Part I
by Herbert S. Parmet
Hillsdale Town Historian
Not until late in the 19th
century, a generation after Hillsdale’s
sons had joined up to fight in the bloodiest of all
wars on the
continent, the Civil War - did an historian explain the
process
that gave birth to the town. As the movement of
Dutchmen from
the lower Hudson Valley (and the original New
Netherlands)
and farmers from New England competed with the Indian
tribes
– the Mohawks and Mohicans, who later merged with the
Stockbridge – they constituted what came to be “the
leading
edge of settlement.”
So there it was, the
“frontier” — not just the remote far west
like the Great Plains and the Rockies, but where many
settlers
closed in on open and fertile lands.
1
The part that came to
be
called Hillsdale, situated between the Taconic range
and the
higher Taconics to the east, became a gateway to the
Berkshires.
“Hills Dale,” as it was known
at one time lay just some twenty
miles east of the Hudson Valley, whose shores a Swedish
sailor
named Roeliff Jansen and his family touched after
traveling up
that estuary in their small “krag,” after having
navigated that
portion of the trip up the waterway the native
Americans knew
as “the great river” or ”Skatemue.” After its
headwaters rise in
the northern part of the county, the Roe Jan Kill flows
southward
over soft carbonate rocks through seven of the county’s
towns
before finally hooking to the east and spilling into
the Hudson.
Today’s hunters will
appreciate the early accounts that describe
a land alive with abundant herds of deer, bear and
small game.
The stretch of territory between the Hudson and the
Berkshires
truly was newly open for settlement, a land for the
taking, a land
where stability was far in the future.
At the time of the American
Revolution, the Taconic hill country
was still basically an “unbroken wilderness,” in the
words of a
standard history of New York State. Most of what is now
the
Town of Hillsdale belonged to the Van Rensselaer
family, major
beneficiaries of the Dutch patroon system, and much of
the
modern town was within the manor of Rensselaerwyck.
Colonial
maps show that “Renslaerwick” also included Nobletown
and
Spencertown. The present location of Route 23 follows
the line
separating Rensselaer lands from Livingston Manor.
Baronial farmlands were leased
to proprietors and rented to
tenant farmers. It is little wonder why the area
discouraged the
prospects of yeoman farmers and prompted them to seek
available
lands elsewhere. Many, especially Scots-Irishmen,
sought out
prospects to the south, including along the Appalachian
frontier.
Much of upstate New York, including the vast Upper
Manor of
the Livingstons on the west side of the Hudson,
resembled the
old European feudal system. Predominate among the
colony’s
political leaders were those who represented the
aristocratic
families most tied to the lords and merchants.
2
With the coming of the
Revolutionary Era, the system was
ready for change. Albany County had its share of
turbulence.
Historically, of course, the Hudson Valley was one of
the chief
cradles of American independence, especially with the
major
battles fought around Saratoga and Ticonderoga. Much
closer
to the present Hillsdale, it furnished a route for one
of the more
heroic achievements of the battle for independence.
Colonel
Henry Knox, then only 25 and a former bookseller from
Boston,
joined with his brother in volunteering to retrieve
munitions and
cannon that had been captured by Ethan Allen and,
improbable
as it now seems, transported them over the snowy
countryside to
provide vital assistance for General Washington’s
troops near
Boston. The junction of county road 21 and Route 22,
the site of
the original Nobletown (the former name of Hillsdale),
is a good
place from which to appreciate Col. Knox’s journey as
the team
dragged “a noble train of artillery” along part of the
Great Road
that ran from Albany to Boston through Mitchell Street
and White
Hill to Route 71 and into Massachusetts.
Other developments were less
supportive of the Patriot cause.
Many of the tenant farmers, fearful of suffering less
protection
than they already had if the Van Rensselaers and the
Livingstons
got more of an upper hand by aiding the revolution
found
themselves siding with the Tories.
3
An early map of
Berkshire
County in Massachusetts shows that a boundary line of
1773-
1778 separated the county from the Province of New York
shows
Hillsdale at 42.15 degrees north latitude and about
73.27 west
longitude. Mt. Washington and Egremont appear as part
of
Berkshire County on this map, as they are today.
The ongoing conflicts were also confused when
Massachusetts
claimed that the Charter of William and Mary ran along
the New
York line north from the northwest corner of
Connecticut, which
constituted a straight northward line along 73 degrees
30 minutes
north latitude, which placed the eastern portions of
Copake,
Hillsdale, Austerlitz, Canaan, Lebanon, Stephentown,
etc., in
Massachusetts.
4
However, by an
agreement in May 1773, the
Massachusetts–New York line was set at the northwest
corner of
Connecticut and parallel to the Hudson River and about
20 miles
east of the river, at N. 21 degrees, 10 min and 30 sec
E
(Magnetic.)5
The settlement was later ratified by Massachusetts
in 1901 and New York in 1901.6
Overlapping boundary claims
helped to spark the anti-rent
agitation, which spread to other areas of the state,
where some
operated as secret societies and became politically
potent. Much
of the disturbance centered in the Taconic region.
Annals of
that unsettling period invariably note the prominence
of Robert
Noble. Noble was the son of one of the original New
England
settlers of what became known as Hillsdale in 1791 but
had been
called Nobletown since the 1750s.7
Noble had already
managed
to round up several proprietors accused of abusing
tenant interests
and having them jailed in Springfield8.
With the border dispute
and the resistance to rent fueling outrage because the
territorial
conflict often meant that tenants sometimes had to pay
additional
rentals in order to satisfy claims originating from
proprietors in
both states (which the Appeals Court rejected in the
case of
DePeyster vs. Michael, 1852), the younger Noble’s armed
resistance finally forced the hand of the governor to
use the
infantry to drive him back into Massachusetts. Even the
lawyer
who had defended the proprietors, who claimed that the
tenants had
not fulfilled all their commitments, later acknowledged
that the
decision brought to “a legitimate close the anti-rent
controversy in
favor of the anti-renters.”9
New York’s new constitution, ratified in
1846, had already prohibited future feudal tenures.
So hectic was this period in
New York’s history that one
prominent resident, John Collin, a Republican
congressman,
noted in the introduction to his early history of the
town that the
“turbulence in Hillsdale for three-fourths of a century
after its
first settlement by civilized people and the different
nationalities
of those people has prevented any historic record being
kept of
them, and their scores of cemeteries, not being under
legal
protection, have become to a great extent obliterated.”10
So spotty
are early Hillsdale records that many of the registries
of land
titles are only now available thanks to a bound volume
in the
possession of the Berkshire County Court’s archive
center. The
papers are in a former church located on Park Square in
Pittsfield–another reminder of the Massachusetts claim
to what
is now much of Hillsdale. Building fires, a prominent
hazard of
that era, accounted for other losses of information,
especially
when churches were consumed by flames.
All in all, it had not been an
easy period in the life of the state
and the new nation. A report prepared by the state’s
Division of
Archives and History in 1926 noted that “Eight years of
the war
had coarsened the people of the State. Profanity,
immorality,
theft, burglary, robbery, gambling and other evils
called forth
prayers and other importunities from the pious.”11
But, aside from taking the
huge step toward realizing what
John Winthrop had envisioned as “a Citty [sic] upon a
hill,” the
achievement of independence also led to the gradual
implementation of some of the ideals of the
Enlightenment.
Foremost among these reforms was representative
government.
