Inside Ulster County's Archives • with Eddie Moran and Jonathan Palmer

Transcription by Jerome Kazlauskas

[00:00:00] Eddie Moran: We're not trying to tear down one group to bring someone else up. The story that was being told, which included that one group, was not accurate across the board. In certain areas, it was not accurate because it didn't even endeavor to include groups of people that were here, but even the history that was being done just about the Europeans, which was incredibly selective, wasn't being done accurately.

[00:00:27] Brett Barry: Edward Moran III [he goes by Eddie] is a descendant of the region's Huguenot and Dutch colonists, and as Ulster County's newly appointed historian, he's well aware that history doesn't stop there. Before his appointment with the county, he was a tour guide and interpretation manager at Historic Huguenot Street. Moran is a 2020 graduate of SUNY New Paltz, where this podcast just so happens to find its production interns, so I called on Izzy Schuyler and Ruby Zuckerman to join me at the Ulster County Hall of Records in Kingston, New York. I asked Izzy and Ruby to come up with some questions for this fellow New Paltz alum, and they didn't disappoint. The questions they came up with were foundational to this interview. After our chat with Eddie, stay tuned for part two of this episode for a fascinating tour of Ulster County's Expansive Archives with Historian Eddie Moran and Archivist Jonathan Palmer. Believe me, you don't wanna miss it, but first here's Eddie.

[00:01:38] Eddie Moran: My name is Eddie Moran. I am the newly appointed Ulster County historian, so municipal historians are actually a state-mandated position. Every town, really every village, every county is required by law to have a historian.

[00:01:53] Brett Barry: So I think a lot of people associate the role of a historian with, let's say, a gray-haired individual?

[00:01:59] Eddie Moran: Yeah.

[00:02:00] Brett Barry: Can I ask how old you are?

[00:02:01] Eddie Moran: I'm 26.

[00:02:03] Brett Barry: What has drawn you to history?

[00:02:05] Eddie Moran: You know, that's a question I can answer in a bunch of ways, I think, and honestly, I think that's a question that I think over in my own head still all the time, and I sometimes come to different answers, but, you know, as far as I can remember, I've always been interested in history in general. It kind of strikes an interest that also, you know, rises in other areas like nature and the environment of just why questions of wanting to understand kind of how things work and how things came to be the way they are now, and I think that growing up in Ulster County, I grew up in the kind of area around New Paltz, the Wallkill River Valley. You grow up really with a sense of histories all around you.

[00:02:42] Brett Barry: What do you think a young historian brings to the table?

[00:02:46] Eddie Moran: That's a fantastic question. I mean, in one sense I think energy and, you know, a commitment to this role that I think lends itself to long-term goals and to, you know, projects that take a great deal of time. I think there's maybe a parallel to be had even with the type of training you get as a doctoral student in history, where your first years or a large portion of your first years are just getting familiar with the scholarship that has already been done on your chosen research topic, and that was something I had to do at Huguenot Street in my first months: familiarize myself with all that had already been written about the local history of the period that they interpreted there, and so there's a degree of that. People are really starting to revisit traditional narratives and interpretations of history and, you know, sometimes I shy away from the word revise so much that I like to say they are completing them because I think people are very comfortable, and, you know, we know as a field really that a lot of the history that had previously been done was not complete.

[00:03:44] Brett Barry: So you bring up an interesting point here, and your bio describes you as a descendant of Huguenot and Dutch settlers. How does that ancestry inform how you interpret and disseminate Ulster County history?

