(Great Barrington, Mass.)—Hillsdale—Hudson—Catskill—Grand Gorge—Oneonta; State 23.
Massachusetts Line to Oneonta, 100.5 m.
Two-lane macadam with stretches of concrete.
New York Central R.R. parallels route between Grand Gorge and Stamford and between Davenport Center and Oneonta.
East of the Hudson River State 23 crosses a hill country in which several contemporary writers have found refuge. West of the river it climbs over the northern stretches of the Catskills, summer playground for New Yorkers, with hotels and boarding houses sprawling up the slopes and the compact white homes of dairy farmers resting in the valleys. The landscape carries the romantic coloring of Dutch legend as elaborated by Washington Irving and of the more virile tales of James Fenimore Cooper.
Section a. MASSACHUSETTS LINE to CATSKILL; 23.8 m. State 23
Crossing over from Massachusetts at the crest of the Taconic range, the route hems the northern border of the Taconic State Park (see Tour 20) and climbs up and down the Columbia County hills. Artists and writers, forsaking Greenwich Village a decade or so ago, came to this region for the ‘incredibly beautiful scenery,’ but soon found the sturdy, earth-rooted farmers of Dutch and German stock as interesting and as timeless as the hills and valleys themselves.
State 23, a continuation of Mass. 17, crosses the MASSACHUSETTS LINE, 0 m., at a point 7.9 miles west of Great Barrington, Massachusetts.
Near HILLSDALE, 1.7 m. (686 alt., 500 pop.), at the junction with State 22 (see Tour 20), John Cowper Powys, British novelist, lived for several years in country ‘more like England than any landscape I have yet seen in the whole of America.’ Arthur Davison Ficke, author of Sonnets of a Portrait Painter, lives near by on his farm ‘Hardhack,’ named for the swamp brush that chokes the fields; here he wrote most of the poems in The Secret, published in 1936. In the shadows of Phudd Hill, Alan Devoe writes his nature essays in the tradition of Thoreau and Burroughs.
In the center of CRARYVILLE, 6 m. (640 alt., 128 pop.), is the junction with a macadam road.
Left on this road 2.9 m. to COPAKE (Ind., snake waters) LAKE, shaped like a horseshoe by a promontory which juts from the northern shore. Developed as a summer retreat, it was first used by Indians who had a village under sheltering hills at the outlet.
Taking much of its importance from the manor house of the lower manor of Rensselaerswyck, CLAVERACK (Dutch, clover field), 14.4 m. (209 alt., 400 pop.), was the Columbia County seat until it was superseded by Hudson (see Tour 21). Today principally a suburban residential district for Hudson businessmen and retired families, it steps out of the past with an array of old mansions.
The VAN RENSSALAER MANOR HOUSE (R), at the eastern village line, an L-shaped building with long shingled roof sloping unbroken to the first floor level to form a porch, is a conglomeration of additions to the original two-room dwelling, built probably about 1712. The lower manor was presented in 1704 by the fourth patroon to his brother, Hendrick Van Rensselaer.
The OLD HUDSON COUNTY COURTHOUSE (R), built in 1786 and used as a seat of justice until 1845, is a two-story-and-attic building of brick painted white with stone foundation. The style is Georgian Colonial; the portico has wood Corinthian columns and pilasters. Here in 1804 Alexander Hamilton argued for a retrial of Harry Croswell, publisher of The Wasp in Hudson, who had been found guilty of libeling President Thomas Jefferson. ‘I contend,’ said Hamilton, ‘for the liberty of publishing truth with good motives and for justifiable ends, even though it reflects on government, magistrates or private persons.’ The court divided on this case two and two; but in 1805 the State legislature enacted into law the principles which Hamilton had professed.
The LUDLOW HOUSE (R), said locally to be as ‘old as the town of Claverak,’ is a two-story weathered brick structure with varicolored slate gambrel roof, brown shutters, and wood trim and window jambs painted white. The MILLER HOUSE (L), built in 1767, a brick gambrel-roof dwelling, considerably altered in the interior, was used as a meeting place for courts-martial during the Revolution; prisoners were kept in the cellar. The VAN-DERBO HOUSE (R), a brick structure painted white, with green shutters, Greek Ionic columns on the entrance porch, shingled roof, and gabled ends, was built about 1800, during the village’s prosperous era.
