As we all know, the original pioneers for inland and western United States came from the Colonies spread along the Atlantic seaboard. Transportation networks then were all but nonexistent, being restricted to the immediate coast and the rivers and streams large enough to handle shallow draft vessels. From 1620 until 1825, this situation did not greatly improve.From the very beginning of human habitation in Colebrook and the surrounding towns, the population was restless; the surviving documents are full of references of citizens being helped financially by town funds to relocate, often to New York state. Colebrook’s first resident left town and moved northward a few short months after building his log house just north of the Winchester town line on Smith Hill. This was 10 years before the outbreak of hostilities that led to the American War of Independence.Seth Hurd, the first settler to the upland known as Beech Hill, arrived in 1786 and remained until 1806, when he pulled up stakes and moved to the newly opened region that was to become the state of Ohio. Seth went by ox cart, and the journey took well over a month, with the cost equaling the amount he had derived from the sale of all his Colebrook property, something over $1,000, which left him to begin life all over with no money or cash reserve. Somehow, he persevered, as we know that he left descendents who still live in northeastern Ohio.The North family of Colebrook produced several sons who, upon receiving a basic knowledge of the skills needed to be a successful pioneer, left for northern and western New York state. Enos North pioneered to Genesee County, N.Y. His location in Genesee County was 7 miles south of Batavia and 23 miles south of the Erie Canal, which was then under construction. Shortly after arriving, he wrote a letter back home in 1824 in which he describes clearing forest and creating farmland. Transportation was difficult, and commerce was almost nonexistent. In his correspondence, he advises his younger brother back in Colebrook, who is a peddler during the warm months, what to bring with him next year. He hopes to sell whatever he can carry with him and thus has to make important guesses as to what commodities will bring the most profit.After the opening of the canal, a letter contains the following information, huge in its implications from our vantage point nearly 200 years later:“It is no longer necessary to send someone to accompany their merchandise on the long trip to western New York state, as goods consigned to the agents of the canal in Albany were perfectly safe and secure, and would arrive in any designated port along the way exactly the way they had been shipped.” Today we hardly give a second thought when sending a package by any of the several carriers available to us, but what happened with the Erie Canal was a truly landmark event.The Erie Canal was the brainchild of New York Gov. DeWitt Clinton, a giant of a man alongside the likes of Washington, Jefferson and Franklin. It was his vision of a transportation system that would not only transform New York, but the entire nation. The growth rate of the western states would have taken an infinitely longer time had it not been for this waterway connecting the port of New York with a cheap, safe route to the Great Lakes, down the St. Lawrence and connecting with the Ohio, Mississippi and Missouri rivers.The year 1817 marked the beginning of construction of the canal, which culminated with its completion at Tonawanda, on the Niagara River downstream from Buffalo on Oct. 26, 1825. The builders had created one of the greatest engineering works of modern time; it is 10 times as long as the Panama Canal at 340 miles, and with its smaller branches, constituted the world’s greatest waterway system.Leaving the opening years of the Erie Canal, Colebrook records next comment upon it by means of correspondence written by one of the teenage Rockwell girls in 1850, when she visited family and friends in northern Ohio. She went from Colebrook to Albany by stagecoach, a trip that took a full day. From there they went to Schenectady by a train having seven cars; at one time they went 7 miles in 15 minutes. That off-hand comment contains the reason for the future demise of the American canal system: They couldn’t compete with either the time schedule or the amount of cargo carried by the railroads.The Rockwell party boarded a canal packet vessel named the U.S. Capt. Cook for Utica with 28 passengers. At Utica they changed to another stage for Syracuse, which they reached two and a half days later. Continuing on in a series of stage coaches, they passed through Lockport, which, she said, contained the greatest curiosities that they had seen. “The double row of locks, built one above another with their white gates making a very neat and handsome appearance. A boat was passing through when we were there. The canal for 3 miles above is cut through solid rock. There is a large and flourishing village on the canal.”At Buffalo they went aboard the steamer Henry Clay, which carried them across Lake Erie to Fairport, Ohio, where they proceeded via stage to their relatives. The author commented that the cabins of steam and canal boats are miserable places at night and a person needed nerves of iron or a large pile of opium in order to sleep.The return journey began with an 18-hour voyage across the lake to Buffalo, then a 200-mile ride by stage over deplorable roads to Schenectady. As they passed along the banks of the Mohawk River, she commented on the canal boats passing leisurely along through the beautiful meadows. Between Schenectady and Albany they traveled by rail coach (a train drawn by horsepower). From there to New York City the journey continued by steamship.The original canal was 4 feet deep and 40 feet wide, and floated boats carrying 30 tons of freight; over the next 100 years the canal was enlarged and the capacity of the vessels traversing the Erie Canal increased to a maximum of 1,600 tons.The economic significance of this canal system launched New York far ahead of her former rivals, Boston and Philadelphia. Massachusetts, in1825, had been on an economic par with New York, but 16 years later, its exports were only a third of New York’s; Philadelphia, once the nation’s leading seaport, fell to a distant second. New York never relinquished her position of dominance; today she remains one of the world’s great centers of economics and culture with a vast hinterland encompassing not only New York state, but the majority of Connecticut and New Jersey as well. Bob Grigg is the town historian in Colebrook.
