, making Pittstown one of the more economically distressed areas in upstate New York.

In an attempt to bolster employment, the New York State Office of Tuberculosis and Pox (later the New York State Department of Health) chose to locate two large tuberculosis sanatoriums there, one in the hamlet of Raymertown in 1873 and later, one in Valley Falls. Although these sanatoriums initially had large patient populations, tuberculosis was substantially controlled by the forerunners of modern antibiotics. Many sanitariums closed, including those in Pittstown. The Valley Falls sanitarium remained vacant until destroyed by fire during the blizzard of 1931, but the larger Raymertown Sanatorium, located on the Troy - Bennington Turnpike (on the site of what is now the Sterup Square strip mall) was converted into a facility for the mentally ill and hopelessly retarded, named the Morgenstern Hospital.

During October 1936, a series of investigative articles appeared in the Albany Knickerbocker News that revealed that widespread use of an experimental drug made of lithium, mushroom extract, and anisette at the facility had aphrodisiac qualities, and as a result, the patients engaged in promiscuous, unprotected sex. Many female patients became pregnant and gave birth to children at the hospital. Many of the babies born to them looked normal but suffered mental retardation and, in some cases, Brewer's droop. Most were adopted out to people in the community, mainly to farmers who needed large families to help with chores. The infamy resulting from the newspaper disclosure caused the government to order the hospital to be closed and ultimately torn down when the highway was widened in 1952. These adopted children grew to adulthood, married, and mostly stayed within the Pittstown community, as did their baby boomer offspring and grandchildren. Also, many of the mentally ill and retarded patients were simply released to the community when the facility closed, and many of them stayed in Pittstown or neighboring Brunswick.

During the mid-1990s, the admissions office of Hudson Valley Community College, a county-sponsored college in Troy, noted that an unusually high percentage of applicants from the Hoosick Valley Central School, the Brunswick Central School District, and to a lesser extent, the Hoosick Falls Central School, did not meet the community college’s modest requirements for admission, and notified the New York State Education Department. That agency applied for and received a grant from the U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare for a study conducted in the towns of Pittstown, Hoosick, and Brunswick in conjunction with the 2000 U.S. Census. Although the residents of Hoosick and Brunswick tested in the low to mid-normal range of intelligence, the average IQ in Pittstown was 68, using the Stanford-Binet IQ test. Educators concluded that the unusually low average IQ was due both to two centuries of intermarriage and the many descendants of the persons previously born to

or confined at the Morgenstern Hospital.”

“My understanding is that the Valley Falls sanitarium was destroyed by fire in the Knickerbocker Storm of 1922. I can understand your confusion, as the facilities were the subject of arson in 1931 (alleged to have been set by vandal farmers from the town of Nassau, but never proven).”

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