The Hudson Valley and the Catskill Mountains are part of the American imagination, a cauldron for artistic identity and a proving ground for the emergence of personal mechanical mobility. There was Fulton’s steamboat, the early railroads and the earliest tests for automobiles in 1903. And here documented, a 1908 motorcycle endurance run over now familiar roads, but what were once incredibly challenging terrain.

In the 1930s Midget racing cars were run on a quarter-mile clay track off Cooper Lake Road in Bearsville.