On a recent cold morning in Saugerties, the sidewalks seemed unpopulated by anyone who was not my friend, her son, and me, but inside every shop in that village we found paying customers and diners inside each restaurant and coffeeshop. It was quietly bustling, even at 11:00 a.m.
Saugerties covers about a dozen city blocks with restaurants, retail shops, a major local bookseller, a classic vaudeville-era theater. Its history, which is still under construction, stretches back three centuries.
The histories of our upstate communities often reflect the histories of the different industries that once dominated each community and then moved on. Saugerties hosted several different industries as it grew.
Through the late 1600s through the 1700s, Saugerties was mostly a mill town: lumber and paper. Paper mills were still major employers into the 1970s. The Esopus Creek flows north from Kingston to Saugerties and then to the Hudson River, and its steady flow along with several waterfalls on the way down to the Hudson supplied all the power that was needed. There was also an iron works plant along the Esopus in the 1820s that produced thousands of tons of “hoop iron” each year for barrels. That may sound like a niche market to our ears, but it was as necessary as the barrels themselves.
As the English, Dutch, and German immigrants started to populate the area east of the Catskill Mountains through the 1700s, the settlers noticed that the local stone, a bluish gray sandstone found in long narrow bands through the fields and hills near Saugerties, could be used to mark boundary corners on farmland. Because it is hard but not brittle and because it resists weathering, the bluestone started to be used for headstones on local graves.
By the mid-1800s, entrepreneurs had opened several resorts in the Catskill Mountains for New York City residents eager to leave the city’s sweltering heat each summer. Those residents had started to demand and build better paving and infrastructure back home in the metropolis: the bluestone found here was perfect for the streets of New York City. For decades, bluestone quarry-owners sent horse-drawn wagons loaded with the valuable stone slabs south to the city and the more successful ones bought sloops to carry even larger loads down the Hudson. Over the last 175 years, many millions have walked on Catskills bluestone without visiting the Catskills.
The area around Saugerties has many former bluestone quarries that look like snapshots of the day that quarry operations ceased, even if that day was a hundred years ago. Slabs and stone fragments sit there unshipped to New York City, unpurchased, unwanted.
And then there is Opus 40. Built in one of the abandoned bluestone quarries near Saugerties by one man, Harvey Fite, Opus 40 is a contemporary American version of Stonehenge or the collection of Easter Island moai.
Fite was a sculptor and fine arts professor at nearby Bard College when he purchased the quarry. Using the rubble that had not become NYC sidewalks, Fite filled one six-and-one-half-acre section with hand-laid circles of bluestone paths and ramps, leading nowhere and everywhere, from fifteen feet below the ground level up to the magnificent centerpiece, the obelisk, a nine-ton, three-story-tall single stone, which from different perspectives seems to point at the nearby Catskill Mountains, join with the range, or appear to be the reason the Catskills exist. And Fite did it all alone with ancient techniques. At first intended to be a showcase for his sculpture, over the next thirty-seven years the site itself became Fite’s life work. He died in 1976.
The gentle slope of a meadow faces most of the stone park and is the perfect spot for picnics or to listen to live music: the list of world-famous performers who have filled the spot with live music is a long one, from Pat Metheny to Sonny Rollins to Orleans in previous years to the Sun Ra Arkestra in 2022.
The music and arts spirit that many associate with nearby Woodstock also includes Saugerties: “Big Pink,” where members of The Band resided and recorded The Basement Tapes with Bob Dylan, is near, and Woodstock ’94 was held just outside Saugerties.
Since 2003, HITS Horse Shows, “the leading producer of world-class Hunter/Jumper Horse Shows across America,” has held an annual summer-long championship series in Saugerties, which brings hundreds of competitors and thousands of horse lovers to the area. This year’s series will run from May 19 to September 10.
Saugerties continues to find success for itself just as it has through the decades as it grew from a mill town to a quarry town to an arts town to how it is described on the sign outside exit 20 on the New York State Thruway: “Friendly, Historic Saugerties.” It is a vibrant part of life in Ulster County.
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Mark’s website: http://thegadabouttown.com/