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Follow Up on the
News
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Shokan
History Mystery
“According to our regulations, stone walls, streams,
any significant physical features should appear on the map
given to the board,” Minow explains. “That’s
my question to the town- shouldn’t it be on there? It’s
not something that we’ve come across on this planning
board. We have seen burial plots on maps, of course. But nothing
is there and, from what I understand, they’ve already
moved (the stones). I haven’t gotten an answer yet.”
Nancy Fallon, who now lives in the home Minew used to own
on Route 28 near Bostock Road, noticed the headstones propped
against a tree while a house at the site was being renovated.
When a Realtor’s open house was in progress and Fallon
noticed them missing, she asked what had become of them.
“Oh, you know about those?” Fallon reports the
Realtor as responding- “The owners didn’t want
anyone to think they were buying a house next to a cemetery,
so they disposed of them.” Fallon later discovered them
in the bushes on property between the two houses.
One headstone fragment reads: “-er L. Dubois Died August
21st 1858” with further undeciphered inscription below.
Another seems to read: “Clarissa Goodwin, Wife of Peter
L. Dubois, Died Aug. 2, 1898, Aged 93 years, 4 months and
15 days.” Another possible half of a headstone (although
it could be the bottom of Peter’s) is visible from Longyear
Road, according to Fallon.
“I believe that those bodies are still in there,”
Fallon said.
If so, that might complicate matters for “Artcraft”,
the entity seeking to subdivide the land and who could not
be located in time for this report.
Officer Dawn Biers of the Olive Police Department said she
was unaware of any violation of law at the site and referred
all further questions to town supervisor Brendt Leifeld.
“The advice that I got was to tell the planning board
that the builder has to clarify whether there’s a bona
fide cemetery there or not- or if there’s people in
there- when he comes in for his public hearing (on June 27th),”
Leifeld said. He added that he didn’t believe any actual
graves were moved. “They just pulled the stones out
and laid them by the side of the road or something. I have
no idea but that’s what it looks like. I don’t
know beans but I’m sure you can’t just rip up
gravestones without some sort of formality. But, it could
be a family plot, which has different implications, I’m
told.”
Woven over age-old religious codes and customs regarding human
burial, consecrated ground and other such matters, contradiction
and ambiguity abound in regulations concerning a wide variance
of circumstances around public and private burial plots. Although
there are some general consistencies, laws concerning the
disturbance of grave sites vary widely from state to state
and even from place to place within the same state.
In most states there are statutes making it a criminal offense
to deface or remove tombstones even in discontinued cemetery
sites. There are laws against “forging, mutilating,
destroying or concealing registers of burials.” Opening
graves without going through formal channels is a felony.
The Laws, Rules and Regulations of the New York State Cemetery
Board contain a number of contradictory positions that focus
primarily on incorporated cemeteries. “Streets or highways
cannot be laid out through certain cemetery lands” without
application to local rural cemetery associations, for instance,
but state legislatures can delegate authority to remove human
remains without resort to eminent domain proceedings. Since
parts of the original property containing the headstones lay
on both sides of Route 28, a question may arise as to whether
the highway was built through an old cemetery site.
This was the case in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, a few years
ago, when workers digging under a street encountered around
200 coffins which turned out to be an unrecorded graveyard
for slaves not buried on their owner’s land. In this
case, the city voted to build a memorial at the site.
With development steadily eating its way through rural areas,
the question of old graves and cemeteries, as well as liability
to unnotified relatives of anyone disinterred is increasingly
common but such links to the past are not always seen as a
problem. Some developers leave grave sites undisturbed, grading
around them and erecting retaining walls, even when the engravings
are so old that the names have weathered away. Last year,
the Montgomery Advertiser reported that an Alabama man who
bought 300 acres for residential development decided to incorporate
a family graveyard rather than moving it because he felt it
added character and personality to the landscape.
