Research Report #53 — Resource Industries of the Shawangunks
For many years scientists and naturalists have been studying and observing the flora and fauna of the Shawangunk Ridge. Foremost among them was Daniel Smiley, for whom Mohonk Preserve’s Daniel Smiley Research Center is named. Dan wrote numerous reports summarizing his observations on various topics. This regularly occurring series will feature some of these reports; some hold tremendous scientific value today and just await an interested researcher to follow up, others showcase a quirky sense of humor or highlight an oddity of nature.
Read the Reports:
Resource Industries of the Shawangunks. January 1986. Daniel Smiley. Historical Cultural Note №16.
A Note from Paul C. Huth, Director of Research Emeritus:
In my work with Daniel Smiley over the years, we would regularly learn interesting details about 18th and 19th century Shawangunk settlement families. How they came to the ridge and developed subsistence farms of various sizes on wildland in very difficult conditions. The challenges of developing the basic needs of habitation, such as building a log or locally cut plank home and constructing supportive farm outbuildings. Opening fields that were plagued by stones and shallow soils on bedrock, and having to work for years around remaining stumps from cleared forest trees. Raising vegetables to consume fresh by the family, and some to harvest and store for later or winter use, either dried or stored in root cellars. Planting buckwheat in the nutrient poor soil, and harvesting the resulting “grain” for stock feed, or grinding for flour and porridge, along with mixed grains such as rye and oats. Some families had a few apple trees. Most maintained some stock, including horses, cows to supply milk and allow for hand churning of butter for domestic use and sale, having chickens for eggs and meat, and possibly housing a few pigs. Large areas of most farms needed to be set aside in pasture and meadow. The need to annually supply hay, a vital commodity for the stock, that had to be cut and gathered by hand with considerable effort.
Cash money was absent or always in short supply, as much commerce was conducted by barter and trade. But some store-bought items were necessary, and the blacksmith and the miller needed to be paid by barter or cash. Robi Josephson and Bob Larsen, in their 2013 book An Unforgiving Land-Hardscrabble Life in the Trapps, a Vanished Shawangunk Mountain Hamlet, considered that “most Trapps families barely scraped by.” As a result, when there was a seasonal landscape “resource industry,” like picking “huckleberries,” which allowed for large resident participation and sale of the harvest to a few local and outside buyers for cash, most joined in, sometimes with the whole family.
As Dan stated for us, “The history of the use of Shawangunk resources is of interest in our current effort to understand the evolving ecosystem.” In these two reports, Dan drew together interesting historical accounts he had found describing the “huckleberry industry,” the “wintergreen industry,” the “hoop industry,” “grist mills” (especially to do with the grinding of buckwheat), and “charcoal burning.”
The Huckleberry Industry
First of all, we must define huckleberries and blueberries, in relation to this resource industry. Botanically, while both huckleberry and blueberry species grow on the ridge, blueberries in both low and high bush forms, produce the sought after fruit. Marc Fried probably best got at the different use of the terms. In the Epilogue of his 1995 book, The Huckleberry Pickers, A Raucous History of the Shawangunk Mountains, Marc refers to “the berrypickers themselves” having the last call on usage of the common name. “….the word they employed much more commonly was ‘huckleberry,’ with ‘blueberry’ usually reserved to denote the cultivated version.”
Probably starting as early as some of the first settlement on the ridge by about 1800, local families likely began picking huckleberries each year in their familiar spots on the highlands where the shrubs grew in profusion. Josephson and Larsen reported “the earliest printed” account of an already robust annual industry appeared in the New Paltz Times in July, 1860. Fried feels the summit berry industry likely began in earnest by the 1850s, with the building of “the first good road to Sam’s Point from Cragsmoor,” and a “plank road from Ellenville across the mountain to Newburgh,” completed in December, 1851.
In an article from the Friday, Ellenville Journal, 27 June 1879, we learn of an “abundant” crop of huckleberries, “the first shipment….for the season was made to New York on Tuesday morning” (6/24). “Col. Starkey is trying to perfect arrangements for an extra train….as berries leaving here by train reach New York the same night. The harvest will begin in earnest with the first part of next week.” An article from the Ellenville Journal (20 September 1895) reports, “that from careful estimates it is clear that at least $50,000 has been paid to the pickers for huckleberries gathered on the Shawangunk Mountain this past season, between Wustsboro and Kerhonkson.” And, from another local article of unknown reference, “about 45 years ago, when the berries were very profuse, the Stedner family of seven established a sort of record by picking 480 quarts in one day. For these they received six cents a quart. In those days, baskets holding 45–50 quarts were strapped to the pickers backs, and twenty quarts and hour was not an unusual picking speed.”
