Overlook History Hike with Will Nixon

Transcribed by Jerome Kazlauskas

Will Nixon  0:03  
Michael once proposed that Woodstock sort of secede from the mess of the United States and declare itself the Republic of Ashokan, and if you wanted to be a citizen, we had a handful of things you should do. One of which is you should hike Overlook Mountain.

Brett Barry  0:19  
Will Nixon has been writing about Woodstock for decades, including a column in the Woodstock Times and two popular books: "Walking Woodstock" and "The Pocket Guide to Woodstock," all in collaboration with writer Michael Perkins, who died in 2022. So when Will suggested, we hike Overlook Mountain together to talk history ... I knew he'd have much to reveal. On today's "Kaatscast," join us for a history hike with author Will Nixon.

Campbell Brown  0:52  
Kaatscast is sponsored by Briars & Brambles Books. The go to independent book and gift store in the Catskills, located in Windham, New York, right next to the pharmacy, just steps away from the Windham Path. Open daily. For more information, visit briarsandbramblesbooks.com or call 518-750-8599; and 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 the Catskills Chronicle. For more information, call 518-763-6854 or email: mountaineaglenews@gmail.com.

Brett Barry  1:33  
A three-hour hike with anyone can lead to all sorts of conversation and my Overlook hike with Will Nixon was no exception. We talked about living in the Catskills.

Will Nixon  1:45  
I just felt this determination ... this drive to get out of the city and remake my life and live in a log cabin in the Catskills.

Brett Barry  1:56  
Interviews and books. Sure, it's a column for the Mountain Eagle called "Ashland Speaks." She lives in Ashland, which is near Jewett.

Will Nixon  2:03  
He'd written about driving out to Standing Rock in 2016 and I was so touched by this essay.

Brett Barry  2:12  
My wife just finished her second book.

Will Nixon  2:14  
Okay.

Brett Barry  2:15  
It's about Carolyn Wells, who was a forgotten mystery author from the 1920s/30s.

... And bookshops.

Will Nixon  2:21  
Here's one shelf of rare books. He pulls out transcripts of the Luddite Trials.

Brett Barry  2:27  
There was one slip and fall on some ice ... me.

Will Nixon  2:32  
Years ago, the last fire tower keeper ...

Brett Barry  2:35  
And a tale of rattlesnakes.

Will Nixon  2:38  
He was, I guess, a curmudgeon. Someone told me that if he found a rattlesnake out on the road, he would throw it in the canvas sack, bring it down to his house, let it loose on the lawn to scare the kids, and then cook it up for dinner. Those days are gone. [LAUGHTER] You know, a rattlesnake is now an endangered species. You're not allowed to do that anymore.

Brett Barry  2:58  
Because of that guy.

Will Nixon  2:58  
[LAUGHTER] Yeah, he did it.

Brett Barry  3:01  
But in today's show, we focus on two bits of history marked by this place: the first of which will recounted at the Trailhead parking area where he explains ... inspiration struck for the very beginnings of Woodstock as "Art Colony," but first an introduction.

Will Nixon  3:21  
Okay, I'm Will Nixon. I lived in Woodstock for a long time and now down in Kingston ... a friend and I, Michael Perkins, wrote a book called "Walking Woodstock: Journeys Into the Wild Heart of America's Most Famous Small Town," which we published in 2009. It had started as columns in the Woodstock Times. We had our book launch at the Byrdcliffe and it was our two hours of being Stephen King because we had a line out the door to get signed copies of the book. We had no idea; we had a following like that from the newspaper. Bushwhack Books was the imprint we had created for ourselves—and so all these years later, I'm still publishing Bushwhack Books, and we're now standing at the parking area for Overlook Mountain, which is a hike that I've done many times and love. Michael once proposed that Woodstock sort of secede from the mess of the United States and declare itself the Republic of Ashokan, and if you want it to be a citizen, he had a handful of things you should do. One of which is you should hike Overlook Mountain. So this is an act of citizenship what we're doing today to hike up Overlooked Mountain. He felt that you didn't really know Woodstock unless you both loved it and hated it. You know, if you just love that you didn't really know it well enough. It may be a parking lot surrounded by trees today, but there's a wonderful tale about the founding of Woodstock that takes place here.

Audio  4:58  
[MUSIC]

