Books

Paperback, 32 pages

In this newly revised edition of The Gristmill, young readers will discover that people would travel from far and wide to visit the gristmill for the essential service of having their grain ground.

Paperback, 129 pages

In 1870, the” New York Herald” proclaimed that Ulster County was New York’s “Ulcer County” due to its lawlessness and crime. The columnist supported his claim by citing that in only six months, “it has been the scene of no less than four cold blooded and brutal murders, six suicides and four elopements.” Hannah Markle–the bane of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union–ran a Kingston saloon where murder and violence were served alongside the whiskey. John Babbitt confessed on his deathbed to murdering Emma Brooks, and Willie Brown–reputed member of the Eastman Gang–accidentally shot his best friend. The infamous Big Bad Bill, the “Gardiner Desperado,” lashed out more than once and killed in a drunken rage. Discover the mayhem and murder that these and others wreaked on one of New York State’s original counties.

Paperback, 232 pages

The Ontario & Western, the O&W, or, as both boosters and detractors referred to it in its later years, the “Old & Weary,” operated from 1869-1957 and ran from Oswego on Lake Ontario to New York City, passing through the midlands and southern counties of New York State, with spurs to Utica, Kingston, Port Jervis, and Scranton, PA. Filled with colorful characters and miscellaneous machinery, O. & W. chronicles almost a century of alternating hope and heartache, prosperity and poverty, dignity and degradation. Her passing was mourned for a variety of economic and sentimental reasons, but the loss was deeply felt in an intangible way. The rambling, elderly, inefficient, accident-prone, irritating old railroad was a part of a way of life now gone from the American scene.  

Paperback, 128 pages

First inhabited by the Lenape Indians and settled by European colonists in the seventeenth century, New York’s Sullivan County has experienced several ages of prosperity and growth over the last two hundred years. Locals conceived of timber rafting in the eighteenth century to support the shipbuilding industry, followed by a prosperous tanning boom in the nineteenth century that supplied leather to the Union army. Finally, two periods of tourism, known as the “Silver Age” and “Golden Age,” capitalized on the area’s fresh air, clean water and magnificent scenery. In this collection of images, local author and county historian John Conway provides a comprehensive look at this much-celebrated region.