The Wintergreen Industry
Wintergreen is a rather small native plant of the Shawangunks. It inhabits slope and summit forests dominated by Chestnut Oak and Pitch Pine. It has shiny elliptical mostly evergreen leaves, that when crushed, exude a strong aroma. Over the centuries, the plant has been harvested and processed for its fragrance, as a food flavoring, for use in medicine and making medicinal tea, the fruit used by Native Americans.
One of the ways to process the plants “for use in flavorings and medicine” was by distillation and the resulting production of concentrated oil. In this process, larger distillers purchased Wintergreen plants harvested by hand from around the ridge and shipped to the distillery in big burlap bags which weighed “about 100 pounds….for which the pickers received from $2 to $3.” In most cases, harvesting was “for women and children.” Smaller seasonal operators likely harvested locally if there was a good concentration of plants. From first hand accounts and newspaper articles, we learned that there were a number of distilleries operating on and around the ridge, starting at least by the 1850s, a few lasting until the early 20th century. There were accounts of at least two located in the Village of Ellenville, “another early….(one) flourishing about 1875 was….situated on top of the mountain near where the present Cragsmoor road leaves Route 52,” in 1870 there was one located in Gardiner, and there was apparently at least one in the Trapps Mountain Hamlet.
We subsequently learned from Alfred B. Smiley, “that there was once a Wintergreen still located beside Peterskill Road (at Minnewaska) where the first stream (south of Route 44–55) crosses. It was operated by one of the Otis Family.” In August 1985, Dan and I “explored the area” described by Al. As we reported in Historical Cultural Note №13, there was no surface remains of a still either upstream or downstream from Peterskill Road, to the flow of the nearby Peterskill below. We also explored the woods upstream for the presence of Wintergreen plants. “In an estimated three acres we found less than a dozen Wintergreen plants.” We theorized, that in the late 19th century when the still might have been located there, the availability of reliable stream water, and a good source of Wintergreen plants in the more open woods there and nearby, must have made a distillery economically feasible. At the end of the Note, as a remembrance of this forgotten Shawangunk industry, Dan proposed “to name this stream-Wintergreen Stream.” And, so it is today in our Mohonk Preserve “Place Name” inventory.
The Hoop Industry
As we have seen, for local ridge families, seasonal resource industries provided opportunities for the harvest of a natural product, like huckleberries and wintergreen plants, and for sale to local and outside buyers for much-needed cash. Another one of these, usually begun “when the huckleberry season was over,” and driven by a large annual demand, was the cutting and shaving of mostly hardwood poles to produce hoop stock to be used by coopers in the binding wooden staves to form a barrel. In those days almost everything “salable,” and of quantity, was shipped in large and small wooden barrels. Quoting John Burroughs, in his 1886 essay “Phases of Farm Life,” which appeared in his book, In The Catskills (1910), “...big hoops,little hoops, hoops for kegs, and firkins, and barrels, and hogsheads, and pipes; hickory hoops, birch hoops, ash hoops, chestnut hoops, hoops enough to go around the world.” The “slack cooperage was not watertight,” the barrel staves bound together with “split saplings...the ends were notched so that one fit into the other”. Products shipped or preserved in these barrels included a wide variety of staples, including “salt, apples, cement, maple sugar, nails, and even eggs…with buckwheat hulls…for padding,” sugar, flour, butter, and even gunpowder!
On most mountain farms was located an outbuilding called the “hoop-shop” where the sapling shaving was done by the splitter sitting on a shaving horse with a clamp to hold the pole, tightened by foot pressure, the splitting done usually with a sharp draw knife. Experienced splitters could produce “a thousand hoop poles in a day,” bound in bundles of a hundred for later transport and sale. In the 1887 Second Annual Report of the New York Forest Commission, it lists 45,000,000 hoops produced in the Town of Wawarsing alone that year, “the Shawangunk mountain produces about two-thirds of the Ulster (County) output.” It goes on to say that “the farmers about here think as much of their hoop-pole lots as they do of their grainfields. I have known of twenty-five to thirty hoop-poles to grow from one chestnut stump…the average price for the last ten years has been about four dollars per thousand for all kinds.” In 1893, one article noted that hoops for use on cement barrels sold for “50 cents a bunch…to as high as $3 a bunch for heavy hickory and oak straps for packing boxes.” All of this repeated hoop pole cutting in relatively large areas prevented the regrowth of forests and left large areas of important “water-sheds in a denuded condition.” Dan found of particular interest in the article he included, that Theodore Wicklow in Ellenville in 1908 “was producing 75,000,000 hoops a year, making him the largest dealer in the country!” But it was not long after that, with the advent of new and cheap “metal and wire hoops,” and the manufacture of slatted wooden and reinforced cardboard boxes, that the hoop industry met its end.
