The schoolhouse on a 1918 postcard
“There came the big day” when the schools centralized, says Fellows, who remembers going, at the start of seventh grade in the mid-1950s, to the high school at what is now Lawrence M. Cahill Elementary School on Main St. “It was very different,” she says. “But all the other children came from other one-room schoolhouses, so everyone experienced the same culture shock.”
Centralization was not an evolutionary event. “We were in favor of consolidating, though we had reservations,” says Post, 89, who was one of the West Saugerties representatives on the centralization committee. “We didn’t rush into it. You do what you think is the right thing at the time.” But, she adds, “You go from the heart as well as the head. Of course we liked the old school, and we had a very good teacher, a real crackerjack, but it (centralization) had to happen, because of transportation and other reasons. But as far as education was concerned, we lost something.”
Fellows adjusted to attending school in the village and was in the third full class to graduate from Saugerties High School in 1961. Still, she says, “There is nothing like it today, the way it was then. When I close my eyes at night, I think about all the wonderful times.”
The Blue Mountain Church, whose current building dates from around 1850, also has long been a place of tradition. Brink’s history says that Henry Ostrander, when serving at the Katsbaan and Blue Mountain churches, alternated between preaching in Dutch and in English, with Dutch becoming less and less frequent as the older generations passed on. “The last Dutch sermon in the town of Saugerties was preached at the Blue Mountain Church about 1886 by its pastor, the Rev. Abram G. Lansing, and was thoroughly enjoyed by his many parishioners who were able to understand it,” Brink declares.
Sally Ann Zollo, who was baptized at the Blue Mountain Church in 1941 as Sally Ann Lamouree, says the church was a hub for family and community when she was growing up. Zollo’s parents were active members. Her mother, Lillian, was church organist and Sunday school teacher and her father, Henry, was a member of the consistory. (He taught for several years in the West Saugerties and Manorville one-room schools before attaining the office of assessor; in 1929 he was elected supervisor.) Her maternal grandfather, Edward Myer, would hitch his horse, with sled or wagon, inside the long lean-to shed beside the church in a spot that had a plaque bearing his name.
Now a full-time organist at the church (where Marie Post was organist for many years before her), Zollo says she is “blessed to support the church with music.” She remembers the Cheerful Workers, the church ladies’ organization; they made quilts, put on fundraiser suppers for all comers and arranged yard sales. A big summer fair that drew folks from Albany and New York City was set up in the shed that held her grandfather’s horse. While still in existence, the auxiliary has “dwindled,” Zollo says. “We try to keep up the fair and the suppers. And the Sunday school is growing a bit.”
Rev. James Alley — who, like his long-ago predecessor Ostrander, serves both the Blue Mountain and Katsbaan Reformed churches — also notices that the congregation has shrunk during his decade-long tenure: the consistory has gone down from eight to four, and, “on average, the number of people in attendance has slightly gone down and the average age has slightly gone up.” Going to church, here as elsewhere, he says somewhat wryly, “is not the sort of thing that people want to do.”
In West Saugerties’ heyday, however, going to church was more than something people did. They came in such droves that they almost literally beat a path to one church door. That church was the Our Lady of the Mountain Roman Catholic chapel, built in 1940 on what is now West Saugerties Road “to accommodate summer visitors to the popular bungalow region of the town,” according to the Town of Saugerties Historic Resources Survey of 2005. Shortly after the church opened, Bub Bach recalled, “There was no road there then. The county put a road straight up through Hogsback”—the vernacular name of the stretch up toward Platte Clove—“for the Catholic church. You couldn’t drive up that road during the war because it was so crowded with people walking to church.”
Sally Zollo says the congregations from the two churches got along well. “There were no problems that I can think of,” she says. “All were welcome in our community. Sometimes Catholics would come to our church.”
Wendy Brown now lives in the former Catholic chapel, which had been abandoned for six years when she bought it 34 years ago. (It closed when St. John the Evangelist Church opened on Route 212 in Centerville in the 1960s.) The old organ still sits up in what had been the choir loft (now used for storage); the 18-foot ceilings in the 2,100-square-foot space that held the pews makes the place “very hard to heat,” Brown says. A few heavily leaded, stained-glass windows remain in the house, along the staircase and in the old nave and the altar space that is now the kitchen and dining area.
Brown, a glass artist, says the front of the building used to look more like a church than it does now, and people would stroll in thinking it was still a chapel. “I’d turn around and there’d be strangers in my living room,” she chuckles. “When my daughter was in grammar school, her friends’ parents would come and point out which stained glass windows their families had donated.” Brown’s husband, Bob Leddy, adds that people also would stop in seeking alms or looking for a priest. “And it took many years for the local kids to stop hanging out on the back steps, thinking it was still an abandoned church.”
The place retains something of a church motif: the huge marble kitchen counter is from an altar at a church in Phoenicia that was getting rid of it. “But,” says Brown, pointing to a large crack down the width of the thick, white marble, “they broke it first because it was no longer going to be used for something holy.”
While schooling and religion in West Saugerties have changed with the times, Post and others hope that their legacy is not gone. “When I first went to Blue Mountain Church, I was so shy, and now I regret I didn’t talk more,” Post recalls. “We need to keep in touch with the older people there, because we’ve lost so much of that history.”
