Hist Of New Paltz New York I

Includes bibliographical references.

A deep sense of history lingers in New Paltz, still home to many direct descendants of its original families. Settled nearly three hundred twenty-five years ago by French Huguenots, the town is located halfway between New York City and Albany, a few miles west of the Hudson on the banks of the Wallkill River. In this magnificent setting, with panoramic views of the Shawangunk Mountains dominating the western horizon, a stable little community prospered. New Paltz invites readers to reflect on fascinating images that document development and inevitable change. Sky Top, with its landmark Mohonk Tower built high on the Shawangunk Ridge, beckons residents and travelers alike. Huguenot Street, famous for its original stone houses, is now a National Historic Landmark District. Each semester college students arrive to swell the population of a town that has been associated with higher education ever since a classical school was opened in 1828. New Paltz is illustrated with some two hundred unique photographs dating from the 1860s, many published here for the first time. Informative text helps track dramatic changes in architecture, modes of transportation, and lifestyle.

Challenges the belief that the Walloons and the Dutch of the Hudson Valley were cultural preservationists who resisted English culture. Winner of the 2017 Hendricks Award presented by the New Netherland Institute In 1678, seven French-speaking Protestant families established the village of New Paltz in the Hudson River Valley of New York. Life on the edge of European settlement presented many challenges, but a particular challenge for these ethnic Walloon families, originally from the southern Spanish Netherlands, was that they lived in a Dutch cultural region in an English colony. In Set in Stone, Kenneth Shefsiek explores how the founders and their descendants reacted to and perpetuated this multiethnic cultural environment for generations. As the founding families controlled their town economically and politically, they creatively and selectively blended the cultures available to them. They allowed their Walloon culture to slip away early in the village’s history, but they continued to combine Dutch and English cultures for more than 150 years. When they finally abandoned the last vestiges of Dutch culture in the early nineteenth century, they did so just as descendants of English colonists began to claim that the national commitment to liberty and freedom was grounded in the nation’s English heritage. Not willing to be marginalized, descendants of the New Paltz Walloons constructed an alternative national narrative, placing their ancestors at the very center of the American story. Kenneth Shefsiek is Assistant Professor of History at the University of North Carolina Wilmington.

Incorporating more than 3,000 illustrations, Kornwolf's work conveys the full range of the colonial encounter with the continent's geography, from the high forms of architecture through formal landscape design and town planning. From these pages emerge the fine arts of environmental design, an understanding of the political and economic events that helped to determine settlement in North America, an appreciation of the various architectural and landscape forms that the settlers created, and an awareness of the diversity of the continent's geography and its peoples. Considering the humblest buildings along with the mansions of the wealthy and powerful, public buildings, forts, and churches, Kornwolf captures the true dynamism and diversity of colonial communities - their rivalries and frictions, their outlooks and attitudes - as they extended their hold on the land.

This book offers the full, annotated translation of a recently discovered Dutch account book recording trade with Native Americans in Ulster County, New York, from 1712 to 1732. The ledger contains just over two-thousand transactions with about two-hundred native individuals. Slightly more than one-hundred Indians appear with their names listed. The volume and granularity of the entries allow for detailed indexing and comparative analysis of the people and processes involved in these commercial dealings in the mid-Hudson River Valley. Waterman and Smith place this exceptional resource within its historical context, presenting figures and tables with aggregated data. They examine several key aspects of the intercultural exchanges, such as the high level of participation by Native American women and the growing importance of the deerskin trade in this region. In addition, the appendix contains individual profiles of forty Esopus and Wappinger Indians appearing in the Ulster County account book.