Main Street, Margaretville will be rocking Friday, evening, August 30 when a Cruise-In, a benefit chicken barbecue and a free movie launch the Labor Day Weekend with a bang.

The event, co-sponsored by the Business Association of Margaretville (BAM)and the Historical Society of the Town of Middletown (HSM), will take note of the 50th anniversary of the Woodstock Festival. Music from the era by The Fishercats will get folks dancing in the street, which will be closed between Bridge Street and NBT from 5 to 8 p.m.

Several shops will stay open, some with sidewalk sales. The Margaretville Fire Department will hold a chicken barbecue with proceeds to benefit Skip Jester, long time MFD member and Main Street barber, who is recovering from a serious leg injury. Sales will take place in front of Home Goods at the corner of Main and Bridge Streets. Take dinner home or eat it on tables to be set up in the street.

“The Grange, Revisited,” a talk on the history, organization and activities of the ‘Patrons of Husbandry’ will be presented at the Historical Society of the Town of Middletown hall, 778 Cemetery Road, Margaretville on Friday, Aug. 23 from 5 to 7 p.m.

A simple supper of soup and home-made bread will follow the talk by Amy Taylor, a member of a long-time Grange family and secretary of the HSM Executive Committee.
Admission is by donation.

Former Grangers are invited to attend and share memories and photos of their time in local Granges (Greene Valley Grange in Halcott; Wawaka Grange in Halcottsville, New Kingston Valley Grange and others.) Artifacts and implements from local Granges will be displayed.

The Grange, founded in 1867 and officially referred to as The National Grange of the Order of Patrons of Husbandry, is a nonprofit, nonpartisan, fraternal organization that advocates for rural America and agriculture. In the 19th and early 20th centuries it debated, and strongly influenced, state legislatures and agencies on topics of interest to farmers. The Grange was also a social organization, hosting dances, dinners and holiday celebrations, as well as talks and workshops on agricultural crops and practices.

“Ghosts on the Land: How Hardscrabble Farmers Changed History,” will be the topic of a program presented by the Historical Society of the Town of Middletown, 778 Cemetery Road, Margaretville on Saturday, Aug. 17.

Admission is by donation.

Essayist Jennifer Kabat of Margaretville will be the speaker and guide of this two-part exploration of the Anti-Rent War of the 1840s, its local impact and its connections to international social movements of the time.

Kabat will share some surprising findings of her research into the history of the land upon which she and husband David Rainbird recently built a home on Bull Run Road near Margaretville. The project led to the article “Ghostlands,” published in March 2019 by the British magazine Granta.

On August 17 at 5:30 Kabat will lead a short walk on her property at 1314 Bull Run Road to stone foundations of buildings that were once part of the Clum family farm (directions and info: jenkabat@gmail.com). The Clums were tenant farmers on lands owned by the wealthy Livingstons, part owners of the vast Hardenburgh Patent. They lived, worked and died on the rocky farm that they never owned, yet they apparently did not join their neighbors in the uprising Kabat describes as “violent, radical and profoundly ambitious.”

At 7 p.m. at the HSM hall on Cemetery Road, Kabat will present an illustrated talk about the tumultuous Anti-Rent War, when costumed farmers banded together and used guerilla tactics to overthrow the feudal land-holding system that originated in 18th-century England. She will trace the uprising’s connection to the international economic collapse of the 1830s, which spawned an anti-capitalist backlash. “Utopian alternatives were spun, and socialism spread across the country. People believed in possibilities outside of capitalism. Collective values were more important than the self,” she explained.

Some local Anti-Rent leaders aligned themselves with men like Charles Fourier, the French philosopher who espoused communal property and personal and political liberation, and Robert Owen, a Welsh industrialist turned utopian socialist who moved to the US to create one of the first intentional communities practicing communal ownership.

“What amazes me is how internationalist they were in their ideals,” wrote Kabat of Catskill farmers. “That they were drawing on politics from Europe, that this tiny seeming backwater became tied into much bigger politics.”

The 7th Living History Cemetery Tour, sponsored by the Historical Society of the Town of Middletown, takes place Sat., June 22 (rain date June 23).

This year’s tour is at Margaretville Cemetery, on Cemetery Road, just off Route 30 (upper Main Street) in the Village of Margaretville. Tour-goers will meet 10 people from the past on one-hour guided tours that depart from the parking lot every 20 minutes starting at 4 p.m. There are seven tour times available; reservations are required and can be made by calling 845-586-4736. Admission is $20; children under 15 get in free.

The cast of local players, directed by Frank Canavan and Joyce St. George, includes Agnes Laub as nurse-historian Ethel Bussy Coulter; Kelly Keck and Dave Turan as WWI vets Bruno Metzner and Marcus Korn; Ann Saxon Hersh as Margaret Hallock Newton, proprietor of the Pakatakan Lodge; John Bernhardt as banker and school board chairman James Henry Hitt.

Also, Melissa Day as Eleanor Sands Marvin, the granddaughter of Margaretville power couple George G. and Catherine Moore Decker; Jim Rauter and Gretchen Walker as Dr. James and Harriet Allaben; Amy Taylor as farm wife and mother Abigail Clum, and Burr Hubbell as John Dickson, Jr., a timber raftsman on the East Branch who served in the War of 1812.