Above the rich farmland of the Esopus Valley, on the hillsides of Hurley Mountain that most people pass without a second glance, two remarkable communities took root. In the decades before emancipation, free Black folks, working class whites and descendants of the Munsee Esopus purchased land at Lapala – building homes, raising families, and creating a self-sustaining multi-racial community that would endure through the Civil War, the Depression, and well into the 20^th century. The places they called home had names: Lapala, and later Eagle’s Nest.

This program traces the full arc of that story — from the forced migration of enslaved Africans to Ulster County under Dutch and English colonial rule, the displacement of most Esopus peoples into the Revolution, and the arrival of immigrant tenant-farmers, through the gradual emergence of free Black and mixed landowners claiming a place of their own. Drawing on deeds, census records, oral histories, photographs, and the memories of descendants who still live in the area today, Erin von Holdt, Kate Hymes, and Rob Sweeney, bring this layered, largely untold chapter of Ulster County history into the light.  It is a story of arrival, survival, and families — some of whom still call Ulster County home.

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This event is free, but seating is limited—please reserve your spot in advance.
We suggest a donation of $15 to support the Sunday Salon Series and the work of the Ulster County Historical Society. You can contribute online when you RSVP or donate at the event itself via cash, check, or credit card.

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About the Presenters

Erin von Holdt-Gilbert is a local historian, genealogist, and fiber artist based in the Hurley-Marbletown area. She serves as Chair of the Hurley Heritage Society Rev250, Contributing Historian for the Dr. Margaret Wade-Lewis Center for Black History and Culture, President of the Friends of the Marbletown Cemetery, and a member of both the Marbletown Historic Preservation Commission and the Ulster Garden Club. Her deep roots in the region and her work tracing the lives of its earliest and least-documented residents make her one of Ulster County’s most important grassroots historians.

Kate Hymes is a writer, poet, and the inaugural Ulster County Poet Laureate, appointed by County Executive Jen Metzger in 2023. A New Paltz resident, she has led Wallkill Valley Writers workshops for over twenty years — writers who have worked with her have called her the story doula. Her poems have appeared in national and regional anthologies, most recently Mightier: Poets for Social Justice (Calling All Poets, 2020). She serves as Vice President of the Board of the Dr. Margaret Wade-Lewis Center for Black History and Culture, and is currently working on a body of poems inspired by the lives of free and enslaved people of African descent in New Paltz and Ulster County. In her own words: “I want to be a griot who writes poems and tells the stories that keep the ancestors alive.”

Robert Sweeney is the Town of Ulster Historian, a past president of the Hudson Valley Vernacular Architecture organization, and a longtime Elder of the Old Dutch Church in Kingston. A Bard College alumnus with deep ties to the county’s stone house tradition, he has spent decades as an architectural historian and estate manager, and is known locally as an authority on Colonial-era Ulster County structures and their histories — as well as, by his own proud admission, a dedicated show chicken breeder.