HUDSON, 18.1 m. (100 alt., 11,487 pop.) (see Tour 21), is at the junction with US 9 (see Tour 21) and State 9G (see Tour 21B).
State 23 runs in common with State 9G south of Hudson along the river, skirting swampland (R), haven for migratory ducks in season. Rising 543 feet beside the tidewater Hudson, MOUNT MERINO, 19.6 m. (R), was named for the sheep, among the first introduced in America, pastured on its rocky slopes by Chancellor Livingston (see Tour 21B).
At 22 m. State 23 branches right from State 9G to the RIP VAN WINKLE BRIDGE (car and occupants 50¢; pedestrians, 10¢), crossing the Hudson. Constructed in 1935 at a cost of $2,500,000, it is a deck cantilever-type steel structure 5,040 feet long and 142 feet above the river. In midstream the bridge rests on small Rogers Island, scene of one of the last battles between the Mahican and Mohawk Indians.
CATSKILL, 23.2 m. (75 alt., 5,414 pop.) (see Tour 21A), is at the junction with US 9W (see Tour 21A).
Section b. CATSKILL to ONEONTA; 76.7 m. State 23
The history of the region between Catskill and the Susquehanna Valley, supplemented by the present scene, shows to what uses man can put a mountain landscape: destroy its timber for tanbark and barrel hoops, tear jagged holes into it to quarry stone, clear its untillable acres for scratch farming, conceal stills in its secluded corners, tame it with manicured golf courses, and people it with figures of old romance. Through it all, the mountains have retained much of their beauty, thanks largely to the State, which has bought up the 232,000 acres of the Catskill Forest Preserve (see Conservation) to prevent further destruction and to rebuild. Fields have gone back to woodlot; the shorn hills have grown new timber.
At Catskill is the junction with State 23A (the Rip Van Winkle Trail), an alternate route between Catskill and Prattsville.
South on State 23A, which runs in common with US 9W (see Tour 21A) for a short distance. At 1.6 m. US 9W continues left (straight ahead) and State 23A branches right. Hidden among tall trees in the foothills is the ABEEL HOUSE (L), 5.1 m., just visible from the road. In this one-and-a-half-story Dutch Colonial stone structure built in 1721, David Abeel was captured by marauding Indians during the Revolution and taken to Canada.
PALENVILLE, 10.1 m. (560 alt., 280 pop.), is the legendary home of Rip Van Winkle. Washington Irving wrote of the ‘. . . light smoke curling up from a village, whose shingle-roofs gleam among the trees.’ During the Revolution there was a fortification on this site.
Right from Palenville on a macadam road 1.2 m. to the old OTIS ELEVATING RAILROAD STATION (R), now a private home, where nineteenth-century vacationists transferred from the narrow-gauge cars running between Catskill and the foot of the mountain to the cable car that hauled them up the steep wall to the Catskill Mountain House (see below). The straight gash of the tram’s course up the mountain is now the path for an electric power line. At 2.9 m. (L) is the abandoned trail of the stagecoach road that hairpinned up the mountain in the days before the cable car. Here is a view of SLEEPY HOLLOW, the ravine halfway up the mountain designated by Irving as the place where the mythical Rip Van Winkle slept. Hikers who follow the abandoned coach road up the mountain stumble on the ruins, 1 m., of the RIP VAN WINKLE BOARDING HOUSE, built in 1845 on the rim of Sleepy Hollow. The hotel had an enormous drinking bar to accommodate passengers during the rest and feeding period for the stagecoach horses. Before the visitors continued up the mountain they were shown the exact spot where Rip slept, with the indentations made by his shoulders in the rocks, and the tree under which he found the worm-eaten stock of his fowling-piece.