[00:03:56] Eddie Moran: Yeah, so, you know, I think that my own upbringing really is a good example of the way that history used to previously be incomplete, so as I was growing up, you know, thankfully in the state curriculum here students are required to learn about local history, but still, you know, when I think back to the elementary school lessons I had on Indigenous people, what I recall is lessons about the Haudenosaunee, and they're very present in my mind, and I can't readily recall learning about the people that lived here, an entirely different cultural group whose language, the Lenape, is as far from Haudenosaunee as it is from English, and so that, I think, you know, gives you one sense of that way it's incomplete, but I also grew up going on field trips to places like Historic Huguenot Street. I was blessed to have parents that also really encouraged this level of history and would take me on weekends to local historic sites, and I have family that are also interested in history. I have an uncle who's a social studies teacher. You know, I was quite young when he first told me that the history I was hearing at Historic Huguenot Street was not complete at a time when there were staff members and researchers there who were uncovering and were starting to promote more inclusive and accurate history there, but it still hadn't kind of permeated the full organization and story. You know, my own upbringing in the ancestry gives me, I think, almost a sense of responsibility. The descendants of the Lenape people today [their nations, their governments] reside today in Ontario, Oklahoma, and Wisconsin. I'm descended from the colonizers that took that land from them, and here I sit in Kingston, New York, the same place where they took that land some three or four hundred years ago. The story of my ancestors has always been told. Doesn't everybody deserve that same right?

[00:05:38] Brett Barry: How are you working with other local organizations and entities to broaden our collective perspective of history?

[00:05:43] Eddie Moran: Yeah, in one sense, just giving them time and resources—even just one person full-time being dedicated to research—is more than many local historical societies can say they have. They're really built [many of them] on just dedicated volunteers who are, you know, generously lending their own time to this work, and so, you know, one example is I'm working right now with the Ulster County Historical Society in Marbletown, and with their, you know, incredible support, I've been documenting references to enslaved and Native people in the account books of the head of household in the house that now comprises the county historical society. I have time here each day in my job to be doing research like that to then plan a talk or a presentation... give that to them, but also, you know, I work with other organizations and in more advisory capacity as well, and sometimes it's a matter of tying them all together. The account books are preserved in a different repository. They are preserved and held at Historic Huguenot Street, but they were created, and they're relevant to the history of a different museum, the Ulster County Historical Society, and so sometimes, you know, some of my work is also bringing those organizations together, cultivating a network of historians here that can support one another too.

[00:06:54] Brett Barry: Let's backtrack a little bit. What are the roles of a county historian? I know there are quite a few.

[00:06:58] Eddie Moran: That's a great question. You know, one of the roles is to just continuously research and promote and share the history of the county to be doing research from primary sources both here but also held in other repositories and to do research talks to bring that information to the public. I mentioned another responsibility, which is cultivating and supporting a network of local historians. Sometimes I kinda refer to it as like history infrastructure around the county, but it's also providing research help to the public as well. You know, sometimes that can be a doctoral student or a professor at a university who's working on a specific research topic relevant to our area, and sometimes, and I think one of the most rewarding instances is, you know, the smaller questions that an individual might have about their own ancestry. Someone who might have been raised in Kingston or had a family member who lived here that they visited a few times as a kid. Can you help me find out who my grandfather that lived in Kingston was? Can you help me find out more about him and more about his life? And, you know, truth be told, that that oftentimes is way quicker than a lot of the research I'm doing on my own, and yet it has an immediate, and I think a really outsized, impact.

[00:08:04] Brett Barry: And you can just do that. That's a part of your job, and I can anyone in the public could call and ask you for this research.

[00:08:10] Eddie Moran: Absolutely, and with the huge amount of emails and requests we get, sometimes it can take us a week or two to get back to you, but yeah, if we're here, we will help you.

[00:08:19] Brett Barry: If I wanted to know a little bit more about the history of the property that my house is on, is that something that you would be able to help me with?

[00:08:25] Eddie Moran: Absolutely, and that especially is, you know, almost kinda similar to some of the work that's done when you buy a new house: it's title searches. It's, you know, creating a chain of deeds, going back to the earliest landowner, but then we also can help with things like newspaper references. Our archivist, John Palmer, also has those moments when we're facilitating research. For example, he has a guide that he created that is how to research your house history, and so sometimes we have formal guides we can provide. Sometimes it's me, you know, kind of less formally talking with someone, meeting with someone to talk them through how they would do that research.

[00:08:57] Brett Barry: Great, I would love to schedule some time with you guys to figure that out. What's your sense at this point of the breadth of these archives?

