Making Mountains

New York City and the Catskills

David Stradling

• Editorial: University of Washington Press
• Año: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780295989891
• Categoría: History
• Categoría: North American History

For over two hundred years, the Catskill Mountains have been repeatedly and dramatically transformed by New York City. In Making Mountains, David Stradling shows the transformation of the Catskills landscape as a collaborative process, one in which local and urban hands, capital, and ideas have come together to reshape the mountains and the communities therein. This collaboration has had environmental, economic, and cultural consequences. Early on, the Catskills were an important source of natural resources. Later, when New York City needed to expand its water supply, engineers helped direct the city toward the Catskills, claiming that the mountains offered the purest and most cost-effective waters. By the 1960s, New York had created the great reservoir and aqueduct system in the mountains that now supplies the city with 90 percent of its water. The Catskills also served as a critical space in which the nation's ideas about nature evolved. Stradling describes the great influence writers and artists had upon urban residents - especially the painters of the Hudson River School, whose ideal landscapes created expectations about how rural America should appear. By the mid-1800s, urban residents had turned the Catskills into an important vacation ground, and by the late 1800s, the Catskills had become one of the premiere resort regions in the nation. In the mid-twentieth century, the older Catskill resort region was in steep decline, but the Jewish "Borscht Belt" in the southern Catskills was thriving. The automobile revitalized mountain tourism and residence, and increased the threat of suburbanization of the historic landscape. Throughout each of these significant incarnations, urban and rural residents worked in a rough collaboration, though not without conflict, to reshape the mountains and American ideas about rural landscapes and nature.

Chapter 1

A Natural Resource

Civilization seemed to have done little more than to have scratched this rough, shaggy surface of the earth here and there.

—John Burroughs, 1894

One is struck by the lack of majestic trees like those of many Maine forests. Along the mountain roads the wood is mainly of the second growth; the axe has done its work—the lumber is too near civilization not to be needed.

—Philip Quilibet, 1877

In the decades following the American Revolution, settlers moved into the Catskills unconcerned with the markets of New York City. Too distant in the days of carriages and too small a market for most agricultural products until after the War of 1812, New York City played no role in the decision of the first farmers to seek land in the mountains. For a generation, sometimes more, they produced almost entirely to fill local needs. In this way, the earliest history of the Catskills, the first effort to remake the mountains, from wooded valleys to productive farms, had essentially nothing to do with the small city at New York Harbor. What's more, life in the small city was not all that dissimilar to life in the country, despite the former's dedication to commerce. In 1800, New York's 60,000 residents lived clustered on the tip of Manhattan, and most could easily escape the city's confines by crossing the Hudson to the open spaces of New Jersey, by traveling up to the sparsely inhabited reaches of the island, or even by taking to sea.¹

If Catskills settlers thought nothing of New York's growing commerce when they took to the mountains, few of them intended to remain aloof from spreading agricultural markets altogether, and over time the influence of the city would be felt in the Catskills. Indeed, market participation was the goal of most settlers, for only through trade might they accumulate some wealth, purchase land, build finer homes, and live better lives. Early surplus trading remained close to home due to poor transportation, but the object of trade was to find the best price. From the very beginning of Catskills settlement, merchants and farmers could generally find the best prices in New York City. And so, what at first was truly a rural endeavor to make a living in an upland frontier gradually became an effort to sell for greater profit to a market more than 100 miles downstream. Even as early as the 1820s the city affected the mountains, its growing market encouraging settlers and entrepreneurs to find some means to make money from the land, to find something to sell to the city down the river. In the nineteenth century, Hudson River sloops, then steamers and canal barges, and then railroads, allowed mountain residents to ship out various products urbanites might require. These market connections transformed the region's agriculture, at first creating a greater demand for export items, but then creating the economic conditions under which mountain farmers could not compete. Just as important, market connections created opportunities for numerous nonagricultural, extractive industries. Over time, the Catskills provided several natural resources to the city—from butter to bluestone, from tanbark to barrel hoops. Altogether these various enterprises, and many others that supported the Catskills economy, had a transformative effect on the mountain environment, most particularly in extensive deforestation and the disturbance of the area's streams and rivers. The market connections that brought Catskill agricultural products, stone, wood, and tanned leather down to the city thus united local hands and city money, an early and important component in the collaborative effort to remake the mountains.

