Cemetery Tour cast announced

May 14, 2014 | news archive

The Third Annual Living History Cemetery Tour sponsored by the Historical Society of the Town of Middletown will be held on the first day of summer, June 21.

This year’s tour will be at the Sanford Cemetery on County Route 6 (New Kingston Road), Dunraven, one-half mile off NYS Route 28. Costumed players will portray eight individuals buried there, and an Esopus Indian, burial place unknown, who will talk about life before the coming of European settlers to the East Branch Valley.

Guides will lead visitors through this picturesque burial ground to meet each character, whose stories have been meticulously researched. A section of the cemetery was used for reinterment of remains taken from the Arena, Millbrook and Dunraven areas flooded by the Pepacton Reservoir in the 1950s. The earliest headstone, dated 1803, is for a teenage girl originally buried in the Old Arena Cemetery.

Tour reservations – by phone only — will be taken beginning June 1 at 845-586-4736. Tours will run periodically from 4 to 7 p.m.

Players and their subjects include Fred Margulies (pioneer farmer Ziba Sanford); Roy Moses (early settler and mill builder Samuel Smith); Fred Travis (physician and teacher Robert Waterbury); Agnes Laub (Thankful VanBenschoten, credited with growing the first commercial cauliflower in the region); Harriet Grossman (turnpike gate keeper Matilda O’Brien); John Bernhardt (tavern keeper and slave owner Abel Sands); John Exter (Estonian basket maker Karl Amor); Ken Taylor (outdoorsman F. Lee Keator) and John Hartner (the Esopus sachem known to the Dutch as Hendrick Hecken).

Penny Social, Pie Sale May 10

Apr 30, 2014 | news archive

The Historical Society of the Town of Middletown (HSM) will host a Mother’s Day Weekend Penny Social and Pie Sale Saturday, May 10 at the HSM hall, 778 Cemetery Rd., Margaretville.

Doors open at 1, drawings start at 2:30.

Items to be raffled include toys, housewares, tools and jewelry. There will be baskets for cat lovers, for jam lovers, for tea lovers. Take a chance on a gift certificate for a craft class, a meal at a fine local restaurant, a haircut, or maybe a psychic reading!

Regular tickets cost $2 for a sheet of 25; premium tickets, for higher end items, are $10 a sheet. Proceeds will go to the HSM Raise the Roof fund.

Winners will be drawn every few minutes starting at 2:30. While you wait, enjoy a cup of coffee and a cupcake, or a piece of homemade pie. You can even buy a whole pie or cake to take home for Mother’s Day dessert.

For information on Historical Society programs and events, find us on Facebook!

“Arkville Underground” shows evidence of paleo-Indians

Apr 21, 2014 | news archive

The second of two spring programs on the theme “Reading the Land” will be held Saturday, April 26 at 1 p.m., when Lynda Carroll will present an illustrated talk, “Arkville Underground” at the Historical Society of the Town of Middletown (HSM), 778 Cemetery Rd., Margaretville.

Admission is $2 for HSM members, $4 for non-members.

Lynda Carroll was part of a team of archaeologists and technicians from the Public Archaeology Facility (PAF) at Binghamton University who conducted a 2005 survey of a section of what would become the MARK Project’s Mountain Laurel Gardens housing development along Delaware County Route 36 (the Arkville Cut-Off Road).

The researchers uncovered numerous points, tools and cherts, along with evidence of fire pits where carbonized wood and nut fragments were dated to more than 3,000 BC. Carroll will interpret the discoveries as documented in a formal report on the project. An exhibit on PAF’s programs and projects will also be available for viewing before and after the presentation.

Lynda Carroll is a PhD candidate in Anthropology at Binghamton University and is a coordinator for their Public Archaeology Facility’s Community Archaeology Program. She has been a project director for over 30 Cultural Resource Management projects in New York, and has conducted research in Jordan and Turkey. She is currently teaching at SUNY Broome Community College.

Since 1972, the facility, its professional staff and a cadre of consulting archaeologists have provided cultural resource management services to clients throughout the Northeastern US, with a focus on New York and Pennsylvania. PAF conducts site evaluations, archaeological and historical architectural surveys, and data recovery for energy, communication, mining, housing and other State and Federally permitted developments.

History served with soup on April 27

History served with soup on April 27

Apr 15, 2014 | news archive

If you like your soup and salad served with a side of history, you’ll want to visit Spillian, the former mansion of the Fleischmann family, on Sunday, April 27 when some of the proceeds from the weekly, all-you-can eat Soup Sunday event will go to the Historical Society of the Town of Middletown (HSM).

At 3 pm, Spillian partner Leigh Melander, Ph.D., will share stories and images of the Fleischmann family and the history of the Fleischmanns Park House, newly reborn as Spillian: A Place to Revel, an inn and retreat center, located at 50 Todd Mountain Rd., Fleischmanns.

Leigh has been doing extensive research on the property, working with the NY State Historic Preservation Office to have the property listed on the State and National Registers of Historic Places. The Fleischmanns were an extraordinary family, and this property has a very special history that both shaped and reflects the history of the village, including being the childhood summer home of Gertrude Berg of Molly Goldberg radio and television fame.

The Great Room at Spillian, the former Fleischmann family hideaway.

Soup Sunday begins at 4 p.m. This is a weekly offering at Spillian, a prix fixe meal with a bottomless bowl of soup, green salad, bread, sweet treat for dessert as well as coffee and tea, served family style. In the spirit of the Fleischmanns bread lines, born at their Vienna Model Bakery in New York City, guests are invited into the kitchen to be served their soup in a ‘soup line.’

This event offers a glimpse into the elegant, eccentric and fascinating world of the family that gave Fleischmanns its name. Entry is $25, which includes a $5 donation for the HSM roof fund.

For more information, please call 800-811-3351 or email play@spillian.com.

Need your feathers renovated?

Apr 2, 2014 | Tin Horn

While doing some research in the 1880 Middletown census I came across an unusual occupation of a man named J. L. Thurber, age 54: “feather renovator.” He and wife Olive had three sons, Adelbert, 20, Eddie, 18 and Herman, 14, all listed as laborers. Hmmm, what the heck was a feather renovator? Google and Goodsearch yielded a couple of ideas, the closest perhaps from the memoir of an Illinois woman, whose memories were published in The Prairie Historian, Jefferson Co. IL, March 1972:

“I remember when the feather renovators came to town. They stayed several days, making over and reconditioning feather beds and pillows. The young men were sporty guys and the girls liked that. One girl eloped with her renovator beau.”

It sounds like the cleaning and plumping of feather pillows and mattresses was later done by steam machines. For example, the Wikipedia entry for inventor Robert Benjamin Lewis of Maine explained that decorative feathers–ostrich, peacock, egret, and the like—were used to adorn the wardrobe of the fashionably dressed, and when the garments were sent out to be laundered and cleaned, the feathers would go also. On June 27, 1840, Robert Lewis assigned U.S. Patent no. 1655 to New York City businessman John H. Stevens; this patent was for a “Feather Renovator,” or a “Machine for Cleaning and Drying Feathers,” described as the “arrangement and combination of feathers by steam and steam heat” and could be used for dressing over old feathers or preparing new feathers for any domestic purposes.”

Any other ideas out there?