Albany—Berne—Junction with State 30; State 43. 34m.
Two-lane macadam or concrete.
An Indian trail in 1805 became the Albany and Delaware Turnpike, forerunner of State 43. The route winds to the summit of the Helderbergs, in whose gray-faced limestone cliffs early American geologists traced the records of geologic times; and curves around the corners of century-old buckwheat fields planted by descendants of the earliest settlers. About the middle of the nineteenth century swift mountain streams furnished power for mills, tanneries, and textile factories; but railroad development left the Helderbergs so isolated that, except for patches of dairy farms and buckwheat fields and the homes of gentlemen farmers who commute to their Albany offices, the area is slowly reverting to damp, thick woods.
Southwest from ALBANY, 0 m. (18 alt., 130,447 pop.) (see Albany), at 7.5 m. is the junction with a side road.
Right on this road 1 m. to the NEW YORK STATE EXPERIMENTAL GAME FARM (open 9–5 workdays), a 128-acre tract of rolling pasture land, woodlot, and artificial ponds, where grouse, difficult to raise in captivity, are propagated in large numbers. Pheasants and ducks are hatched in large incubators with a total capacity of 25,000 eggs.
The VAN DYKE HOUSE (R), 8.7 m., a story-and-a-half cottage built in 1791, now defaced by a glazed lean-to and degraded into a chicken house, retains much sturdy Dutch charm in its rough stone walls, tiny windows, and hillside garret entrance. Within, wide fireplaces and chimney cupboards are nesting places for hens.
At 15.7 m. is the junction with State 85.
Left on State 85 to REIDSVILLE, 2.3 m. (1,420 alt., 60 pop.), center of the antirent conflict in 1839. Albany County sheriffs, reinforced by 120 militiamen, were repulsed at Reidsville by 1,000 embattled farmers. Armed opposition to the law continued until the State constitution of 1846 abolished the semifeudal system of land tenure and set a limit of 12 years on agricultural leases.
State 85 dips down to a dead end in the middle of one-street RENSSELAERVILLE, 10 m. (1,350 alt., 496 pop.), settled toward the end of the eighteenth century by Connecticut families who came by way of Long Island. At the western end of the village a footpath leads to the impressive FALLS OF TEN MILE CREEK, which provided power for nineteenth-century grist and flour mills.
The village is a museum of post-Colonial and Greek Revival architecture, owing much of its charm to Ephraim Russ (1784–1853), who was the village carpenter-architect during its golden age and manifested an exceptional skill in adapting the trend toward the classical to the traditional New England architecture.
The RENSSELAERVILLE ACADEMY (R), on a steep hill off Main St., a white frame structure, was erected in 1815 as the church of the Presbyterian congregation organized in 1796.
The STEVENS HOUSE (L), Main St., built in 1809 by Russ as an inn, many-windowed, with beautifully detailed doorway, Palladian windows, and fine cornices, stands in a prim, gracious setting of maples and elms.
Opposite (R) is a small house, noteworthy for the amusing window hoods and doorway carved in a provincial French Second Empire style and imposed on a provincial Greek Revival mass.
The HUYCK HOMESTEAD (L), Main St., is of yellow clapboard with white trim.
The PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH (L), Main St., erected in 1842, is, with its Doric columns, broad moldings, widely projecting cornices, flush siding, and tower quoins, an excellent example of the Greek Revival adaptation to masonry forms.
The JAMES RIDER HOUSE (L), Main St., built in 1823, is a white frame building; the gable end, facing the street, is broken by a gracefully framed semicircular window.
The JENKINS HOUSE (R), Main St., built by Russ in 1812, is a more economical version of the Stevens House. The well-proportioned SPLOYD HOUSE (R), Main St., built in 1825, has a charming façade, the more surprising for its small pedimented porch supported by three slender Roman Doric columns, the central column engagingly breaking all the rules set by academic designers.
The SAMUEL GALLUP HOUSE (L), 19.4 m., built in 1786, is a large salt-box type, marred by accretions in the form of gable and shed dormers, porches, and a long rear wing.
