Remembering Arena: 60 years gone

Remembering Arena: 60 years gone

Sep 9, 2014 | news archive

An illustrated talk on the construction of the Pepacton Reservoir and its impact on displaced communities, particularly Arena, will be presented Sunday, Sept. 14 at 1 p.m. at the Historical Society of the Town of Middletown (HSM), 778 Cemetery Road, Margaretville.

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

Diane Galusha, author of Liquid Assets, A History of New York City’s Water System, will deliver the program titled “Remembering Arena: 60 Years Gone.” She will explain the City’s 20th-century search for reliable sources of water, the damming of the East Branch of the Delaware River to create the largest reservoir in the City’s supply, and the repercussions to 1,000 people in four communities who were forced to leave their homes, farms, and businesses.

The James Martin house is moved from Arena to higher ground in Dunraven.

Special focus will be given to the lost hamlet of Arena in the Town of Middletown. Photos of most of the buildings in the hamlet, many taken by Catskill Mountain News photographer Al Weiss, will be shown. Other communities claimed for the 21-mile-long reservoir were Shavertown and Union Grove in the Town of Andes, and Pepacton in the Town of Colchester. Those with photos and/or memories of these communities, or of reservoir construction, are encouraged to share them.

The speaker is President of HSM, a former journalist and editor of the Catskill Mountain News, 1989-96. She is employed at the Catskill Watershed Corporation.

In addition to Liquid Assets (1999), she has written several other books of local and regional history, including Another Day, Another Dollar, The Civilian Conservation Corps in the Catskills (2008); Through a Woman’s Eye: Pioneering Photographers of Rural Upstate (1991), When Cauliflower was King (2004), and As the River Runs, A History of Halcottville, NY (1990).

Animals on the Farm display at Cauliflower Fest

Animals on the Farm display at Cauliflower Fest

Sep 9, 2014 | news archive

Photos and stories of Animals on the Farm will be the featured exhibit in the History Tent at the Cauliflower Festival this Saturday, Sept. 27 from 10 to 4 in Margaretville Village Park.

Find out about Olive, a handicapped Hereford on the Bouton farm in Halcott; the obstinate churn dog remembered by John Burroughs who grew up on a Roxbury farm; and the disastrous consequences that befell Mike Todd of Dry Brook when he tickled the belly of an ox.

Photos of prized dairy cows, handsome work horses and much-loved cow dogs, barn cats, chickens and even a pet bobcat will be displayed.

A calf and a lamb, born this summer on Chris and Judy DiBenedetto’s farm in Halcott will greet visitors at the History Tent, sponsored by the Historical Society of the Town of Middletown. HSM will also mount its annual exhibit on the cauliflower industry, which flourished in the Catskills from the 1890s through about 1950, and continued on some large truck farms through the 1990s.

The eagerly anticipated DVD of the Third Annual Living History Cemetery Tour, held in June at Sanford Cemetery, Dunraven, will be available for sale. The video of the one-hour tour, featuring nine area players portraying people from Middletown’s past, was professionally produced by videographer Jessica Vecchione.

A sales table of beautiful glassware and other items will help raise funds for HSM.

Several regional history books will be available for purchase, including “When Cauliflower Was King in the Catskills.”

The Festival is sponsored by the Central Catskills Chamber of Commerce and area businesses.

Mamie Townsend and calf on the family’s Bragg Hollow, Halcottsville farm.

Animals on the Farm display at Cauliflower Fest

Evening of summer pleasures will benefit HSM

Jun 25, 2014 | news archive

An evening of simple pleasures — garden strolling, porch sitting, cider sipping and a bit of lawn bowling, all enjoyed with background music from the player piano – will be the order of the day at a Summer Soiree Friday, July 11 at The Raven’s Nest, the home of Tom and Connie Jeffers in Margaretville.

The event, which runs from 5 to 8 p.m., is a fundraiser for the Historical Society of the Town of Middletown (HSM). It will include light fare from Mary’s Cookin’ Again, tastings of the Jeffers’ home-made hard cider, and other libations.

Mamie Townsend and calf on the family’s Bragg Hollow, Halcottsville farm.

Guests will enjoy tours of all three floors of this elegant 1890s home. A restored player piano with its visible workings is sure to fascinate. Choose from among the Jeffers’ collection of several hundred rolls of old time and modern tunes.