So it most likely was not an accident of chronology
that New
York State increased the number of its counties in
1786, carving
Columbia out of what had been the southeastern part of
Albany,
and, just four years before that, right on the heels of
the end of
the Revolutionary War, the legislature cut out part of
Claverack
and created Hillsdale.12
After removing such original districts
as a part of Austerlitz and, later, Spencertown,
Hillsdale was left
as the third largest town in the county with 48.3
square miles,
exceeded only by Chatham and Austerlitz. The county
seat was
also moved from Claverack to Hudson. Such changes,
limited
as they were, involved the very gradual
post-revolutionary
process of making government more accessible to the
community.
That marked a loss from what may still be the all-time
high point
of Hillsdale’s population. The number, over 4,700, was
reached
as early as in 1800. Granted reasonable accuracy,
although the
figure included part of what later became Austerlitz,
it reflects
the decline that resulted from farmers moving away
after years
of soil erosion and crop failures. In common with other
hill
towns in the region, farms in Hillsdale raised sheep
and furnished
large amounts of cloth. One of the last textile mills
was located
near where Hunt Road meets Route 22. Only two sawmills
remained by 1855, down from eight in 1820. The town
also had
four grist mills, including one at what became known as
Murray’s
Corners (at the intersection of Route 23 and Collins
Street in
East Hillsdale), which was owned by Henry Walter
Murray. Parla
Foster operated a tavern there, and another one of the
earliest
taverns was run by Gaius Stebbins in the hamlet.
Few now realize that beneath
the hills that range from 650 feet
above sea level to over 1,600 feet, were veins of iron
ore. One
recent topographical survey reported that “As in Copake
and
Ancram to the south, the Taconic range contains
important
deposits of iron ore which were mined intermittently in
the 19th
century,” including by the baronial Livingston family.13
After
the discovery of an ore deposit in 1800, some three
miles northeast
of the hamlet of Hillsdale, some sporadic iron mining
did take
place later. A proliferation of charcoal burners in the
area resulted
from the operation of furnaces..
Another economic boost came at
mid-century. The New York
& Harlem Railroad came to Hillsdale in 1852. The line
connected
Chatham with New York City, and was credited with
bringing a
gradual upward spike in population, from 2,123 in 1850
to 2,552
the year before the firing at Fort Sumter.14
(Note: Part 2 will take the story of Hillsdale from the
Civil
War to the present.)
Hillsdale: A History
Part II
War, especially the longest and bloodiest conflict on
American
soil, changed the nation, leading to growth within the
next few
years. By 1870, three hundred people lived in the
hamlet.
Hillsdale was on its way toward becoming the most
important
stop on the Harlem Railroad south of Chatham.
1
America was getting more and
more newcomers every day.
Immigration, which began to rise at mid-century, was
reaching
new levels. The Irish had long since settled in the
northeast,
and now they were followed by migrants from eastern and
southern Europe, all helping to enlarge the labor force
that helped
to fuel the country’s industrial expansion. Of
America’s forty
million people in 1875, fully seven and a half million
were foreign
born, and most went to find work in the cities.
2
“Just at the time
it was becoming the dominant force in American life,
the city
was being rapidly differentiated from the rest of the
nation by
the growing ethnic, religious, and cultural
differences,” one
historian has written. “Perhaps at no time was the line
of
demarcation between urban and rural America so sharp as
it was
in the first two decades of the twentieth century.”
3
The city of New
York, about 120 miles south of Hillsdale, was pushing
toward the
seven million mark it would reach before World War II.
Such growth would not have
been possible without the
intersection of the expanded market for labor and new
technology.
Westinghouse air brakes became a boon for railroading,
and so
was the Bessemer process for coal and steel. Railroads
connected
cattle country with markets in the cities, and modern
refrigeration
made that transportation possible.
The legendary “Robber Barons,”
the money men, led the era,
their capital stimulating the process, together with
their energy
and shrewdness: the Rockefellers, the Morgans, the
Vanderbilts,
the Whitneys and, not least of all, the inventions of
Alexander
Graham Bell and Thomas Alva Edison. All helped to
create the
“Gilded Age,” an era of new fortunes that contrasted
with pockets
of urban poverty. Such changes, starting with New York
State’s
Erie Canal, also created the greater demands of the
new, longdistance
competition, markets on a much larger field of play.
Yet, despite the early
post-war gain in population, Hillsdale’s
actually declined by the last part of the century,
reflecting the
national shift from farm to city.
4
Agriculture was
dominant, hay
and grain the chief farm products during the two
post-Civil War
decades. Then, when grain prices fell, came the rise of
dairy
farming, taking advantage of the growing urban markets
to the
south.
Beginning with the splendid
harvests of the 1870s and 1880s,
producing such commodities as milk, butter and cheese,
with
easy access to the railroad, remained central to
Hillsdale’s
economy. Hillsdale, with 103 dairy farms, soon had the
highest
percentage of cows of any town in the county.
5
In 1880, fifteen years after
General Robert E. Lee’s surrender
at Appomattox, the Hillsdale Herald reported
that “Good roads
diverge in every direction, from the village over which
the
pleasure seeker can at will speed along to Copake Lake
with its
charming scenery and excellent bass fishing; or to the
craig-lock
retreat of cool plashing Bash Bish, or the panoramic
elevation of
White’s Hill, or Mr. Everett, or the beautiful villages
of Egremont,
Lenox, and Stockbridge. With headquarters at the
Hillsdale
House, time would fly along so that the happy searcher
for health
and amusement would be loath to leave until the yellow
October
leaves began to fall, and the Bitter Sweet grew
scarlet.”
6
Oldtimers
agree that there were more roads and byways then than
there are today.
Land supported over half of
the population. Those not
dependent on farming worked as carpenters, laborers,
and
merchants. Henry D. Harvey, for example, was a jeweler,
and
John M. Albert was a mason. Allen Sheldon was a
merchant.
Charles F. Brusie ran a hotel; and so on, most recorded
in the
county’s directory. Other families, with names still
familiar to
Hillsdale over a century later, included Bushnell,
Collin, Decker,
Ostrander, and Stalker. Major Bullock, who built the
Bull &
Bullock lumber and feed business right after the Civil
War, would
best be remembered as the great grandfather of Edmond
Herrington.
At the center of the hamlet,
Hillsdale House became a seasonal
attraction for visitors enjoying the bucolic hills and
dales of the
Harlem Valley and the surrounding countryside.
7
On the Shun
Pike near the border with Massachusetts and not far
from where
a vein of iron ore was first discovered in 1800,
Seymour Winchell
ran a place where visitors could enjoy the cool
breezes, the
Summit House. Just a few miles to the north, at Green
River, the
La Pierre House operated by Pierre D. Van Hoesen, was
lauded
as a “fine summer resort” with twenty-one guest rooms.
In matters of faith, Hillsdale
also reflected the changing nation.
From early on, private homes were used for religious
services.
Long before the Civil War, the “methodism” of John
Wesley
challenged the teachings of John Calvin among growing
numbers of post-Revolutionary, post-Enlightenment
Americans.
But the change was not without local resistance. Stones
were
sometimes thrown at private homes, were such citizens
as
Murray Corners tavern-keeper, Parla Foster, sometimes
led
services. Still, even in that limited area, the number
of churches
multiplied, eight in three locations in the town by
1851,
according to local historian Bette Gallup.
8
Methodism had helped to
splinter some of the earlier
congregations, such as the First Baptist Church that
dated back
to 1787 and was Hillsdale’s first. The only surviving
accounts
tell us that the doctrinal differences spurred the
birth of about
three dozen congregations. With the generosity of the
millowning
Richmond family, land was acquired in what was then
called “Sheep Hole” (along the present County Route 21,
now
indicated by a New York State Education Department
historical
sign), to establish a Union Church, which was built in
1822.
