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SHANDAKEN, NEW YORK: A PICTORIAL HISTORY
by Lonnie and Ruth Gale
From "The Introduction":
"The Ulster and Delaware Plank Road was a slow, expensive, and outmoded way of transporting all the manufactured goods flowing from the township. Thomas Cornell, a transportation magnate residing in Kingston, supplied the solution. He was a director of the Delaware and Hudson Canal, which transported coal from Pennsylvania to Rondout, a Hudson River Port at Kingston, and at one time he owned the famous Hudson River Dayliner Mary Powell, and a fleet of tugboats. His idea was to build a railroad from Rondout, through the Catskill Mountains to Oswego. It was chartered in 1866 and a stock solicitation began immediately. By the middle of 1869, equipment and material were obtained, and the building of the railroad began. With a warm winter to help, the first train arrived as far west as Phoenicia in June 1870. By the end of 1871, the railroad was running to Highmount at the northwestern end of the town of Shandaken. That year the railroad carried 113,763 passengers and 25,000 tons of freight. The Ulster and Delaware Railroad provided many jobs and a faster, cheaper means of transportation. It started the biggerst industry of all in the Catskills--tourism--which remains the area's largest source of income today.
Hotels and boarding houses had to be built to accommodate the large influx of tourists brought by the railroad. The Tremper Inn (Phoenicia, 1878) and the Grand Hotel (Highmount, 1881) were two of the largest hotels built. James A. Wood was the architect and contractor for both buildings. Meanwhile, rail connections were sought by the huge hotels in neighboring Greene County. The Stony Clove Railroad, a branch of the Ulster adn Delaware, started at Phoenicia in 1881. It reached Hunter in 1882 and Tannersville, Haines Falls, and Kaaterskill in 1883. This narrow-gauge railroad carried 40,000 passengers and 14,000 tons of freight in 1884. Phoenicia had become an important railroad hub in the Catskill Mountains."
Situated in the northwest corner of Ulster County, New York, the Town of Shandaken is today mostly New York State Forest Preserve and offers few employment opportunities for its citizens, but at one time Shandaken prospered as the "most richly productive" township in the county. Lonnie and Ruth Gale, long-time residents of the town and collectors of Shandaken post cards and photographs, have chronicled the rise and fall of its many industries, the coming of the turnpike and the railroad, the growth of tourism, and daily life in its deep valleys from 1800 to 1950.
87 pages, more than 200 illustrations, 8.5 x 11
$17.00 paperback--A Purple Mountain Press original
Copyright © 1999 Purple Mountain Press. All rights reserved.