Will Nixon  5:02  
Woodstock is a colony of the arts was created by the establishment of Byrdcliffe [big arts colony] below us by a very wealthy man named Ralph Radcliffe Whitehead, 1902. He's living in Santa Barbara with his wife. He went to Oxford. He learned about arts and crafts colonies and he ... he wanted to start one here in the United States. Bolton Brown was a young man who had grown up in Upstate New York. He was a very strong willed man who ended up fighting with everybody ... art teacher at Stanford, Jane Stanford, the widow of the founder of Stanford, found Bolton Brown one day teaching art with nude models of the Victorian Era. She didn't approve. He wasn't willing to kowtow to the church and puritanical values. So, eventually, he's fired from Stanford. At the same time, he meets Ralph Radcliffe Whitehead and Whitehead is so wealthy ... he makes an offer to hire Bolton Brown. Bolton Brown refuses the offer. Whitehead doubles the offer. Bolton Brown refuses. Whitehead triples the offer. Brown accepts. Whitehead wanted to create his arts and crafts colony in the ... North Carolina near Asheville. This is a sad but true story. He didn't want to come here to the Catskills because they were Jews. Brown insisted the Catskills would be better because they're closer to New York City and arts ... the arts world. Whitehead wanted his colony to be at 1,500 feet or thereabouts [a higher elevation], which had to do with theories that if you're in the valley, you're with pestilence, and if you're too high, it's too cold, so there's the right elevation where he wanted his colony. So Bolton Brown comes east ... he starts at Windham ... he's gonna scout the whole area and find a spot for this arts colony. The whole notion of arts and crafts was that this was the age of the Industrial Revolution: factories, mechanization ... and they wanted to do the opposite, which was to treasure handmade crafts [the individual] and the individual is kind of an entrepreneurial, independent worker, not a factory slave—and so they wanted to create one of these arts and crafts colonies and they eventually did. It became Byrdcliffe here in Woodstock. I'd like to read a passage about his travels through the Catskills from an essay he wrote. He says, "A stage took me up to the northern side of the range to Windham to describe my operations from this point would require a book not an article." Sometimes I traveled by horse and buggy, but quite as often on my feet. Much of the country I explored was without roads or even pads and it was by virtue of my contour maps that I was able to go a foot and alone, even to the highest ridges and mountains in the group. I scrambled over some ... it's so wild ... it seemed no man or even animal could ever have been there. Some were flat table rock covered everywhere with dry grey dead moss a foot thick ... the same grey moss hanging ... they sand for students from all the branches of the few stunted spruce trees that barely survived. I am an old hand at mountain work having served my apprenticeship in the wildest of the California Sierra, but for sheer savage impenetrability and utter laboriousness. Some of these Catskill trips really kept my experience.

Audio  8:43  
[MUSIC]

Will Nixon  8:46  
He found his way down into Mykhailo near here and he came up the backside of the back road here [McDaniel Road] and there was a boarding house here called "Meads Mountain House" and he met Mr. Meade. So he was standing where we're standing. It's in 1902. The forests are not here. Its ... its fields and you get a clear view down to the Hudson River and the Hudson Valley, and he writes exactly here ... "The story of modern Woodstock really begins," but it was just at this moment and from this place that I like Balboa from his peak in Darien ... first saw my South Sea ... South indeed it was and wide and almost as blue as the sea that extraordinarily beautiful view ... amazing and extent. The Silver Hudson River itself in a remote haze ... those farthest and faintest humps along the horizon being the Shawangunk Mountains.

Audio  9:44  
[MUSIC ENDING]

Will Nixon  9:47  
So he was smitten with the view. We will get that view up on the top of Overlook Mountain, but he got that view from here, and he said to himself, "This is the place."

Audio  9:55  
[MUSIC]

Will Nixon  9:56  
And he went down and identified these five or six hardscrabble farms on the lower slope of Mount Guardian, which is the sister mountain of Overlook, and then they built Byrdcliffe, so that was really the birth of the colony of the arts, which is what Woodstock is today.

Audio  10:14  
[MUSIC]

Brett Barry  10:19  
When the Byrdcliffe Colony was founded in 1902, Overlook Mountain was welcoming guests to its Summit Mountain House: the second iteration. The first was destroyed by fire in 1875. In 1917, Morris Newgold purchased the hotel, not even a decade later, firewood level it again. Hikers today can explore the ruins of Overlook's third iteration. This one never occupied by hotel guests. Standing at the site with Will Nixon, he elaborated on that bit of history.

Will Nixon  10:58  
A hotelier from New York City named Morris Newgold apparently had four hotels in New York over time. He bought the second hotel right before it burned. It was dilapidated, burned, and he had a vision of building his Shangri-La up here and he invests upwards of a million dollars. He wants to build the Grand Palace. The era of great Catskill hotels was long gone. Yeah, the Catskill Mountain House ... that was the one that was like a long standing success. I think Newgold's visuals will do that here, but that era had passed by ... they say, "the twenties and the thirties." There are other structures up here that, I think, did open and did function, but this was never finished and open to the public ... the colony down in Woodstock ... that was the staging house. The idea was that just ... you'd come up, you'd spend the night in the colony, and you'd be brought up here. It used to be really done out: fine furnishings, all kinds of things in there, pictures were through the roof, and there was like a couple up on the roof. It was quite a dramatic structure. His grandson inherited it and wrote a heartbreaking history of this hotel, which his grandfather has invested his heart and soul in building this Grand Palace up here ... million dollars ... it's worth of materials, marble, all kinds of fine furnishings. The grandfather dies, I think, 39 or 40 right on the eve of World War II. The places shuttered up by Bill Newgold, the grandson and his father.

Brett Barry  12:30  
Bill Newgold recounts in the 1976 edition of New York State Conservationist. Before I left Woodstock for the army, we covered every window with metal lathe and double-barred every door on every building, but it was to prove a futile effort. We still had on the premises: thousands of dollars worth of new building materials of every description stockpiled for the job. This proved to be our undoing.