The house of worship later became known as the “Downing
Church,” named for one of the region’s oldest
Methodists,
although the church itself continued to serve Baptists.
9
Another
church, the North Hillsdale Methodist Church (known for
a
time as the Wesleyan Chapel) followed in 1837.
The Foster family continued to
be prominent in the Methodist
movement. A new church went up in 1845 on land
contributed
by Stephen Foster, but fire shortened its life and
destroyed early
records. It became better known as the forerunner of
the United
Methodist Church of Hillsdale, which was completed in
1847.
10
Already organized and functioning by 1832 in the
northeastern
Hillsdale community of Green River was a Presbyterian
church.
11
Peter H. Stott’s recent survey
of the county, written for the
Columbia County Historical Society, also reports that
“The first
settlement in the western part of town may have been
about 1745,
when the German Martin Krum, a member of the Dutch
Reformed
Church in Claverack, is reported to have purchased 800
acres
from the Van Rensselaer family. By 1769 there were
evidently
enough families in eastern Claverack and western
Hillsdale to
form a new church in the western part of Hillsdale, the
‘Reform
Lutheran Unity Church,’ now referred to as the ’Krum
Church.’”
12
Other early houses of worship included the First
Presbyterian
Church, which went up in the hamlet in 1837 and, a few
miles to
the north, the German Evangelical Lutheran Church just
east of
tiny Harlemville, which served more recent arrivals.
13
Newcomers to Hillsdale soon
found that, however pleasant
the summers, the region was far from immune from the
climactic
extremes of upstate New York. The mid-80s became
notable
for a few such events. A rainstorm on July 23, 1887,
hit hardest
in the West Hillsdale and Craryville area, and resulted
in “great
creeks running where streams were never heard of
before; barns
overturned or swept away; bridge timbers strewn all
over the
lots, embankments swept out from in under the railroad
tracks
leaving them suspended in the air.” Mills along the
Roeliff Jansen
Kill were mostly destroyed. Two men, a Mr. Haywood and
a Mr.
Brusie, were at work at the nearby plow works when the
flood
struck. They barely just managed to live to tell about
it.
14
The
following year, just as folks were enjoying a balmy
spell, the
same snowstorm responsible for dumping the famous
Blizzard
of ‘88 on New York City hit Hillsdale in mid-March.
Drifts,
powered by seventy-mile an hour winds and fed by up to
thirtyone
inches of snow, piled up to three feet, making roads
impassable, and taking perhaps scores of lives.
15
Nor, just a few
months later, did nature spare the area from further
damage. A
July cloudburst north of the hamlet dropped a
devastating foot
of rain in less than an hour, destroying bridges, mills
and houses.
16
Other, more temporal realities
also brought the world closer to
Hillsdale. The Spanish-American War, with the
subsequent
Filipino insurrection (which led to annexation of the
Philippine
Islands), showed that the United States was asserting
itself as a
player among world powers, a trend that was accelerated
under
the presidencies of Theodore Roosevelt and William
Howard Taft.
By the time of Woodrow Wilson’s election in 1912,
political
battlers had become more intense. Unrest was deepened
by
conflicts over militant industrial labor and
immigration;
deportation of aliens was begun. A revived Klu Klux
Klan came
along in 1915, this time more virulent than its
original agenda of
ending Reconstruction. Hatred was directed toward such
minorities as Roman Catholics and Jews. Ongoing
throughout
the period was the most intense implementation of Jim
Crow
conditions, with violent actions against blacks in
addition to
denials of voting rights, lynchings, rigid enforcement
of
segregation, and an effective continuation of slavery
by other
means. In 1915, after Mexican outlaw Pancho Villa led
his gang
in a raid on U. S. soil and attacked the New Mexico
town of
Columbus, President Wilson launched an Expeditionary
Mission
that soon involved two-thirds of the regular army. The
public
was generally supportive, but the people were far more
divided
about what German interference with U.S. interests on
the high
seas meant for the possibility of intervention in the
great war
that had already broken out in Europe in 1914.
Potential enemies
were everywhere, especially among dissenters and
aliens. As
doubts about patriotism mounted, there were more calls
for
greater loyalty. Teddy Roosevelt urged “Americanism” as
an
anti-dote to dissent. As there appeared to be no way to
avoid
getting involved in the European war, especially with
attacks on
neutral shipping, Wilson declared that “there is such a
thing as a
man being too proud to fight.”
As re-election neared in 1916,
the president also began to
promote a preparedness campaign. The promotion of
patriotism
fell into line; that sentiment was re-invigorated when
the
Republican Party held its quadrennial presidential
nominating
convention in June when journalist Walter Lippmann, who
had
close ties to Wilson, reported on the atmosphere of the
gathering.
He scoffed at the ostentatious display of patriotism,
with “the
flag, red, white and blue, all its stripes, all its
stars, and the flag
again a thousand times over, and Americanism till your
ears ached
and the slaves and the tariffs, and Abraham Lincoln,
mauled and
dragged about and his name taken in vain and his spirit
degraded,
prostituted to every insincerity. . . . the incredible
sordidness of
the convention passes all description.”
17
Even as resistence
to belligerency continued, and, more likely, because of
it, devotion
to the spirit of Americanism grew. It was in that
atmosphere,
fifty-one years after General Lee’s surrender at
Appomattox, that
a Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Monument was dedicated in
Crellin Park
in Hillsdale’s center, made possible by a ten thousand
dollar
bequest from Civil War veteran John K. Cullin
The celebration was clearly a
reaffirmation of Americanism
and, on that day especially, of Hillsdale’s devotion to
the republic,
as hundreds of automobiles packed the center of the
village.
Many of the 2,500 present came by train; so did the
band from
Philmont, which led the parade of war veterans in
decorated
automobiles, and members of the Masonic fraternity, to
a platform
just east of the monument. The band played the “Star
Spangled
Banner.” Atop the Vermont granite base stood two bronze
Civil
War figures, a soldier and a sailor flanking a flag. A
bronze
tablet on the front side depicted the naval battle of
the Monitor
and the Merrimac. The western side had a list of
the area’s 149
war veterans.
One local man read a poem he
had written for the occasion.
He called it “Columbia’s Brave Volunteers.” The
Hillsdale
Harbinger of July 7, 1916, duly reprinted
the text, which
concluded with the following stanza:
The monument stands on the Old Village Green,
Erected in honor of all
The heroes of Hillsdale who followed the flag,
When the nation sent out the first call.
We read on the tablet the names there inscribed,
In letters so clear and so plain—
And we will say to the world we will fight as they
fought,
Should the Call come to Colors again.
HILLSDALE, A HISTORY
PART III
By Herbert S. Parmet
Turn south from the Civil War monument and
continue down Anthony
Street through the heart of the old hamlet.
Pass the old post office at the
corner of Coldwater and move on to the bend
in the road, stopping short
of the Copake town line but approaching the
old Agway building, where
a unit of the old Chatham Shirt Factory
stood in the 1920s. Then head
right, not the sharp angle that leads to Ed
Herrington’s store and
lumberyard, but diagonally following the
Anthony Street Extension.
Follow the little bridge over the gulley.