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Dick Hermans in the Oblong Bookstore on Millerton\u2019s Main Street in 1985.
Provided
For Hermans, the award has prompted some reflection about why he has spent so much of his life involved in community projects.
“I was thinking about it this morning: Why do I do what I do?” he said. “And I think no matter what I’ve done, whether it’s been school board or rail trail, I’m trying to be useful to the communities I’m associated with.”
Hermans is perhaps best known as the longtime co-founder and steward of Oblong Books in Millerton, a business that began almost by accident. He and his former partner, Holly Nelson, were living in Millerton and looking for something to do during the winter. They had been painting houses, including the Grange Hall in Millerton, a job Hermans got through his aunt, who belonged to the Grange.
At the time, Hermans was also working in insurance for his father, doing collections.
“It was fine except I was doing collections, and it really kind of left me cold,” he said.
He and Nelson began thinking about what they might do together. Nelson was an avid reader, while Hermans had studied journalism and had worked in a record store. They noticed a chain of book and record stores operating elsewhere in the Hudson Valley and decided to follow that model.
And so Oblong was born.
Dick Hermans in the Oblong Bookstore on Millerton’s Main Street in 1985.Provided
“We really learned it by the seat of our pants,” Hermans said.
The business would eventually become a beloved and integral part of Millerton’s commercial life. But although Hermans may have learned the book business as he went, his affinity for retail — and for the connections that happen across a counter — had begun much earlier.
As a child, his second-grade teacher operated a little cardboard pencil shop in the classroom, and Hermans still remembers the satisfaction of selling a pencil for a nickel.
“I really liked selling somebody a pencil for a nickel,” he recalled. “I can remember that experience, and it was so pleasant.”
Later, while living in Arizona, he helped establish a food co-op and worked at the counter.
“I kind of knew that I liked doing that kind of thing,” he said. “It’s a nice way to be pleasant with people, but without making too much commitment to them.”
His relationship with Millerton also predates Oblong. His grandparents lived in the village, and he first came to Millerton as a baby. Over the years, he has watched the town change through several generations.
He remembers a Millerton with a much broader array of businesses, when stores such as Delson’s, the Main Street department store that stood for nearly 40 years in what is now Millerton’s Antiques Center, seemed to carry almost everything a resident might need.
“You could find everything from a set of dishes to a shotgun,” he recalled.
The rise of shopping malls changed that kind of downtown retail, he said, but Millerton has remained a lively commercial village.
“For us, it’s been a great place to have business,” Hermans said. “It’s a busy village.”
For Hermans, running a store was never simply about selling books and records. It was a way of being part of a place.
Music has remained another constant. Hermans continues to sell music at Oblong and hosts the radio program “New Harmony” on WKZE. The business of selling music has changed dramatically over the years, particularly with the rise of streaming, but Hermans has adapted.
He was initially reluctant to bring vinyl records back into the store because of their expense. But about four or five years ago, he began stocking LPs again, and they have become the main form of music the store sells.
He finds that many of the customers buying them are reconnecting with music they loved years ago.
“I do best with classic albums that people may have had when they were young,” he said. “And now that they’re retired, they want to hear it again.”
