Win this quilt!

Win this quilt!

Jun 14, 2011 | Tin Horn

A colorful queen-sized quilt in the log cabin design has been donated to the Historical Society of the Town of Middletown to raffle as a fundraiser.

The quilt can be seen this Saturday at the HSM table at the Pakatakan Farmers Market at the Halcottsville Round Barn. The more tickets you buy, the better your chance of winning this hand-stitched beauty! The winning ticket will be drawn at the HSM annual meeting October 23.

The Catskill Mountain Quilters, which meet every Monday at the Erpf House in Arkville, completed the quilt which had been started by Jackie Reither of Margaretville. Jackie, with several other quilt enthusiasts, had pieced the top during a workshop sponsored by Cornell Cooperative Extension several years ago. Recently, she gave the partially finished bed cover to the local quilting group to complete. Peg Barnes, who led the Extension workshop, is a member of the Catskill Mountain Quilters.

The group has made and donated countless quilts to area non-profit groups and institutions to help them raise funds. “The Historical Society is grateful to all of the talented women who worked on this beautiful quilt, which is destined to be a family heirloom for the lucky winner,” commented HSM President Diane Galusha.

The Pakatakan-St. Augustine connection

The Pakatakan-St. Augustine connection

Jun 5, 2011 | Tin Horn

More on the Native American conversation:

Ethel Bussy, in her 1960 book History of Margaretville and Surrounding Area, noted that “In 1949, Willard Sanford (former Village Historian) took a piece of stone from the site of the ancient Indian village of Pakatakan near Arkville and it was sent by express to the Lightner Museum at St. Augustine, Florida. The stone was to be engraved with the name of the donor and the site from which it was taken and was to be inserted into a stone bridge being built near the museum. The bridge was to be made up of stones from each battlefield and historical site in the US.”

An inquiry sent to the Lightner Museum (www.lightnermuseum.org) yielded the following reply from Irene Lewis Lowrie, Registrar at the museum: “The good news is that we do have a list from 1948 showing that Willard F. Sanford of New York donated ‘a stone from the Pakatakan Indian village in the Western Catskill Mountains.’ Additionally, there are many small pencil drawings of the various rock columns showing numbers on various shaped rocks. The bad news is that here is no paper record indicating which number corresponds to which name. We can only assume Sanford’s rock is out there, somewhere on posts at the base of the bridge. . . . A photograph in Hobbies, July, 1948, p. 102 shows that the original four foot wide short block walls at both ends of the bridge were to be surfaced with historical rocks. Probably due to a lack of enough rocks, the block walls were greatly scaled down to be more column sized. They are covered with various rocks, stones and a few bricks.”

Ms Lawrie passed along this photo of the bridge, with the Pakatakan rock embedded somewhere. The whole story of the Native American village – whether it was indeed a settlement, or a seasonal camp, and precisely where it was located — remains a topic for debate and wonder.

The bridge at Lightner Museum, with Pakatakan rock embedded, somewhere.

Andrew Miller’s heartache

May 11, 2011 | Tin Horn

Got a problem? Has a pile of woe been laid upon your doorstep? In a funk about life? Read on to learn what stoicism and perseverance mean.

John Miller of Tijeras, New Mexico, is writing a book about his forebears who emigrated from Scotland to Bovina in 1819. He sent us the chapter about Andrew Miller, the second son of James and Grace Archibald Miller, born in Scotland, in 1814.

Andrew was 32 when he married Christian Scott, whose family came from the same Scottish parish as the Millers. Christian Scott Miller bore seven children on the couple’s New Kingston farmstead. None of them lived to age 20.

A lung ailment claimed seven-year-old James in 1860. On September 30, 1865 contagion claimed two-year-old John, followed within hours by the toddler’s mother, Christian. 15-year-old daughter Grace died six days later. Sons David and William also died in the mid-1860s, before they had entered their teens.

With no boys left to help him worked the farm, Andrew sold 125 acres to his brother Walter, and then remarried Dorothy (Dolly) Swart of New Kingston who helped him raise his two remaining daughters: Mary, who married Andrew Hewitt in 1868, and then passed away seven months later at the age of 20; and Magdalene (Matty), who at age 16 married Reed Dumond, and died in childbirth just two weeks after her 17th birthday.

Andrew had survived his first wife, their children, and all of his siblings when he himself left a sorrow-filled life on New Years Day, 1892 at the age of 84.

John Miller welcomes contact with anyone interested in his genealogical research: celtic@wildblue.net.