Grist (or Flouring) Mills
Today we hardly give a thought to the purchase of flours ground from various and sometimes exotic grains in our local grocery stores. But to the 18th, 19th and early 20th-century subsistence farm families on the ridge, making flour from home raised grain was a challenge. Small amounts could be coarse ground in mortars at home, and by neighborhood sharing. The finer ground grist would be used for baking, the coarser used in “samp” combinations.
Dan found two articles that he felt captured the importance of local mills to area residents. Grist mills, like sawmills, were mostly built alongside streams that could supply water for power. We haven’t found any record of a grist mill located on the ridge, but there were several in the Rondout Valley, the early one in Gardiner at Tuthilltown, and another at Pine Bush. The building of the Wawarsing & New Paltz Turnpike over the ridge in 1856, allowed for much easier transport of grist to be processed. From the “Early Grist Mills” article, we can see the barter and trading nature of the time, “one John Hall having a team of horses, took the grist of some of his neighbors and generally charged two days labor for carting three bushels of rye to and from the mill.” Historian and good friend Katherine T. Terwilliger, in an article in the Ellenville Journal in 1969, quotes Town of Neversink Historian Inez Gridley, that “A bushel of good buckwheat would make about thirty pounds of flour.” Census records from 1865, show some Trapps Hamlet residents growing between two and four acres of buckwheat and one to three acres of corn. In an article in the 24 July 1880 New Paltz Times, under the heading “Gardiner Items,” it is reported that “Several farmers have sowed buckwheat the past week, believing in the full moon.” According to fellow Botanist Karl L. Brooks, the introduced “buckwheat…ripens rapidly, thriving on the poorest soil…render(ing) it a fit crop for poor land that might produce scarcely anything else.”
Charcoal Burning
We are lucky that Dan Smiley was such a prolific and detailed recorder. I saw in my time working with him that he just seemed to have an innate polished sense of what nugget should be recorded for future reference. And, since he didn’t know what might be needed, he recorded everything he could! Today, we are the beneficiaries of that great philosophy.
For example, on 12 August 1940, Dan wrote the following “Memo to file by D.S. (Jr.),” documenting the first-hand experience with charcoal burning resulting from a visit with his good friend of some 30 years and Clove resident Irving Van Leuven. Charcoal production was, in the 19th and early 20th century, a widespread industry on the ridge, burned seasonally by local men. We have documented over 50 charcoal pits on the east slope of the mountain between Mohonk and the Mohonk Preserve Visitor Center. Each of these consumed 10–12 cords of wood for each burn, and each pit was burned more than once. An August 1886 New Paltz Independent newspaper article mentions “Smoke continuously rises from the woodlot…the wood being cut down and converted into cordwood and charcoal.”
Irve told Dan that “he was the last one who burned any in the Clove.” Dan recorded that Irve said “they usually burn 10–12 cords...in 4 foot lenths…from a week to 10 days.” While large quantities were shipped out of the Shawangunks, some local charcoal was purchased by both Mohonk and the Minnewaska Mountain Houses for baking bread, as a result of its long reliable even heat.
In late May and early June, 1943, Irve Van Leuven conducted a demonstration charcoal burn near his home in the Clove, closely documented and photographed by Dan, and Mohonk employee, Alton Quick. In May, 13 cords of wood were harvested by Irve “upslope above (the) Van Leuven House and (the) kiln laid up at at the old site just below the house.” It was ignited, burned, and cooled, between 27 May and 11 June. In all, 522 bushels of charcoal were produced. This resulting “chark” was purchased by the Mohonk Mountain House, at 44 1/4 cents per bushel, “for use in the kitchen for broiling.”
Trapps History
At the end of this 1986 report, Dan mentioned his friendship with Irve Van Leuven, and appended a published interview with him, which appeared on 11 March 1956, in the Poughkeepsie New Yorker. A poignant article, profiling a man who spent most of his life at home in the Trapps Mountain Hamlet, and who had a deep sense of place. Irve says “I want to get back (home)….to get back to the mountains, the Shawangunks…” Irve died in December that year.
Read the Reports:
Resource Industries of the Shawangunks. January 1986. Daniel Smiley. Historical Cultural Note №16.
