A Catskill Catalog by Bill Birns

By Bill Birns
Mention New Kingston to residents of Kingston and receive blank stares, with mutterings of “where’s that?” But shortly after the Revolution, New Kingston offered recovery and opportunity to the people of that battered Hudson River town.

by Bill Birns
July 4, 1776 several farms sat along the banks of the upper Pepacton, as the East Branch of the Delaware was then called. Farmers named DuMond and Von Waggoner, Hendricks and Kittle, Slyter, Green, Yaple and Carpenter made up a little outpost of settlement on the frontier. Similar groupings of farms sat in the Shandaken Mountains along the upper Esopus Creek.

Every organization I’m associated with is obsessed with having a Web site. Well, maybe obsessed is too strong, but every meeting I attend seems to include at least one discussion about developing, maintaining, and improving people’s ability to gain, through the Internet, information deemed important by that organization.

Today, the term Yankee refers to the baseball team in the Bronx or, perhaps, to any American abroad, but once the term clearly identified New Englanders. The Red Sox Nation of the six states of New England (can you name them?) must swallow hard and recognize that they were once, eek, Yankees!

My arrival in the mountains and the publication of Alf Evers’ monumental history The Catskills: From Wilderness to Woodstock (Doubleday, 1972) occurred at about the same time, so I have always felt a bond with the author. Alf Evers died in 2004, a month short of his 100th birthday. He was a Catskill Mountain institution.