Junction with State 8—Amsterdam—Wright (Sidney’s Corners)—Schoharie—East Branch; State 30. 156.9 m.
Two-lane macadam or concrete.
The New York Central R.R. parallels route between Grand Gorge and Margaretville; Delaware & Northern R.R. between Margaretville and East Branch.
State 30 follows the Sacandaga River out of the southern Adirondack area, rises with the Schoharie River up the western slopes of the Catskills, and descends with the East Branch of the Delaware into the Delaware River Valley.
Section a. JUNCTION STATE 8 to WRIGHT (SIDNEY’S CORNERS); 65.9 m. State 30
The junction of State 8 (see Tour 14), and State 30, 0 m., is at the confluence of two branches of the Sacandaga (Ind., drowned lands) River, a rock-strewn mountain torrent.
At 7.2 m. the road cuts through the SACANDAGA STATE CAMPSITE (open May 25–Sept. 25, free; register with warden).
The small shed and the bridge-like structure slung across the river (R) at 8.7 m. is a STREAM GAUGING STATION of the U.S. Geological Survey. In co-operation with the Hudson River Regulating District, this station keeps a close check on the flow of the Sacandaga miles upstream from control reservoirs, electric generating stations, and mills.
NORTHVILLE, 20.4 m. (795 alt., 1,110 pop.), on one arm of the Sacandaga Reservoir, is a base for fishing in the reservoir (pike, pickerel, bass, perch; boats rented). Marking the southern end of the Northville-Lake Placid trail of the Adirondack Mountain Club, it is also an outfitting point for hikers and campers. Five small glove factories provide limited industrial employment.
VAIL MILLS, 34.5 m. (780 alt., 110 pop.), is at the junction with State 29 (see Tour 13). AMSTERDAM, 44.4 m. (300 alt., 33,640 pop.) (see Tour 11), is at the junctions with State 5 (see Tour 11) and State 5S (see Tour 12).
Between 61.4 m. and 61.8 m., State 30 runs in common with US 20 (see Tour 8) along Schoharie Creek.
Between 63.3 m. and WRIGHT (Sidney’s Corners), 65.9 m. (610 alt., 24 pop.), State 30 runs in common with State 7 (see Tour 10).
Section b. WRIGHT (SIDNEY’S CORNERS) to GRAND GORGE; 32.1 m. State 30
Through the Schoharie (Ind., bridge of driftwood) Valley, the route follows a scenic and historic trail. Clustered along the road are the big red rambling barns and white houses of well-to-do farmers; the rich bottom lands grow heavy with meadow, wheat, and corn, potatoes, carrots, celery, onions, lettuce, cabbage, and tomatoes.
When the German Palatines found themselves trapped on Livingston Manor (see Tour 21B), they revived the legend that they had been promised the fertile fields of ‘Skohare’ and sent representatives to treat with the Indians. The latter, though they had already sold the title twice, were not averse to a third sale. In the fall of 1712 about 150 families moved to Albany and Schenectady; about one-third of them cut a way through the woods to Schoharie that same fall and lived through the winter somehow; the remainder followed in the spring. They settled in seven villages, named for the emigrant leaders and stretching from the present Central Bridge to Middleburg.
The Indians were friendly, and helped the white settlers; conflict threatened only when the more religious of the Palatines attempted to regulate the morals of the red men.
Not having been permitted to take with them the tools brought from England, the immigrants faced the frontier with only their hands and their axes to serve them. The cold of winter was hard to bear. As spring moved up the valley, it brought the settlers joy. Fields were prepared for planting, first with men dragging the crude wooden plow. Later community resources were pooled to buy a horse—a bony old nag that was hitched up with a cow to turn the soil. That horse adorns the seal of Schoharie County—not, however, the bag of bones of reality, but a dream horse with sleek body and flowing tail.
