By Elliott Bristol and Donna Brown

You might ask: is dendro contagious? Well, no, it isn’t, and it doesn’t cause any pain. Dendrochronology, or the short version dendro, is the science of dating wood. We all learned in grade school that counting the rings tells us how old a tree is, but how could the number of rings identify the year it was cut? As we came to understand, the pattern of the width of annual tree rings corresponds to annual climate variations, establishing a pattern of dry seasons and wet seasons. Comparing wood cores to known profiles allows for precise dating of when the tree was growing. And having the bark edge in the sample identifies when the tree was cut.

By Christopher Klose, HRH Member

We are indebted to avid, early photographer Harriet Martin Dey, of the Upper Red Hook Martin family, for capturing this summer tableau of “putting up” hay in the barn at the dawn of the Twentieth Century. Because fully two-thirds of a farm’s output was needed back then to feed the horses (and mules), the rural rubric was simple: make hay – or else: no hay, no motive power. It took weeks of slow, heavy teamwork by farmers, their families, hired hands, and stock to cut, rake, stack, load, and stow the hay in the barn for the coming winter.

By Thea Burgess, HRH President

When Americans commemorate our history, the Stars and Stripes typically wave in the background. When fireworks shoot up red, white, and blue on the Fourth of July, we think of the American Revolution. When we sing “The Star-Spangled Banner,” we unify, and we may remember our military standing firm against the British bombardment of Fort McHenry in the War of 1812. And when the American flag is ceremonially lowered or raised, we stand a little taller and respectfully contemplate. During the Civil War after the defeat of the Confederacy at their capitol of Richmond, VA, the country witnessed the Confederate flag being lowered in defeat and the Union flag hoisted in victory. Tivoli (and New York City) resident Col. Johnston Livingston de Peyster of the Union Army was credited with that important act after Richmond’s fall in 1865. Yet the fog of war and competing agendas complicated the issue of who should receive that significant and symbolic honor.

By Daniel Middleton

This piece originally appeared in the Summer 2006 edition of About Town.

It is a scene from a sly Noel Coward comedy. Imagine an elegant old house on the banks of the Hudson built in the style of a Roman temple. The simple box shape made of stucco and brick is distinguished by its front: a triangular roof supported by six large columns shading a lengthy portico with a stunning view of river and distant mountains. A warm evening in springtime is fading to darkness, and the guests make their way from porch to dining room which glows in the fading like. The drink is flowing and everyone is having a good time. Conversation is witty and competitive among the guests, many of whom are notables from the arts and academe.

By Elio Estersohn

My grandfather was a 1st Lieutenant during WWII, in what is now the Air Force. Carl J Estersohn was a fascinating guy. He was a splendid father, spouse, brother, and grandpa. He lived to the age of 93. The aforementioned was healthy and joyful for 92 and a half of those years. During the last several months of his life, however, he had some health issues with his heart and his arteries, and was in and out of hospitals during that time. In his final two weeks we brought him back home because we knew he would not live for much longer, so we wanted him to expire in the comfort of his own home. The morning before he passed he couldn't communicate that well, which was worrisome. He passed during the halftime show of the Super Bowl. It was a coincidence, but felt very calculated, since he was a big fan of football. My grandfather changed the lives of so many, including my own. He was a war hero, an orthodontic surgeon, an entrepreneur, and a family man. He was and always will be a role-model.

By Nancy Bendiner

As I walked down the driveway to a yard sale in Red Hook, New York, on that pleasant summer day, little did I know what that walk would mean. Soon I eyed boxes stacked in the garage which did not appear to hold the usual yard sale items. A few papers near the top of the contents beckoned to me, the dedicated document sleuth. With the permission of the family, I explored further and found a cache of family memorabilia, old photos, documents, a few genealogies, and carefully constructed albums, some of which pertain directly to Red Hook history.

From the look of things, I thought that much of this yard sale treasure could find a place in the archives of Historic Red Hook (HRH). I presented this possibility to Butch Fell, son of the recently deceased Gladys Fell (1927-2021) who had lived in the house where the sale took place. He kindly offered to donate these items that his mother and his father Harold Fell (1924-2011) carefully collected over many years.

By Sarah K. Hermans

In recognition of Mental Health Awareness Month this May, Hermans explores the experiences of Red Hook residents with treatment and medical institutions in the nineteenth century. *Please note that this article may contain difficult historical topics regarding mental health and illness.