West of Palenville State 23A follows steep, narrow KAATERSKILL CLOVE and enters Catskill State Park (see below) at 11.2 m. Irving described the clove as ‘wild, lonely, and shagged, the bottom filled with fragments from the impending cliffs, and scarcely lighted by the reflected rays of the setting sun’; William Cullen Bryant wrote a lyric about it, and Thomas Cole reproduced its beauty on canvas. Today swank homes and clubhouses cling to the steep slopes.
At HAINES FALLS, 15.2 m. (1,900 alt., 200 pop.), is the junction with an unmarked macadam road; right here 3 m. to the NORTH LAKE STATE CAMPSITE (open May 25–Sept. 25, free), from which trails lead to the upper rim of Sleepy Hollow and to NORTH POINT (3,280 alt.), commanding a wide view. At the campsite is the entrance to the grounds of the CATSKILL MOUNTAIN HOUSE (adm. to grounds 25¢), built in 1823. The huge, three-story white frame building, classical in design, with 13 wooden Corinthian columns supporting a long front portico, has been a show place for more than a century. From its veranda at the brink of a 1,400-foot cliff is an awe-inspiring view of the Hudson Valley floor.
At TANNERSVILLE, 17.3 m. (1,920 alt., 656 pop.), on Lake Rip Van Winkle, is the junction with a macadam crossroad.
1. Right 1.3 m. on this road to ONTEORA (Ind., mountain of the sky) PARK, an exclusive group of elaborate summer homes. Here Hamlin Garland wrote his Middle Border books and his memoirs. In 1927, after attending one of the colony’s exclusive social functions, he wrote that ‘luxury such as this may be debilitating.’
2. Left 2 m. on this road to ELKA PARK, another colony of private residences.
Twilight, Elka, Santa Cruz, and Sunset Parks are expensive resorts, separate in setting but under a single board of directors, admitting only those who can produce letters of introduction from persons known to the management. Here the top social strata of New York and Philadelphia come from expensive city apartments to the mountain wildness tamed by urban conveniences.
At 19.5 m. on State 23A is the junction with State 214; left here 7.8 m. to DEVIL’S TOMBSTONE STATE CAMPSITE (free), at the entrance to Stony Clove. Just north of the campsite, in the heart of the clove, is the junction for State-maintained foot trails to the tops of Hunter Mountain (4,025 alt.), Plateau Mountain (3,855 alt.), Sugarloaf Mountain (3,782 alt.), Twin Mountain (3,647 alt.), and Indian Head Mountain (3,585 alt.).
At 21.4 m. is the junction with a road across Schoharie Creek; left here 0.6 m. to COLONEL’S CHAIR (3,100 alt.), a mountain shaped like a chair, a gully forming the seat and ridges the arms. From here marked foot trails lead to the peak of Hunter Mountain, 4 m., and a fire observation tower (open when ranger is on duty), Phoenecia (see Tour 15), Slide Mountain, Sugarloaf Mountain, and Indian Head Mountain.
Strung out for two miles in the narrow valley of Schoharie Creek, HUNTER 21.5 m., (1,600 alt., 624 pop.), is an array of boardinghouses against the mountain wall. As early as 1880 the railroad through Stony Clove was depositing Jewish families in the valley town, and today it has a large year-round Jewish population and several kosher markets; fruit and vegetable stands cover the sidewalks, creating a decidedly urban atmosphere.
At 36.9 m. is the western limit of Catskill State Park; at 37 m. is the junction with State 23 (see below).
State 23 branches right from US 9W in CATSKILL, 0 m. Maples and elms, fencing the highway, shelter tourists’ cabins, boardinghouses, and gas stations; life-size figures of Rip Van Winkle and other souvenir doodads are dangled as bait for the tourist trade.
Hereabouts legendary gnomes with bushy beards and eyes like pigs’ worked in metals. Under the full moon they gathered on the mountain cliffs, dancing and capering until the night wore out. They brewed a liquor that shortened the body and swelled the head. When Hudson and his crew landed on the riverbank, the pygmies held a carouse in his honor; when the sailors departed they were distorted by the magic distillation, which, we moderns know, was Catskill applejack.