[00:09:06] Eddie Moran: It's a bit daunting, you know, truth be told, and, you know, thankfully none of the records are really out of reach, and that's something that I think we are really striving now to make clear to people is that, you know, John is doing incredible work with our archives division in digitizing records and making them fully available. I'm working actively in doing research to bring the information from these records to the public, but that said, "Anyone is also free to make an appointment with John to come in to look at those records themselves," and even if, you know, we haven't gotten to digitizing a record, one example that I can shout out right away that's deeply important is the records from the Ulster County Courthouse, which was in New Paltz in the 20th century. That was a place where, you know, not only people that were in poverty but, you know, people in the margins of society who were oftentimes cast aside. Many people that were cast aside and on the margins found themselves there. People passed away there, or if they passed away elsewhere and were cast aside, they were buried there. We do have an interpretive publication exhibit online about that history. We are working in the next few years to digitize those records. We also, you know, encourage and invite anyone from the public who wants to see those records to do that research, to reach out to us, you know, as soon as possible to come in to view those originals too.

[00:10:22] Brett Barry: Materials that are online, how do people access that?

[00:10:25] Eddie Moran: Both are our kind of digitized archives: the digital records themselves that are scanned, as well as the archives of a number of incredible local museums and organizations, so SUNY New Paltz, towns like New Paltz, the Ulster County Historical Society, and I could go on. I'll use this same platform, which is nyheritage.org, and you can navigate that platform by, you know, you can do it geographically. You can navigate it by a list of organizations. It's incredible.

[00:10:54] Brett Barry: As a newbie in this role, do you have a list of priorities?

[00:11:00] Eddie Moran: Yeah, you know, I think that there's a responsibility to not just tell an accurate and inclusive story of Native history, but I think there is a responsibility to, you know, begin supporting and, you know, like, fully incorporating the perspectives of the descendants of those Native people, and so, you know, it's a story that we're proud to be delving into and that we're proud to be expanding the narrative to include a better idea of what the Native experience here was, of just how devastating and colonization in this area was, but it's a story that I think is not necessarily best told by me. They are the best keepers of that knowledge, and, you know, no one can better share their perspectives than they themselves. You know, they live in these, to a degree, faraway places. As a result of the actions of the colonists who created the government that I work for. And so I think there's a responsibility to not just tell that story accurately, but to do a better job in supporting those individuals and facilitating their access to the land where that history took place and to the remnants of that material history here, so that's a goal, and expanding the narrative out to include all peoples, yeah, so those are two of the many goals I can shout out right away, yeah.

[00:12:11] Brett Barry: We talked about gray-haired historians at the beginning of this conversation. This seems like a job you can gray into. Can you see yourself in this position for a while?

[00:12:21] Eddie Moran: Absolutely, I almost kinda laugh because my 19-year-old self would probably be horrified hearing me say that, and this was not something that I saw myself researching or working in until really pretty recently, until right before I started at Huguenot Street, and so I studied history. I was very interested in the 1960s and the New Left movement in the U.S. I studied Irish history, especially 20th-century Irish history, and those were histories that I think gave me a sense of, you know, not just that telling those stories was impactful and relevant to today and to improving the world that we live in, but they were stories of people that they themselves were being impacted by changing worlds and that they were trying to fight against those negative changes and to better the world that they were living in, and I didn't see a sense of that so much with local history. I still didn't have a sense of the scale of something like enslavement here or just, you know, how rich and fascinating and important Native history here is, and it wasn't until I mentioned, you know, earlier scholars at places like Huguenot Street started to bring that history to the forefront, and so I worked there as a tour guide at a time when my predecessor. She was beginning to work in that research from those early scholars into the interpretation, and immediately I saw, oh wait, this history that I had discounted and kind of wrote off my whole life, this local history. This is a place where, you know, I can't think of a history where there's more important work to be done in expanding the narrative and where there's more of an impact to be had.

[00:13:47] Brett Barry: So the limited scope you were exposed to as a younger person was what kind of drove you away from being so interested in local history, but then realizing that it goes a lot deeper?

