A Catskill Catalog by Bill Birns

Trivia quiz. Category: American History.
1. When George Washington took the oath of office as our first president, who swore him in?
2. The 1776 Continental Congress in Philadelphia appointed a Committee of Five to draw up the Declaration of Independence. John Adams represented Massachusetts; Ben Franklin, Pennsylvania; Roger Sherman, Connecticut and Thomas Jefferson, Virginia. Who was the member representing the Province of New York?

The prototype of the smart, tough upstate operator has to be Robert Livingston, a Scots immigrant who arrived in New York Harbor in 1674, 20 years old and eager to make a New-World fortune. This hardworking immigrant, in a few short decades, made the greatest fortune, and sired the grandest family, in New York Province.

Once there was a town called Eminence.

How can a brook be dry? Isn’t a brook, by its very nature, wet. A drive up Dry Brook in the August heat of a dry summer day will reveal long stretches of baked gravel in the streambed, but, still, there is water in the brook – it’s just, temporally, a narrow brook. So how come we call that stream Dry Brook?

The first produce of the Catskills to achieve commercial value were seeds of the balsam fir. That’s right, evergreen seeds. Seems that landscape gardening was all the rage in 18th-century England.

When I was a kid, I had a record – vinyl, 33 and a third, long-playing – called “Great Moments in History,” or something like that. (I also had a complete set of small plastic statuettes of the 34 Presidents of the United States, but that’s another story.)

If the Catskills were a kingdom, the Hardenbergh Patent would be our Magna Carta.
By the patent, I mean the piece of paper, parchment probably, upon which, in 1708, New York Provincial Secretary George Clarke wrote.

The capital of American colonial history has to be Williamsburg, Va. Colonial Williamsburg recreates that city, as closely as possible, to what it was like just before independence. Spend a couple of days in Williamsburg and you are in colonial Virginia.

The late Nat Ciccone used to photograph Catskill Mountain barns. The longtime Margaretville Central teacher and coach would drive scenic mountain back roads, stopping to capture, on 35 millimeter film, those barns of Ulster and Delaware counties, that, Nat knew back in the ’80s, would not be around too much longer.

Just got in from shoveling. Big snow is all encompassing, takes our full attention: physically, certainly, but mentally, psychologically, and emotionally, as well. Big snow brings up wellsprings of memory and talk.