It was easy to know you were in Bedell . . .

Jul 11, 2011 | Tin Horn

I lived in Bedell, just “over the hill” to the west of Halcott. There were (and are) several ways to get to Bedell from Halcott. From the old Halcott Store and post office you could go west then north over the mountain into the head of Bedell, and Big Red Kill Road, or go a little farther south and come out by Joe Todd’s house, which led to Little Red Kill Road. You could also go over the Old Halcott Road to Moseman Road and also end up by Joe Todd’s house.

It was easy to know you were in Bedell. Coming up Little Red Kill Road, past the cemetery, before it intersected with Big Red Kill Road, you could see the white letters in my great uncle Gilbert Streeter’s pasture, way up on the hill behind his house that spelled out “Bedell NY.” The letters could also be seen from Big Red Kill Road as you passed by my parents’ house (Hilton and Stella Kelly) and continued up the valley.

My great grandfather Ward Kelly, Uncle Gilbert’s father-in-law, laid out the large flat rocks, and painted them white. They were placed in the ground on a slant so they could be seen more easily from the road. The rocks were evenly spaced so the letters appeared from a distance to dot the hillside.

Anyone seeing the rocks from the road might imagine the letters to be at least 5 feet high. My cousin Karen (Finch) Hull and I knew from experience (since we walked the hills on his farm regularly as we played outdoors) that each letter was at least 20 feet high. As they weathered we thought they should be repainted. One of our hill treks took us up there with paint cans and brushes to repaint them. It took us longer than expected. There were a heck of a lot of stones to paint! They were a mix of chipped paint, weathered stone, and dried moss.

The historic stone sign is gone today, replaced by a road, which leads to the Treetops housing development on the hill. Would anyone like to re-create the Bedell sign? There is ample room on my father’s land, and he’s agreeable to seeing it up there again. Please contact me at larmour1@nycap.rr.com, or the Historical Society, mtownhistory@catskill.net

Linda Kelly Armour

3 responses to “It was easy to know you were in Bedell…”

richard dell shultis
Wednesday, October 16th, 2013

Hello Linda…….your blog about Bedell New York stirred some wonderful childhood memories. As a youngster I lived in Kelly Corners and also the Denver-Vega valley. My aunt and uncle lived in Bedell just a short distance from the cemetery. My aunt Emma Kelly was the Postmaster in Bedell for many years and my uncle Merchant Kelly had a gas pump on the corner of their property to serve all the locals gasoline needs. My parents Dell and Dorothy Shultis are buried in the beautiful little cemetery in Bedell, I can still vividly recall the wonderfully pungently sweet aroma of the wild thyme that grew as a groundcover over much of the cemetery. And I remember well seeing the big letters on the hillside spelling out BEDELL……I am 70 years old and live in Phoenix Az. Would love to know if you knew my aunt and uncle.

Linda Armour
Wednesday, October 16th, 2013

It was so good to hear from you, Richard. Merch and Emma were my next door neighbors growing up. They were the only couple I ever knew who celebrated their 75th wedding anniversary. Just walk down the hill, across the stream, up the hill, and you were at my house on Big Red Kill Road (not Little Red Kill Road where the cemetery is). Stella and Hilton Kelly are my parents. I walked the approx. 2/10 mile daily to get our mail. I remember the small post room quite well and either Merch or Emma, sometimes both, greeting me with a smile. After the post office closed, we received our mail via roadside mailboxes from Fleischmanns. Wilbur Woolheater was the postman. When he passed away, my mother Stella became the postman, er postwoman. She served that role for 43 years, retiring in 2007. Mom and Dad moved to assisted living last year and we sold their home. The white Bedell sign will live in memory only. I wish I had a photo of it, other than in my memory.

richard dell shultis
Wednesday, October 16th, 2013

thank you Linda for responding…..and you do indeed have sweet memories of my aunt and uncle. Emma and my mother Dorothy were sisters. I am sure that I met your father sometime in the 1950s. They spoke of him often. The people who lived in that Red Kill valley were the best people on earth…..honest hardworking and neighborly……..With best regards, Richard Shultis

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