Between 1803 and 1816, the Kingston Commons were divided up and sold off. Saugerties separated from Kingston and was incorporated as a town in 1811. The following year the state organized a system of district schools, under which the town of Saugerties was divided into 12 districts, according to “The Early History of Saugerties” by Benjamin Myer Brink, published in 1902. The boundaries of what are now the town’s 20-odd hamlets—Mt. Marion, Pine Grove, Katsbaan, and so on—were defined by the early school districts, the number of which probably expanded around the population centers at the time, says Benjamin.
The districts’ borders don’t go very far from the schoolhouses themselves, which are the epicenters of the precincts. The 1875 Beers Atlas of Ulster County shows the West Saugerties schoolhouse at the corner of what is now West Saugerties Rd. and West Saugerties–Woodstock Rd., where it still stands (on a residential property). The boundaries extend along West Saugerties Rd. only about half a mile up Platte Clove past Manorville Rd., and southwest to just below the point where what is now Bach Rd. connects to West Saugerties Rd. Not a lot of real estate.
These days, Smith says, the east boundary of the hamlet runs from West Saugerties Rd., down Band Camp Rd. for a mile and up Van Buskirk Rd. a mile. From there, it encompasses all the land west to the rise of the Catskill Escarpment, from the border with Woodstock to the south and about a mile up Manorville Rd. to the north. This area takes in the fan of fertile soils at the base of the Platte Clove deposited after the last great glacier. All of the hamlet’s land, even up the slopes, had been farmed since the time of the first settlements in the 18th century.
Besides farming, industries in the early days included logging and, according to historian Alf Evers, some quarrying of the region’s renowned bluestone along the lower slopes of Overlook Mountain, predominantly in the 1840s and 1850s; one Saugerties record recounts that bluestone was a multimillion dollar business in the town by 1875. Brink’s history mentions the Shaler tannery in West Saugerties during the first half of the nineteenth century. “All this has passed away with the passing of the hemlock forests,” Brink remarks somewhat mournfully, referring to the crucial role of eastern hemlock as the key tanning agent in the early hide-tanning industry. (In the industry’s 19th century heyday, according to Hugh O. Canham in Northern Woodlands magazine, as many as 64 tanneries operated in the Catskill region, and estimates hold that 70 million hemlock trees were harvested for their bark.)
Dairy farms abounded—Bub Bach worked at Schoonmaker’s dairy—and the Bach family’s farm sold potatoes, calves, and eggs. “Someone from Long Island had a suitcase that held 48 dozen eggs,” Bach says. “We’d fill it and seal it and send it right back to ’em, back and forth every other week or so.”
Residents went down Blue Mountain into the village of Saugerties to work at the paper mill, which opened in 1827, and the iron mill, which Brink notes operated from the 1820s to the 1880s. Some of the quarried stone also went down to the village, to Malden or, via what is now Rt. 212, to the Saugerties dock, according to Benjamin. (Bub Bach’s grandfather worked the Cuppy Quarry at the top of Platte Clove.) A sawmill, gristmill, and cider mill also kept locals employed. Starting in the 1820s and through the 19th century, many skilled immigrants—English and Irish laborers—came to work the quarries and the iron and paper mills and settled in the town, some moving up into the hamlet.
Hunting was another big activity. An August 1979 article about Bub Bach’s father, Charlie, in “Toodlum Tales” (a town paper run by Benjamin and others in the late 1970s and early 1980s) describes a bear cub that Bub brought home and kept until “Teddy” started roughing up the house. “We did a lot of hunting,” Bub Bach says. “Rabbit, squirrel, partridge, deer, bear. And people don’t realize we’ve got wolves. In the ’70s I saw something in the woods, thought it was a dog. It started to snarl and I shot it and took it to the DEC (state Department of Environmental Conservation). It was an Eastern brush wolf.”
“West Saugerties is something of an enigma,” Smith says. “It wasn’t until the nineteen-teens and twenties that it became that community.”