Will Nixon  12:57  
Bill Newgold comes back. He's fought on the front in Europe ... liberating countries ... and I think he's even seeing concentration camps. He comes back to this building and it has been ransacked, and in his essay, he said, "This was a worst ruin to him than what he'd seen in Europe." He was just devastated.

Brett Barry  13:22  
Newgold continued. The thieves arrived first and carted off the equipment and materials, then came the vandals like locusts and laid waste to anything that was whole. They ripped open the roofs and exposed the wounds of the dying giant to slow erosion by the elements. I tried to reconstruct in my mind ... the inexplicable violence that had taken place. I had seen neater carnage at the Battle of the Bulge.

Will Nixon  13:50  
He doesn't quite say this, but older friend of mine, Djelloul Marbrook. His mother was married at the end of her life to Bill Newgold. Djelloul's view is that what happened during the war, everyone in Woodstock and there still was a strain of anti-semitism up here. People in Woodstock came up here for free pickings, and Djelloul said that, "When he was a kid, you know, people would brag about their mantelpiece from the hotel." They just had all kinds of comments and stolen them all. Newgold doesn't say this in his essay, but Djelloul's view, which may be what Newgold really felt was that they were a Jewish family. You know, they had brought a lot of wealth into the hotel ... the colony ... controversial Moorish architecture ... Djelloul's view ... this was ... this was like a horrific kind of anti-semitic tragedy that took place here that this place was just gutted and everything was taken out. I don't think anyone that I know was ever arrested for it. It's not even talked about. It was, you know, ransacked. I don't ... I don't know if you'd even use the word, "ransacked." It was stripped.

Audio  14:58  
[MUSIC]

Will Nixon  15:00  
So Newgold came back and it broke his heart. But he then ... he then ended up owning the colony for decades ... a long time. So he stayed in town. He was a rare or a collector of antiques and he ... and he even had a radio show on antiques, so he had quite a career of his own, but this was a dark episode of Woodstock history that's not talked about that I'm aware of. I didn't know about it until I heard about it from Djelloul, and ... and then I read Bill Newgold's essay, which was written and published in the Conservationist [a New York State magazine] and most of the essays really kind of in praise of his grandfather and all that went into this place. Kids in the fifties and sixties like Djelloul ... they would come up here. It was the great haunted house. They would run around the floors and see what was there and Djelloul spent the night ... camped out on the top of the tower. In the sixties, it's such a hazard. I think it was then dynamited—and so that's what you see today is the standing remains. It was cement like this because the previous two Overlook hotels had burned. So the idea was ... if you make it out of cement like this, it's going to ... it's going to stand. It's not going to burn down.

Brett Barry  16:11  
And it's standing, but nobody has ever officially used it, right?

Will Nixon  16:15  
It's a no, so it never opened as a hotel.

Brett Barry  16:18  
Is this, I mean, there's a cell tower on it, so I'm not sure it's a state land.

Will Nixon  16:23  
Yes, so the cell tower is a little pocket of private land. That's right behind it. There is a little pocket and they have the right away to drive up and down the surface. This ... this is on state land, and years ago, I went to a state hearing, and the issue was no permanent human structures on state land in the Catskills. What is this pretty permanent? [LAUGHTER] So I think one option was you take it down. Another option was you fence it off. Another option was you fence off the dangerous parts and I think the ... I don't know if it was an actual option or it was just the reality was they didn't do a damn thing. They just left it up here because it's such a spectacular sight.

Brett Barry  17:06  
And just a bit more hiking past the ruins of the Overlook Mountain House reveals stunning summit views from the top of the Overlook fire tower. It was at that spot where Will Nixon read his poem entitled, "Fire Tower."

Will Nixon  17:22  
Never mind your replacement, the airplane. You’ve pulled lightning from the sky, tickled your legs blue with St. Elmo’s fire. You’ve bathed in cold fog, shed icicles like thousands of earrings. You’ve whistled through hurricanes, watched meteors scratch the black dome in every direction without leaving a trace. You’ve ignored wars. You couldn’t name a president. You’ve chaperoned two generations of trees. You’ve tolerated thousands of visitors climbing the zig-zag of your spine to stand inside your empty square head & believe they see what gods see.

Audio  18:05  
[MUSIC]

Brett Barry  18:05  
To read Bill Newgold's article, "My Grandfather and the Mountain," click our link in the show notes for the May-June 1976 edition of "The Conservationist" where it appeared. "Kaatscast: The Catskills Podcast" is a biweekly production of Silver Hollow Audio. Transcriptionist: Jerome Kazlauskas, Production Intern: Juliana Merchant, and introducing Campbell Brown who voiced our sponsor copy. I'm Brett Barry. Thanks for listening and we'll see you again in two weeks for the history behind a famous Catskill woman dubbed ... "The First Lady of Radio." Until then, find us on Instagram @kaatscast and at our website: kaatscast.com. 

Campbell Brown  18:59  
Kaatscast is supported by a generous grant from the Nicholas J. Juried Family Foundation and by listeners like you. If you'd like to make a donation, you can do so at kaatscast.com. Thank you!