[00:13:56] Eddie Moran: I really appreciate that question because I may have even been kind of simplifying the issue a bit through this conversation. I keep referring to, you know, expanding the narrative or, you know, you just rephrase that so well as, you know, kind of a narrower scope, and that is part of it. It's just, you know, people weren't endeavoring to [even] try and tell the stories of marginalized peoples, but I also would say that even the discriminatory history being done wasn't accurate, and I find that that's really important because we're not trying to tear down one group to bring someone else up. The story that was being told, which included that one group was not accurate across the board. In certain areas, it was not accurate because it didn't even endeavor to include groups of people that were here, but even the history that was being done just about the Europeans, which was incredibly selective, wasn't being done accurately, and so I think it's really a matter of trying to tell a more accurate story across the board for all these groups of people.

[00:14:54] Brett Barry: So are your parents very proud that their son is now the Ulster County historian?

[00:14:58] Eddie Moran: I hope so, yeah, I think so for sure. You know, like I said, I'm blessed to grow up in a family that is very interested in history and a family that, you know, I think cares a lot about two things that can maybe be taken for granted in a time like 2025, and that's just continued learning. I grew up in a family of people that love to learn and continued to love to learn right through the end of their lives, and so I think that's one big part of it, and I think the other part is, you know, a sense of wanting to leave the world better than when you came into it, and so, you know, I like to think I'm working towards those goals and making them proud. I know at least that I'm also having an impact too because whether you actually have, like, you know, familial, like, blood descendancy genealogy, going back to these earlier figures from our history, we all have social descendancy, I think, you know, we all kind of inherit the legacy of the people that lived here and created the communities we live in now, and so I think that, you know, there's a sense that we should all want that to be the kind of best, most accurate, and inclusive narrative possible, so yeah, I like to think I'm kind of trying to make everybody proud.

[00:16:00] Brett Barry: In just a moment, Historian Eddie Moran and Archivist Jonathan Palmer guide us on a tour of the Ulster County Hall of Records, including some rare archival treasures. This is Kaatscast: The Catskills Podcast.

[00:16:17] Campbell Brown: Kaatscast is supported by The Mountain Eagle, covering Delaware, Greene, and Schoharie counties, including brands for the local region such as The Windham Weekly,Schoharie News, Cobleskill Herald, and Catskills Chronicle. For more information, call (518) 763-6854 or email mountaineaglenews@gmail.com.

[00:16:38] Brett Barry: If you'd like to sponsor the show, let us know. You can reach me directly on the contact page at kaatscast.com.

[00:16:50] Jonathan Palmer: My name's John Palmer. I'm the archivist for the County of Ulster.

[00:16:54] Eddie Moran: And we are standing here in the Ulster County Hall of Records on Foxhall Avenue in Kingston, New York.

[00:16:59] Jonathan Palmer: We actually run three divisions out of this building, so the Ulster County Records Center we operate under the umbrella of the Ulster County Clerk's Office, so the Ulster County Clerk's Office runs the recording office, the DMV, and the Hall of Records, so it's a lot of different functions under one umbrella, and within the Hall of Records, we have our records management team, which is kind of run out of this front end of the building here. This is kind of our admin section of the world. We also have an archives program, which I'm in charge of, which is kind of the bridge between the public and the disparate historic record series we have in our care and a micrographics division that's doing a lot of the reformatting work to convert materials to digital to convert materials to microform to make durable lasting copies of those objects for public access and for long-term storage. A lot of people are surprised to hear that we still do microfilming, but microfilm has a shelf life of 600 years and JPEGs do not. We're gonna step through and walk into the main storage. Walking through the loading dock, we'll step right through here.

[00:18:06] Brett Barry: Jonathan and Eddie led us into the 40,000 box storage facility where boxes of paper records towered over our heads. It's kind of like, well, I'll let Jonathan say it.

[00:18:20] Jonathan Palmer: Everybody immediately, whenever they walk into this room, they like jump right to Raiders of the Lost Ark. They think of the end of Indiana Jones, where the crate gets put on a shelf, and that's pretty much what we do here. We don't have the actual Ark of the Covenant, but, you know, we've got lots of other cool things, so main storage here, there's a whole records management team. There were some guys standing just inside the entrance when we walked in who are responsible for the day-to-day fielding of requests, so we've got like 60 county departments, a bunch of other municipalities that store with us from Ulster. We also store for several other adjoining counties in this section of the state, and we'll be receiving and fielding reference requests from them, so like the district attorney's office will say, "Hey, we need this old case file, and that old case file is on a shelf somewhere in here, barcoded, ready to go," so from the time they request it to the time we get it off the shelf, it's usually about like... 20 minutes turnaround if it's a rush job, so we have couriers who will bring that material physically to other county departments on request. We can also fulfill digital reference requests, and this is all just for the internal stuff. This has nothing to do with what the archives is doing on a day-to-day basis.