In planting, the whites followed the weather wisdom of the Indians: ‘not until the leaves of the white oak are large as a squirrel’s ear, is it time to plant corn’—a tradition that has been handed down through the years and is still heard on the farms of the valley. ‘Remedies’ have also been handed down: toe and fingernail trimmings, cut unbroken and wrapped in paper, put in a hole bored in a maple tree and secured by a pine plug, insure the owner against swollen joints.
No sooner were the Palatines settled than they were disturbed by other claimants to their land, but they discouraged these ‘intruders’ with no halfway measures: Nicholas Bayard was driven out of the settlement by an angry mob; when Adam Vrooman attempted to settle on land he had bought from a rival claimant, the Palatines tore his fences and beat his son; when a hapless deputy sheriff came from Albany with a warrant for the arrest of Conrad Weiser, a mob of women under the leadership of the Amazonian Magdalena Zeh took him in hand, dragged him through places ‘where the sow delighted to wallow,’ heaped unmentionable indignities upon him, rode him through the valley on a rail, and left him on the Albany road after Magdalena had laid a stick over him until ‘two of his ribs made four and his organs of vision were diminished by one-half.’
The chief hindrance to expansion was the frontier fear of Indian raids, in the middle years of the century by Indians under French encouragement, during the Revolutionary War by Indians under Tory leadership. Because of its rich grain lands the valley was a particular target for enthusiasts in the British cause. After unsuccessful efforts to secure outside aid, the valley folk determined to defend themselves and constructed a three-fort defense—the Upper Fort above Middleburg, the Middle Fort below Middleburg, and the Lower Fort at Schoharie. The sporadic raids reached a bitter climax in the Johnson-Brant raid on October 17, 1780, which left the valley in burning ruin, though the forts withstood attack.
South of WRIGHT (Sidney’s Corners), 0 m., the route follows the left shoulder of the valley. The DIETZ TAVERN (R), 2 m., a two-and-a-half-story frame post-Colonial house, with the colonnade rising to the top of the second floor, served as an inn at the junction of the Schoharie-Albany and Schoharie-Schenectady turnpikes in the early nineteenth century.
At 2.6 m. is the junction with State 43 (see Tour 9).
SCHOHARIE, 2.9 m. (611 alt., 827 pop.), is a village with many shade trees and expansive Colonial and post-Revolutionary houses. Its only industries are the cultivation of nursery stock and the quarrying of stone for crushing, the latter an enterprise that developed rapidly with the improvement of rural roads.
Community social life reaches its peak in the Thursday night street dances and open air motion pictures in summer. In a roped-off street square the villagers and their friends from neighboring communities unite for play and dance. In the twenty years that the street dance has been a Schoharie institution, the fiddling of the back-country amateurs has given way to blaring ‘swing’ orchestras.
Much of Schoharie’s pride in its past is embodied in the LOWER FORT (open daily), known locally as the Old Stone Fort, a two-story structure with square tower constructed of native limestone, that stands (R) at the northern limit of the village on a small rise above the road and commands the valley. Erected in 1772 as a Dutch Reformed church, it was stockaded in 1777 to help defend the valley from raids; so secure was the stockade and so staunch its defenders that the sallies of Johnson and Brant on October 17, 1780, were repulsed.
Maintained by the county as a museum, the fort contains thousands of relics, including crude wooden implements that the pioneers fashioned to set up homes in their promised land: shovels fashioned from logs, tree trunks hollowed into mortars, mauls cut from huge wood-knots, grain forks whittled from forked tree branches. Shoes, except for moccasins, were crudely made of heavy leather and tied with leather thongs; a still cruder shoe was whittled from willow blocks. There is also the first automobile—a crude horseless carriage—owned in Schoharie.
The JOHANNES INGOLD HOUSE, on a knoll 200 feet from the highway at the southwestern limits of the village (L), is a two-story brick post-Colonial dwelling erected in 1795 on the site of an earlier house that was burned in the raid of October 1780. The rooms have paneled wainscoting and large fireplaces with carved mantels and ornaments. In the attic are exposed the huge hand-hewn timbers of the house frame, joined with sturdy oak pins. Near the head of the attic stairs stands the ancestral loom, and in a small basket are the weaver’s patterns.