Trains once ran there, but now
the road over the former trestle winds to
the right and loops around the
white building on the site of the old milk
depot. Follow what may be
called Hillsdale’s “Historic Trail” and
pass the remains of the foundry,
now a ramshackle, abandoned rust-colored
building. The old railroad
station stood across the road from what had
been, for over a century,
main gateway to the city for commuter and
commercial transportation.
But, in 1972, the Harlem Division of the
Penn Central Railroad, which
had “merged into corporate existence” in
1968, succeeding the New York
Central, suddenly disappeared; and that was
that. Hillsdale lost its
passenger service.1
Four years later, freight was also gone.
George (Bud) Atwood, Jr., a
retired maintenance chief of the old Roe Jan
School on Route 22 whose father once worked for
Herrington’s, stood at the
edge of what was once one of the three depots along the
Upper Harlem where
dairy farmers left their milk to be collected, then
shipped by rail to be processed
before delivery to markets. The old “factory” has been
converted into an
apartment house, just a relic from the town’s “old days.”
Atwood remembers
that the arriving trains were “hot and heavy” on summer
days with some 300
people getting off at the station on Friday nights loaded
with city weekenders.
Yes, his two listeners responded with approval; that’s the
way it was; they
remembered it well. In fact, a hotel opposite the station
owned by a guy
named Mickey Flynn and known to everyone as “the Bloody
Bucket,” serviced
the needs and desires of the arrivals, and so did some of
the nearby
boardinghouses, big frame buildings with large front
porches for the
convenience of warm-weather visitors.
The two apartment house women who
stood by knew Bud, as did just about
everybody else. They also remembered the “good old days”
of Hillsdale, when
the train dropped off the city folks on weekends and
served the farmers most
of the rest of the time, connecting the metropolis for
supplies and produce
from the country. Trucks later took over the freight
cargo, and the Agway
store on Anthony Street inherited the feed business.
2
Increasingly, former train
passengers began to find their way north to Columbia
County by using the
Taconic State Parkway. Scenic for most of the way, its
viewpoints were even
grander as it extended northward during the 1940’s. The
newer, faster Interstate
684 from Westchester County gave motorists an even quicker
start away from
urban sprawl.
In those years
after the Great Depression and the Wall Street crash of
‘29, somewhere between a quarter and a
third of Americans lost fulltime
jobs. Farmers all over had been on the
skids long since; hard times
on the farm beat out disaster on Wall
Street by a good couple of years.
But the crisis was deepened by a collapsing
banking system and misguided
“protection” under the Hawley-Smoot Tariff
of 1930. An administration
in Washington still too faithful to old
nostrums intensified the crisis.
Millions, left on their own, struggled as
best as they could, and without
unemployment compensation, Social Security,
or other social safe guards
now taken for granted like Medicare and
Medicaid, to say nothing about
medical insurance. Private charities tried
to fill the vacuum, but there
was too little to work with.
Americans went
on, as historian Kenneth S. Davis has written, with
“a restlessness of the undirected,
unpatterned energies. Every freight
train moving across the land bore its quota
of homeless men and boys,
who wandered from place to place, living on
handouts and odd jobs as
they looked for steady work. Along every
highway were hitchhikers,
thumbing their way from here to there, not
knowing or much caring where
‘there’ might be.”3
All too often the “there” was back on the
farm. A slow return to the
land characterized the desperation about
trying to survive in the cities;
indeed, the quest for “bread” marked
movement everywhere, resembling
the migrating Oakies who pushed on to
California in John Steinbeck’s
The Grapes of Wrath.
Among those returning to the land, Hillsdale got
its share. A population low of just 968 in
1930 rose ever so gradually
toward the end of the decade. Dairy
farming, already the region’s chief
industry and centered in the Harlem Valley,
took another step forward.
Peter H.
Stott, reporting for the Columbia County Historical Society,
has already described how Hillsdale fared:
In the 1890s, dairying grew
substantially in Hillsdale as fresh milk began
to replace butter as the chief product of the dairy farms.
Several
farms were already shipping milk to New York directly from
the trackside
milk platforms. One of the earliest milk depots, if not
the earliest in the
county, was that built by Slawson Brothers in the early
1890s to ship
milk to New York City. Slawson built a milk receiving
plant where all
the farmers could bring their cans of milk for bottling
and direct shipment
to New York. Within a few years, many of the surrounding
railroad
hamlets in Copake and Ancram also had milk depots.
Initially,
many of the milk stations, like Slawson Brothers, did
their own bottling.
Not long after that, however, bottling was discontinued
and all the milk
was shipped directly in cans to a central bottling
facility in New York
City.
4
There is no
question that, as former Hillsdale supervisor Calvin
Sheldon recalls, dairy farming became the
town’s major industry.5
It
was the most successful instrument for
local recovery, helping the area
through that greatest internal disaster
that had befallen Americans since
the Civil War itself, the Great Depression.
Those were clearly the most
trying of times, the calamity that led the
incoming president, Franklin D.
Roosevelt, to warn that “the greatest fear
is fear itself.”
Down through
the First World War, while creameries were built in
such communities as Harlemville, Slawson
remained Hillsdale’s largest
employer. The eleven men who worked in the
milk depot and the office
staff of one comprised the largest milk
plant below Chatham. Farms in
the area were able to supply the factory
with a daily delivery of 360
forty-quart cans of milk. Just as the war
came to an end, the site was
bought by a major metropolitan area
supplier, Sheffield Farms.6
More than any
other town in the county, Hillsdale became a regional
center for the transportation of goods to
New York and elsewhere. Cattle
pens held calves for shipment, and there
was a big barn for hay, but
competition forced change, so Hillsdale’s
dairy farmers joined hands.
With enough dairies to produce two hundred
cans of milk a day, they
formed a farm cooperative, the Hillsdale
Producers Association.
At the outset,
the enterprise was all Hillsdale’s. But expansion quickly
followed after incentives encouraged milk
supplies from farmers in the
region. “The Hillsdale Co-op,” writes
Stott, was a success beyond
anyone’s expectations, and by the 1950’s,
the plant was the largest of
any in the county, taking milk from farmers
as far away as Kinderhook,
East Chatham, Germantown, and New Lebanon.”
At the same time,
with the aid of the Co-op, electricity came
to the farms. At its peak, in
1948, the combination of Ancram, Copake and
Hillsdale numbered four
thousand heads of cattle.
With the
exception of Dutchess County, Hillsdale moved ahead faster
than the state as a whole, Dutchess, along
with Albany and Ulster, took
the lead during the next decade. Hillsdale,
although later falling behind
the Mid-Hudson area, still made more
progress than the rest of Columbia
County.7
The Producers
Association, as it turned out, was but a temporary
source of relief for Hillsdale’s dairy
farmers. A variety of forces beyond
their control buffeted them during the next
few decades. Terrible weather
was always a destructive force beyond
anyone’s control, but the erratic
wet, cold spring of early 1973, the
cost-price squeeze during the Nixon
years, and the price freeze on retail foods
sacrificed those who tried to
live off the land. No wonder a leader of
what had by then become the
Eastern Milk Producers Cooperative warned
that shrinking profit margins
of milk companies were threatening
bankruptcy for the industry.