In Olive, like elsewhere, small family cemeteries were once
far more common than appreciated today. But Olive (and Hurley)
can also claim the special circumstance of having nine villages,
including Brodhead, Brown’s Station and Ashton, removed
or relocated to make way for a reservoir to serve New York
City’s water needs. Of 2,720 bodies recorded as having
been removed from burial plots during the reservoir’s
construction, 368 remained unknown or unclaimed between 1909
and 1911. According to Bob Steuding’s history of the
reservoir, The Last of the Homemade Dams, the City’s
Board of Water Supply offered $15 for each friend or relative
residents cared to remove on their own and $3 per headstone.
Some 81 bodies were reinterred in Burgher Cemetery at the
head of Watson Hollow and others went elsewhere but, seemingly,
the City then misplaced the records of who went where. Apparently,
many of the original headstones were simply discarded. Hence,
the question: could the Dubois’ headstones be merely
grave markers carried to their present site without the bodies
they refer to?
This is a legitimate question and, when a record of Peter
and Clarissa Dubois at New Jefferson Cemetery in Greene County
was discovered during the research for this article, it seemed
a promising lead. Attempts to trace the couple through the
many comprehensive volumes of “The American Descendants
of Chretien Dubois” were fruitless and a Greene County
removal loomed as somewhat unlikely. The fact that the markers
for a husband and wife were discovered at the site also seemed
to argue against the stones turning up where they did randomly.
So did the fact that the New Jefferson records had birth years
for Peter Dubois and Clarissa but blank spots for dates of
death.
An E-mail from Sylvia Hasenkopf of the Greene County website
‘Tracing Your Roots’ agrees.
“I would hazard a guess that the two are buried in Olive,
as the death dates are, indeed, given on the tombstone(s),”
Hasenkopf points out, noting that “whoever put up the
New Jefferson stone didn’t know when they died.”
The New Jefferson stone reads:
Peter L. Dubois 1802-
Clarissa Dubois 1805- w/o Peter L. (Nee GOODWIN)
Cornelius Dubois 18 Feb 1837- 21 Aug. 1913
Adelaide J. Dubois 3 Jul 1849- 26 Feb 1931 w/o Cornelius (nee
GOODWIN)
James Dubois d. 19 Jun 1913 in San Francisco, CA, Age 87y
Born Palenville, NY pioneer of that state.
“I am not certain, actually, that these names are all
on one tombstone (I have not yet personally transcribed the
New Jefferson Cemetery), but it does appear likely,”
Hasenkopf concludes. “It was fairly common, especially
in the late 1800’s and early 1900’s, to list whole
families on one tombstone, even if not all persons were buried
in that plot.”
So, the mystery remains as to whether Peter and Clarissa Dubois’
remains are still at the site. The primary conclusion, in
glancing back at the history of our graveyards and the trend
to new development, seems to be that “Eternal Rest”
doesn’t last forever.
A
Preservational Patriot
When asked what he can remember of his first trip
into either Olive or Shandaken, Hinchey laughs. He says
it’s difficult to discern the exact moment.
“I was reading about the Catskills before I ever got
here, in Irving and Cooper,” he says of the 19th century’s
two great American authors. “It seems I’ve been
coming into them my whole life.”
Hinchey was born in New York City 68 years ago, but grew
up in Saugerties, where he graduated high school before
going on to SUNY New Paltz and eventually, after stints
working the cement factories that used to line the Hudson
in his youth, a career in politics as a Democratic winner
in stolidly Republican districts. And a solidly old-style
liberal Democrat at that.
How perfect, we note at some point in our recent talk, he
driving, that Hinchey would end up being our state’s
only representative on the Congressional commission that
created the new FDR memorial in our nation’s capital.
“The Catskills have a mystique and wonderment to them
that’s just marvelous,” Hinchey says, after
having received a “Steward of the Catskills”
award from the Catskill Preservation Corporation, the organization
of leading regional and national environmental groups that
came together two years ago to fight the mega-development
proposed for the region’s central high peaks area
by Crossroads Ventures. “They represent the most important
watershed in the world, as well as one of the key protected
park areas in our nation.”
The congressman jokes about getting legislation passed to
fight the current infestations of tent caterpillars that
have denuded many of the region’s richest forests
for the second summer in a row. But then he grows more serious…
talking stewardship issues.
