Tin Horn
Observations and Discoveries
Your contributions to this blog are welcome. Please contact us with questions, discoveries, or musings related to Middletown history.
Take a closer look . . .
Margaretville Visual Scavenger Hunt Stroll three blocks of Margaretville’s Main Street and SEE what you’ve been missing . . . Click on this link, print it out and take an awesome visual scavenger hunt. It’s fun, challenging and could win you a ticket to our Labor Day concert and community picnic! Thanks to Sharon Suess, Ros Welchman, Larraine [...]
Save the date!
You’re invited to join us on Friday, July 12th at 4p.m. at Middletown Town Hall, 42339 State Highway 28, Margaretville, for the unveiling of a commemorative marker in celebration of Middletown’s 250th Anniversary of settlement. Dr. Bill Birns will be speaking as well as Town Historian Len Utter. Let’s hope the weather cooperates in making [...]
Go directly to jail!
There is a mystery in Dunraven: Why would an iron jail cell have been set atop a concrete bunker built into a stone retaining wall on the old Smith farm on New Kingston Road (now the Blue Deer Center)? The cell was made by the E. T. Barnum Wire and Iron Works Company in Detroit, which [...]
Season preview!
It’s just starting to feel like spring but we’ve been busy firming up plans for a jam-packed season of programs and activities. Details will follow on this website, and in a flyer to be sent with the Spring Bridge to our members. For now, a partial preview: The first program of the year will be [...]
The Stone family saga
This is the tale of a Clovesville family whose name has faded from the Catskills because the men who carried it left to find their fortunes and meet their destinies more than 130 years ago. They were the Stones: John, William, George and Rutson, sons of Caroline and Robert. Their father died in 1849 at [...]
A new pair of boots — a shop local story
In researching the lives of Middletown’s Civil War veterans, I came across an interesting letter to the Catskill Mountain News published April 8, 1960. B. C. Todd wrote in to share memories and stories that old-timers had passed on to him, including this one about Calvin Crosby, a Clovesville merchant and tanner (and Civil War [...]
Hey, check out our new wood splitter!
That’s what these young men may have had in mind when they posed for a photo on the Robertson farm in New Kingston with a monumental stack of perfectly proportioned wood in 1922. If anyone can identify these guys, or explain how the wood splitter worked, or how the pieces of firewood could have [...]
More News is good news!
Several hundred more pages of the Catskill Mountain News, 1967-73, have been added to the commons! This batch of digitized microfilm will be the last for awhile, the end of a five-year effort to make the News, 1902-1973, readable and searchable on line.The only years that are missing are 1920, 1925 and 1968. The Historical [...]
Here’s to George . . .
The Historical Society has lost a good and faithful friend with the passing of George Hendricks. A trustee on the board since 2008, George was always ready to help. He was a prime mover in getting our historic marker program started with the installation of the first one in Highmount, at the boulder that held [...]
210 barns!
Signs still adorn the George Adee barn door on Hubbell Hill New Kingston is the big winner when it comes to the number of barns — 32 — still standing in the Town of Middletown. Mind you, they’re not all big dairy barns, but even the smallest horse, chicken and storage barns had important roles [...]