“Numerous food items,” he predicted,
somewhat darkly but not
unreasonably, “will be rationed in the
United States within the next two
years if farmers do not realize a
sufficient return for the raw product they
produce.”8
Increasingly,
aided by tax code interpretations that encouraged those
with the means to invest in land,
hard-pressed farmers were tempted to
sell out, sometimes to corporations not
even remotely involved with
agriculture. Other revisions in the tax
code “certainly kept farmers
investing in farms”; they were among other
programs that went in the
opposite direction by helping farmers get
out of the business. The net
result, pointed out Art Baer, who was
chosen as town supervisor in 2003
after having served as a local justice, was
that the “little farmers sold out
and the bigger farmers got bigger.”9
A basic way of
life was being threatened. A proliferation of attempts
to limit growth of parcels of land became
popular. Others, at the same
time, feared the consequences of rash
action. Reckless zoning changes
threatened to boost the price of new homes
beyond the reach of their
children. Still, retaining the “rural
character” of neighborhoods became
a major theme. Town boards had a volatile
issue on their hands.
Compromises were tailored for different
parts of the various communities.
Copake led off in the spring of 1973, and
Hillsdale then followed. Plots
with a minimum of three acres became the
rule in many of the outlying
areas.
In a time of
change, others went the other way. One Hillsdale land
owner pushed for the commercial upgrading
of the property adjacent to
the junction of routes 22 and 23.
Immediately, any such growth faced
the need for a sewer system. By early 1973,
plans were drawn up to buy
land just north of that main intersection
for a sewage treatment facility.
Those 6.82 acres were expected to cost
about a thousand dollars per
acre, enough, it was hoped, to handle the
106 residences and businesses
then within the hamlet. Town Supervisor
Calvin Sheldon, weighing all
this, worried about the availability of
state or federal funding for the
project. He soon got his answer: the town’s
ambitions for a sewer and
controlled commercial growth then got a
fatal setback. In June of 1973,
President Nixon, then also contending with
escalating inflation even as
his Watergate crisis grew more severe,
vetoed a federal bill designed to
underwrite the construction of municipal
sewage treatment plants.10
Many
years later, Supervisor Sheldon, who two
five-year terms, recalled that
“If there had been money, it would have
been all done,”11
but the hamlet
and its shops were left dependent on septic
tanks.
Other, more
positive, things happened. In 1969, the Roe Jan School
on Route 22, having served the community
since 1933, joined a new
consolidation that brought together two
rural school districts to form an
educational jurisdiction of almost three
hundred miles, a move that was
forced by overcrowding and aging
facilities. The first class graduated
from the new Taconic Hills Central School
in June of 1972. Consolidation
also modernized the area’s phone systems
when the Copake and
Columbia-Rensselaer companies combined in
1971 to form the Taconic
Telephone Company. John Benedict (Ben)
Ackley, the president and
chief operating officer whose family had
begun the Copake Company in
1908, announced the laying down of thirty
thousand more feet of cables.
“Party lines” were becoming passé.12
Then the
trains stopped running. Passengers boarding train number
922, the evening train from Chatham on Penn
Central’s Harlem Division
at 6:55 a.m. on March 20, 1972, reached
Grand Central Station, as usual,
by way of Martindale, Hillsdale, Millerton
and Dover Plains. But they
could not return. Nor was there any
alternative transportation. The
trainmaster at the terminal in New York
City blandly explained, “We
don’t care how they get home.” Their
expected train, number 935
northbound to Chatham, would stop at Dover
Plains.
That was it. A
decision earlier in the day by the Third Court of Appeals
in Philadelphia upheld a U.S. District
Court ruling to enable the Penn
Central to end service on the Upper Harlem,
something they had been
trying to do ever since their acquisition
of the line had included other
cost-cutting, slimming down measures. So
passenger service from the
metropolis to Hillsdale came to a dead halt
after 120 years. Four years
later, almost exactly to the day, freight
trains were also discontinued.
In Hillsdale,
the Roe Jan Chamber of Commerce fought back. Public
hearings played to packed auditoriums. The
lead opposition group, which
had been formed as early as 1961 to combat
early glimmerings by the
New York Central aimed at abandoning the
Upper Harlem, the Hudson
Valley Transportation Association, waged
increasingly futile battles. But
the trains to Hillsdale were gone, and,
with it, the end of inter-city railroad
operations in the United States.13
As with change
everywhere, the absence of a rail line accounted for
only part of the change. Abandonment of the
line naturally related to
cost-effectiveness for the company;
whatever the effect of that loss was
to the Harlem Valley, the trend that marked
the final years of the 20th
century in Hillsdale and into the 21st
was probably inevitable. As early
as 1972, for example, H. Hicks Waldorf, the
owner of the 400 acre Twin
Bridge farm in Copake warned that, while it
had not yet hit with great
force, “with the departure of people from
the urban areas this land will
be in demand.” Selling land was more
profitable than working on it.
The number of working farms did, in fact,
decline. The population of
milk cows in Columbia County declined from
nineteen thousand heads
in 1978 to ten thousand twenty years later.
In addition to those dealing in
dairy products, the 545 farms in the
county, as of 1998, raised various
livestock, including beef cattle, calves,
fruits and berries. Others tended
to nurseries and greenhouses.14
Change
threatened in other ways. Local residents remained determined
to preserve the rural qualities of their
environment. When, in 2005, long
and costly efforts by the St. Lawrence
Cement Company to build a plant
in near the eastern shore of the Hudson
River were finally squashed,
those who prized nature above all won the
day. The leader of an
environmental group that fought the
proposal, Ned Sullivan of Scenic
Hudson, seizing on the environmental
factors behind the decision by the
State of New York, hailed the victory as
sustaining the primacy of natural
resources rather than degrading “the
world-class culture and historic assets
of the region.”15
One
significant change, universally welcomed in the area, although
not achieved without a long series of
referendums, was an upgrading of
the district’s educational facilities. The
remote locations of the schools
on Route 22 and a high school that far more
convenient to distant Philmont
involved long, costly busing, often the
most expensive item on any rural
school’s budget; the buildings themselves
were becoming inadequate.
Finally, desperate to sell the idea to the
district’s taxpayers, the school
board called on Rhinebeck Architecture
Planning PC to draw up viable
plans. The resulting complex covered
350,000 square feet in Craryville
off Route 23, west of Hillsdale. The total
project, finally approved by
the voters and constructed at a cost of
$43.5 million, revolutionized the
Taconic Hills School District’s facilities.
The complex centralized the
entire educational system, creating one of
the largest school buildings in
the state. Designed as two main schools and
a community center within
a single building (a swimming pool was
later added), classrooms were
clustered by grade levels or departments.
The site was further improved
for by a state-of-the art performing arts
center, ideal also for such
community theater as “Earth Angels,” a
charitable fund-raising musical
group. The building opened for classes on
September 1, 1999.16
Turn back from
the Historic Trail and reverse the course along what is
now Anthony Street. Pass the dental office
of Dr. Joel Goldstein, moving
across the road from the old post office,
since relocated in modern quarters
on Route 22, and see the drab one-story
building, where Tony Jones and
Victoria Simons got started with their
rendition of the The Roe-Jan
Independent after buying the paper from
Elinor Mettler, who began to
publish it as a local weekly in 1973, just
as the Roe Jan Inquirer ended
its brief run. That enterprising lady from
Copake Falls founded the
Roeliff Jansen Historical Society five
years later and remained its driving
force throughout. Now published twice a
week and edited by Parry
Teasdale but owned by an absentee holding
company with many papers
in the Northeast, the Journal Register
Company of Trenton, New Jersey,
it occupies its own building on a tract of
land off the south-side of Route
23. Its scope enlarged beyond the immediate
Roe Jan area, the weekly
proclaims itself the paper of the
“Hudson-Berkshire Corridor” and has
reported an average circulation of 8,125,
making it the largest in the
county.17
Behind the
newspaper’s modern offices and southeast of the town’s
major intersection, is land near the town
garage deemed essential for any
sewage treatment facility. The immediate
beneficiaries would obviously
be those who live in the hamlet and the
area’s shopkeepers. Supervisor
Bill Anglum came into office determined to
do just that, and so did Art
Baer when he took over in 2004.