South of Schoharie the road sweeps up the valley toward the Catskills, past the SITE OF HARTMAN’S DORF (L), 6.9 m., largest of the seven Palatine villages, and at 7.2 m. crosses the grass-grown right-of-way of one of America’s shortest railroads.
The story of the Middleburg & Schoharie Railroad is an epic of transportation change. Built at a cost of $90,000 in 1867–8 when iron rails were perfection in transportation, at the turn of the century the road grossed in a single year $97,000 carrying hops, timothy, and lumber 5.7 miles down the valley to the junction with the Schoharie Valley Railroad. But as the hard-surfaced road crept up the valley, the railroad was superseded. The single locomotive, built in 1895, snorted less frequently up and down the valley; during its last years it habitually jumped the tracks once a week and carried a huge jack on its stubby cow-catcher with which to restore its equilibrium. Toward the end, station stops meant nothing: the engineer stopped to pick up a fare wherever he received the hitchhiker’s signal. This railroad and its wheezing engine once provided background for a motion picture of Edison’s boyhood days as a telegrapher. The president of the road pointed out that although his road was not as long as some of the others, it was just as wide; he sent guest passes on his line to railroad presidents the country over, and they in return sent him passes over their roads, so that he saw America free. In its last days the road found difficulty in meeting a weekly pay roll of $46 and was closed in October 1936 by the State Public Service Commission. Sold at a public auction on March 15, 1937, the railroad brought $11,000 and the antique 40-ton locomotive, $1,265.
The SITE OF THE MIDDLE FORT, 8.7 m., across the field (L), will ever be sacred to true Schoharians because of its association with the insubordination of Tim Murphy, Schoharie Valley hero, which saved the fort, and possibly the valley, from capture by Sir John Johnson’s Tories and Indians.
Timothy Murphy (1751–1818), a native of New Jersey, led the rough-and-tumble life of a frontier child, with the woods, a squirrel gun, and Indians as teachers. Owner of one of the first double-barreled rifles, he raised terror in the hearts of the Indians as the magic man whose gun would shoot without reloading; he killed Indians, it is said, skinned them, and used the hide for leggings. In 1776 he qualified for Morgan’s Rifles, far-feared Virginia corps of sharpshooters. His dead-eye aim is credited with having turned the tide at Saratoga, when from his station in a tree he shot down General Frazer and demoralized the British defense.
On the October day in 1780 when the Tories and Indians swept down the valley plundering and killing, Murphy was stationed at the Middle Fort. In order to get information on the strength of the defenders, Sir John Johnson sent a flag of truce toward the fort; Major M.L. Woolsey, the commander, was ready to surrender and ordered the flag admitted; but Tim Murphy, in the face of a threat to kill him for insubordination, fired at the flag-bearers and drove them off. Thus Timothy Murphy saved the day and saved the valley and won himself a place in the heart of every true Schoharian.
Through MIDDLEBURG, 9.2 m. (650 alt., 948 pop.), the road winds down a shaded avenue with large post-Colonial and Greek Revival homes on spreading lawns and a rustic log and stone wall along the creek (R). From the post-Revolutionary period down to the coming of hard-surfaced roads, which brought a resort and tourist trade, the village has been the center of trade for the upper valley. Founded in 1712 by John Conrad Weiser and the first group of Palatine pioneers, Middleburg, first called Weiser’s Dorf, is the oldest settlement in the valley. It was burned in the Johnson raid of 1780.
The DUTCH REFORMED CHURCH (L), a post-Colonial brick structure with its steeple immediately above the pulpit, was built in 1786 to replace the house of worship burned in the 1780 raid. In the MIDDLEBURG CEMETERY, on a hillside back of the village (L), are the graves of Timothy Murphy and Governor William C. Bouck (see below).