[00:19:34] Brett Barry: How much of this is digitized, and what's the importance of keeping paper files, as you said before about microfilm that has a shelf life of 600 years versus a JPEG? Who knows? Is it the same with paper versus digital?

[00:19:51] Jonathan Palmer: Well, yeah, so, I mean, paper's like us. If you store paper the way you store yourself, you know, 65 degrees with a comfortable humidity, it's gonna last a very long time. It's kind of a known commodity in that sense, so, you know, it's a balance of process versus product, so when you look at all these shelves here, the important thing to remember first off is that not everything that's on these shelves is gonna get saved forever, which surprises a lot of people when they come to, like, an archives and records management facility. You think, "Oh, they just keep adding boxes to the shelves until eventually you run outta space," but our records management program here at the County of Ulster, which was started in the late eighties, was part of a big push across the state to get records management programs running to, you know, start making judgment calls in a very precise and efficient way about what needed to and what didn't need to be saved, so we follow something now called LGS-1, which is the latest New York state retention schedule for local governments, and what that guide tells us is, you know, when somebody brings in a box that contains, like, receipts from filling up a delivery van, it says, "Oh yeah, you only have to save those for like a month," but all of those personnel files, you're gonna keep them for like 30 years after that person has left the county, you know, and you're gonna keep all the materials that go to the recording office, the Clerk's Office. Those get kept forever, and so what you end up with is this weird balance of a calculation of space over time that you're using, so as things come in, some stuff's going out, and some stuff is staying. There are laws that govern when materials come in that we can reformat things and destroy the original and make the reformatted version [the record copy], so a lot of stuff that has like 30- or 50-year retentions, it's a lot more economical space-use-wise for us to reformat those things, treat the reformatted thing like making it into a roll of microfilm instead of 60 boxes. It makes more sense for us to make that roll of microfilm and save that than to save all the paper. A lot of what you're looking at here, these boxes, these inactive records that we've got here, we don't really retain intellectual control over most of the materials here, so if you look, like, you know, there are boxes from the finance department, there are boxes from social services, there are boxes from the DA's office. We can't just go into those boxes and say, "Oh yeah, let's scan all this stuff today, and, you know, throw out the originals." Those are still governed and controlled by the entity that generated them. We just have to do the storage for material created by the Clerk's Office, you know, which we've been doing since the 1680s. We have a lot more control over that because those are records generated by our department, and generally everything that we get in is a public record.

[00:22:44] Brett Barry: There's a difference between, like, government records and archives, or it's the same thing, like historic archives versus what is...

[00:22:51] Jonathan Palmer: Well, yeah, you know, and this is the interesting thing, you know, a lot of the materials in here could be FOIL'd by a member of the public, so Freedom of Information Law. You can actually request documents through Freedom of Information Laws in New York State, so you fill out a FOIL request for a specific type of document based on your use case, like everything from lawsuits to investigative journalism. Ulster County, the Clerk's Office, decided years ago, you know, we've got a lot of stuff that, first off, nobody even knows is here to FOIL it, like we've got court of general sessions from the 1750s. Also, why would you make somebody FOIL that? So we'll create an archives division, which was started in 2000, actually. That was essentially our decision to try to work to make the historic materials, the things that we have here prior to 1911, prior to the New York State Capitol Fire. The really amazing early stuff that testifies broadly to the history of the county, we decided to make an archives program so when the public walks in the door, you aren't met with somebody saying, "Oh well, you have to FOIL that." You're met by somebody who says, "Oh yeah, that's a cool question. Let's break down that question and try to figure out the types of things that are gonna answer that," so, you know, we end up getting a lot of people who come to us requesting assistance with doing research on the history of their houses. We get people who are doing genealogical research on their families. We get people who are, you know, like Eddie. For example, his focus lately has been the study of the lives of two of the earliest enslaved people here in the county and, you know, the remarkable ins and outs of their story.

