For many, the name “Pine Plains” evokes a dot on the map while driving along the Taconic State Parkway, but to relegate the Hudson Valley town to a bypassing point on a map is to commit a history lover’s faux pas.
For those who have benignly wandered into that particular offense, and I’m forced to include […]
For this special tenth anniversary issue, Main Street Magazine uncovered the interesting history behind some of our local towns and how they were granted their names – and this is just a tiny sampling!
As we go about our daily lives – going to work, shopping, attending cultural events, and gathering with friends – we often […]
When you really consider the everyday things around you, they start to seem like tiny miracles. – Amy Shearn
Next June 12 marks the 40th anniversary of the dedication of the “old Copake Falls Church” as home to the Roeliff Jansen Historical Society (RJHS) and Museum. The building itself, rescued from neglect and adaptively repurposed, turned 130 […]
Alexandra Peters gave me a private tour of her sampler collection on display at the Sharon Historical Society through October just after this enthralling exhibition opened in June. It was a very personal introduction to the art and meaning of needlework samplers which reveal the lives of American girls and their families from 1700 to […]
As of 2021, according to statistics from the US Department of Veterans Affairs, little more than 240,000 of the 16 million Americans who served in World War ll are alive today. Last year marked the 80th anniversary of what President Franklin D. Roosevelt would famously call “a date which will live in infamy.” The Japanese […]
Last school year, our Searching for Slavery class was encouraged to explore ways to authentically share our work with the community. The idea of a public event appealed to us.
Fast forward to this year, nine community schools – public and independent, middle, and high school – gathered on April 28 and 29 at Troutbeck in […]
It’s February, Black History Month, and we’ve revisited and updated our 2021 post about slavery in the Hudson Valley. New sources helped us to better understand not just how widespread and tenacious the institution of slavery was in the Hudson Valley, but also to appreciate the magnitude of the struggle for freedom fought by those […]
Sometimes a topic for a blog post comes to us through sheer luck. This happened recently, when we received an inquiry from Lance Fromm, an Andover, MA antiques dealer.
“Hello … I have come across a walking-stick with a silver engraved cap on top that reads ‘J. B. Collin Hillsdale NY.’ A Google search […]
The Roe Jan Brewing Co., one of Hillsdale’s newer businesses, located in one of the older commercial buildings in the town, has been awarded a 2021 New York State Preservation Award by New York State Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation. Roe Jan Brewing is one of nine projects in the state recognized for […]
We recently discovered that Hillsdale shopkeeper Matthew White has assembled one of the most complete collections of late 19th and early 20th century Hillsdale postcards. It gave us the idea for this blog post. And, as often happens, researching the topic led us to explore the history of a humble item that turns out to […]