In the Victorian Era and Gilded Age of the mid- to late- nineteenth century, the term “mental health” was practically unheard of. If a person needed help or exhibited behaviors that didn’t mesh with society, there were few options for them. Those who were seen by a doctor were sometimes prescribed rest, isolation, confinement, or a slew of somatic (physical) treatments that did not actually help, such as trepanning, bloodletting, purgatives, and the infamous lobotomy. The idea of treating troubling thoughts and moods with non-invasive therapy or drugs that pin-point neurological issues only gained traction in the greater medical community in the 20th century.

By Nancy Bendiner

Flowers, trees and plants can offer visual delight and remove us from our worries. No doubt the ladies who founded and continued the garden clubs of Red Hook felt this inspiration and aimed to make our world a better place. So doing, these ladies help us learn about their times.

A Seed is Planted

The Red Hook Hotel saw the launch on March 9, 1942, of the Red Hook Garden Club, with Mrs. Merrick C. Phillips as its first president. On that day, the Red Hook “Business Men’s Association” committee provided entertainment. Some of the surnames of the first members are recognized today in the Red Hook community: Kerley, Cookingham, Tremper, and Hart.

More than ten years later, on September 30, 1953, a second garden club in Red Hook was launched: the Dutch Village Garden Club. The founder, Mrs. Herman Mandell (formerly Viola Teator), greeted 17 attendees at her home for the first meeting. In honor of the Dutch heritage of Red Hook, a Dutch motif was chosen, with the tulip as club flower. Charter members’ surnames included, among others, Bathrick, Boice, Fraleigh, Hart, Donerly, Coon, and Cole.

By Claudine Klose

Posing for a group photo circa 1929, the women of the Historical Club of Upper Red Hook personified the “cream” of local society. All wives of successful farmers and professionals and overwhelmingly Dutch Reformed and politically conservative, they were civic-minded and wanted to promote education and enlightenment in their community. The exclusive “by invitation only” club was formed in 1901 as “The Monday Club,” but because Mondays were typically wash days, they decided that “laundry and literary pursuits were a bad combination,” so moved the meetings to Fridays and renamed the group the Historical Club of Upper Red Hook.

By Sarah K. Hermans

Susie Fulton (October 1861–1913) was the daughter of Elisha Fulton (27 Apr 1824–26 Mar 1903) and Margaret Smith (25 Feb 1827–14 Jul 1884). She and her sister, Jennie Z. Fulton, never married and were both teachers at one time or another at Jackson Corners, Cokertown, Elizaville, Rock City, and Mount Ross. Susie taught kindergarten in Red Hook in a large “double house” at the upper end of North Broadway and school at District No. 7 in Rock City before 1872, when the school was in its old location.

By Claudine and Christopher Klose

In honor of Black History Month, it is a privilege to share our quest to piece together the story of Red Hook’s long-lost African American burial ground and its people.

Writ large or small, history depends on research. Lots of it! Old deeds, church, town and village birth and death records, census data, tax records, family correspondence, personal reminiscences, newspapers, family histories, letters, photo albums, and much more are our sources.

From a copy of a deed in our archives, we know that on June 12, 1850, local landowner Elisha Finger sold a small plot near the Mill Pond located on Mill Road for $150 to the “Cemetery Association of Colored Inhabitants.” The founding trustees of the cemetery were Uriah St. Paul, Thomas Jefferson, Prince Ellsworth, Tobias Grant, Philip Johnson and Joseph Human (Herman misspelled perhaps?).

Message from Our New HRH Board President Thea Burgess

Beth Jones is a force of nature. Her natural inclination is to jump in and do, something she has done for the last 16 years for the Friends of Elmendorph and Historic Red Hook. Beth became a board member in 2006, then president of the Friends of the Elmendorph until 2013 when she helped drive its merger with the Egbert Benson Historical Society. Since then, she has served as Historic Red Hook’s treasurer and most recently its president in 2021, a role she took on when former president Claudine Klose’s term expired. Beth would do this for a year, she said, despite her responsibilities running her Upper Red Hook-based life and wealth planning firm, Third Eye Associates, Ltd. through the surge and ebb and surge of the pandemic, trying times for us all. As usual Beth stepped up for Historic Red Hook.

The Elmendorph Inn is what first connected Beth to Historic Red Hook. As a newcomer to town in 2004, she would drive by the building and want to see it lit up and full of activity and energy and fun. Beth was instrumental in making that vision a reality, evidenced by our tavern nights, holiday open houses, and soup and chili nights. It is fitting that we concluded our capital campaign with Beth at the helm. She was a key partner in putting us on the road to our sound financial footing. Beth, through Third Eye Associates, has managed our investment reserves and is always looking toward our bottom line, initiating fundraising activities such as our annual gala auction and benefit.