Today LEEDS, 3 m. (172 alt., 300 pop.), is a one-street town with hotels, souvenir shops, and stores advertising ‘cure-all mineral waters’ drawn ‘through solid rock from a natural cave.’ The REFORMED CHURCH (R), a two-story native stone structure with gable end facing the street, and the old STONE ARCH BRIDGE, built of local limestone, are about the only monuments left of the Dutch builders. The two eastern arches of the bridge, the oldest in the State, were laid in 1760 and the two western in 1792. The bridge was restored by the State in 1937.
West of Leeds once lived Ralph Sutherland, who caught his runaway white slave and tied her to the tail of his horse to drag her home; her skull was smashed against the rocks and she died. Sutherland was acquitted of her murder, but was required to wear a cord about his neck to remind his neighbors to shun him. The fertile imagination of the mountain people went to work: they heard a shrieking woman pass the house nightly, tied to the tail of a giant horse with burning eyes and smoking nostrils; they saw a woman on the garden wall with lights shining from her fingertips, uttering unearthly laughter. Sutherland died a lonely man.
Between Catskill and Cairo the road follows the bed of the old Catskill Turnpike, linking the Hudson and Susquehanna Valleys, over which huge, wide-wheeled freight wagons crawled behind straining teams of four oxen or six horses. As railroads were built, the turnpike shrunk, so that today, except where it runs in common with main-traveled roads, it is little more than a winding country lane, hub-deep in spring mud, hard and dust-choked in summer.
CAIRO, 9.8 m. (340 alt., 573 pop.), is another tourist town; villagers not engaged in catering to summer visitors work in the surrounding apple orchards.
Left from Cairo 1.4 m. on an improved road to PURLING (480 alt., 180 pop.), known as Forge until 1895, when it was renamed for the purling of waters over the stones in the Shinglekill. Here Enoch Hyde and Benjamin Hall built their forge. Iron ore was brought up from the Hudson on mules. Later wooden-wheeled clocks, oaken buckets, grain cradles, and furniture were manufactured with power supplied by the creek.
ACRA, 13.3 m. (668 alt., 105 pop.), is surrounded by apple orchards. Local cider is distilled to potent Catskill applejack. In the last years of the prohibition era, Jack (‘Legs’) Diamond moved his gang headquarters to an innocent-appearing white farmhouse in a grove of trees just north of the village. Hounded by rivals, the sallow-faced thug came to the isolation of the Catskills to raise local stills to the status of an organized business. Mountain bootleggers did not welcome the intrusion, and Diamond was shot down in one of the mountain drinking joints. He survived, returned to his Acra home, and had the trunks of the trees about his house painted white to make an ambush attack impossible. Broken by legal battles, he was eventually killed in a cheap rooming house in Albany.
Thurlow Weed (1797–1882) was born in a log cabin east of the village, and spent several years among the rugged, superstitious backwoods people. Weed, last of the political journalists involved in the struggle between Federalism and Jeffersonianism, rose from blacksmith, boathand, salt-boiler, and printer to political dictator. He published an anti-Masonic newspaper in Rochester in 1826 and cemented his political career in 1828 by swinging the anti-Masonic sentiment arising out of the Morgan incident (see Tour 11) to the support of John Quincy Adams for President. In 1829 the anti-Masons elected him to the Assembly so that he could be in Albany to edit the Albany Evening Journal, which he made the undisputed leader of the Whig press until the rise of Horace Greeley’s Tribune. Weed’s political sagacity was as important to the birth of the Republican party as was the antislavery issue.
West of Acra the characteristic Catskill red rocks appear; they formed a part of the great Catskill delta, their red color resulting from oxidation when the sea level was low. At 19 m. is (R) POINT LOOKOUT (2,400 alt.), with a 100-foot tower (view from top 10¢; telescope 10¢) at the edge of the cliff, commanding a broad view northward to the Helderbergs and eastward across the Hudson to the Taconics, Berkshires, and Green and White Mountains—‘all creation,’ as Leatherstocking said in Cooper’s story. Windows in homes in EAST WINDHAM, 19.5 m. (1,920 alt., 100 pop.), a summer resort on the northeastern tip of the Catskill plateau, overlook an 1,800-foot drop into the valley of Catskill Creek.