“By the middle of this century, water issues will
be a dominant concern. This reservoir system, which now
serves 9 million, will be key to the lives of 15 million
people as the Long Island aquifers decline,” he says.
“It’s important that this are be protected.”
Do others in Congress understand the importance of Hinchey’s
mission, which has ruled his political life since joining
the state Assembly as Ulster County’s first Democratic
representative in three quarters of a century back in 1975?
“I don’t think they do,” the Congressman
replies. But not for his trying… explaining that,
no matter a growing reliance on filtration systems around
the world, the need for something more.
Should New York City ever be forced to pay upwards of $10
billion to filter its water, he notes, the cost will end
up effecting the economy of the entire U.S. Especially with
the likelihood of the City then having to choke up $500
million a year in maintenance costs.
Hinchey, who has served on the House of Representatives
powerful Banking and Appropriations committees for years,
keeping an eye on the way money moves in the nation, and
helping bring federal aid to our region with regularity,
says more, not less, should be done to aid the protection
of the Catskills and its watershed resource.
Has the area changed over the years, we ask? The Congressman
talks of having pulled together a commission to study the
region’s importance back in the 1970s, and being threatened
by old school politicians in Delaware County as a result.
“Of course, I never did stop,” he said of those
threats, and what they wanted of him.
So what issues does Hinchey feel are key to we Americans
of the Catskills this July 4 weekend?
“We’re involved in a very different world from
what I grew up in, what so many of us came to expect,”
he says. “Our populations are growing, nationally
and on a global scale, creating a new need for all of us
to protect the natural resources key to life. It’s
absolutely imperative that we protect our water supplies.
As important as anything having to do with energy.”
The Representative, who lives in Hurley, ads that he’s
found the current Congress lax, to the point of antagonism,
at protecting the rural values he feels are key to America’s
independence. He’s trying to fight a move, being pushed
through government, to consolidate the dairy industry within
three giant corporations. He’s doing what he can to
protect what remains of small farms, in his district and
across the country.
“More and more, things have been dominated by corporate
interests. That’s not good for our future,”
Hinchey says. “On this weekend we should remember
the author of our Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson.
There’s a guy with vision who knew how important it
was to protect rural America. And what he warned about is
happening.”
Any message for the readers of these papers?
“I think the quality of life in these communities
is good and needs protection,” he said. “Remember:
development is good only if it’s responsible.”
Don’t
Gamble On Gambling
Yet
the ten in attendance took the opportunity to work
out strategies to keep gambling’s chances
at entering the central Catskills at their current
minimal level, and spoke a great deal about developments
elsewhere in Ulster County, including a controversial
proposal aimed at the Woodstock 94 Winston Farm
site in Saugerties and an all-but-forgotten deal
with the Oklahoma-based Modoc Tribe, for a casino
near Ellenville, brokered by then Legislative Chairman
Ward Todd six years ago.
The Olive event was sponsored by the Catskill Heritage
Alliance, which has sought to allay regional fears
that major developments pegged for the central Catskills
not be opened to possible gambling in future decades.
According to reports brought forth at the Open Forum,
prospects now appear remote that the Seneca Cayugas
of Oklahoma and their partner, billionaire mall-developer
Thomas Wilmot of Rochester, will be building anything
in Saugerties, now or in the foreseeable future.
On May 15, the US Supreme Court refused to hear
an appeal of a lower court’s dismissal of
the tribe’s lands claim case, effectively
dealing a fatal blow to any future casino business
in the state for them.
A spokesman for the Schaller family which owns the
property, however, was quick to point out “that
doesn’t preclude us from talking to other
tribes.”
A local accent to such talks is being lent to the
venture by Al Spada, the former GOP County Clerk
of 39 years who is now working part-time as a lobbyist
for the Seneca-Cayuga-Wilmot tribe, as some have
started calling the developmental entity seeking
to push through its plans despite growing local
opposition..
Also still a possibility is a prospective though
somewhat mysterious reputed bid… for another
possible casino site at the former IBM recreational
facility on old Route 32 in the Town of Ulster.
Options on that property and adjoining ones are
reportedly held by the Oneidas.
