As the United States approaches the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, Greene County Historian Jonathan Palmer sees the milestone as an opportunity not just to commemorate the Revolutionary War, but to reconsider how its legacy shaped communities across the Catskills. In Greene County, he said, the story of the Revolution is less about a single battlefield and more about how residents embraced its ideals long after independence—shaping local identity, settlement patterns, and civic life in ways still visible today.
Greene County did not exist in 1776. Formed in 1800 and named for Revolutionary War General Nathanael Greene, one of George Washington’s most trusted commanders, the county reflects how later generations defined themselves through the Revolution’s memory. Palmer spoke with us about that legacy, his role as county historian, and why local history remains essential to understanding the region today.
What does the Greene County historian do? What does your day-to-day look like?
I’ve got a weird job, actually. Greene County doesn’t have a full-time historian. It’s a county of a little over 48,000 people, 14 towns and five villages, and it’s culturally divided between what we refer to as the mountaintop and valley.
I only do that job in the evenings and on weekends. From 9 to 5 every week, I serve as the archivist for the County of Ulster. Ulster County Historian Eddie Moran and I work right down the hall from each other. I wear two hats all the time. I wear the hat of the archivist, and I wear the hat of the historian. They’re two sides of the same coin.
As an archivist, I’m concerned about making sure that information is available to people. The long and short of it is that because history is an evidentiary process, we have to make sure we’re endowing people with the evidence that they need to make informed conclusions about the past.
And then as the historian, I am interpreting that evidence and making conclusions and presenting those to the public.
What’s your background?
I grew up in Athens, and my family’s lived within 15 miles of that area since the 1660s. I often tell people that being somebody’s eighth great-grandson makes you nothing at all. These are just ancestors. A lot of people have these ancestors in common. It’s actually very common in this area to find people with lineages like that.
But what it means for me personally is that I think I approach the place I was from with a deeper connection to it than a lot of people might have at first glance when they’re thinking about the place they exist in.
The idea that I could walk through town and I was related to half of the cemetery—It’s a weird thought for a kid to encounter the idea that you are a product of something that has been happening for a very long time in a very specific place.
What does the 250th anniversary mean in Greene County?
It’s very strange, because if you were in Greene County in 1776, there would be no Greene County.
If you had been in other parts of Windham that now comprise the towns of Hunter, Jewett, Lexington and a little bit of Halcott, you’d be in Ulster. If you go kind of north and east of that line, you kind of cross over into what are the old districts of Catskill and Coxsackie, and that’s Albany County at that time.
So for us up in Greene County, our story and our relationship to the Revolution, at least as I perceive it, is much more a story of our relationship to its memory and its legacy.
So Greene County’s Revolutionary story is not just about what physically happened there?
Things happen in Greene County during the Revolution. Don’t get me wrong. The Articles of Association, which is one of the only surviving signed Articles of Association from the Hudson Valley from 1775, survives and gives us a really good sense of what the political identity of the people living in Catskill and Coxsackie were at that early date.
The people living in that place and the concerns they had come down to us through preserved records, groups like the correspondence of the Bronck family in Coxsackie. These are people who are working with the committees of safety. They’re concerned about Tories, they’re concerned about levies for the Continental Army and things like that.
But there’s no grand battle that is a central feature of our tale.
Are there local stories from the war that stand out to you?
There’s the massacre of the Strope family in Cairo. There’s a skirmish that’s fought out on the Schoharie Kill in the vicinity of modern Prattsville.
It’s a very interesting story because allegedly a British soldier is killed in this skirmish leading a band of Tory raiders out to Schoharie, down toward the valley, and they’re stopped and intercepted.
The British soldier is buried by an enslaved man, in all the apocryphal tales of the story that come down to us. I really love that story because you’ve got this British soldier and the man who buries him out on the side of the Schoharie Kill after the skirmish in 1778 or ’79 is an enslaved man.
You have to think, what’s that guy’s experience? He’s out here in the middle of really what is like the howling nowhere. Prattsville is the howling nowhere of the 1770s. It is out in the middle of the boonies.
Was he burying that guy because he could have been that man’s liberator in a different scenario, or is this just somebody who’s observing a burial custom and trying to maintain some dignity in a place that’s riddled with abject chaos?”
How did Greene County come to define itself through the Revolution?
When Greene County was formed in March of 1800, it’s formed by a partition of Albany and Ulster counties, and all the people living in it decided to name the county after this great revolutionary hero.
Nathanael Greene is the first of Washington’s generals to die after the Revolutionary War. This man lingers in the public consciousness as one of our great deceased heroes whose legacy is one that we must carry forward with us through time.
In that act, the people of Greene County decide to place this stamp on what the identity of the county is. It’s like, we are a revolutionary people, and we continue to be, 20, 25 years after the signing of the Declaration of Independence.
How did that identity shape the mountaintop?
The people who come to the mountaintop, the people who settle up in Windham, Ashland, Jewett, Prattsville, Lexington — why is Lexington called Lexington? It’s called Lexington because of Lexington and Concord. They’re saying we’re going to name this community after one of the hotbeds of revolutionary fervor.
