Rosendale, a town of 6,000 just fifteen minutes south of Kingston, played an out-sized role in the Hudson Valley’s history and the development of New York City. Local resident and former Army historian Gilberto Villahermosa discussed his new book on the history of Rosendale at a Town of Lloyd Historical Preservation Society talk Monday, filling…
Prattsville, a small town straddling the Schoharie Creek in northwestern Greene County, is home to Pratt’s Rock, a site once called “New York’s Mount Rushmore” by Ripley’s Believe It or Not. It was here the town’s founder and namesake, Zadock Pratt, employed a series of itinerant stonemasons to carve his life story in a cliff…
Joe Diamond receives a small shard of blue and white from one of his undergraduate students and flips it over in his dirt-creased hand, rubbing it with his thumb to remove the centuries-old soil. “Majolica, 17th century,” he says with the unassailable confidence of an art appraiser showing a piece. “This stuff is like 1630…
The rock formation was visible to the side of the trail as we crested a hill near Overlook Mountain in Woodstock: a craggy boulder sitting in the topsoil with a rock wall sinuously trailing behind it like a tail. The tail was wider at the ground and peaked at the top and extended a good…
I visited John Burroughs’ Slabsides on two separate occasions, and both featured the type of icy weather Burroughs would have confronted with the same violent gusto he confronted porcupines. Burroughs was a preeminent naturalist who produced a cornucopia of essays now considered to be tomes of nature writing. He scribed much of them while at…