West of Middleburg State 30 crosses Schoharie Creek into the region of the valley’s most prosperous farms. At the turn of the present century these were the richest hop fields in the world. Serried rows of uprights studding an occasional field are reminders of the time when Schoharie hops brought wealth to the valley farmers. Villagers today tell wistfully of hop-harvest dances that progressed up the valley night after night until dawn. There was little time for sleeping; with huge beefsteaks and apple pie for breakfast, the laborers returned to the fields to work, and then to the barns to dance again at night.
Decline of hop-growing began in the nineties when the blue mold, blamed on an excess of lime in the soil, blighted the fields. With no effective means to attack the scourge, farmers continued to grow hops for what they could get out of them, until prohibition forced them into dairying and the growing of wheat, oats, and buckwheat; some experimented with a blue potato or sought to solve the mystery of the sweet plum tree that, they contend, refuses to bear fruit if planted more than one mile from Tim Murphy’s grave.
The route passes the SITE OF WILDER HOOK, 10.4 m. (L), principal Indian village at the time of the Palatine settlement, and MOUNT ONIS-TAGRAW (Ind., corn mountain), or Vrooman’s Nose, 10.6 m. (R), cast like a bold profile of a man’s nose and named in a spirit of caricature for the family that lived—and five of its members were massacred—in its shadow, at 10.8 m. (R).
On the morning of August 9, 1780, as Captain Tunis Vrooman was unloading a rack of wheat, an Indian pounced from the shadows of the barn, tomahawked and scalped him. His wife was chopped down and scalped. Ephraim Vrooman ran to the house, picked up his small child, and hid in the cornfield. His wife, hiding near by, thoughtless of her own safety, stood up among the tasseled corn and called, ‘Ephraim, Ephraim, where are you? Have you got the child?’ She was dropped by an Indian bullet and was scalped. Another Indian spotted Ephraim and thrust a spear at him. Ephraim parried the blow and the child in his arms smiled. At the third thrust of the spear, the baby gurgled and laughed excitedly. The Indian’s heart softened, and instead of scalping father and child he took them prisoner. The raiders left five Vroomans dead, houses plundered, buildings burned, and livestock shot, and took 30 prisoners. At the first night’s encampment, the scalps of the dead were stretched on hoops to dry before the eyes of relatives. The Vroomans later returned to the valley, and many descendants still farm Schoharie soil.
The SITE OF THE UPPER FORT is at 13.7 m. (L); here the first shot was fired on October 17, 1780, to warn the lower valley of the approaching Tory-Indian raiders.
Across the fields (L) at 14 m. is BOUCK’S ISLAND, on which stands the stately post-Colonial BOUCK HOME. William C. Bouck (1786–1859), zealous advocate of internal improvements, served the State in both houses of the legislature, as canal commissioner, and as governor, 1842–4. He was descended from a line of Schoharie farmers and his education was limited to a few winter terms in the local school.
BLENHEIM BRIDGE (L), 20.9 m., built in 1855 by the famous Yankee bridge builder, Nicholas Powers, is 228 feet long, the longest single-span wood-covered bridge in the world. In 1931, when the bridge was threatened with destruction to make way for a new concrete structure, the county changed the course of the highway and preserved the old span as a monument to the ingenuity and skill of early American bridge builders.
The LANSING MANOR HOUSE (L), 24.5 m., standing high on a plateau, is a study in the splendor of manorial days. The first-story bricks are covered with lapped siding, and the walls of the second story are entirely of wood. Huge chimneys, rising above the low hip roof, vent the smoke of nine of the thirteen original fireplaces. John Lansing served as military secretary to General Philip Schuyler. Judge Jacob Sutherland, his son-in-law, was living in the mansion when called as a delegate to help alter the State Constitution in 1821. Later the mansion was owned by John A. King, governor of New York, 1857–9.
At 29.6 m. is the junction with State 342.
Left on State 342 to GILBOA DAM, 0.5 m., impounding the waters of Schoharie Creek and creating the SCHOHARIE RESERVOIR, a unit in New York City’s water supply. Waters impounded by the dam cover the oldest forests on earth—the fernlike trees of Middle Devonian time called Eospermatopteris (dawn seed fern). A group of FOSSIL TREE STUMPS, 1.1 m., are preserved at the foot of the dam (R).
