A Catskill Catalog by Bill Birns

So, I’m driving to Albany, going to see a movie – there are a lot of high quality, grown-up movies out right now, but, living in the Catskills, you have to travel a bit to see them. I decide to take a cross-country route to the Capital District, looking for a little mountain adventure on a gray, ground-hog’s-seen-his-shadow late winter day.

In the late 1800s, “the best known and most reliable guide” in the Catskills, was James W. Dutcher of the Big Indian-Oliverea Valley. So stated the Commemerative Biographical Record of Ulster County, published in 1896.

I was amused a few years back by a cover story in New York magazine. The August 2003 article was about the Catskills’ second-home real estate boom that followed the horrible events of September 2001, when hundreds of New Yorkers discovered the Catskills and many bought homes and acreage here in the mountains.

In 1883, one of the richest men in America bought 60 Catskill Mountain acres to build a summer colony for his extended family. Charles Fleischmann was a 32-year-old master distiller and yeast production superintendent on the estate of an Austrian nobleman when he first visited the United States in 1866. He came to New York City to attend the wedding of his sister Josephine.

When the first January inauguration took place in Washington, D.C., this part of the Catskills was roiling in resentment, anger, and neighbor-against-neighbor ill feeling. It was January 20, 1937.