Dillon Streifeneder
I was born in Northern Dutchess Hospital and spent the first 18 years of my life growing up in Red Hook. I just moved back to the Hudson Valley after being away since 2010. I am currently a PhD Candidate in early American history at Ohio State University and am in the process of completing my dissertation. I became involved with Historic Red Hook when I was kindly invited to join by Will Tatum (head of HRH’s Nominating Committee and Dutchess County Historian). I also heard there would be a tavern night at the Elmendorph Inn.
I grew up right on the border of Dutchess and Columbia County. For anyone who has driven north on Route 9 (a great source of confusion for people not from New York, especially when Route 9 intersects with 9G, 9H, 9W, etc) through Clermont, it is hard to miss the plastering of New York Historic signs for “Chancellor” Robert R. Livingston, and the Livingston Manor and Family. That particular Livingston (there were many of them) helped write the Declaration of Independence and brokered the treaty for the Louisiana Purchase. I distinctly recall one summer after I got my license bobbing around in my old Volkswagen when I came upon another less prominent historic sign down near Pawling off the Taconic Parkway. Noting a few different local facts, there was a once-sentence blurb about tenant farmers led by William Prendergast that “rebelled against their landlords.” I went off to college and did not give the rebellious tenants another thought until my senior year when I came across them again.
Since then, I have done a good deal of thinking about William Prendergast, his wife Mehitabel who served as his defense attorney during his trial, as well as the other “riotous” tenants. They continue to hold my interest and play a part in my own research, much of which is based on local places and the lives of ordinary people. Chancellor Livingston might have his historic signs and his name etched in prominent history books, but to really understand how the American national narrative has formed, we have to look at the lived experience of ordinary Americans like those riotous tenant farmers. After all, in the indelible words of George Bailey, it's the common people who “do most of the working and playing and living and dying” in a community— communities I might add just like Red Hook.
Dillon Streifeneder is a member of the Programs Committee and Collections Committee. He can be contacted at d.streifeneder@historicredhook.org