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Local History
Photo of Haunted Huguenot Street in New Paltz by Mookie Forcella
Nights of the living, days of the dead

Mid-Hudson towns offer plenty to do during Halloween season


As autumn wanes and the nights lengthen, the Witches’ New Year draws nigh and the veil between the realms of the living and the dead grows thinner. Unless you are blessed with the Second Sight, you...

October 20, 2011 02:43 PM | 0 0 comments | 9 9 recommendations | email to a friend
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The Redcoats are coming!

Burning of Kingston reenacted this weekend


If you visit Uptown Kingston on the afternoon of Sunday, October 16, you may find yourself caught in a melee between rifle-toting Colonial bluecoats and British redcoats. No, it’s not that the resi...

October 13, 2011 12:00 PM | 0 0 comments | 10 10 recommendations | email to a friend
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Photo by Beth Blis
Built to last

Brick collectors’ website sheds light on historic Hudson Valley industry


A century ago, New York was a city primarily built of bricks, many of which were manufactured on the banks of the Hudson River, which was lined with massive brickworks from Little Ferry, New Jersey...

October 07, 2011 12:00 PM | 0 0 comments | 4 4 recommendations | email to a friend
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The Ridge
Gentlemen farmers

Hudson River Heritage’s Country Seats Tour targets historic farmsteads in Dutchess & Columbia


The Hudson River landscape was the inspiration for the Romantic vision manifested in the works of painters, architects and landscape architects in the mid-19th century, its embowered picturesque es...

October 06, 2011 12:00 PM | 0 0 comments | 6 6 recommendations | email to a friend
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For years, Fitch Brothers, one of the largest local bluestone businesses (shown above), shipped tons of bluestone from its yards in the Wilbur section of Kingston. (Lithograph courtesy of the Friends of Historic Kingston)
Something old, something blue

Free Kingston Historic Bluestone Festival returns to The Strand


Way back in the Devonian Period of the Paleozoic Era, about 350 million years ago, when the lobe-finned fishes were beginning to evolve legs, a mountain range now known as the Acadians or Ancestral...

September 29, 2011 12:00 PM | 0 0 comments | 9 9 recommendations | email to a friend
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The Palatine Farmstead in “East Camp”
From the Rhineland to Rhinebeck

“Let’s Go Deutsch” celebrates German settlers’ heritage at Palatine Farmstead this Saturday


This Saturday, September 24, the Palatine Farmstead in Rhinebeck – a historic restoration-in-progress being accomplished under the auspices of the Quitman Preservation organization – will be hostin...

September 22, 2011 12:12 PM | 0 0 comments | 13 13 recommendations | email to a friend
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Photo of the late Fred J. Johnston by Dion Ogust
Furnishing links with history

Fred J. Johnston House is a gem in Uptown Kingston


When Fred J. Johnston started collecting 18th- and early 19th-century furnishings and decorative arts for the eight-room Federal-style house that he first rescued from oblivion in 1937, no one – le...

September 15, 2011 12:44 PM | 0 0 comments | 9 9 recommendations | email to a friend
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Three Vassar Girls Abroad, published in 1882
Learnéd ladies

Vassar offers free lecture series on history of women’s education in America


Maybe like me, you have a yen to go back to school. The intensity of attending college lectures and seminars represents an appealing antidote to the haphazard learning that happens on one’s own (in...

September 08, 2011 01:11 PM | 0 0 comments | 15 15 recommendations | email to a friend
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Blue Violinist by Marc Chagall, 1947.
Far from Vitebsk

“Chagall in High Falls” exhibit opens this Saturday at D & H Canal Museum


It has become common knowledge that the great Modernist painter Marc Chagall lived in High Falls, the silhouette of Mohonk above the fields stretching out from the simple farmhouse that he rented, ...

September 01, 2011 08:00 AM | 0 0 comments | 12 12 recommendations | email to a friend
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Gustav Stickley and an early Morris chair by Gustav Stickley
Stickley situation

Famed furnituremaking family left footprints across New York State and northern New Jersey


If money were no object – if I were to win a large prize in a lottery, for example – I would live in a Craftsman-style house, entirely filled and decorated with Arts and Crafts-style furnishings. A...

August 04, 2011 10:00 AM | 0 0 comments | 14 14 recommendations | email to a friend
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