HSM plans 2017 season

Feb 15, 2017 | news archive

The Historical Society of the Town of Middletown is preparing an exciting new season of local history programming.

Pick up a copy of the HSM 2017 calendar February 18 at the former Miller’s Drug Store, Main St., Margaretville during Sweet on Main. The Society will hold a bake sale and will exhibit items from its growing collection between 10 and 2. There will be a ‘selfie’ station too!

Upcoming programs include “Before Belleayre: A history of Highmount” (June 17), and “History as it Happened,” a tribute to the Catskill Mountain News (August 12).

A month of programs in observance of the 100^th anniversary of women’s gaining the right to vote in New York State will happen in July, including a presentation on women’s domestic lives at the turn of the century, a concert by the Delaware Dulcimores, and a Main Street Suffrage March to the Open Eye Theater which will be staging a new musical, “Seneca Falls,” about the first women’s rights conference in 1848.

A series of walking tours of four area cemeteries will be held the last Sunday of April, May, June and August. They will replace the Living History Cemetery Tour, which will take a year’s hiatus after five successful annual events.

Area metal detectorists will descend on Halcottsville June 10-11 to see what treasures may be buried on several properties there in a special fundraiser to benefit HSM and the Halcottsville Fire Department which is trying to restore the 1916 Wawaka Hose house.

The annual meeting in October will feature Bill Horne, author of The Improbable Community: Camp Woodland and the American Democratic Ideal,” in a program about Mike Todd, Orson Slack and other mountain elders who shared their wisdom, music and skills with Woodland campers from 1939-1962.

Looking ahead, HSM is seeking information, images and artifacts related to World War I, which will be the focus of an exhibit in 2018. If you have photos, letters or memorabilia from family members who served in the war, please contact Diane Galusha, 845-586-4973.

Video: Do you remember 1950s Middletown?

Jan 25, 2017 | Tin Horn

You’ll enjoy this video, created by Fred Margulies, of a program we held in April 2016. We asked the audience to chime in with info about people and places highlighted in a slideshow.

Hope you enjoy this communal trip down memory lane. Please contribute your own recollections if the spirit moves.

Watch Video

Kids and their dolls in Margaretville captured c. 1950 by Ethel Bussy

Saturday, Nov. 7 the History of Light

Jan 8, 2017 | Events

HISTORY OF LIGHT 2015 PHOTO GALLERY
Click for a larger view of each image…

pitch-pine-strip

Native Americans, and pioneers, burned strips of pitch pine to illuminate small areas

Paul-with-women

Q&A followed Paul’s presentation

Paul-with-dark-light

An early ‘flashlight,’ equipped with a cover, proved especially useful in police stakeouts.

Paul-with-audience

Examining lighting artifacts

Paul-Misko-light-enhancer

A tin backboard and a crystal globe projected and enhanced light from a candle

Calling Dr. Green…

Oct 30, 2016 | Tin Horn

Was this the George Green house?

A recently discovered photo of a grand old house that once stood in Dunraven has shed a bit of light on 19th-century doctoring.

When this photo was taken by the NYC Board of Water Supply in the late 1940s, the house was part of the Bruce and Cora Kelly farm. The buildings and 18 acres of the 128-acre farm were claimed for the tailwaters of the Pepacton Reservoir and the site is now a vacant lot where Delaware County Route 3 and NYS Route 28 intersect just west of the Route 28-30 divide.

The 1869 Beers Atlas shows a house in that location (look beneath the large Clarks Factory PO) belonging to Dr. G. H. Green. We think this could be the Kelly house — it certainly looked like the home of a prominent person.

Dr. Green was born in 1808 in Franklin to Solomon Green, Jr., a physician who by 1840 was practicing with John Ferguson, Jr. in Bovina. That’s about the time his son began practicing in Middletown, in an area then called Clark’s Factory. This was a booming locale with a big tannery that employed many people. The good doctor was a busy man.

The Dec. 14, 1951 issue of the Catskill Mountain News ran excerpts from his account book from 1858-61 (the book was then in the hands of Hillis Judd of Fleischmanns – does anyone know the whereabouts of this book?) Dr. Green did everything from deliver babies (a girl, to the wife of Abram Wilson, for a fee of $1.50), to extract teeth (Hannah Owen paid 13 cents for his services, Philo Dickson was charged a quarter for two teeth pulled.) Treatments included ‘bleeding,” castor oil, and “acid for teeth” given to Ransom Sanford. Warren Dimmick was treated with “sugar of lead,” or lead acetate: It was once prescribed for intestinal troubles, sore nipples and poison ivy. It was eventually shown to be toxic, so essentially Mr. Dimmick and others thus treated had been poisoned!

Then as now there was the spectre of malpractice. In 1856, George Green’s father and partner were taken to court by Thomas L. Scott of Bovina 15 years after Scott fell off a horse as a child and broke his arm. He claimed the physicians didn’t set or treat his arm correctly. The court deliberated from Saturday morning to Monday night before finding the defendants guilty of malpractice and ordering them to pay their former patient $450 in damages.

Indeed, even doctors cannot cure everything. Dr. George and wife Nancy Roberts Green outlived all three of their children. They lost an infant, Warren, in 1849; a teenage son, also named George H., in 1870; and a daughter, Mary Amanda, who was 32 when she died in 1881. Nancy passed away in 1886.

Dr. Green, who had served two terms as Town Supervisor, lived to the ripe old age of 87, passing on in 1896.

Poorhouse talk at Annual Meeting Oct. 22

Oct 3, 2016 | news archive

An illustrated talk on the Delaware County Poorhouse will be presented Saturday, Oct. 22 at the Historical Society of the Town of Middletown’s annual meeting and luncheon.

The event begins at noon at the HSM hall, 778 Cemetery Road, Margaretville. It will include a report on HSM’s activities over the past year. Current and prospective HSM members are most welcome.

Admission is $20 and reservations are required for the luncheon of roast turkey with dressing or vegetarian lasagna. Call 845-586-2860 by Oct. 14 to reserve your seat.

The program, which follows a short business meeting and HSM trustee election, will be given by Delaware County Historian Gabrielle Pierce. “Down and Out at the Delaware County Poorhouse” will reflect on lives lived (and lost) during the years that the Home existed, c. 1828-1965.

Pierce has been County Historian since 2010 and has done considerable research into this almost forgotten Delhi institution where hundreds of area residents spent months or even years. Her presentation will utilize narration, photographs and interviews with individuals who lived and grew up at the Home, and will also cover the cemetery at the site.

The Poorhouse, located on Arbor Hill Road, was home to poor, homeless, and indigent families and adults from all over the county, including Middletown. It also housed the “feeble and insane,” the disabled and the sick (there was a special section for those with tuberculosis).

Unmarried pregnant women and those whose husbands had left them lived there with their infants and children, many of whom were born and died there. In later years people without heat who could not stay in their homes during the winter found shelter at the Home.

The facility was believed built in 1828. It burned in 1862 but was immediately rebuilt with residents moving back in in 1863. It ceased to operate in 1963 when the buildings and 100 surrounding acres were sold. A new county infirmary was built in 1964 on Route 10, Delhi.