Samsonville, New York

Samsonville is a hamlet in the southwestern corner of the town of Olive in Ulster County, New York. Bordered to the north by Mombaccus Mountain and Ashokan High Point, it is within the Catskill Park on the southeastern edge of the Catskill Mountains.

Samsonville, New York
Hamlet
Samsonville, New York
Coordinates: 41°53′15″N 74°17′39″W[1]
CountryUnited States
StateNew York
CountyUlster
TownOlive
Elevation
856 ft (261 m)
Time zoneUTC-5 (Eastern (EST))
 • Summer (DST)UTC-4 (EDT)
GNIS feature ID964351[1]

Early History

Native American hunters made use of a natural rock shelter beneath a cliff in the area now called Samsonville as early as 2000 BC and possibly as late as AD 1600. Excavations at the site yielded stone blades, potsherds, arrowheads and spear points.[2] The modern town grew up around a tannery established by the Palen family in 1831 below a falls on Mettacahonts Creek.[3] In 1848, the Palens sold the business to fellow tannery operator Zadock Pratt, with Henry Samson as operating partner. The area around the tannery had been known as "Palentown" but acquired the name of Samsonville, leaving Palentown as the name of the adjacent area of Rochester, Ulster County, New York.[4]

Henry A. Samson

Henry Almanzo Samson, for whom the hamlet was named, was born April 4, 1818 in Woodstock, Connecticut, where he learned the tanning trade. In 1853, having established himself as a wealthy local businessman, he was named a Lieutenant Colonel in the 20th Regiment, New York State Militia and the following year was commissioned Brigadier General, 8th Brigade. In 1853, Zadock Pratt gifted his share of the Samsonville tannery to his son George Watson Pratt. Samson became the sole owner in 1856 and also had an interest in four other tanneries. In 1857, he built a grand Italianate villa at 32 West Chestnut Street in Rondout, New York. General Samson performed his Civil War service in New York state, but raised local troops for the Union: "Employees of the big tannery at Samsonville responded well to the patriotic activities of its owner, General Samson of Rondout. 43 of these sturdy men from the back country enlisted in the old 20th and 27 more entered the 120th the following summer."[5] In addition to his tannery interests, Samson was a member of the Board of Directors of the First National Bank of Rondout, one of the original trustees of the Rondout Savings Bank, a founding officer of the Rondout and Oswego Rail Road Company and president of the Washington Ice Company. He died on February 9, 1869 and is interred in Montrepose Cemetery in Rondout, now a district of Kingston.[6]

The name of Samson Mountain, which stands above the upper reaches of Rondout Creek, commemorates Samson the tanner. The peak now known as Ashokan High Point, which looms over Samsonville, was also called Samson by older residents, and is so named on a 1942 United States Coast and Geodetic Survey benchmark at the summit.[7] "Little Ashokan" (also known as "Round Mountain"[8] or "Ashokan Cobble"[9]), a lesser summit below High Point, was known locally as "Samson's Nose."

"The Most Important Town in the Entire Catskill Mountains"

Historian Harry Albert Haring wrote that, in its heyday, "Samsonville was the most important town in the entire Catskill Mountains, - its population was the largest, its payroll the greatest." [10] The Civil War created a high demand for the hemlock-tanned sole leather that was the Samsonville tannery's main product. After the war, demand declined, as did the supply of hemlock bark. As bark cutters wiped out the local hemlocks, all the Catskill tanneries eventually closed. Historian David Stradling wrote: “In many locations...when the tanneries closed, the settlements around them closed too. Samsonville, the site of General Henry A. Samson’s large tannery, was once an important town. In 1854, the Samson Tannery employed seventy men, processing a remarkable 31,000 hides a year. By 1930, Haring declared Samsonville nearly a ghost town; it had never found a replacement of the jobs lost when the tannery closed.” [11]

In 1871, an Ulster County directory noted that Samsonville "contains a church, a hotel, three stores, a grist mill, a saw mill, a tannery and about 100 inhabitants." [12] At that time, tanning was still being done in Samsonville by William V.N. Boice & Sons.[13] In 1873, however, the tannery burned down (for the third time) and was not rebuilt.[14] In 1880, historian Nathaniel Bartlett Sylvester still identified Samsonville as a "thickly-settled neighborhood" but added: "Since the abandonment of the tannery business the importance of the place has declined." Not all was gone: "There are two stores, one by Pratt Shurter and one by Peter Barringer, – Mr. Shurter is also postmaster, – a grist mill, owned by Anthony Shurter. There is also a saw-mill at this place, and a blacksmith." [15]