GRAND GORGE, 31.6 m. (1,420 alt., 388 pop.) (see Tour 7), is at the junction with State 23 (see Tour 7).
Section c. GRAND GORGE to JUNCTION WITH STATE 17 (EAST BRANCH); 58.9 m. State 30
Following the natural trail of the East Branch of the Delaware River for 58 miles, State 30 rolls through scenes made famous in the essays of John Burroughs. In July and August the hills flame with the yellow and tawny of hawk-weed. In late summer the valley is a cauliflower field. In season, the East Branch and its feeder streams swarm with trout fishermen.
South of GRAND GORGE, 0 m., State 30 squeezes through a narrow pass between high wooded hills. At 6 m. is the junction with a steep, winding, red-tinted country road, climbing Old Clump mountain.
Right on this road 0.8 m. to the junction with a country road; left here 0.1 m. to the OLD STONE SCHOOLHOUSE (L), in which John Burroughs, naturalist-writer, and Jay Gould, railroad tycoon and stock manipulator, were classmates. According to legend, in their schooldays their roles were reversed: Gould once wrote a poem for the future poet to save him from staying after school, and Burroughs bought Gould’s grammar and geology textbooks for 80¢ when the latter was hard up. The school is now a private home.
The main side route continues up the hill to (R) WOODCHUCK LODGE (open in summer), 2.1 m., in which Burroughs spent the last years of his life. It is a two-story frame house, preserved much as he left it; a few scabs of paint linger on the clapboards, and the vine-clad porch, where he used to sit and look out over the blue hills, has native trees for pillars and snaky saplings for lattice-work. Inside are many of the tools with which he worked. ‘You’d think I’d escape visitors among these remote Catskill hills,’ he wrote, ‘but I have had as many as 40 or 50 come in a single day.’ Here Dr. Clara Barrus, Burroughs’s biographer, wrote most of the Life and Letters.
Born near by on April 3, 1837, the seventh of ten children, John Burroughs grew up from humble backwoods circumstances to become one of the world’s foremost nature writers and essayists, wearing, in gentler fashion, the mantle of Thoreau. Through the 24 volumes of his published works, from Wake Robin to The Last Harvest, nature, much of it observed in this Catskill country, is the theme, though in his later years he turned to philosophical and critical writing. Older neighbors still remember him: ‘Johnny Burris (the local pronunciation) was an odd one. He liked to come up here and watch us work and then write about it.’ Today mementos of Burroughs, especially books and photographs, are on sale in Roxbury, and the village draws an income from the memory of the ‘odd one’ who sleeps on the hill.
Just beyond Woodchuck Lodge is the weatherbeaten HAY-BARN STUDY (L), where Burroughs wrote many of his essays, working on a desk improvised out of an old hencoop and looking out through the open barn door upon the fields and woods. Here Burroughs almost met death in one of the Model T’s given him by his camping companion, Henry Ford. He learned to drive when he was past 75 and kept his car in the old hay barn. Once the car turned over on him, breaking his arm; doctors fixed his arm and Ford gave him another Model T.
Up the wild pasture (R), at 2.3 m. is BOYHOOD ROCK, a huge glacial boulder marking Burroughs’s grave. He picked the site himself; here as a boy he sat and dreamed, viewing the panorama of valley and hills. Just before he died, on March 29, 1921, on a train speeding him back from the west coast, he rose from his pillow and asked, ‘How far are we from home?’ A simple bronze tablet on the face of the rock shows Burroughs shielding his eyes against the sun with his hand and looking off across the valley; underneath is inscribed, from his poem Waiting, the line ‘I stand amid the eternal ways.’
In the BEECHWOODS (L), across the road, Burroughs and his camping companions, Henry Ford, Thomas A. Edison, and Harvey Firestone, cooked thick steaks over an open fire.