All these guys, they’re veterans of the Revolution, but many of them aren’t from Greene. For us as historians telling this story, how can we do justice to the story of Greene County by just telling the story of what happened physically in Greene County during the war? You can’t.
Every cemetery you go to up on the mountaintop, you see it. You walk into Jewett Heights Cemetery and you walk around among the stones, and most early 19th-century gravestones contain biblical passages, quotes of poetry, things like that.
But all these guys who were buried up in Lexington, dying in their 70s and 80s in the 1820s and ’30s, the thing they have their families put on their stones is “a soldier of the Revolution,” “a soldier of ’76.”
These are people who had long, fulfilling lives. They were captains of industry. They were the movers and shakers of our understanding of local governance in a new country. They’ve done amazing things. But the thing they say about themselves when they die is, ‘I was a soldier of ’76.’ That is stirring.
Many local historians, and stewards of history, are older. It’s seemingly difficult in today’s zeitgeist for younger people to gravitate toward a career in the preservation of local history. Why is that?
Eddie and I are outliers, of course. We’re working on not being young. Give it a little time and we won’t be.
But town boards are often looking for people who know the community, have been a part of the community in some way, and have the free time to do that. I don’t know any young people with free time. We’ve all got day jobs.
I would love to be a volunteer in more capacities, but I work 60 hours of my week right out of the gate, not counting the commuting time, the meetings and things like that that happen outside of that.
I just bought a new house, and I feel like I’ve got survivor’s guilt as a young person who was finally able to get a home. I’m shocked I was able to buy a house in the county where I grew up. So many people I know aren’t able to do that even though they want to stay.
What role does history play in a moment when people are getting information from so many fragmented sources?
A lot of people say young people aren’t into history at all. It’s just that we haven’t had a moment to contextualize it yet for ourselves.
For all of the pitfalls that are presented for the history community now with the advent of AI and the degradation of media literacy, I think so many young people are realizing that history is key to unlocking their understanding of current events.
If you want to understand American politics, why is what’s going on right now happening? I can only look backwards and say that what’s happening right now is as American as apple pie, for better or worse.
There is so much evidence and events that mirror what we’re experiencing now that might offer some clues for where our next steps are.
What does that mean for your work as a historian and archivist?
The idea of historical authority is just out the window. I deal with that issue all the time where people will say, well, I read about this, and it’s like, no, you read the Google AI summary and it’s just spitting out whatever you want to see. And it’s wrong. It’s almost categorically wrong.
As a historian, all you can do is make sure that the stuff you’re producing reflects your best possible understanding of the source material at hand.
More importantly than that, I think as an archivist, I’m very concerned with making sure that when people are out there making claims, they know that there are sources that can back up or undermine what they’re trying to say.
History is an evidentiary process. I want it tattooed on my forehead.
You also mentioned how much history can remain hidden in private hands. Is part of your work trying to change that?
That’s something I’ve done a lot of, and I’m very proud of some of the things that have come of it. I wouldn’t say convincing people is what I do so much as confidence-building.
We’re part of a confidence-building process. One of the coolest collections out there belonged to this guy Gene Dauner, who still works for the post office on the night shift in Kingston. In the 1960s, when he was in his early 20s, he picked up a camera and just started taking Kodachrome slides of whatever was going on in the community around him — demolitions, renovations of buildings, construction of roadways, all the destructive stuff that was happening.
Nineteen thousand slides later, he put his camera down, and he called up the archives here and said, ‘I really want to donate these records somewhere.’
We talked to him about what we could do. It was a confidence-building process that we understood where each other was coming from, and we were able to get the Gene Dauner collection here at the clerk’s office.
The Ulster County Archives is now in the process of uploading all this stuff to New York Heritage. As a historian, I know there are images in there that I’m going to be using and sharing with people. As the archivist, I know that I can never perceive all the possible use cases for that material. I want to make sure that it’s available for anybody who wants to engage in the historical process themselves.
What do you want readers to know about local history work happening this year?
If you want to know what’s happening this year, we’ve got a big July 3 event happening in Catskill for the 250th. Patty Austin, the director of Greene County Tourism, has been instrumental in getting it organized. It’s going to be a really fun evening on Main Street in Catskill.
But more importantly, go to the website of your local historical society. Get connected with them, take a look at their program schedules, get a membership, because all of these organizations are struggling to continue doing the good work that they’re doing.
They’re all nonprofits, and they are “profiting not”—that is something everybody’s got to remember.” These are not businesses where they’re trying to look at their bottom line and they’re answering to shareholders. They are just doing this for the love of the game.
Connect with the Mountain Top Historical Society. Connect with the Pratt Museum. Call up the Greene County Historical Society. See what they’re up to. Cairo Historical Society is doing some wonderful stuff. Windham Historical Society is arranging programming. There’s a historical society in Lexington. There’s so much going on.
And if they don’t know who to talk to about their local history community, they can call up their town clerk and say, “Who’s the town historian? I want to meet them.” They can do that any day of the week.
Noah Eckstein is the editor-in-chief of The Overlook. Send correspondence to noah@theoverlooknews.com.
