Middletown History Center to host baseball talk by Collin Miller

Middletown History Center to host baseball talk by Collin Miller

Apr 15, 2026 | 2026 News

On Sunday, April 26 at 2pm, the Historical Society of the Town of Middletown will launch a new season of local history presentations with a spirited talk, “Fleischmanns Field of Dreams and The Rise of the Mountain Athletic Club” by Collin Miller.

The illustrated program will be held at the Middletown History Center, 778 Cemetery Rd., Margaretville. Admission is by donation. Miller will also bring a show-and-tell treasure trove of artifacts and baseball ephemera from his personal collection.

“Stumpy” Miller leads Mountain Athletic Club (M.A.C.) Vintage Base Ball, a team fashioned after the original club founded in 1895 by the Fleischmann family on the present-day site of Fleischmanns Village Park. The ball field there was placed on the State and National Registers of Historic Places in 2020.

According to Miller, in the decade between 1895-1906, the M.A.C. and their playing field along the Bushkill became a destination for summer visitors, country folks and villagers alike arriving on the Ulster & Delaware Railroad.

Many M.A.C. ballplayers would go on to have formidable careers in the major leagues such as Hall of Famer Miller Huggins, Doc White, Red Dooin, and Judson “Jay” Kirke who was born in Allaben and grew up in Fleischmanns.

In 1913, the Village was renamed Fleischmanns to honor the gift of the M.A.C. Grounds to the community by Julius Fleischmann who together with his younger brother Max played on the team during its heyday.

Miller joined the M.A.C. in 2007, its first year of revival following nearly a century of inactivity. In 2011, the team went dormant again for several years due to the devastating effects of Hurricane Irene. But Miller and others revived the team in 2017, and with community support, vintage baseball has re-emerged as a summer institution and tourism draw in Delaware and Ulster Counties.

Miller has continued to research the team’s history with help from the Society of American Baseball Research and John Thorn, the official historian of Major League Baseball who visited bungalow colonies in Fleischmanns as a boy in the 1950s.

The M.A.C. has been featured in three books including New York’s Great Lost Ballparks (SUNY Press, 2022), Vintage Base Ball’s Enduring Legacy (Pocol Press, 2023), and most recently, Peter Pan in the Catskills and Other Historical Essays (Purple Mountain Press, 2026).

Copies of the new book will be available for purchase at the talk, as will limited edition M.A.C. baseball card sets and schedules for the upcoming season.

HSM will clean headstones during May

HSM will clean headstones during May

Apr 15, 2026 | 2026 News

Before

After

The Historical Society of the Town of Middletown (HSM) will offer a headstone cleaning service at Middletown area cemeteries during the month of May.

In the weeks leading up to Memorial Day, HSM’s trained volunteers will use D-2, a non-toxic cleaning agent, to remove algae, lichen and age-related grime from monuments and headstones in this annual fundraiser.

This service is provided at a cost of $30 for a single stone, $50 for two stones or a two-sided stone. To take advantage of this offer, send a check and contact information, along with name(s) on the headstone(s) and the cemetery, to:

HSM
PO Box 734
Margaretville, NY 12455

Or place your order and make payment at https://www.zeffy.com/en-US/ticketing/headstone-cleaning

For more information, leave a message at 845-586-2400, or historicalsocietyofmiddletown@gmail.com.

The Historical Society is preparing for its 2026 season of programs and special events. Find details at mtownhistory.org.

Revolutionary Characters On Stage

Revolutionary Characters On Stage

Mar 20, 2026 | 2026 News

The Historical Society of the Town of Middletown will bring to life soldiers, spies and ordinary citizens trying to make sense of a changing world when it presents “Middletown and the Revolution: Voices from the Frontier,” a living history program to mark the 250th anniversary of the Revolutionary War.

The performance, to be held at The Open Eye Theater, Margaretville July 11 and 12, will feature eight local actors in period costume describing how their lives were upended by the rupture with Great Britain in 1776. Middletown was part of Ulster County at the time, and the area along the East Branch of the Delaware River was considered the “frontier” between Indian territory to the west and the more heavily populated and strategically important Hudson Valley.