[00:24:32] Eddie Moran: And so you can imagine, like, those records that are created in the administration of government here in the county. You can imagine just how important the records from the earliest years of the administration of governance from the county are. We're here in Kingston in a community that was founded as early as 1652, and so we have documents, you know, court records from some time period, like the late 17th century, that can give us an exceptional amount of information about that time, and so, you know, the case that John just referenced, for instance, we have a court case from the 1670s that is really exceptional, if not almost kind of unique in New York, in the depth of information it provides us about two enslaved people who are here in Kingston and in Hurley in that period.

[00:25:14] Jonathan Palmer: That's the use case right there, like, so what Eddie just told you about, like, that's not the average reference request that a government archive gets, but because we have this uniquely large amount of historic material, we want to be able to assist and cater to individuals who are trying to answer questions that, you know, inform us more about our own past.

[00:25:34] Eddie Moran: As broad as these archives are, and you guys can get a sense of the scale still, there are many documents that are preserved at other repositories in the county. For the most part, if you are looking to do research, let's say, in an account book from a general store in the 18th century, it still is very likely that you're going to have to go to a local historical repository dedicated to that to get documents that might be more personal in nature or someone's personal financial documents, so we still are kind of skewed towards those government records and the historical records.

[00:26:03] Jonathan Palmer: We're part of a puzzle, yeah, you know, he's great. A historian puts a puzzle together. We're part of that, so...

[00:26:09] Brett Barry: And you mentioned how paper and people like the same conditions. I'm very comfortable in this space. This is the perfect temperature for me.

[00:26:17] Jonathan Palmer: Yeah, because I mean it is. It is a little chilly, but, you know, that kind of helps to keep the humidity at the right temperature. This building was originally a piano wire factory. They made piano wire and pianos here. It wasn't really designed to be a record storage facility, so big square rooms like this with traditional blower systems will create what's called microclimates, so parts of the room will be slightly higher in humidity or slightly higher in temperature, so we actually have big fans that we just plug into the wall to move the air around during the day just to keep everything consistent. Something else I'll mention too: everybody who walks into this space says, "Wow, this is a lot of flammable material!" This part of the building uses a traditional sprinkler system. We have a climate control system that controls temperature and humidity and a sprinkler system that we'll just make these papers wet and surprise a lot of people to know that wet paper is much easier to conserve than no paper, so it's like a worst-case scenario. We never want to have to use a sprinkler system, but the building's protected in that way. The vault, I'll show you guys what we do down there. It's a whole other can of worms.

[00:27:26] Brett Barry: Our hosts led us through the building to a room within a room, the vault, where some of the county's earliest and most important documents sit in wait.

[00:27:38] Jonathan Palmer: So this is the archival vault. This is where the cool stuff is, so I alluded to before the idea that we're providing access to pre-1911 historic materials and that [1911] date is important because that's the date of the New York State Capitol Fire that destroyed a lot of the state's documentary heritage from the revolutionary period in the Young Republic. So the New York State Capitol burns, we lose a bunch of papers, and what that means is that the copies of any of those papers that survive at the county level in all the counties of the state become that much more important to preserve and protect because, in this case, they're some of the only ones left that testify to some of the series that were lost, you know, up in Albany at that fire, so this room is actually a building within the building. This was built separately after the county took this structure over in '97, and unlike main storage, this uses an inert gas fire suppression system, so this big tank here is filled with a type of inert gas compound that if for some reason the alarms were to go off in here, we'd have 30 seconds to get out before these dispersal units in the ceiling dropped a bunch of gas into the room, pushed all the oxygen out, and starved a fire of air. That's a fire suppression system. You just take away one of the things that feeds the fire, and there's no more fire. In this case, it just happens to be something that if you were to stay in the room when it went off, it would also kill you, but, you know, we have to play the long game here with this stuff. We have to choose to use protective systems like this because, you know, in some cases the cost of conserving these materials, if they were damaged by water or other things, would be so prohibitively expensive that we might not be able to undertake it in a reasonable amount of time, so, you know, the types of materials I'm talking about are like this.

