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 last in a series of community outreach programs held by the library to gather information from residents for a comprehensive map of historical locations in the town.
Made possible through two grants, the map follows decades of questions from locals and tourists about historical buildings in Greene County’s largest town. The final map, which planners expect next year, will be available in print and will mark historical properties across the town prior to 1950.
The library kicked off the series of outreach sessions in June across the town’s multiple hamlets and two villages, each with a distinct identity. The first session was held in Lanesville, once the region’s railroad gateway, followed by stops in the village of Hunter, Elka Park, and Haines Falls before Friday’s session in Tannersville.. An event planned for Platte Clove was canceled due to a miscommunication involving the planned location.
Terns-Thorpe said while some of the sessions were sparsely attended, the library’s map committee was able to learn some helpful information.
“In Haines Falls there were a lot of people,” she said. “We were able to get exactly where certain places were.”
Terns-Thorpe said while Platte Clove’s session was canceled, she got the word out to the hamlet’s residents during the Platte Clove Community Picnic earlier this month.
“I was able to bring over a lot of handouts,” she said. “Hopefully we’ll get some feedback from that.”
Dale, who was also at the first session in Lanesville, said she enjoyed the sense of community the work fostered.
“From my experience, in Lanesville, it was just a nice sense of community about where places are,” she said. “There’s so much history up here. This place was booming in the late 1800s.”
Friday’s session zeroed in on the historic resorts that once dotted the village of Tannersville. Terns-Thorpe said she had fond memories of several, including the Cold Spring House, the village’s first Jewish resort, once located on Spruce Street.
The resort, built in the 1890s, was once the second-largest hotel in Tannersville.
“Everybody stopped to take pictures of it,” Terns-Thorpe said.
The Cold Spring House is one of nearly 300 data points expected to be included in the project. Elmo said the group would be sending their data to a surveyor for review before it is forwarded to Greene County GIS (Geographic Information System) Director Owen Nachtigal to combine it into a cohesive map.
Once it is printed, the back of the map will have facts about the locations included.
Elmo said she expects the completed map to be large.
“It’s going to be like one of those comedy maps when you’re driving, where it takes up both seats of the front,” she said. “I think that’s the size we’re looking at.”
While she had initially expected the printed maps to be small enough to distribute to anyone who wanted one, Elmo said due to the large amount of data points, it’s more likely that just a few copies will be made and kept in community locations around the town of Hunter.
“I’d like to give one to every spot we went to,” she said. “They could be stored or displayed in a prominent and easy-to-access place, like The Rod and Gun Club in Lanesville, the firehouse in Haines Falls gets a lot of traffic, the libraries, the historical society.”
Elmo said the map would be saved as a digital file, so if the library were to get additional grant funding, more maps could be printed in the future.
“It’s depending on how many we can print, that will determine how choosy we need to be,” she said.
Connor Greco is a staff reporter for The Overlook covering Windham, Hunter, and surrounding Greene County communities. Send correspondence to connor@theoverlooknews.com.