Countywide, casino prospects have dimmed considerably
since last year’s “home rule”
resolution ruling them out in any towns which oppose
them. In Saugerties both the village and town boards
unanimously did just that, and prospects seem little
different in the town of Ulster… even though
such resolutions hold no force against tribal claims,
per U.S. law.
Aas if to counter such opposition, the Pataki administration
took its most aggressive position ever last week,
promising full support and asking the federal Bureau
of Indian Affairs to expedite its review of all
current tribal claims in the state, including the
backing of a plan by the St. Regis-Mohawk tribe
to bring gaming to the Catskill’s doorstep.
The project, a joint venture between the tribe and
Empire Resorts, would convert about 30 acres at
the Monticello Raceway into a “sovereign nation.”
The site appears to be the only potential one in
New York that could actually obtain federal and
state approvals before Pataki leaves office next
January.
“The Governor strongly supports the tribe’s
efforts to build a casino at the raceway site,”
wrote Pataki’s Assistant Counsel and chief
gaming advisor Greg Allen, in a letter to federal
regulators last week. “I respectfully urge
the BIA to expedite its review process and promptly
notify this office once the potential environmental
impacts have been satisfactorily addressed.”
“We’ll do what we have to do to get
it done” added the Governor’s spokesman
Saleem Cheeks.
Pataki’s advocacy appears to extend to the
adoption of an expedited environmental assessment
completed in the late 90’s for an earlier
but similar project on the site. That study, accepted
by the BIA in April, 2000, determined it would have
“no unmitigated significant impacts”
on the community despite a projected increase in
traffic of 5.9 million vehicles per year.
Local groups opposed to the casino say the old data
is of little value and highly misleading in the
current economic climate, and that an up-to-date
Environmental Impact Statement should be required.
“Sullivan County has turned around dramatically
in the years since those studies were done,”
said David Colavita, president of CasinoFree Sullivan
County, a grassroots coalition opposed to the project
which local anti-casino forces has been paying close
attention to. “Every economic indicator is
up significantly post 9-11. And we know from our
recently completed county Master Plan that casino
development ranks at the bottom of the list for
preferred economic development choices here. But
the Governor is more interested in shoehorning a
casino into Sullivan County than he is in the interests
of the people who live here.”
Ultimately the decision as to what constitutes an
acceptable environmental review rests with the BIA’s
regulators. In April, the agency had asked
the tribe for additional information: “We’re
very close to responding to (that request) said
Charlie Degiomini, a spokesman for Empire Resorts.
“We’re just about there.”
A decision is now expected from the BIA within days
or weeks.
The governor’s move in support of the project
was almost immediately followed by an unannounced
vote of Sullivan County’s 9-person legislature,
accepting a newly negotiated $15 million/year payment-in-lieu-of-taxes
agreement with the St. Regis Mohawks. Should the
BIA find in favor of the casino, Pataki would need
to declare his agreement with their “no unmitigated
significant impact” assessment, after which
the BIA would issue a final land trust agreement
permitting construction to begin.
“I can’t get excited about (Pataki’s
letter to the BIA)” said state Sen, John Bonacic,
whose district includes the site, as well as our
own Central Catskills region, and who was once supportive
of up to three casinos in the region before starting
to show a change of heart in recent years. “We’ve
been down this road before, several times in fact.”
Stay tuned…
The
Skinny On Caterpillars
For those
in attendance from Ulster County, the scene seemed
old hat at first. After all, it was only last summer
that people in the Phoenicia area were talking about
the infestation of Forest Tent Caterpillars and
Gypsy Moths, which essentially denuded a majority
of trees up and down the Route 28 corridor through
the season’s early half, as the third of several
plagues that had hit the Town of Shandaken (the
others being fire and flood).
So they were getting what Ulster had already got.
Haha.
Turns out, though, that the happily-chomping tent
caterpillars do their thing in an area for two to
three years before naturally dying out for a decade
or so. And what had seemed passé in Phoenicia
in late May is actually mid-stream… and moving
fast eastwards into Woodstock and even Kingston.