At 22.4 m. is the eastern boundary of CATSKILL STATE PARK, covering 596,120 acres in Greene, Ulster, Delaware, and Sullivan Counties. The State owns 232,000 acres outright and exercises water and forest control over the remainder. Within the protected area are many villages, summer resorts, farms, and hunting and fishing clubs; but mile after mile of forest wilderness is guarded against spoliation, shielded from the ax, and even from farming, pasturing, and habitation. Mountain and valley are for deer, fox, racoon, grouse, trout, and other wild life, and for the hiker who trails up the summits of high peaks and the hunter who crashes through the wilderness tangle in the fall.
In ASHLAND, 29.7 m. (1,422 alt., 196 pop.), Jairns Munson operated one of the first Catskill ropewalks—one of the 173 enumerated in the United States in 1810. Under the roof of a long, low building, spinners walked back and forth twisting the fibers so that by reciprocal friction they held together when strain was applied. In the summer the rope-making was often moved into the open to permit walks as long as 900 feet.
At 34.2 m. State 23 crosses the western boundary of the Catskill State Park, and at 36 m. is the junction with State 23A (see above), alternate route between Prattsville and Catskill.
PRATTSVILLE, 36.1 m. (1,150 alt., 384 pop.), a long, narrow town in the shadow of Prospect Hill (R), is supported by summer boarders, its creamery, and the trade of vicinity farmers.
Directly across the road is PRATTS ROCKS (picnicking), a public park donated to the village by Zadock Pratt, its namesake. Determined to perpetuate his name for posterity, Pratt left carved in the rocks a bust of himself, carvings of his favorite dogs and horses, and a bust of his son, Colonel George W. Pratt.
Born in Stephentown, Rensselaer County, Zadock Pratt (1790–1871) came to the Catskills and amassed a $14,000 fortune from a general store at Lexington. By 1825 he had built his own village, Prattsville, on Schoharie Creek, constructing more than 100 houses for settlers. At one time he operated the largest tannery in the mountains, a large gristmill, and a hat factory. Mountain neighbors regarded him as ‘the most wonderful man the country ever produced.’ He had a peculiar sense of humor. One hot Fourth of July, with the sun baking the Catskills, he hitched his white horses to his sleigh, strapped on the bells, bundled himself in his fur coat, and drove over the mountains to Catskill.
Soon after the War of 1812, the hush of Catskill forests was shattered by the ring of axes, the rumble of wagons, and the work songs of men. Shiploads of raw hides from South America hove up the Hudson and were trucked up over mountain peaks to tanneries blooming on the edge of every hemlock forest. Tanning required one cord of bark to every ten hides; since the largest wagon could carry only enough bark for five hides, tanners found it economical to bring the raw hides to the bark.
The hides were ‘sweated’ in liming vats for removal of hair, then passed to the first of a long row of tanning vats containing various solutions of tanbark, sumac acids, and water—the vats close together so that a husky man with a fork could lift a hide from vat to vat without waste of time. The hide finally emerged, tanned and ready for drying and shipping. The process, like a modern assembly line, was endless.
Tanbark peeling attracted many muscular migratory workers who worked for a few weeks in early summer while the sap was high and bark was loose. The work was hard, from sunup to sundown. A good bark peeler could pile two cords a day, for which he was paid as much as $2.75, bountiful wages for the times. Life was one continuous camping out, ever on the march for the retreating hemlock. The men lived in hemlock shanties slapped together in a few hours. The bark peeled off, millions of feet of potential lumber were left to rot and burn on the mountain sides. The dried, brittle logs were tinder for forest fires, and what man had failed to waste, fire did.