[00:29:24] Brett Barry: Jonathan pulls a box off the shelves and sets it on the table.

[00:29:28] Jonathan Palmer: So all of the storage containers in this room are all pH-neutral storage boxes. This just happens to be a heavier-duty one, and within it, you know, we have wrapped up in here a bunch of the earliest records of the county, so this is a tax list, and this right here is the Nicolls Treaty, which ended the Second Esopus War in 1665, so all of these materials that are stored in here were actually conserved years ago by the Northeast Document Conservation Center, so we have a really nice little slip case for this item now, and everybody bulks at me whenever I pull things like this out and I don't have white gloves on, but, you know, white gloves are kind of a thing of the past in the archives world. So long as your hands are clean and dry, you have a lot more dexterity when you're handling fragile objects than you would if you were to have, like, you know, rubber or cotton gloves on, so this is the first page of the Nicolls Treaty, you know, after the first Anglo-Dutch colonists arrived here in the 1650s. Within about a decade, conflict had erupted between them and the Native people of this place, whom we refer to now in the historic record as the Esopus. The reason this conflict erupts is because the Anglo-Dutch colonists show up here. They say, "Wow, look at all this beautiful farmland. We should take this," and the people who had been living here for 10,000 years at that point said, "We'd really like it if you didn't," so this conflict erupts that goes through two phases that are referred to now as the Esopus Wars, taking place from 1659/60 and from 1663/64, and that 1664 date is interesting because not only does the Esopus War end, but Dutch rule over the province of New Netherland ends. The English show up. They take over the colony and make it into New York, and so the first English governor comes to Kingston in 1665 and creates this treaty with the Esopus that requires that the treaty solidifying the peace be renewed in perpetuity going forward, and they do that for about a century afterwards. We also have a wampum belt that was presented at the 12th renewal of the treaty in the 1670s. It's kind of remarkable actually that we have material like this still, but, you know, for a researcher to come and look at this stuff, you know, there are so, so many different things you can infer from this, but the thing that strikes everybody right away is that you have the signatures of the Native representatives on the document itself, so, you know, you think about the evidentiary value of something like this. We're standing now, right now, looking at a document that was present and in the hands of people who, you know, for all intents and purposes we think of as very abstract and distant people. We can't really comprehend them, but this is a very personal moment here. This is something that we can connect to and relate with, and in this way it kind of helps us to unlock that moment in time and connect with people from a different era.

[00:32:31] Brett Barry: Can I assume that this treaty was broken?

[00:32:35] Jonathan Palmer: Yeah, that's actually—and that's something that Eddie can speak to as well—but the long and short of it is yes. You know, so we strike a treaty with the Esopus, and where are the Esopus now? Eddie, where are the Esopus now?

[00:32:47] Eddie Moran: They're in Wisconsin, Oklahoma, and Ontario. They comprise five federally recognized nations that are solely Lenape and the Esopus, being a local subset of the Lenape people, and there is also a nation in Ontario, so a sixth nation that is majority Haudenosaunee people but also includes Lenape people and actually includes the most direct descendants of the Esopus who lived here or many of the most direct descendants. The Lenape people experience a diaspora, really, as a result of this colonization, so we can almost kind of assume that there are descendants of the Esopus in all five of the federally recognized nations, or six, I meant to say, across Ontario, Oklahoma, and Wisconsin, but also something remarkable about this treaty. This was broken, and yet there's also an incredible story with this document of, for generations afterward, attempts to, if not preserve the full thing, preserve the intent of coexistence that I think kind of underlies the treaty itself, and so beyond just the initial treaty there, there is a series of renewals that stretch well into the 18th century, almost up to the revolution. Does it go all the way to the revolution, John?

[00:33:55] Jonathan Palmer: Right to the eve of the revolution, yeah, and it's the revolution, you know, it's the thing that forms our current national identity that leads to the final expulsion of the first people of this place. You know, the reason there are no renewals afterwards is because the very complex, you know, systems of alliances and affiliations that really make the revolution in this region more of a civil war than anything else lead to the expulsion of the people who had aligned themselves with what we think of now broadly as the British cause, but really, you know, you think about here's the Esopus who align themselves with the British. Why are they aligning themselves with the British? Because they're upholding existing treaties. They are recognizing the sovereignty of a neighboring power that they had interacted with for a century at that point. It just happens that that becomes the losing side.