Finally,
overcoming local objections that involved feasibility of land
acquisition and costs, prospects brightened
with the Town Board’s
approval in November and especially when
the hamlet’s taxpayers gave
their consent by a by 40 to 15 vote in
February of 2005, drawing the
reality of achievement closer than at any
time since 1973. Remaining
issues involved the acquisition of
privately owned property and approval
by the state’s Department of Environmental
Conservation.18
Baer
energetically pushed that goal. It would,
he hoped, become the central
achievement of his administration, to the
great benefit of the merchants
of the hamlet.19
There, in that central section along the
commercial strip on the west
side of Anthony Street, near where the
Berkshire Flower Shoppe did
business, is Trudy’s Beauty Shop, heir to
George Avenia’s barber shop.
George’s son, Tony, has expanded his B & G
Wine retailing business on
the northern side of Route 22. Just
west of the modern store, on a spacious
lot overlooking the road, stands one of Hillsdale's treasures, the 126
year old
Mt. Washington House. This handsome perfect example of a Second
Empire
Mansard, its style taken from the work of the 17th century French
architect, is
host to food and drink. Its light and airy rooms are topped by a ten
foot
ceiling, which also covers a game room with two billiard tables, a posh
bar
with a 20 foot Mahogany counter, and an elegant dining room. The
stately
structure, with its spacious front lawn, sits across
the way from the Soldiers’
and Sailors’ Monument. Facing them all,
dominating Village Square opposite
the grand statue near the former Hillsdale
Sports Shop, now Vincent
Owens’ Hillsdale Electronics, and a new
two-story commercial structure,
is the landmark Hillsdale House, a popular
gathering place for drink and
food. Anywhere from ten to a couple of
dozen men also meet in the
dining room at least once a month. Calling
themselves the Old Boys
Discussion Group, they have been following
their routine since the spring
of 2003 (after an initial session at Four
Brothers) to air the monumental
issues of the day. Their exchanges, which
began at the height of the
controversy over the invasion of Iraq, are
usually well-informed,
stimulating, unscripted, and occasionally
heated; sometimes they can be
as candid as confessions in the “tomb” of
Yale’s Skull and Bones Society.
The participants make it a highlight of
their schedules and manage to get
to that forum with its luncheons at the
center of Hillsdale from a wide
area.
But
undoubtedly the oldest meeting place in the hamlet is the most
imposing building of them all, now a
first-class restaurant, L’Aubergine.
Long a Hillsdale landmark, dominating the
major intersection of the
town’s two main roads, it began life back
in 1783 as the Elmwood Inn.
Parla Foster, the 18th
century East Hillsdale tavern owner, was among
those who used the Elmwood as a political
meeting place. Its third floor
room was used for dances while, at the
other extreme, bars on the cellar
windows helped to confine prisoners before
they could be shipped off to
the county lock-up at Claverack.
Elmwood later
evolved into the Dutch Hearth. From 1971 until 1995
it became Hillsdale’s best known building.
As L’Hostellerie Bressane
under the ownership of chef Jean Morel, it
was called L’Hostellerie
Bressane, the four-star restaurant was
regarded as “among the best in the
Capital Region.”20
Among those who dined there were two governors,
Mario Cuomo of New York and William Weld of
Massachusetts. Taken
over by another chef in 1995, David Lawson,
the restaurant and its inn
continues to uphold fine cuisine and draw
tourists.21
A much more
accessible eatery for the budget-conscious is the Hillsdale
Country Diner at the crossroads run by
Linda Warner. Those preferring
home-cooking, however, are more likely to
step into Chuck Weldon’s
updated IGA supermarket. But locate where
the old Hillsdale Super
Market once was one must return to Anthony
Street. That store was in
the hands of the Avenia family for many
years before it was sold and then
burned down in 1982.
At the other
side from the large offices of The Independent and Joe
Handelman, Jr’s Taconic Valley Lawn &
Garden center, where Hillsdale
Farm Supply once stood, is a still largely
vacant shopping plaza, which
offers more parking space than businesses
there have needed. At its
center of the complex is the often busy OTB
office. At the eastern end,
serving as they keystone of the commercial
strip, is a Four Brothers pizza
parlor, the local version of a popular
chain noted for its Wednesday night
meatball special.
Some
Hillsdalians, however, may prefer to ask one another: Do you
remember what happened in June of 1982?
That was when Richard
Nixon came to town. He was there for lunch;
it happened at that Four
Brothers. Much like tributes to former
presidents everywhere, a photo
of that grand moment still decorates a wall
inside that restaurant. Nixon,
should anyone forget, feasted on a Greek
salad and posed for admirers
before moving on to visit an old law
partner in Great Barrington. He
could have stopped at the corner gas
station, or dropped in to get a paper
from Tom Snow at the Taconic North
Superette, at the spot once called
Murray’s Corners. But he and his party did
not. To the eternal pride of
the proprietors, they stopped at Four
Brothers!
West of the
hamlet, on White Hill Road, the old Herrington store, an
easy walk from the old railroad station,
has developed into 17,000 square
foot of sales space. Edmund Herrington,
representing the third generation
of the family-owned business, now the
largest employer in town, expanded
his building supply operation beyond
Hillsdale in 1998. Already owning
twenty-five acres locally, with over one
hundred employees, more than
forty vehicles, and a distribution center
east of the 22-23 crossroads,
Herrington’s further enlargement came with
the purchase of Community
Lumber and Hardware, a retailer with
outlets in Millerton, New York,
and Sharon and Lakeville in Connecticut.
That latest expansion, plus
the spacious two-story addition for offices
behind the Hillsdale store, Ed
Herrington explained to a reporter for
The Independent, fulfilled the vision
of his father, who predicted the sort of
merchandising now created by
Home Depot, all “to meet the needs of the
customer.” The firm, reported
The Lakeville Journal, was the
area’s only building materials dealer
offering computerized estimating services.”
Builders, Herrington said,
can be provided “with detailed material
lists down to the last nail and the
last roll of joint tape,” giving them an
accurate estimate of how much a
project will really cost.22
The
construction boom of the late 90’s and into the turn of the century
has obviously been a blessing for
Herrington’s business. That, in turn,
has been helped by the town’s proximity to
the well-publicized “cultural
Berkshires,” a magnet for many upscale
vacationers and retirees seeking
relief from the adjacent northeastern
cosmopolitan centers. Always central
to such leisure-time seekers, and for those
with a more scholarly bent, is
the area’s public library, which has served
the region from its present
building since 1924. Still directed by
Carol Briggs, who took over in
1972, it is now known more appropriately as
the Roeliff Jansen
Community Library. Standing rather stately
on a site overlooking Route
23, it now houses 14,303 books, 2,448 tapes
and recordings, and has
16,764 holdings in all. Plans are now being
made to replace the
overcrowded building with a new one on
Route 22, south of the town
and just above idle former Roe Jan School
building.23
Winter
snowfall sometimes in the seventy-five to one hundred inch range
as a seasonal total, is not unusual for
Hillsdale, and that adds to its virtually
all-season attractions. Old-timers have
been heard talking nostalgically about
the “good old days” before
commercialization became central to just about
everything, and when youngsters could be
seen schussing downhill on empty
stretches of Route 23 with home-made skis.