Hermans still reviews between 700 and 1,200 new music releases each week through the store’s distributor, Alliance Entertainment, carefully deciding what belongs on Oblong’s shelves.
That same commitment to place has led Hermans into a wide range of community projects. His work with the Harlem Valley Rail Trail is among the efforts he mentions when reflecting on his years of civic involvement. He has also served on the school board and has been involved with the Millerton Business Alliance and the Irondale Schoolhouse. He is now involved with The New Pine Plains Herald, which he sees as complementary to the work of The Millerton News and The Lakeville Journal.
“I really think that the important thing about this award is that people understand what a newspaper does to connect them to their community,” he said. “And if that means anything to their lives, they gotta support it.”
Hermans knew Mary Lou and Robert Estabrook and remembers them as people who were deeply conscious of their responsibilities to the community.
“They were really nice folks,” he said. “They were very conscious of what their role in the community was.”
There is, in fact, still plenty on his plate. Hermans admits he needs to scale back because he has taken on more than his current abilities can comfortably accommodate.
“To be given this award is very special,” he added. “But I don’t feel like I’m done.”
This article has been changed to reflect that Hermans and Nelson were partners. A prior version states that they were married.
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Adamah Farm crew members planning out the day’s tasks on a late September day.
Janna Siller
Over my 15 years of growing vegetables in Falls Village, I’ve exerted my will over all kinds of conditions, from drought to humidity to crows with a taste for cantaloupe. That’s what farming is all about. You zip around the field, hopping on and off tractors, moving hoses and chasing weeds, all in an effort to arrange conditions in favor of your crops. It is the crops’ job to gulp up sunlight and move water through their stems, to transform solar energy into your next pesto or ratatouille or butternut squash soup. It is the job of the farmer to irrigate just enough but not too much, to slice dandelion leaves without damaging delicate cabbage roots, to pander and pamper and stay in tune with what plants need to thrive.
The easy part of farming is trusting plants’ resilience. I have seen bright green shoots barrel ahead out of a plant torn to shreds by hail. I’ve watched wilty, heat-stressed seedlings turn rigid overnight and greet the next morning with vigor. The hard part is letting go of what you can’t control. As our crops lapped up Friday’s gentle sunshine and I considered the weekend forecast, I imagined roots holding tight to wet earth and branches supporting each other in sideways, pelting rain. I made sure all of our storage crops were already harvested and tucked away. I battened down the sides of our greenhouses and wished the remaining field crops good luck.
The nor’easter didn’t materialize too dramatically in our corner of New England. A few broken branches and debris blown about, nothing like the July Fourth storm that sent half a tree crashing onto the deer fence and left crates of fresh veggies in coolers without power.
Fall storage crop harvests amid soil building cover crops at Adamah Farm in Falls Village. Janna Siller
Farming is an exercise in acceptance. To do it well and return year after year, you have to balance hubris and humility. The prize can often be a certain equanimity, a training in the art of moving into the next day even when the last one scrambled all your plans.
Epic change is not always about the unexpected. It also comes like clockwork on the seasonal calendar. As I type, the last of summer’s watermelons wait naively on the vine for a few hot days to finish ripening. Broccoli are holding their leaves wide as they did in June and July, only to find that the hours of sunlight decrease with each earlier sunset. Plants can’t pick up and go south or call the manager to order a bonus round of sunshine. Their growth slows and they get a resigned look to the hue of their leaves, so different from the frenzied growth of summer.
The release of fall is not tragic or gloomy. It is not an ending because so many fall tasks are about setting up for the new beginnings in spring.
We turn the vines that yielded thousands of pounds of fruit into the soil, where healthy microbes feast on their rotting stems. Then we plant cover crops — a mix of cereal grains like rye and oats and legumes like peas, vetch and clover. Cover crops hold the soil and its nutrients in place over winter, feeding the soil food web and adding organic matter that next season’s crops will need to grow.
We sort sprinklers and repair hoses. We inventory tarps. We take notes about which plants did well where and how we might try a new approach for this or that. We stack crates of cured garlic and onions and winter squash in a cool, dark room.
We save seeds from tomatoes and beans and lettuce, carefully labeling each variety for next season’s long, sunny days.
Janna Siller is the farm director at Adamah, a community farm in Falls Village offering CSA shares, educational programs and a food access program.
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