Middletown History Center to host baseball talk by Collin Miller
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.