“We’re telling people to sit tight,”
said Horticulture Educator Teresa Rusinek of the
county’s Cornell Cooperative Extension office,
who has been fielding calls from concerned homeowners
along with Community Horticulture Coordinator Donna
Crawford. “They’ve already done their
worst damage and should be finished in the next
couple of weeks. At this point the caterpillars
are getting ready to pupate and turn into moths.”
Rusilek added that she and Crawford had received
a majority of calls from Phoenicia and Kingston,
where the pests were even hitting “street
trees.” She noted that the number of omplaints
from Woodstock, other than its Western half, has
been on a par with what she’s heard from Gardiner.
Where she lives, near Marlboro, has seen nothing.
Same with New Paltz.
We asked her about rumors, largely from Woodstock,
that the state Department of Environmental Conservation
might have released black flies to combat the plague
of caterpillars. Or maybe even sprayed.
“They might have done that in the past, but
no anymore.” Rusilek replied, “I’ve
heard those stories… Besides, the rule is
that the bigger the caterpillar gets, the harder
it is to spray.”
Tom DiCillo, the man in charge of pesticides at
regional DEC headquarters in New Paltz, said his
department would never do any spraying any more,
and haven’t done any since 1980.
“It’s just too controversial,”
he noted.
As for the release of flies to combat the caterpillars,
he said he’d “not heard that one”
and referred such inquiries to his agency’s
forestry division.
They were all in the field all week but a look online
found an extensive report on caterpillar infestations
from last summer.
“Forest Tent Caterpillar (Malacosoma disstria)
is a native insect found in hardwood forests throughout
North America and is especially abundant in eastern
North America,” reads the official description
at the start of Naja Kraus’ 2006 page-turner,
“NYS DEC Forest Tent Caterpillar Defoliator
Report 2005.” “In New York they prefer
to eat sugar maple, aspen, cherry, apple, oaks,
birch, ash, alder, elm and basswood. They never
eat red maple, sycamore and conifers.”
The report notes how the caterpillars live for five
to six weeks from early Spring through June. They
spend three weeks in cocoons (never tent-shaped,
as one might expect. Those are gypsy moths, which
like oak tress for nourishment and living space.)
Then five days as a moth, in July, before laying
eggs that then lie dormant for ten months before
the cycle starts again.
They don’t like to nest in the trees they’ve
eaten down to bark.
Outbreaks “are episodic and may last two to
nine years,” although ten year intervals seem
the norm, with bad batches seen in 1887, 1896-1901,
1923 and 24, 1935-1940, 1951-55, 1980 to 1982, and
1991-1993. At their worst, in the 1950s, they damaged
a total 15 million acres of forest in the northern
part of the state.
Defoliation, the report says, can be severe but
rarely mortal, although tree harvesting (chopping
them down) is not recommended until a caterpillar
scourge is well past. Too much cutting can take
away natural predators. Natural factors leading
to “outbreak collapse,” it is noted,
are similar to the ways in which gypsy moth outbreaks
stopped in the last ten years. For those wishing
to spray privately, it is suggested, the cost for
the bacterium Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt) runs to
about $25 an acre. Bt, first discovered in 1911,
is considered safe to people and non-target species,
such as wildlife, and acts by producing proteins
(delta-endotoxin, the “toxic crystal”)
that react with the cells of the gut lining of susceptible
insects. These Bt proteins paralyze the digestive
system, and the infected insect stops feeding within
hours. Bt-affected insects generally die from starvation,
which can take several days. Shandaken Supervisor
Robert Cross Jr. recently told those gathered at
one of his town board meetings that he had had the
foresight to order 10 cases of the stuff, which
the town would sell to residents at cost…
directly out of Cross’ office. “We’re
down to two cases, but we’re trying to order
more,” Cross said. In a press release from
the Catskill Forest Association announcing its recent
presentation titled “Caterpillar Killers?”
at Belleayre Mountain’s Overlook Lodge, it
was noted that, “There are several management
strategies to control the numbers of caterpillars,
ranging in intensity from physical removal (squish!),
to large-scale aerial spraying (cha ching!). Around
your home, you can scrape the cocoons from sheltered
areas of your porch or siding. By the end of July,
look for egg masses and remove them too.”