“Voices” will introduce audiences to survivors of battles and prisons, to local Loyalists who sided with Britain, to area settlers kidnapped, murdered and burned out of their homes. There is even a doomed love story in the mix!

“Voices” players include Gary Falk as Valley Forge veteran Elijah Parker; Burr Hubbell as Issachar Robinson who survived six months in the infamous Sugar House prison in New York City; Michael Fairbairn as militia man Jacob VanBenschoten, and Amy Taylor as tavern keeper Catherine VanWaggonen who comforted the dying Harmonus Dumond, shot in a case of mistaken identity.

John Bernhardt and Steven Hitt will portray wealthy Patriot George Sands and his Tory son Abel Sands. Rebecca Newman will appear as Mary “Polly” Yaple Avery recounting her teenage tryst with the Native known as Teunis.

The youngest member of the cast, Casey Eminowicz, 15, a freshman at Kingston High School, will describe the trials of Benjamin Burgher who was kidnapped and taken on a 300-mile journey by foot and canoe to Fort Niagara.

Narrator is Arnie Schwartz.

Directors of this living history presentation are Joyce St. George and Frank Canavan. Stage Manager is Carol Schwartz. Script writers include Terry Bradshaw, David Hill, Mary Barile, Marge Hellenchild, Diane Galusha, Joyce St. George and Frank Canavan.

The themed program, presented as a series of monologues, replaces for this year the Living History Cemetery Tour for which HSM has become famous. The tour (both armchair and on-site versions) will return in 2027.

Ruth’s Ring

Ruth’s Ring

Nov 5, 2025 | Tin Horn

His grandmother’s diamond ring on Michael’s finger. Not worth much in dollars and cents, but the story of its recovery is “worth a million bucks.”

Michael Fairbairn is obsessed with looking for old stuff. He’s spent countless hours over many years scouring farm dumps and river banks, barn ruins and abandoned reservoir towns for small treasures that he carefully catalogues, tangible pieces of history that give him pleasure and cause him to wonder.

His most recent find took his hobby to new heights, or shall we say new lows: a diamond ring that has spent nearly 80 years in the bottom of a septic tank.

It started with a conversation with his aunt, Martha Fairbairn Tait, who revealed for the first time a secret she had kept since was three years old: She had dropped her mother’s engagement ring down the bathroom sink drain. “I was told to leave that ring alone, but I guess I just couldn’t do that. One day I was playing around the sink and I don’t remember if I was wearing it or if it just fell, I just remember I dropped the ring. And there was no stopper in the drain. I never told a soul.”

Not her sister. Or her brother. Certainly not her mother, Ruth Fairbairn, who never once mentioned the missing ring. “I don’t know if my mom thought she’d lost it or what.” So it was something of a relief to finally tell someone – her nephew, Michael.

“She told me she’d always felt bad about it. So I decided I was going to try to find that ring,” he related.

With his daughter Sarah and a pair of shovels, he set off to the site of the former Fairbairn house in Dunraven. The house was torn down in the mid-1950s, but he knew the site, knew where the septic tank was, and he and Amy started digging. It was slow going, but on the third day of digging past the collapsed tank cover, six feet down, he hit pay dirt, so to speak: well-composted sludge, otherwise known as very old poop.

Michael, neck deep in the stone-ringed tank.

Neck deep in the hole, he began to shovel the compost through a strainer. Many shovelfuls later, he saw something shiny, and there it was – Ruth’s ring, last seen by his mischievous toddler aunt so long ago. He wiped it clean, took a photo of it, and sent it to Martha who identified the white gold ring with the tiny diamond in the center.
“I knew he’d find it,” Martha said, “but what were the chances?”
Glad she had come clean with her secret, and thrilled that the ring had been reclaimed, she told Michael to keep it as a family heirloom. One with an amazing story of loss and rediscovery.