In EAST BERNE, 19.6 m. (1,174 alt., 57 pop.), is the junction with State 157 A.
Right on State 157A to WARNER’S LAKE, 0.4 m., and THOMPSON’S LAKE, 2.4 m., small clear-water lakes cuddled in sags of the Helderberg escarpment. A small tract on the shore of Thompson’s Lake, reserved for public camping, fishing and bathing, is operated by the State in conjunction with JOHN BOYD THACHER PARK (picnicking, hiking), 4.5 m., a 920-acre wooded area embracing the sharpest, most picturesque Helderberg cliffs. The park was named for John Boyd Thacher (1847–1909), historian and mayor of Albany. From the edge of the sharp, gray-faced, fossil-shot limestone cliffs is a broad majestic view: the wide patch-quilt farm valley that unfolds below was once the bottom of a lake.
The Helderberg Plateau, raised by a series of limestone, sandstone, and shale deposits in the ancient seas of the Silurian and Devonian, is cropped with fossils, and has been a field laboratory for geologists for many years. Much of the earliest study of North American geology was worked out in the Helderberg strata and the names given to the formations have gone around the world for correlation purposes. Some of the greatest geologists pioneered here: Louis Agassiz, Ferdinand Roemer, Sir William Logan, Amos Eaton, James Hall, W.W. Mather, Sir Charles Lyell, Lardner Vanuxem, Ebenezer Emmons, Charles S. Prosser.
The park area includes the Indian ladder region, named for the INDIAN LADDER, which takes the place of a tree said to have been felled by Indians against the sharp cliff to reach the summit of the plateau from the Bear Path foot trail below. The trail is reached by descending the Old Indian Ladder Road near the northwest end of the park.
At the head of the old Indian Ladder Road, a dirt road leads across a field at the top of the cliff to an iron ladder, which leads down through a crevice to a narrow footpath and HAILES CAVE, 2,800 feet long.
Ski trails developed in the park in recent years have become popular. The trails have no long downhill runs, but a broken, up-and-down ledge formation offers varied opportunity to practice ski technique.
Farmers cart their buckwheat, abundant in the area, to PITCHER’S MILL, 20.4 m., the sole survivor of East Berne’s early industrialism. Built between 1800 and 1810, the five-story clapboard structure contains flour mills still powered by a large water wheel.
BERNE, 23.5 m., (1,000 alt., 257 pop.), huddled on a steep hillside above the Fox Kill, was named for the native Swiss city of Jacob Weidman, leader of a party of Palatine immigrants who made the first settlement about 1750. In 1845 the first antirent convention was held in the LUTHERAN CHURCH (R), a simple, red-painted brick post-Colonial meetinghouse. The 200 delegates from eleven counties representing thousands of discontented farmers endorsed sympathetic candidates and secured adjustment of their difficulties in the constitutional convention of 1846.
At 25 m. is the junction with a macadam road.
Left on this road 5 m. to the SITE OF THE DIETZ MASSACRE, where Johannes Dietz and seven members of his family were slaughtered in their home in September 1781 by a band of Indians and Tories during one of their thrusts into the Schoharie Valley (see Tour 24).
State 43 runs close to the twisting, fast running, rock-strewn Fox Kill, a tributary of the Schoharie Creek, along which are several picnic and camping groves and swimming pools.
In the STONE HOUSE, 31.5 m., built in 1775, Jost Becker and neighbors successfully repulsed an attack by Tories and Indians. An effort to burn the Becker gristmill was frustrated when a crack shot brought down a Tory just as he was about to apply the torch.
In its drop into the broad Schoharie Valley, State 43 passes the GEORGE MANN TAVERN (R), 33.8 m., a square red brick structure built before the Revolution. In its basement barroom, Tory sympathizers plotted to seize the rich grain supply of the Revolutionists in the valley.
At 34 m. is the junction with State 30 (see Tour 24).