[00:34:50] Eddie Moran: So really it's the British who uphold this treaty and renew it for generations well up until the revolution, and it's really us in independence who break that treaty then, yeah.

[00:35:04] Brett Barry: From, you know, grade school on, we hear about these treaties in the abstract. Here's one sitting on this desk. Do documents like this ever make it to a display case for the public to see, or are they really under lock and key, and you have to kind of request access?

[00:35:19] Jonathan Palmer: We're very excited when we have opportunities to bring these things out, and we have to be careful about bringing these originals out into adverse climates and, you know, exposing them to variables that might cause them harm. You know, you can't just put these out in front of, you know, 50 school kids. We can put the facsimiles of it out. We can put digital objects out on the web, though, so that people can interact with this stuff and spend time with it, so, you know, it's a balance of, you know, recognizing the evidentiary value of the original and making facsimiles available so that people broadly can interact with this without the pages literally crumbling apart from overhandling the rest of the stuff that we're storing in here. For example, if you take a look over on the wall there, we have a notice hanging up on the wall. That's, you know, a notice for the commencement of the condemnation proceedings for the land seizures at the Ashokan Reservoir. We have 30 or so boxes of the trial transcripts of the condemnation proceedings for the creation of the New York City water supply system, and so people are coming to use these and consult these regularly. You know, it's a fascinating tale of, you know, a vision of what public improvement meant and how public improvement and public betterment were practiced at the beginning of the 20th century. It's the story of, you know, a decision that was made to endow millions of people with the best drinking water in the world that also dispossessed people of their homes and changed forever the dynamic of, you know, the central rural heart of Ulster County. The other two really cool collections that we're working on right now that I really have to hype up. The Daily Freeman turned over their photo morgue to us back in 2021, and so 85,000 press photos that we're scanning prints of and, you know, getting ready and uploading onto New York Heritage. The first 5,000 of those photos are live online already, and we were also recently given the photographic collections of Gene Donner, who was a local documentary photographer who decided literally last year that he wanted to make his 19,000-image slide collection available to the public, no questions asked, you know, which is an amazing decision by somebody who's the creator of material to endow people like that with, you know, these things that testified broadly to what our recent past was. Gene took 19,000 Kodachrome II slide films of the Mid and Upper Hudson Valley [the Catskills]. He did all of the photos of urban renewal on the Rondout, showing what these communities were before they were destroyed and the people were displaced—absolutely amazing stuff, and he was just a 20-year-old with a camera when he started. He just decided that change was happening and he needed to document it, and now, because that testifies to such a broad story, you know, a place like ours, this archive, you know, he decided this is the home for these. We'll put these in the care of the Clerk's Office, which has been preserving things for 300 years. They seem to be pretty good at it. As we're digitizing them, they're gonna be available, you know, for researchers to use, you know, they're gonna be available for publications. Gene is very excited to see these get utilized and shared, you know, and it's the thing that we ask, just like any other repository. It's like, if you are, if you're the one who's gonna decide to use this stuff, cite it. Tell people what it is, you know, give a little credit to Gene, you know, and that's, I think, a lot of people forget—that that's part of our information literacy that we need to promote and advocate for is, you know, contextualize where information comes from.

[00:38:55] Brett Barry: Thanks to Ulster County Archivist Jonathan Palmer and Historian Eddie Moran. Recording by Izzy Schuyler. See our show notes for a link to a behind-the-scenes video by Ruby Zuckerman. Transcription by Jerome Kazlauskas. Announcements by Campbell Brown. Explore all our stories at kaatscast.com, where you can sign up for our newsletter, grab a Kaatscast t-shirt, and more. Follow us on Instagram [@kaatscast], and please don't forget to rate and review wherever you listen to the show so more people can find us. Kaatscast is a biweekly production of Silver Hollow Audio in the heart of the Catskill Mountains. I'm Brett Barry. Thanks for listening.