The Shurter Mills

1812 War veteran John "Captain Jack" Shurter was the first known resident of Samsonville, one of the original Town Officers when Olive was founded in 1823 and a Justice of the Peace. The mills he and his descendants operated for six generations at the top of the Samsonville Falls on Mettacahonts ("Markham") Creek preceded Samson's tanning business and long survived it. The Shurter grist mill ground local buckwheat, wheat and corn, as well as clover for animal feed, until a flood knocked it off its foundation in 1928. That mill ("where the grain is ground, with a rumbling sound, that feeds all Samsonville") was celebrated in "The Tall Pine Tree" ("The Samsonville Song") collected in the 1950s from local residents Celia Krom Kelder and Mary Avery.[16]

The Shurters also operated saw mills that produced excelsior and, later, headings (barrel tops) and shingles, and that side of the business continued after the loss of the grist mill, with a gasoline-powered engine supplementing the sometimes unreliable water power. A turbine installed between the mills provided electric power to Samsonville well before it was available in other remote Catskills communities.[17]

Post-Tannery Years

After the tannery era, bluestone quarrying, timber harvesting and shaving hoops from saplings ("hoop poles") to bind the barrels that held Rosendale cement, as well as growing oats and hay, provided employment and income for a reduced population.[18] In 1895, a Rand McNally Atlas gave Samsonville's population as 111.[19] 1940 census records counted 115 persons in Samsonville.[20] In recent decades, urban emigrants and second-home owners have added to the population, though many members of old local families - Barringer, Boice, Quick, Shurter, Van Kleeck, Krom, Haver, Davis, Beesmer, Palen, Roosa and Kelder - are still living in the area.

The tannery, mills, stores, hotel and schoolhouse that once stood in Samsonville are gone, as is Abey Kelder's saloon, celebrated in the local folk song "Kintey Coy at Samsonville"[21] The post office, opened in 1849 with Henry Samson as the first postmaster, closed in 1965 [22] and Samsonville is now included in the Olivebridge ZIP Code, 12461. A handful of older buildings remain, most notably the Samsonville United Methodist Church, built in 1873.[23] In that same year, the Reformed Church of Samsonville, founded in 1851, was taken down and relocated to nearby Krumville.[24] Tetta's Market, a gas station, convenience store, pizzeria and former tire store operated since 1952 by four generations of an Italian-American family, is the hamlet's major commercial business.

Public school students in Samsonville are in the Onteora Central School District and attend Bennett Elementary, Onteora Middle and Onteora High School in the Olive hamlet of Boiceville.

Since 1954, Samsonville has had its own volunteer fire company, Olive Fire Department Company No. 4.[25]

