In 1800, more than 2,000 enslaved people lived in Ulster County, according to Ulster County Historian Eddie Moran, citing that year’s federal census.
Moran, a New Paltz resident who studies the history of enslaved people in the region, is descended from all seven founding families of New Paltz, each of which enslaved people. New Paltz was founded in 1677.
Moran was also a student at the State University of New York at New Paltz in 2019, when officials renamed six campus buildings that had carried the names of New Paltz founders who enslaved people.
“Enslavement here was not any less brutal or inhumane than it was down South,” Moran said of New York. “And it wasn’t less common in New York.”
That history provides context for the Woodstock church, founded in 1799 as the Dutch Reformed Church. The church’s minister, the Rev. Kathryn Rivera Torea, is working on an apology for its early history, which included a minister, elder, deacon, and congregation member who were enslavers in the early 1800s. She hopes to have an update on her progress in the next few weeks.
The church’s history came to light in the 2025 book “A History of the Woodstock Reformed Church: Worship and Community Service at an Architectural Landmark on the Village Green.”
“It says Woodstock was a typical community at the time,” said primary author Bill Rhoads, a church elder and professor emeritus of art history at SUNY New Paltz. “At that time, it was not an artists colony. It was a rural farming community.”
According to the book, church and census records showed that:
Peter A. Overbagh, also spelled Overbaugh, minister from 1806 to 1817, and his wife, Marie Ostrander, enslaved six people in 1810 and five in 1820.
Cornelius Dumont, also spelled Dumond, and his wife, Hendrickje Newkerk, enslaved one person in 1790 and 1800. He appears as an elder on the application for the church’s 1805 certificate of incorporation.
Arie Newkerk, also known as Aaron Newkirk, and his wife, Maria Risely, enslaved one person in 1810 and 1820. Newkerk is listed as a deacon in church records.
Congregation members Abraham W. Van Gaasbeck and his wife, Elizabeth P. Hasbrouck, enslaved two people in 1800 and one in 1810.
The book also found that congregants and ministers promoted blackface minstrelsy; that enslaved Africans arrived in Woodstock in the 1760s; and that the first church registry of the Protestant Reformed Dutch Church of Woodstock, the predecessor to the Woodstock Reformed Church, covered the years from 1805 to 1809.
That registry recorded the names of 94 members, including four families who were enslavers and two Black members.
At the time, slavery was common, Rhoads said, calling it “a terrible common practice.”
A member of both the Woodstock Reformed Church and New Paltz Reformed Church, Rhoads said he was inspired to write the 2025 book after completing an earlier one about the architecture of the New Paltz congregation’s church building.
The Woodstock Reformed Church’s “historically important building” inspired the more recent book, and the project expanded to include other aspects of the congregation, Rhoads said. That included the church under different pastors, the church in art, and its relationship with artists.
Rhoads described himself as an architectural historian, noting that his specialty of art history encompasses the history of architecture. It’s “my real specialty,” he said.
Correction: This article has been updated to clarify the opening section’s description of historical census data related to slavery in Ulster County.
John W. Barry is a reporter for The Overlook. Reach him at john@theoverlooknews.com.