The Hudson River Valley near the Catskills has had a long human history. Home of the Lenni-Lenape, Mohawks, and Mahicans at the time of European arrival in the 1600s, the Hudson Valley has supported agriculture for perhaps one thousand years. While Native American agricultural settlements in the mountains themselves were sparser than those in the surrounding Hudson, Mohawk, and Delaware valleys, Indians did make use of the mountains, for hunting and fishing trips particularly. Some lower-elevation locations in the mountains may have helped sustain Native Americans for up to four thousand years, especially as seasonal hunting grounds.² This Native American occupancy is remembered largely through names on the landscape, including Esopus, Neversink, Pepacton, and Pakatakan, but in all other ways evidence of Native American occupation has long since disappeared.

In the late 1600s, Dutch and then English colonists settled in the flat lands between the Hudson and the mountains, but the imposing eastern range of the Catskills generally prevented movement further west. European settlers began to arrive in the mountains in significant numbers only after the American Revolution. Many of them came from Connecticut and other New England states, where the supply of good agricultural land could no longer keep pace with demographic growth.³ Others came south from the Albany area, in search of cheap land in the western Catskills, particularly along the Schoharie Creek and the two branches of the Delaware. They found some locations ready for farming, as Indian clearings gave fortunate settlers a head start on the hard work of making a farm. Still, those hoping to find good farmland in the mountains generally did not, and those who stayed in the higher elevations tended to combine agriculture with a number of other pursuits to make their livings. In this way, the stinginess of the soil and the shortness of the growing season contributed to the development of other industries, including the tanning and bluestone businesses that flourished in the 1800s. Farm families continually searched for additional income, working as bark peelers for tanners or as quarrymen or cartmen when they could.

This pattern persisted through the early 1900s, as families produced whatever they could to stay on the land. Alonzo Hungerford, of the Shokan area, lived a fairly typical life working among the Catskills. Most of Hungerford's income came from his work as a farmhand, but he also labored at another man's quarry periodically. In 1893, he gained ownership of a fourteen-acre woodlot from Zadock Boice, the operator of a sawmill at Bishop Falls, who had already taken the large timber from the property. Hungerford would use the land for many purposes, including taking out cordwood, saplings to make barrel hoops, and even bluestone from a small quarry. Like so many others in the mountains, for so many generations, the Hungerford family pieced together a living, making products for the market, like bluestone and hoops, when they could, and selling their labor when they could not.⁴

Despite the impediments, agriculture gained a stronger foothold in the mountains than one might suspect. In 1819, Henry Dwight toured the Catskills hoping to describe the relatively unknown region's geology. Dwight ascended the very steep Kaaterskill Clove and as he continued westward he was surprised by what he found. The town of Hunter, which Dwight estimated as having 500 to 600 residents, was already producing good crops, and he judged that the land in the Schoharie Valley, in which Hunter lay, was “very luxuriant the first year or two after it is cleared.” What's more, with manure Dwight expected production would improve. In the meantime, even more forest would be cleared, with settlers already hard at work “converting their trees into lumber,” and the region replete with fine mill seats along fast-flowing streams. During Dwight's summer visit, Hunter seemed to hold much promise as an agricultural community.⁵

Just a year later, a surveyor noted the considerable “improvement” of lands further west in the Schoharie Valley, in an area that would eventually become part of Jewett Township. While the upland lots remained unoccupied, the flatter, more accessible lots had substantial clearings, especially along the area's many streams. Near the East Kill, just north of the Schoharie, Abel Mix had “improved” about 50 of his 125 acres, which is to say he had prepared them for farming by removing trees and stumps. Nearby, Charles Kelsey had cleared “a great part” of his 105-acre lot, made particularly valuable by its proximity to two public roads. Just as important, Kelsey's land lay near Zadock Brown's gristmill and sawmill on the East Kill, both of which would provide critical services to the frontier farming community. Brown had already constructed a frame house near the mills, a sure sign of his early success.⁶