References
  1. "Samsonville, New York". Geographic Names Information System. United States Geological Survey.
  2. "town.olive.ny.us/history/175th-anniversary/historical-quilt/".
  3. The Mettacahonts is a tributary of Rochester Creek, which in turn flows into Rondout Creek, a tributary of the Hudson River. The Munsee name was Magtigkenigkonk, which older locals rendered as Mattekhonk, Matticum, Markham or Markin's Creek or Kill. "Robert S. Grumet, Beyond Manhattan: A Gazetteer of Delaware Indian History Reflected In Modern-Day Place Names, New York State Museum, 2016, p. 19" (PDF)."1974 interview with Mrs. Esther Kelsey, née Shurter, by historian Bob Steuding". "Camp Shady Rest postcard".
  4. "Tanning in the Catskills". January 20, 2016. The author of a 1964 note on Samsonville history in the Kingston Daily Freeman wrote that the tannery had been built in 1831 but gave the owners before Pratt and Samson as "Hammond and Edson." Stoddard Hammond was a major tannery owner elsewhere in New York and in Pennsylvania."Kingston Daily Freeman, 9-25-64" (PDF).
  5. "Will Plank, Banners and Bugles: A Record of Ulster County, New York and the Mid-Hudson Region in the Civil War, Madison, WI:Centenniel Press, 1972, p. 116".
  6. "Gen Henry Almanzo Samson (1818-1869) - Find A..." www.findagrave.com."Chestnut Street Historic District"."History of the Ulster & Delaware".Bowen, Daniel (1893). "Samuel Penniman memoir in "Family of Griffith Bowen...""."George Watson Pratt bio in Nathaniel Bartlett Sylvester, History of Ulster County, New York, Philadelphia: Everts & Peck, 1880, foonote, p. 156-157".
  7. "Ashokan High Point Hike and Map with picture of benchmark"."USGS 1942 West Shokan topo map".
  8. "Nathaniel Bartlett Sylvester, History of Ulster County, NY, Philadelphia: Everts and Peck, 1880., p. 301".
  9. "Caltopo map of Ashokan High Point".
  10. Haring, Harry Albert (1931). Harry Albert Haring, "Our Catskill Mountains", New York:G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1931, p. 93. ISBN 9781404751248.
  11. "David Stradling, Making Mountains: New York City and the Catskills, Seattle:University of Washington Press, p. 35".. An article in the September 25, 1964 Kingston Daily Freeman maintained that "The Samson tannery during the seasonal period employed from 50 to 150 hands and included teamsters and numerous teams of horses and oxen.""Kingston Daily Freeman, 9-25-64" (PDF).
  12. "Hamilton Child, Gazetteer and Business Directory of Ulster County, N.Y. for 1871-2, Syracuse:Hamilton Child, 1871, p.10".
  13. "Alphonso T. Clearwater, The History of Ulster County, New York, Vol. 2, Kingston: W.J. Van Deusen, 1907, p. 555-6". Lemuel Boice was another pioneer tanner in the Catskills. The Olive hamlet of Boiceville was named for him. His descendants carried on tanning, lumber, bluestone, milling and other businesses in the area.
  14. "Alphonso T. Clearwater (ed.), The History of Ulster County, NY, vol. 1 Kingston, NY:W.J. Van Deusen, 1907, p. 328". "Kingston Daily Freeman, 9-25-64" (PDF). Henry Samson's half-brother Samuel Penniman referred to a fire of 1868 as being the second time the tannery burned "Daniel Bowen, Family of Griffith Bowen..., Jacksonville, FL: Da Costa Printing Co., 1893,p. 259".
  15. "Nathaniel Bartlett Sylvester, History of Ulster County, New York…, Philadelphia:Everts & Peck, 1880, p. 298".
  16. Cazden, Haufrecht and Studer, Folk Songs of the Catskills, Albany: SUNY Press, 1982, p. 637.
  17. "Town of Olive » Historical Quilt". ""Town of Olive 175th Anniversary Celebration," Kingston Daily Freeman, Sunday March 28,1999"., "Kingston Daily Freeman, 9-25-64" (PDF)."1974 interview with Mrs. Esther Kelsey, née Shurter, by historian Bob Steuding"."Nathaniel Bartlett Sylvester, History of Ulster County, NY, Philadelphia: Everts and Peck, 1880., p. 297".
  18. "Introduction," Cazden, Haufrecht, Studer, Folk Songs of the Catskills, Albany:SUNY Press, 1982. "Hudson Valley Guidebook on bluestone quarries".
  19. "roadsidethoughts.com/ny/samsonville-xx-ulster-1890s.htm".
  20. "Ancestry.com 1940 census records".
  21. The lyrics, without melody, were collected from Jerry Van Kleeck and published in Cazden, Haufrecht and Studer, Folk Songs of the Catskills, Albany: SUNY Press, 1982, p. 595.
  22. "NY Postal History..., p. 347" (PDF).Christina Barringer's grocery store operated as a rural station for some time thereafter. Kingston Daily Freeman, February 22, 1965, p. 8.
  23. "Olivebridge and Samsonville UMC".
  24. "Sylvester,History of Ulster County, New York, Philadelphia:Everts & Peck, 1880, p. 300".,"Kingston Daily Freeman, 9-25-64" (PDF).
  25. "History of Olive Fire Department".

Notable people
  • Larry Shurter (1917-2005), midget car and NASCAR race driver, track director of Onteora Speedway in Olivebridge. "Historic Racing".
  • Edwin Dubois Shurter (1863-1946), Professor of Public Speaking in The University of Texas from 1899 to 1923, organizer of The University Interscholastic League "UIL newsletter" (PDF).
  • Sufjan Stevens, singer and songwriter
  • Vernon Chatman, television producer, writer, voice actor, comedian and musician
  • Heather Hitchens, president and CEO, American Theatre Wing
  • Sara Lee, bass player, singer and songwriter
  • Scott Kelder, town of Olive board member[1]
  1. "Town of Olive Boards".
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