They are names carved into the landscape of the Hudson Valley — DuBois, Bevier, Crispell, Hasbrouck — familiar to us as founders, landholders, and pillars of colonial life. But before they were patentees, they were refugees. Driven from their homelands by war, religious persecution, and political upheaval in seventeenth-century Europe, the French-speaking Walloon and Huguenot […]
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, […]
The Ukrainian story in America is one of the great untold immigration narratives — waves of people who left their homeland under pressure of poverty, political upheaval, and persecution, and found their way to communities across the United States, including to places that might seem surprising. Ulster County is one of those places. Since the […]
The Irish story in Ulster County is older, deeper, and more politically charged than most people realize. Long before the Great Famine sent waves of desperate emigrants across the Atlantic, Irish men and women were already arriving in this region — drawn by the promise of work on the Delaware and Hudson Canal, by land, […]
When Italian immigrants arrived in Ulster County in the late 19th and early 20th centuries — to build the Ashokan Reservoir, to work the quarries, to put down roots in Kingston and the surrounding communities — they brought with them more than tools and ambitions. They brought their music. From the emotionally charged working-class opera […]
Long before the 1969 festival made it a household name, Woodstock was already a community shaped by arrivals. Artists came first, drawn by the light and the landscape, settling into a quiet rural town and quietly unsettling it. Then came the musicians, the seekers, the back-to-the-landers — wave after wave of people who came for […]
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 […]
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 […]
For roughly forty years, IBM shaped the rhythm of life in Ulster County — drawing people in from across the country and around the world, and eventually sending them away again. But the IBM story isn't just an economic one. Every person who arrived brought with them their own perspectives, interests, and cultural lives, and […]
For generations, Ulster County's cement industry drew workers and families from across the country and around the world, transforming the Mid-Hudson Valley through migration, labor, and community-building. The ruins it left behind aren't just industrial archaeology — they are the physical residue of lives lived, communities formed, and an economy that boomed, busted, and disappeared. […]