The flats along the Schoharie, the Esopus, and the two branches of the Delaware invited early settlement, but the process of “improving” valleys through agriculture would continue for decades in the less accessible reaches of the mountains. As late as the 1870s, squatters continued to eke out a living by clearing the property of the region's many absentee owners. Abram Kelly, for example, had cleared 20 acres near the Beaver Kill in Hardenburgh, even taking the time to build both a log house and a barn on land he did not own. He kept cattle, using the manure to fertilize his fields of potatoes and buckwheat, two of the most common crops in the region. Kelly had also planted an apple orchard—clearly the action of a man who hoped to stay awhile to reap the benefits of his labors. Each spring Kelly also tapped surrounding maple stands to make sugar and syrup. He had fenced a garden, using the abundant fieldstone, and also cut hay from a sizable meadow of his own creation. In other words, despite the fact that Kelly did not own the land, he conducted an agriculture common to the region, one that relied on multiple crops and, particularly, on grass-fed cattle.⁷

By the 1870s, dairying filled the fertile mountain valleys along the larger rivers and their smaller tributaries.⁸ Lithographer Henry Schile lamented the completeness of the transformation around Hunter during his visit in 1881. “It is a pity that the farmers of this neighborhood could not appreciate the value of the beautiful forests that once flourished here,” he wrote. But, of course, the farmers did appreciate the value of the forests, not just for their beauty, as Schile would have them, but also for their utility. At perhaps the peak of agricultural settlement in the mountains, New York's 1875 census found nearly half of the Town of Woodstock's acreage “improved,” the forest removed. Of the improved acreage, however, only 14 percent was plowed, while nearly 40 percent was mowed for hay and 46 percent kept as pasture. Neighboring Olive Township was about 46 percent agricultural land, with only about 22 percent of this under plow. Each mountain township had its own agricultural pattern, set by topography and soil quality mostly, but no town had more land under plow than in pasturage, a formula that limited the intensity of Catskills farming and the density of the population.⁹

Pasturage dominated Catskills agriculture for two reasons. First, the steepness of the terrain and its rockiness made row crops difficult to grow and not particularly productive when attempted. Pastures and hay fields, however, could easily replace forests on the more modest mountainside grades, at least up to about 2,200 feet.¹⁰ Second, thousands of horses lived in the mountains, particularly for use in the extractive industries. Both tanning and bluestone quarrying required great herds of horses. Horses also aided in the young tourist industry, carrying vacationers to and from railroad stations and on scenic drives. All of this activity, this large number of animals, required food, providing farmers with a ready market for pasture lands and pressed hay. As early Catskills historian Harry Haring claimed, “Every hillside that held any soil became a hay field. Every level spot was planted with corn or oats.”¹¹

Of the exported agricultural goods, butter led the way in the second half of the 1800s, as railroads provided better access to the New York City market. Even the very mountainous Shandaken Township managed to produce 94,000 pounds of butter in 1875, while the most isolated of all Ulster County townships, Hardenburgh, with a total population of just 671, produced a remarkable 74,000 pounds of butter. This level of production suggests the importance of butter as a means of securing cash in an agricultural region that had very little to export. Too far from the city to send unprocessed milk, most mountain farm families turned the vast majority of their market-bound milk into butter. By the late 1800s, the region's railroads had built their own creameries in an effort to develop freight business, and then hired men to work them, marking a shift in labor from women in the home to men in a plant.¹²

Nineteenth-century city residents did drink considerable quantities of Catskills milk, but they generally did so while visiting the mountains.¹³ Indeed, fresh milk and other agricultural products were among the most important attractions for city folk coming to the country in the second half of the 1800s. Just as tourism increased the need for local horses, it also increased demand for dairy cows and chickens in the mountains' farming communities, and for any number of fresh fruits and vegetables. In 1900, the proprietors of the Bishop Falls House, a small boardinghouse run on the Bishops' family farmstead, issued a pamphlet advertising their newly expanded, thirty-five-room house: “An excellent table supplied with fresh vegetables, poultry and eggs, maple syrup, milk, butter and so forth.” Clearly agriculture provided critical support for the local tourist industry, and vice versa.¹⁴