Skiing, in fact, was not a big
national sport in America until after the
Second World War and the times of
abundance that followed. The major
enterprise that skiing became in many
northeastern mountain areas included what
developed as the Catamount Ski
Area. Its 115 acres, with lifts, trails,
and snow-making equipment, straddle
the state line at the point where the New
York towns of Hillsdale and Copake
intersect with South Egremont,
Massachusetts. Area restaurateurs and innkeepers,
such as Cindy and Gert Alpers who run the
Swiss Hutte at the base
of the mountain, can calculate the number
of their customers by the season’s
outlook for Catamount’s slopes, clearly
Columbia County’s major ski center.
For the past decade, in fact, plans have
been evolving for the construction of
condominiums and a virtually self-contained
community at the resort.
In 1988,
Catamount’s presence helped to also attract an outdoor
summer festival. Falcon Ridge, from modest
beginnings in New England,
opened that year by introducing folk song
concerts to the area. Leading
off that year with an array of performers
that featured such talents as
Odetta, Tom Paxton, The Bobs, and Shawn
Colvin and John Gorka (later
better known as The New Kids on the Block),
the festival moved ten
miles west after two years on a stage at
the foot of Catamount and settled
in for annual shows at Bob Brennan’s Long
Hill Farm on Route 23. Pup tents
dotting the hillside and seemingly
weather-proof thousands of fans
have become July perennials.24
Falcon Ridge had become one of the
largest outdoor festivals in the North
East.
Not far south,
in Ancramdale, a blue-grass festival has become an
annual event, further enhancing the musical
offerings of an area within a
forty-five minute drive from the summer
home of the Boston Symphony
Orchestra at Tanglewood. Further enriching
the area’s cultural resources
are two outstanding National Public Radio
stations, one beaming the
broadcasts from WMAC in Albany from atop
Catamount at 105.1 on the
FM dial, the other, at 89.1, supplying
round-the-clock classical music
from WMHT in Poughkeepsie.
In great
contrast to the civility of region, the horrific events of the
morning of September 11, 2001, 120 miles to
the south, across the river
from the nation’s capital at the Pentagon,
and in a field in Pennsylvania,
brought out grief, a resurgence of
patriotic defiance, and American flags
in every conceivable place. Hillsdale also
heard how one part-time
resident, Susan Mollo, walked down the
seventy-two floors to safety
from her Port Authority office in the World
Trade Center. “I’m still waiting
to wake up from the nightmare,” she said
afterward.
The attacks
also, as in previous American wars, brought out anger and
determination. The Independent ran a
full-page reproduction of the American
flag suitable for displaying in windows.
The paper also gave phone numbers
for those who wanted to donate blood. At
the elementary school in Craryville,
children got together to prepare long rolls
of paper with their hand prints to
send to a city school in Lower Manhattan as
a sign of support.
George’s Auto
Shop, still mourning the accidental and untimely death
of its popular owner, George Stalker,
earlier that year, and by then under
the management of his widow, Betty, donated
a tractor trailer and food.
Bill Stottlar drove that supply-filled
load, which also included water and
other necessities for the victims and
rescue crews. “It’s like a war zone
down there,” said Stottlar when he got
back. Later, ambulances with
volunteers went to the city. Meanwhile,
Columbia County’s paramedics
and firefighters stood by to respond if
needed.25
Just how much
the immediate fear and insecurity that resulted from
the new War on Terror stimulated the flight
of Manhattanites to Hillsdale
is hard to say.26
The most reliable statement is that, in some largely
unquantifiable number, there is some
anecdotal evidence that there was
a direct effect.
To whatever
extent such newcomers increased local Democratic voter
rolls is unclear, but more certain is that,
such pre-9/11 Democratic
candidates who narrowly lost their races to
become town supervisors
like Phil Forman and August Sena spurred a
tendency toward local
registrations by that segment of the
population. To newcomers from
metropolitan New York, Columbia County was
a stereotypical upstate
New York Republican stronghold.
But Hillsdale,
like Columbia County itself, was no longer “solid” or
“rock-ribbed” for the GOP. During the
1980’s, Democrats briefly
controlled the county’s board of
supervisors. In Hillsdale, their candidates
have been elected to such local offices as
town justice and seated on the
town council. Moreover, in the presidential
election of 2004, both the
town and the county preferred John Kerry to
the Republican incumbent,
George W. Bush. Of the most recent
supervisors, Sam Dawson, Bill
Anglum and Art Baer, the last two were
chosen with bipartisan support.
Anglum, after serving his four-year term,
found out that party differences
were at best largely symbolic at the town
level, but that partisan power
remained important at the county level.27
Indeed, party registration figures
for both the county and the town continue
to show a sufficient number of
“independents” to swing elections either
way.
At its March
2005 luncheon, Art Baer gave the OB Discussion Group
his analysis of local demographics. Three
distinct groups were delineated.
The first, consisting of full-time locals,
largely but not entirely, born in
Hillsdale, educated in Hillsdale, spent
their lives supporting their families
in Hillsdale. They also number the small
shop owners in the community.
In addition to maintaining the rural
character, their concerns center on
local taxes, more of an irritant to them
than to the more affluent members
of the other groups. Local jobs are also
essential to them, as is industrial
development and affordable housing. Their
representation is sufficient
to maintain their political control of the
county. As one report stated,
“They set the agenda, select the judges,
vote in the sheriffs, the town
supervisors, the town board members … and
they control local tax rates!”28
Such interests
overlap with the second group, non-native full-time
residents. Most first reached Hillsdale as
weekenders and then as retirees.
They have more in common with part-timers;
they were among the prime
opponents of the St. Lawrence project and
anything that threatens scenic
views, air quality, and solitude.
The third
group consists of mainly weekend, part-time residents.
Revealed through verbatim notes salvaged
from the inner sanctum of the
discussion club, we have the following
analysis of that group’s sentiments:
“Keep the area uncrowded, rural, and
beautiful. Don’t disturb our solitude
or our vistas. Don’t pollute our pristine
air with industrial smoke. Don’t
ruin our views with unsightly and crowded
development homes. This
occasionally pits them diametrically
opposed to the interests of the locals
when it comes to housing and industrial
development. A prime example
is the local controversy over the location
of a St. Lawrence Cement plant
in the western part of the county.”29
Interestingly, while the second and
third groups are estimated to account for
only 40 percent of the population,
they own approximately 70 percent of the
land parcels in the Town.
Hillsdale
overall, according to a demographic profile in 2000, had 1,744
people, 96.9 percent Caucasian
non-Hispanics and just 0.6 percent black.
Their median income was $40,156. A recent
study provided statistical of the
area’s housing boom. It showed that between
February 2003 and February
2005, the median sale price of single
family homes in Columbia County
jumped by forty-two percent to a new high
of $193,000.30
As a New York
Times feature story on Hillsdale by Kathryn Matthews
noted in early 2005, “Hillsdale, a New York
gateway to the Berkshires,
feels like an insider’s secret. Maybe
that’s because many weekenders
there are friends who introduced each other
to it, showing off their getaway
of fields, forest and stunning views,
threaded by winding dirt roads and
babbling creeks.”31
But to a large number of those make Hillsdale their
home, it is not merely a place to live but
where different groups collectively
and individually fulfill their versions of
the American dream.
Part I
1Conventional wisdom places the last Indian family in
Hillsdale at about 1810, at a time when many of the tribes had moved to
the western part of the state.
