The Woodstock Artists Cemetery began with a father seeking a place to bury his teenage son. Since 1934, the hillside burial ground has become a record of the people who helped shape the town. The Woodstock Memorial Society, the nonprofit that runs the cemetery off Mountain View Avenue, has about 50 burial plots available. In […]
History
Posted inHistory
Overlook
A Bride Buried Alive and Other Catskills Ghost Stories
In an old Catskills tale, two casket bearers dug up an interred Olivebridge girl to steal her jewelry. As they tried to take it, she woke up. The story appears in Neva Shultis’ 1957 booklet, “From Sunset to Cock’s Crow.” For generations, Catskills folklore has also helped local businesses. Some mountaintop legends were devised to […]
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Woodstock
The Day the Dalai Lama Came to Woodstock
Thousands gathered at Woodstock’s Andy Lee Field on a cool, clear afternoon in September 2006 to hear the Dalai Lama speak. Word-of-mouth had spread news of the free talk, drawing neighbors from across town and giving some an encounter they still recall vividly 20 years later. “I got up as close as I could be,” […]
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Overlook
How the Catskills Remember 9/11
Ram Singal was writing an email in the World Trade Center’s North Tower at 8:46 a.m. on Sept. 11, 2001, when the building shook. At first, he thought an earthquake had struck. Then the building shook again. Singal, a Port Authority project manager who had developed a structural integrity inspection program for the complex, knew […]
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Woodstock
Revolutionary War Veterans Honored With New Footstones
The Woodstock Cemetery Committee and American Legion Post 1026 dedicated new grave markers to two Revolutionary War veterans during a ceremony Thursday, Sept. 3, at Woodstock Cemetery on Rock City Road. The committee, American Legion, and Historical Society of Woodstock honored John Yerry and William Longyear, who were buried in the cemetery in the 19th […]
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Hunter
Hunter Historical Map Project Enters Next Phase as Planners Wrap Up Townwide Tour
Mountain Top Library Director Jaki Elmo and Town Historian Diann “Dede” Terns-Thorpe joined town residents Carol Dale and Lisa DiNino Nemerson last week at the library in Tannersville, narrowing a final list of historical properties in the village for an ongoing project to map the history of the town of Hunter. The session was the […]
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Hunter
Haines Falls Talk Traces Greene County’s History of Slavery
Inside the Mountain Top Historical Society’s 1913 train station in Haines Falls on Saturday, June 27, Greene County Historian Jonathan Palmer described a past often hidden in scattered records: the lives of enslaved people whose labor helped shape Greene County and the Catskills. Palmer, who is also the Ulster County archivist, spoke to a packed […]
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Woodstock
Elias Hasbrouck at the Revolution and the Founding of Woodstock
George Washington took the oath of office as the first president of the United States on April 30, 1789. Administering the presidential oath on that spring day in New York City was Robert R. Livingston; the same Robert Livingston whose family owned and controlled vast land holdings in the Hudson Valley, including what we now […]
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Hunter
Lanesville Reaches to the Past to Create Map Charting Hunter’s History
Local residents took a trip into the past last week at the Stony Clove Rod and Gun Club in the hamlet of Lanesville as the Town of Hunter kicked off five public discussions aimed at enriching a map to chart the mountaintop’s history prior to 1950. The map, made possible through two grants, has been […]
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Olive
Ethnoecologist Justin Wexler Traces Lost Wildlife of the Catskills
The Catskills once held passenger pigeons in such vast numbers that their flocks darkened the sky, along with wolves, cougars, martens, elk and other wildlife no longer found here. That vanished world was the focus of a March 21 lecture at the Olive Free Library, where ethnoecologist Justin Wexler explored how Indigenous communities lived alongside […]
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Saugerties
Acclaimed Sculptor Augusta Savage’s Life in Saugerties: Art, Honors, and Chickens
One day in 1953, the acclaimed sculptor Augusta Savage gave a gift to the Finger family, her white neighbors near the same Saugerties road that now bears her name. It was a bust she’d made of their six-year-old son, Wesley. Wesley Finger, now 79, still has the bust. It’s a treasured reminder of a childhood […]
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Overlook
Ken Burns’ ‘The American Revolution’ Illuminates the Hudson Valley’s Role in the War that Defined a Nation
Crispus Attucks. Lexington and Concord. John Adams. Sam Adams. How much do you actually remember about the American Revolution from grade school? And how much do you think the average American adult knows? Filmmaker Sarah Botstein, who with Ken Burns and David Schmidt serves as co-director on the new PBS Documentary, “The American Revolution,” has plenty to […]