Following the bark-peelers, the hoop-making industry developed, prospered on a lesser scale, and died about 1890. In winter, sapling poles, eight feet long for barrels and five for kegs, were hauled to the hoop-makers’ huts. The shaver split the sapling in the center, working on a bench similar to the old cobbler’s stool. Leaning forward he placed his drawknife at the head of the pole and, with an oarsman’s stroke of the body, pulled it toward him.
The hoop-shaving art was largely practiced by men of great solitude who lived in huts ‘constructed almost as simply as those of the woodrats, made of sticks laid across each other without compass or square.’ They had long and tangled hair; arms and backs bent by constant moving of the shaver’s knife; ‘dress that was a ludicrous mixture of two-years’-old store garments and the pelts of animals; tongues glued to taciturnity from endless weeks of silence . . .’
West of Prattsville State 23 passes, at 36.6 m., a small mountain (L) created by rock and dirt dumped from the SHANDAKEN TUNNEL, which carries water 18.1 miles under the mountain from Schoharie Reservoir (see Tour 24) to Esopus Creek and the Ashokan Reservoir (see Tour 15), and thence to New York. Named for the town of Shandaken, it aptly represents the Iroquois meaning of the name, rapid waters.
In GRAND GORGE, 41.2 m. (1,420 alt., 388 pop.), is the junction with State 30 (see Tour 24).
State 23 follows the Bear Kill and the Ulster & Delaware Railroad (R) through the Delaware County dairy, cheese, and cauliflower region. Hills are less densely wooded, and pasture and field climb well up the slopes. In June and July the hills smoulder with hawkweed, a pest to the farmers, but a gorgeous sight of yellow and tawny amid daisy white, buttercup yellow, and sorrel reddish-brown.
State 23 hugs the lower slopes (L) of MOUNT UTSAYANTHA (3,213 alt.), highest peak in the western Catskills. Here the beautiful Utsayantha, a Mohawk princess, fell in love with a Sioux brave, but Indian taboo barred the marriage. Utsayantha leaped into a lake and was drowned and her father buried her on the summit of the mountain. Her grave is preserved with a marker. Several years ago the grave was entered and nothing was found.
STAMFORD, 49.2 m. (1,827 alt., 1,103 pop.), with its 33 hotels, large and small, including the Hotel Habana, which caters exclusively to wealthy Cubans and South Americans who spend their summers here, is the largest and most pretentious resort in the Catskills. Excellent facilities for golf, tennis, swimming, riding, mountain-climbing, and fishing provide rural recreation without sacrifice of urbanlike hotel conveniences. Exclusive, a rich man’s paradise in many ways, the village has reversed the economic rule: many of the so-called public recreation facilities, which are privately owned, have a sliding scale of prices; fees bound skyward for the ‘undesirables’ and decrease for those who are rich enough to be accounted desirable.
State 23 twists over rolling hills to the headwaters of the Susquehanna River, separated by less than two miles from the West Branch of the Delaware. HARPERSFIELD, 53.4 m. (1,752 alt., 50 pop.), was the scene of Indian-Tory raids during the Revolution, and later was one of the principal stops on the old Catskill Turnpike. Settled in 1771 by Colonel John Harper from Cherry Valley, the settlement, on the Indian trail between the Schoharie and the Susquehanna Valleys, was attacked in the spring of 1780 by Indians led by Joseph Brant (see Tour 8); three settlers were scalped and eight taken captive. Timothy Murphy avenged the loss in a single-handed attack on a camp of 27 Indians. When he left the camp, six Indians were dead and the rest scattered in the hills.
State 23 winds through hills along Center Brook, Middle Brook, and Charlotte Creek, all headwaters of the Susquehanna. At 74.5 m. the view of the broad Susquehanna Valley (R) throws fertile land, mountain, city, and river in bold contrast. At 76 m. State 23 joins with State 28 (see Tour 15) and runs in common with it for 0.6 mile.
In ONEONTA, 76.7 m. (1,120 alt., 11,649 pop.) (see Tour 10) is the junction with State 7 (see Tour 10).