2David M. Ellis, James A. Frost, Harold C. Syrett, and
Harry J. Carmen, A Short History of New York State
(Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, p. 46)
3Ibid., p. 77.
4A section of western Connecticut adjacent to New York
was known as “Oblong” because of its geographical shape. To this day, an
Oblong Book Shop is located in the village of Millerton near the border
with Connecticut.
5Cf., Jay P. Barnes, A Compilation of the
‘Proprietors Lots,’ Plantations & Colonial Records, of That part of
Berkshire County Comprising the Present Middle Registry District, 1920-21,
Berkshire County Court Archives, Pittsfield, Massachusetts.
6A toll keepers’ residence still stands on Route 23
just east of Mitchell Street, a surviving relic of the Columbia Turnpike
toll road, which was privately operated until about 1907, when its control
was bought by the county. About one mile north, connecting Mitchell Street
and Prospect Lake in Massachusetts, is a dirt road called “Shun Pike,” a
reminder of that day’s tax avoidance schemes.
7Before joining with Route 22 at North Hillsdale,
county route 21 passes over what the Dutch knew as Kijk-Uit Mountain,
later Anglicized as Kikeout or Cookout.
8Bette Gallup, A Brief History of Hillsdale
www.hillsdalepubliclibrary.org
9Franklin Ellis, The History of Columbia County.
(Philadelphia: Everts & Ensign, 1878), p. 45)
10John Francis Collin, A History of Hillsdale (Philmont,
New York, 1883, p. v)
11Prepared by the Division of Archives and History,
The American Revolution in New York (1926, p.243)
12Incorporation as a town followed in 1788; Collin,
Hillsdale, p. 67.
13Ellis, Frost, et al., Short History of New York
State, p. 61.
14Peter H. Stott, “Survey of Industrial & Engineering
Resources of Columbia County, New York,” Project No. SP-89-14 (Kinderhook:
Columbia County Historical Society, 1990), pp. 1-15.
Part II
1Peter H. Stott, “Survey of Industrial & Engineering
Resources of Columbia County, New York,” (Kinderhook, New York: Columbia
County Historical Society, 1990,) p. 9. Already in operation since 1845,
just to the south of Hillsdale, was Copake Iron Works, located in what
called Copake Station, which then became Berkshire Pass before assuming
the present identification as Copake Falls. [Supplement to The
Independent, June 10, 1999, p. 59]
2Allen Nevins, The Emergence of Modern America
(New York: The Macmillan Company, 1927), p.49.
3George E. Mowry, The Era of Theodore Roosevelt and
the Birth of Modern America (New York: Harper & Row, 1958), pp. 13-14.
4Stott, “Survey,” p. 9.
5Ibid, p. 14.
6Hillsdale Record, March 5, 1880, as quoted in
Stott, “Survey,” pp. 10-11.
7Stott, “Survey,” p. 10.
8Bette Gallup, “A Brief History of Hillsdale,” http://www.hillsdalepubliclibrary.org
9Stott, “Survey,” p. 7.
10Margaret Hunt, “Hillsdale,” in A History of the
Roeliff Jansen Area. (Columbia County, New York: The Roeliff Jansen
Historical Society, 2003), pp. 53-54.
11Collin, “Hillsdale,” p. 70; Gallup, “A Brief History
of Hillsdale,” http://www.hillsdalepubliclibrary.org ; The Independent,
January 7, 2005.
12Stott, “Survey,” p. 3. Many other houses of worship
remain available in surrounding communities, among them Roman Catholic,
Episcopalian, Dutch Reform, Jewish, and Presbyterian.
13A more recent addition to Hillsdale’s spiritual
community is the non-denominational Christian Church of the Movement for
Christian Revival, which crossed the state line from Great Barrington,
Massachusetts in 1999.
14Hudson Evening Register, July 25, 27, and 29,
1887, as quoted in Stott, “Survey,” p. 13.
15Supplement to The Independent, June 10, 1999,
p. 59.
16Bette Gallup, “A Brief History of Hillsdale,” http://www.hillsdalepubliclibrary.org
17Page Smith, America Enters the World: A
People’s History of the Progressive Era and World War I. (New
York: McGraw Hill, 1985), p. 492.
Part III
1 The Independent, June 10, 1999, p. 59; Louis V. Grogan, The
Coming of the New York and Harlem Railroad. (Pawling, New York: printed
privately, 1989), p. 140.
2 Interview with
George Atwood, Jr., August 24, 2004.
3 As quoted in Herbert S. Parmet, Presidential Power From the New Deal to
the New Right (Malabar, Florida: Krieger Publishing Company, 2002) ,p. 3.
4 Peter H. Stott, “Survey of Industrial & Engineering
Resources of Columbia County, New York,”Columbia County Historical
Society, 1990, p. 12.
5 Interview with Calvin Sheldon, January 11, 2005.
6 Ibid.
7 Existing Conditions, Goals and Objectives, Murphy & Kren
Planning Associates, Inc., April 1971.
8 Roe Jan Inquirer, July 7, 1973.
9 Interview with Art Baer, April 25, 2005.
10 Roe Jan Inquirer, June 15, 1972, January 11, 1973, and
April 19, 1973.
11 Interview with Calvin Sheldon, January 11, 2005.
12 Roe Jan Inquirer, June 1, 1972, and June 29, 1972.
13 Grogan, New York and Harlem Railroad, pp. 320 and 323;
Roe Jan Inquirer, June 1, 1972;
Penn Central Railroad Online at http://pc.smellycat.com/docs/passenger/pcharlemln.html;
Roe
Jan Inquirer, June 1, 1972.
14 Columbia County Farm Statistics, April 2000. New York
Agricultural Service, Albany.
Online at www.nass.usda.gov/ny.
15 The Independent, April 26, 2005.
16 National School Board Association, online at
www.asbj.com/ibd.2001/projects/taconic.pdf.
17 Interview with Pat Baer, April 23, 2005.
18 The Independent, November 26, 2004, and February 15,
2005.
19 The Independent, April 29. 2005.
20 Wiliam A. Dowd, “Aubergine: A Little Less Twinkle,”
Albany Times-Union, July 27, 2003.
21 Margaret Hunt, “About Hillsdale,” www.hillsdaleny.com/about_us.htm)
22 The Independent, June 27, 1994; Berkshire
Record, May 15, 1998; The Lakeville Journal, May 7, 1998.
23 Interview with Carol Briggs, April 28, 2005.
24 The Independent, July 27, 2004.
25 The Independent, September 9, 14, 18, and 25,
2001.
26 Interview with Donna Peck of Copake Realty, January 5,
2005.
27 Interview with Bill Anglum, September 7, 2004.
28 Memo from Donald Sheff, March 21, 2005, based on Art
Baer’s analysis made before a session
of the OB Discussion Group..
29 Sheff memo, March 25, 2005.
30 Profiles, Hillsdale, New York, online at
www.city-data.com/city/Hillsdale-New-York.html;
The Independence, April 29, 2005.
31 Ibid.
(Endnotes)
1 The Independent, June 10, 1999, p. 59; Louis V. Grogan,
The Coming of the New York and
Harlem Railroad. (Pawling, New York: printed privately,
1989), p. 140.
2 Interview with George Atwood, Jr., August 24, 2004.
3 As quoted in Herbert S. Parmet, Presidential Power From
the New Deal to the New Right
(Malabar, Florida: Krieger Publishing Company, 2002) ,p.
3.