We looked through several appendix pages to the
DEC report and found an item about a natural predator
that increased as tent caterpillar populations increased…
“Sarcophaga aldrichi (superficially resembling
a large housefly) can be so abundant that it is
almost as much of a nuisance as the caterpillar,”
the report reads. “The adult fly oviposits
on the cocoon of a FTC and the maggot burrows into
the pupa reducing the FTC pupa to a liquefied mass
upon which the maggot feeds. The population of the
fly increases during successive outbreaks and is
often very abundant in the year before an FTC population
collapse.”
Good news, we guess. But… eeeewwww!
Also drawn by the caterpillars, it seems, are a
number of birds that will flock to an area defoliated
by the little critters.
“Some eat only the insides,’ it says
of sapsuckers, cuckoos and woodpeckers, which have
also been reported as on the increase… not
coincidentally, it appears.
There have been other reports, in sporting columns
from the west and south of us, of fisherfolk making
flies resembling tent caterpillars, or actually
using the little buggers themselves, to catch trout
and whatever else swims in local streams.
“We’re hoping this is the last year,”
Rusinek said from Cornell Extension offices. “People
have been seeing a lot of dead caterpillars. There
have also been new reports of caterpillar beetles,
these big black bugs that eat the caterpillars,
coming in.”
She said she’d heard of some private spraying,
especially involving large tracts of land in the
Big Indian/Highmount area. And Woodstock.
But she’s just counting time until it’s
all over, at least for now.
“You get an all clear for eight years and
then…” she started saying, her voice
trailing off where the Whammo would be.. “That’s
nature for you. Sometimes you just have to let it
run its course.”
A Drippy Ice Cream Cone
Joe Stein addressed us reciting the Gettysburgh Address with
a modern day message. Jack Molloy led us in prayer, and Taps
was played. Ed Baldyga resonated the most beautiful rendition
of “America” that I have ever heard. Then it was
hotdogs and soda in the pavilion cooked by Stork Muller. One
half hour produced the gamut of emotions: tears for the fallen
soldiers, pride for our troops and anthems, a lump in our throat
as Taps tugged our heartstrings, and joy as we greeted our neighbors
and exchanged “Isn’t- it-brutally-hot?” pleasantries.
Another moment that made me proud was the eighth grade Luau
put on by the Middle School PTO. These moms and one dad hauled
in palm trees, constructed a Tiki hut, provided a buffet of
food, hired a DJ and threw one heck of a party for these students
who will move to the high school at a Moving Up Day Ceremony
on June 19. Blenders whirred constantly providing tropical slushies.
Hula-hoops, limbo contests, free raffles, and souvenir photos
made this a gala event.
A moment that made me feel not so proud was when someone drove
in the driveway of my new house and helped him/herself to two
stone planters filled with yellow pansies. They should have
driven further and asked me; I surely would have given them
as a gift. Having them taken made me feel violated. I understand
that our Holiday weekend of Remembrance was also one of mailbox
smashing, stolen bicycles, and vandalism. Sad!
How about those gypsy moths? As I walk in the woods, it sounds
like rain even on those few occasions when it isn’t raining.
Those critters are crunching away. As I look over to High Mount,
the mountain has patches of brown where it has been defoliated.
I wonder if the rain will hinder their growth or have a Miracle
Grow effect. I remember the last infestation. I remember throwing
away shirts my husband wore surveying in the woods because the
gypsy moth “poop” had eaten right through the fabric.
We are in our new home, and our farmhouse belongs to a new family.
Welcome Arron, Karyn, Tallia and Zach to Olive. I hope they
love their home as much as we did.
I am about to retire from Onteora Central School along with
some dear friends and Olivites. John Miller, who used to live
in West Shokan, Mike Boms of Samsonville, and Donna and Mike
Marrin of Shokan are leaving with me. Together we represent
over one hundred and seventy years of teaching. We taught and
learned from thousands of students. There are doctors, lawyers,
plumbers, pilots, carpenters, nurses, engineers, and teachers
who will carry on the tradition of Onteora. For this I feel
proud!
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