By Chris and Claudine Klose

On October 4, 1957, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, the world’s first artificial satellite. The U.S. successfully countered the following April with “Explorer,” from Cape Canaveral, in Florida. The Space Race was on!

Not one to be outdone by either superpower, Red Hook School board member, dairy farmer, Livingston/Astor/Chanler family scion, bib-overalled raconteur and generally acknowledged most eccentric man-about-town Chanler Chapman launched the Barrytown Explorer newspaper in June, trumpeting:

By Thea Burgess , HRH Second Vice President

Not quite a quarter century old, the Red Hook Central School District soccer program has proven its mettle. Both the boys’ and the girls’ teams have won a sectional title and numerous league honors. Both teams feature students named as all stars and players of the year. Both teams have members who played in college and who remain involved in the sport. Red Hook’s soccer program may have had hardscrabble beginnings, but it rapidly rose to the top of the league. The successful playbook has many pages, according to former Athletic Director Andy Seidel: coaches who also teach in the district and thus connect with their squads, coaching philosophies that emphasize winning of course but also focus on fun, hard working kids, strong parental support, and fans in the community who cheer at games long after their favorite players have graduated. The 2021 season is over, and yet again both teams qualified for sectionals. The future burns bright for the squads and their coaches.

By Thea Burgess, HRH Second Vice President

The best week of the summer in the Hudson Valley, arguably, would be the week of the Dutchess County Fair, held in the dwindling days of August in Rhinebeck. Summer is winding down. Fall routines and the beginning of the school year loom but can be ignored for a bit longer. However, in the early 1800s, September and October and even November were the months when people congregated to compare and admire their agricultural bounty. The Elmendorph Inn (once known as Loop’s Hotel), Jacob Loop who ran the hotel, and the eponymous Cornelius I. Elmendorph are all names woven in the history of farmers and their celebrations. While the Dutchess County Agricultural Society and its corresponding fair, did not occur at the Elmendorph Inn site, The Farmers’ Club of Dutchess and Columbia counties did meet in Red Hook and more likely than not, once held a fair (whose location shifted from year to year) at the site of the Elmendorph Inn.

We recently acquired an intriguing letter in our collections written by Peter DeLabigarre in 1794!

A French merchant who arrived in Tivoli in the late 18th-century, DeLabigarre was by all accounts a character. Town Historian Emily Majer colorfully describes him as “ [an] entrepreneur, snake-oil salesman, mountain climber, social climber, archaeologist, [and] silkworm-rancher.” In his book Tivoli, the Making of a Community, Bernard B. Tieger described this French émigré as “charming, perhaps excessively ingratiating, cultivated, well read and also...enormously ambitious, he moved in New York’s best social circles.”

By Claudine Klose

arly in July 2020, Town Historian Emily Majer received an email from a former Red Hook resident, asking whether the Town’s Red Hook Advertiser newspaper had been microfilmed and indicating that he would be interested in supporting a project to digitize them. The former Red Hook resident was none other than Bill Wilken, whose family had run Wilken Brothers, an agricultural business cooperative active in Red Hook in the mid-20th century. Then-president of Historic Red Hook, Claudine Klose, began a conversation with Wilken, now living in Ohio, that resulted in a major gift to support the preservation and electronic dissemination of more than 40 years of Red Hook Advertiser newspaper

By Thea Burgess

What was the zip code of the address where you lived five years after high school? The artist, cartoonist, writer, teacher, and MacArthur ‘Genius’ Grant winner Lynda Barry asked us this during the Omega Institute workshop “Writing the Unthinkable.” Most couldn’t remember. A few of us still were doing math in our heads related to Lynda’s first query when she asked who our fourth grade teacher was. A couple of names were stated but not many. “Mrs. Onody,” I smugly murmured to myself. Building suspense, and our worries that we desperately needed a memory tonic, Lynda hesitated before asking her final question: what was your phone number when you were a kid? We all shouted the digits…

By William P. Tatum III, Ph.D.

How do historians reconstruct the past from fragmentary evidence? Join us for the introduction to this new series exploring how we uncover Red Hook’s hidden past.

“How was your week?”

Consider your reaction when someone unexpectedly asks you what you’ve been up to over the past week. If you’re like me, a sip of coffee, a few “hmms,” or a drawn out “weeeelllll” covers your desperate rifling through your memory. One day tends to bleed seamlessly into the next, especially in these “interesting” times.

Historians face a similar challenge. We ask them questions, expecting a polished, complete answer informing us about events that transpired before our earliest memories. There is little patience for gaps or best guesses, unless one is discussing known mysteries. Yet the records from which they can draw factual information are even more fragmentary than our memories of last week.