Around the turn of the road at 2.6 m. is the ANCESTRAL HOME (R), a huge weatherbeaten country house, backed up by large barns, where Burroughs lived as a boy and helped with the farming. Relatives of Burroughs still farm the fields. After the death of Burroughs, Henry Ford bought Woodchuck Lodge and the Ancestral Home to preserve them in memory of the naturalist. He deeded the burial field on Old Clump to the John Burroughs Memorial Association.
As Burroughs left his mark on Old Clump, so his schoolmate Jay Gould left his on ROXBURY, 6.8 m. (1,470 alt., 475 pop.). The houses are uniformly white, their blinds green, and their lawns trim and neat. The half-mile-long main street, immaculately clean, receives a daily sweeping in the fall when leaves are falling. This is a prosperous village with its large Gould holdings and its central position in the dairying country. Here live retired farmers, summer residents, men who run the village stores, and men who work on neighboring farms, especially the Gould estate.
Born May 27, 1836, on a poor uphill farm bordering Roxbury, Jay Gould began at the age of 16 to amass his $70,000,000 fortune. Between hours of work in the village store, young Gould learned the rudiments of business and surveying. He saved his money, and at 21 was ready for his first big venture. Investing in a small tannery and lumber business in Pennsylvania, he remained only long enough to make a handsome profit. With this capital he turned to railroad financing, buying a controlling interest in the Rutland & Washington Railroad. By 1880 Gould had gained control of more than 10,000 miles of rail—one-tenth of the mileage of the whole country. In 1881 he engineered the consolidation of competing telegraph systems into the Western Union Telegraph Company. The ‘Black Friday’ panic of September 24, 1869, credited to the spectacular attempt of Gould and ‘Jim’ Fisk to corner the gold market, brought a great wave of public anger and resentment. He died on December 2, 1892.
Near the north village line is the GOULD MEMORIAL CHURCH (R), built by the Gould family in memory of Jay Gould. Adjoining the church is KIRKSIDE, which was the spacious, immaculately kept summer home of Mrs. Helen Gould Shepard until her death in 1938. Back 300 feet from the highway is the GOULD LIBRARY (L), an old white structure, purchased and maintained by Mrs. Shepard as a village library. Jay Gould lived in this house while clerking in a local store and making his map of Delaware County. Here he wrote most of his History of Delaware County, a book that today brings as much as $25 at collector auctions.
At HALCOTTSVILLE, 14.3 m. (1,339 alt., 119 pop.), an old covered bridge (R), one of several similar structures that cross the East Branch, spans the river and connects two halves of the village. In MARGARETVILLE, 19.8 m. (1,325 alt., 771 pop.), is the junction with State 28 (see Tour 15); the routes run in common for 3.2 miles. South of Margaretville State 30 and the East Branch form the western boundary of the CATSKILL FOREST PRESERVE (see Tour 7).
The road runs past a succession of dairy farms, some crowded in narrow passes between steep hills, some spread out as hill slopes ease their climb. Gone are the old Delaware County apple holes: every fall 15 to 20 bushels of apples were dumped into a huge hole in the ground, packed with straw, and covered with soil; dug up in the spring, the apples had acquired a ‘delightful earthy flavor’ that made them a delicacy.
At 37 m. is another covered bridge (L), especially interesting for its lattice-like construction.
At SHINHOPPLE, 49.6 m. (1,060 alt., 100 pop.), 7,000 acres of unproductive soil are being converted into a forest and game preserve known as the BEAR MOUNTAIN GAME MANAGEMENT AREA. With the help of WPA labor, the Federal Soil Conservation Service is planting trees, building roads, and developing feeding stations and breeding grounds for wild game.
Early settlers found here an abundant growth of flowering vine, beautiful in the spring, but always tangling the shins and making walking almost impossible; and they expressively named the place Shinhopple.
EAST BRANCH, 58.9 m. (1,007 alt., 300 pop.), is at the junction with State 17 (see Tour 3).