Visit the carriage house, with its specially equipped woodworking shop and Cider Room, and the gardens, in full bloom now at the height of summer. Play a game of croquet using a vintage croquet set, and check out the steampunk installation in the parlor. Don’t know what steampunk is? Come find out!

Admission is $40 per person, $75 for couples. Call 845-586-4878 by July 5 to make reservations for this unique and casually elegant evening. Period dress is welcomed!

At a HSM-sponsored program in the spring of 2013, the Jeffers shared the story of their beautifully restored Queen Anne Victorian home at 191 Walnut Street with a rapt audience of history lovers.

 At the end of September in 1892, architect, contractor and builder Henry Coulter and his wife Nina purchased a lot on the northwest end of Walnut Street from Jeremiah Ackerly. They built a house in which to raise their family and it was completed in the mid-1890s.

Since Mr. Coulter was a builder and the home was intended for his family to live in, the construction is amazingly sound “and somewhat over-built,” the Jeffers say. The house features a typical wraparound front porch with turret.

Later owners (there have been seven) added a massive modern kitchen and a master suite in what was a third floor attic, including raising the turret and “witches cap” by 14 feet.

Reserve Cemetery Tour time today!

Reserve Cemetery Tour time today!

Jun 11, 2014 | news archive

The longest day of the year will bring the most anticipated event of the season when the Third Annual Living History Cemetery Tour comes to the Sanford Cemetery, County Route 6 (New Kingston Rd.), Dunraven.

Reservations are required by June 18. Call 845-586-4736 to reserve one of seven tour times. Tickets are $12.

Sponsored by the Historical Society of the Town of Middletown, the event features costumed players who will portray nine individuals from Middletown’s past. Guides will lead visitors through this picturesque burial ground to meet each character during the course of the one-hour tour.

Old School Baptist Church program June 8

May 30, 2014 | news archive

Sacred traditions and music will merge on Sunday, June 8 when the Historical Society of the Town of Middletown (HSM) presents “The Good Old Way: Music and Memories of the Old School Baptist Church,” at the HSM hall, 778 Cemetery Road, Margaretville.

The free presentation begins at 2 p.m. Grounds will be open at 11 for those who would like to picnic by the pond.

Presenter Ben Bath encourages anyone who would like to share memories, songbooks, photos or memorabilia from Old School Baptist (OSB) churches to come early and chat with him. Locally, OSB congregations met in Halcottsville, Vega and Stratton Falls. All three simple, unadorned churches and their adjoining burial grounds are listed on the State and National Registers of Historic Places.

The Vega church is now a performance venue of the Roxbury Arts Group. OSB meetings are still held annually at the “Yellow Church” at Stratton Falls.

Presenter Ben Bath, a graduate of Bard College, is an ethnomusicologist who has extensively studied the musical traditions of the Old School, or Primitive, Baptists, as well as other early American sacred and secular music.

His 2 p.m. presentation will focus on the OSB doctrine and how that translated into their music. In 1832, hard line Gospel followers, led by Elder Gilbert Beebe, split from New School, or Missionary elements of the Baptist Church who wanted to form Sunday Schools and missions. The “Beebe Baptists” used a hymnal published by Gilbert Beebe that matched religious poetry and scriptural passages to familiar tunes. The elder would intone a line, and the congregation would sing it together slowly, a technique called “lining out a hymn.”

While New School Baptist churches allowed instrumental music, Old School adherents did not, so hymns were sung without accompaniment.

The June 7 talk will cover how tunes were transmitted to large crowds during open air camp meetings of the Second Great Awakening, and how the rise of itinerant singing school teachers meant four-part harmony began to replace lined-out hymns. Local OSB congregations later adopted the 1886 Durand & Lester Primitive and Old School Baptist Hymn and Tune Book, which had tunes written out in four-part harmony.

During the June 8 program, eight local singers will demonstrate the different singing styles and everyone will be encouraged to participate in the old method of lining out hymns.

This program is the closing element of the weekend-long Headwaters History Days, a celebration of heritage, folklife and community in the East Branch Delaware River towns of Middletown, Andes and Roxbury.

www.headwatershistorydays.org.

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).