When the first waves of Dutch, British, and Scottish settlers arrived in Ulster County, they brought with them more than tools and ambitions — they brought their lodges. Freemasonry functioned as a kind of invisible architecture of colonial and early American society: a fraternal system that gave immigrant communities a framework for trust, civic participation, […]
He arrived in New York as a refugee — a Sephardic Jew fleeing religious persecution in Europe — and became one of the most consequential merchants of eighteenth-century colonial America. In 1716, Luis Moses Gomez purchased land near Marlboro in what was then Ulster County, positioning himself as a vital intermediary between Hudson Valley farmers […]
Every instrument tells a migration story. The Appalachian mountain dulcimer — sweet-voiced, lap-held, distinctly American — traces its roots across the Atlantic to the Scottish hummel, the Norwegian langeleik, the German scheitholt, and the French épinette des Vosges. The Scotch-Irish and German immigrants who carried these instruments to the New World in the eighteenth and […]