Since most farm families did not produce primarily for the urban market, Catskills farmsteads reflected a great diversity of production. Jefferson Roosa's Esopus Valley farm at the turn of the century might serve as an example. Roosa, his wife, and his three daughters worked a ninety-seven-acre farm, where they raised corn, oats, buckwheat, rye, and potatoes. The animals on the farm—eight cows, two horses, a large flock of chickens, and some pigs—consumed all of the grains, as well as the timothy and clover hay Roosa cut from about twenty acres. Roosa estimated that in 1906 the cows produced $50 in milk each, which he sold to a creamery near the Ulster and Delaware's Shokan station. He sold eggs in the market, too, earning a total of $224, and eleven hogs earned him $111 in that same year. In total, the Roosa farm sold just over $900 worth of products, a modest income supplemented by two of his girls' summer labor at the Mohonk House, a popular resort several miles away. The most important product of the Roosa farm, however, was not what made it to market, but what stayed at home, sustaining the family of five with a remarkably varied diet. Despite the short growing season, the garden plots of the region's farms produced sweet corn, tomatoes, cucumbers, radishes, beets, lettuce, string beans, peas, et cetera, while fruit trees produced cherries, pears, peaches, plums, and, most abundantly, apples. Of all of the products of the farm economy, then, only a small portion made it to market, mostly in the form of butter, eggs, apples, and pork.¹⁵

In an effort to improve agriculture in the Delaware's East Branch valley, which would have required greater market production, a number of farmers organized the Catskill Mountain Agricultural Society, holding its first fair in Margaretville in August 1889. Not coincidentally, the names of several society officers are also the names of some of the valley's settlements, including Allaben and Griffin (of Griffin's Corners, now called Fleischmanns). Also listed among the eleven vice presidents was Judson Haynes, who was part of the third generation of Hayneses trying to make a living along Dry Brook. Named for his grandfather who had arrived in Dry Brook around 1800, Judson farmed 433 acres in an area known as Haynes Hollow.¹⁶

Support for the Margaretville fair came not just from the farmers in the region, but also from agricultural dealers in New York City. A pamphlet announcing the fair, and the society itself, contained advertisements for four commission merchants based in the city, two of them with offices on Chambers Street near city hall. Each claimed to be specialists in butter, but they listed other products as well, including eggs, poultry, and cheese, all of which made their way out of the mountains in this era, particularly on the Ulster and Delaware Railroad. No doubt conflicts over prices and quality could sour relations between Catskills farmers and the city's commission merchants, but these two different groups of market participants had at least one identical interest, made clear by the merchants' support of the Agricultural Society: both wanted to see more Catskills products sold in New York City markets. This confluence of interests lay at the heart of the collaboration between city and Catskills residents; both groups hoped to grow wealthier from the relationship.¹⁷

Despite the early signs of success and the concerted efforts of merchants and husbandmen, few Catskills farms were successful for long. The gradual nineteenth-century expansion of agricultural lands was followed by a similarly gradual decline. All the same, the agricultural economy and the rural culture it created remained central to the American self-conception, even in the East, where more than just Catskills farms failed in the face of competition from the Midwest. Even those many Americans who left the country for the city generally took with them fond memories of their rural experiences, and those who shared those memories helped confirm the nation's belief in the value of a rural life, especially the connection to nature it afforded.

One of the nation's most important rural memoirists was John Burroughs, born in 1837 on a Delaware Country farm on a hillside above the Delaware's East Branch. John's great-grandfather, Ephraim, had settled near Stamford shortly after the Revolution. One of his sons, Eden, moved south, establishing a farmstead on the slopes of a small mountain called Old Clump. One of Eden's sons, Chauncey, cleared his own farm on the southern slope of Old Clump, where he would help raise ten children and many crops on 350 acres. One of those children, John, would grow up enthralled by his birthplace, ever thankful of his agricultural childhood and the long hours he spent outdoors, in nature. By the time he purchased his father's farm in 1913, however, he had become an internationally known nature writer and only secondarily a farmer. His beloved Catskills, both their wildness and their agriculture, were among his most popular topics.^1...