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 audience in a presentation titled “Our Plantations,” drawing from primary source materials that trace slavery in the region from the Dutch colony of New Netherland to the abolition of slavery in New York in 1827.

“It’s a period of 180 years that we’re talking about where slavery is an integral component of the economy of this place but also the social structure of the place,” Palmer said in the presentation.

The talk came as communities across the country prepare to mark the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, a milestone that has renewed attention on the fuller history of the nation’s founding, including the enslaved people whose labor helped build places like Greene County and whose lives were often recorded only in documents treating them as property.

Though the Dutch introduced slavery to the region, Palmer said, it took deeper root under English rule. Between 1664 and 1775, New York’s colonial legislature passed 34 laws that mentioned slavery.

Abolitionist efforts emerged after American independence in 1783, but emancipation in New York was delayed by decades.

The state passed “An Act for the Gradual Abolition of Slavery” in 1799. Palmer described it as a “slow Band-Aid approach to the end of slavery.” Under the law, children born to enslaved mothers after July 4, 1799, would remain in indentured servitude until the age of 28 for men or 25 for women.

“Being an indentured servant, you’re still recognized as a person in the eyes of the law,” Palmer said. “Being a slave, you’re not recognized as a person in the eyes of the law.”

People born into slavery before that date would remain enslaved for life until 1817, when the state set a final emancipation date of July 4, 1827.

Greene County did not yet exist as a separate county in 1790. It was formed in 1800 from parts of Albany and Ulster counties. Palmer said Albany County had the highest enslaved population of any county in the state, with 3,929 enslaved people in 1790, making up about 5% of the county’s population.

Much of the area’s enslaved population lived in more fertile communities near the Hudson River, Palmer said. In present-day Greene County, that primarily meant Catskill, Coxsackie, Athens, and New Baltimore.

“You don’t see concentrations of enslaved people, populations of this scale, anywhere in the United States outside of Savannah, Georgia, at this point,” Palmer said.

The historical record is fragmentary and often dehumanizing. For many enslaved people in the region, Palmer said, the only evidence that they lived can be found in bills of sale, wills, and court documents.

One 1763 document recorded the lease of an enslaved man named Coff from Michael Van Schaack to Lodewyck Planck. Coff was sent from a farm between Athens and Catskill to Planck’s farm in the Catskill hamlet of Kiskatom.

“This document tells us that these palatine farmers, as a way to work their farms, are leasing individuals out from these old, landed families along the river in Greene County,” Palmer said. “This guy Coff is out there on that farm toiling away, trying to till land at the foot of the Catskills. Think about doing that work on a day like today. It’s shocking to think about.”

A 1769 bill of sale showed a 10-year-old boy named Piet used as collateral by Athens resident Matthÿs Halenbeck as part of a bond in an Albany County court case. Piet was later sold to Johannis Brandow as Halenbeck tried to recover money.

“We’re actually able to follow Piet for a bit of his life, and his family, his son, his grandson,” Palmer said. “It’s kind of strange that we’re able to do that in this case with the scanty records that we’ve got, but this is the beginning of a paper trail of an individual that we actually know something about.”

Records of enslaved women are even more scarce. Palmer cited documents from 1808 and 1814 that followed an enslaved woman named Mary, who was sold at age 18 to Leonard Bronck in Coxsackie in 1808. Bronck later sold Mary to his stepmother, who gave all of her property to the enslaved people who worked for her in her will.

“As far as we can tell, the family lawyers their way out of awarding the estate to the enslaved people,” Palmer said. “Mary is one of these people who, at one point in her life, believed that everything was going to be set for her.”

Palmer also pointed to an unusual visual record of slavery in colonial Greene County: the circa 1735 Van Bergen Overmantel, believed to be the earliest landscape painting of Greene County and the Catskills.

The painting, now located at the Fenimore Art Museum in Cooperstown, depicts a farm in Leeds and was commissioned by the Van Bergen family to fit above their fireplace. It includes members of the Van Bergen family, Indigenous people conducting trade, white Palatine farmers living as tenants on the property, and enslaved Africans.

For Palmer, the painting is a significant illustration of the role enslaved people had in the history of Greene County and the Catskills.

“It’s amazing to think that the first landscape painting of the Catskills — the first time the Catskills are shown geographically shows people of color,” Palmer said. “It shows people who are in marginalized classes. It shows native people. It shows Anglo-Dutch landholders. It shows everyone.”

Connor Greco is a staff reporter for The Overlook covering Windham, Hunter and, surrounding Greene County communities. Send correspondence to connor@theoverlooknews.com.