Those Indian caves

Those Indian caves

May 5, 2011 | Tin Horn

From time to time, tales have been told about ‘Indian caves’ in our area, rock shelters where Native Americans reputedly stayed while traveling through on seasonal hunting and fishing expeditions (see the Our Town page of the Communities section on this website for a bit about the first occupants of the East Branch Valley.)

Mike Kudish at another sheltering overhang

David Rubenstein in Arkville ‘Indian’ cave

David Rubenstein, a student of Native cultures of the Northeast, wanted to know if the Historical Society had ever ascertained the location of any of these caves. Had artifacts or petroglyphs been discovered? Where was the “ancient village of Pakatakan” (spelled many different ways), as mentioned in Ethel Bussy’s History and Stories of Margaretville and the Surrounding Area?

A search of the Catskill Mountain News turned up a 1934 article that an Arkville cave had in fact yielded stone implements and arrow points for many years. The article said Roxbury lawyer Ralph Ives and sons Charles and Ralph Jr. unearthed a fire pit in this cave containing broken pottery, flint scrapers, a hammerstone, pestle, stone sinkers and other implements, along with animal bones made into needles and awls. Ives, who exhibited some of the items at a meeting of the Oneonta Kiwanis Club in June of 1934, claimed the material to be of Algonquin origin, perhaps dating back 2,500 years.

This type of activity is prohibited today, out of respect for the people who left behind traces of their lives, and of the stories they could tell us if left in place. Does anyone know where these artifacts may have landed?

Using information from the article, David Rubenstein, forest historian Michael Kudish and I went to have a look at the cave in early May, but we found nothing to indicate prehistoric occupation. The cave (actually an overhanging rock ledge) is spacious, but not the 30x20x8-foot high cave described in the newspaper account. Big enough to keep modern day hunters and woodwalkers out of the elements though, and clearly a few have taken advantage of that.

We checked out two other likely “Indian caves” and the surrounding forest. Dr. Kudish thinks the combination of tree species – white oak, mountain laurel, black birch, American chestnut and others, indicate the probability of repeated burns, suggesting that Indians may have found shelter in southeast-facing caves and cleared some of the prime flood plain land to grow summer crops.

Intriguing. We’ll likely never know for certain. But as woods walker and writer Peter Manning wrote following a recent tramp with Bovina historian Ray LaFever to “Indian Rocks” in that town, “It’s good to have timeless places that set our imaginations at play.”

If you have a similar story or would like to respond to this one, let us hear from you.

Diane Galusha

The News, from 1863

Apr 4, 2011 | Tin Horn

Orson Allaben was an educated, principled and influential man. A man with character. Money. And opinions. An early developer of the Village of Margaretville, he was a doctor, a businessman, and, in the 1860s, started a newspaper called The Utilitarian, “A Family Journal, Devoted to the Fireside, the Field and the Town.” The two remaining copies of the newspaper, in the collection of the Delaware County Historical Association in Delhi, show it was also useful in promoting his political philosophy. He was not a fan of Abraham Lincoln, or a supporter of the Civil War. In the issue of September 10, 1863, he put forth an “Apology” that the lengthy list of Army draftees “who have won prizes in the great National Lottery of Messrs. Lincoln, Greely & Co.” took up a page of his four-page newspaper and bumped his “Departments of Political Economy, War News and Editorials” that week. “To some, it will be interesting to learn the names of friends or relatives who have been so unlucky. To those of our patrons the list does not interest, we will pray them to excuse.”

The draft list appeared in numerous other newspapers, including the Bloomville Mirror, which Linda Ogborn transcribed for the Delaware County History and Genealogy website. There were “334 names in the wheel” for the Middletown draft, and 95 names were drawn.

Also in the Utilitarian that week, attorney DeWitt Griffin of Griffins Corners (Fleischmanns) advertised that he was ready to help secure “Bounty, Back Pay and Pensions for Soldiers”; Jonathan Keator of Clark’s Factory (Dunraven) requested the owner of a “large, light red (stray) cow, about ten years old, with a white bag” to come claim her; and David Ackerley, proprietor of the Ackerley House in Margaretville, proclaimed his establishment to be “favorably located for trout fishing in the lakes and streams of Dry Brook, Hardenburgh and Beaverkill,” and to be served by regular mail and stage lines, leaving daily for Delhi and Kingston, tri-weekly for Moresville (Grand Gorge), and twice a week for Colchester and New Kingston.”

We’ll have more from the Utilitarian from time to time.