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December 2024

All-digital Hurley Heritage Society Prologue

Happy Holidays from Main Street!

Welcome to the December issue of Prologue, our online newsletter. As the Museum season draws to a close, I am profoundly grateful to all our members and the community who helped make 2024 so successful. In addition to our regular annual events, we planned 3 events to celebrate 50 years of the Hurley Heritage Society. 

At our Spring opening we unveiled our newly renovated gift shop, beautifully painted and organized by Ellen Richards. We also added content to the popular Eagles Nest exhibit, which was followed by a reception to unveil the Eagles Nest sign created by Jim Lee and Wally Cook, and painted by Cindy Gill Lapp. The Eagles Nest exhibit has been retired; however, it will be available on our website.  The sign is part of our permanent Museum collection.

Our 4 annual fundraisers, the Spring and Fall flower sales, the herbal wreath making  workshop, and our Holiday Boutique were well attended.  Look for these events again in 2025. Our popular zoom lectures were well received, and we are planning exciting lectures for next year. We participated in the Burning of Kingston event and hosted the finale of the Cap to Cap run.

Our year was highlighted by three very special community minded events held to celebrate the 50-year anniversary of the Hurley Heritage Society.  The Spring event  was the return of our popular rooster art auction where 23 beautifully painted roosters were auctioned off at Crosspoint Fellowship Church. This Fall we held Hurley Heritage Day, a fun filled community event with food, vendors, music, children’s activities, walking and house tours and more.  And we topped off the year with an evening of dining and entertainment at the Chateau where we also honored two of our most illustrious members, Gail and Bruce Whistance (more about that later in the Prologue).   I wholeheartedly thank everyone who was involved in the planning and execution of these events, including our members, our sponsors,  our volunteers and  our very supportive community.



In closing I wish everyone a Very Happy Holiday! We look forward to seeing you at the Spring Museum opening in May.

Diane Blakely

President

    Hurley Heritage Society

dianemblakely@gmail.com

Hurley Heritage Society Annual Meeting

The annual meeting was held on Saturday, November 16^th, at Cross Point Fellowship Church. The revised Constitution and By-Laws were approved.

The 2025 Board of Trustees is as follows:

President - Diane Blakely

Vice President - Kathy McMahon

Treasurer - William Ryan

Recording Secretary - Ellen Young

Corresponding Secretary - Barbara Zell

President Emeritus - Dale Bohan

Additional Trustees:

Maureen Bowers

Katherine Chansky

Pat Findholt

Raleigh Green

Mike Rice

The Hurley Heritage Society held the final event celebrating our 50th anniversary with a gala evening of fine dining, theater and music at The Chateau, 240 Boulevard, on Friday, Dec. 6, St. Nicholas Day.

The gala featured three historical vignettes set in Hurley in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries. The vignettes were written  and directed by former longtime Coleman High School drama teacher Lise Hopson, who had just come off  her lead role playing Norma Desmond in the Coach House Players production of “Sunset Boulevard.”

The scenes were brought to life  by a wonderful group of professional actors and singers, many of whom Lise  had taught at the former Coleman High School. The musical portion of the program included an unforgettable rendition of Clement Clark Moore’s ‘A Visit from St. Nicholas’.

The evening also included the presentation of a special award to Bruce and Gail Whistance for their countless contributions to the Society.

Gail and Bruce Whistance have been going Above and Beyond for the Hurley Heritage Society for 25 years now, from the days when their Flying Fox String Band played the Corn and Craft Festival and other Society events. Since that time, they have both served on the HHS Board of Directors, and teamed up to curate four popular and successful exhibitions:

Hurley Harvest: By Hand and By Horse (history of Farming in Hurley)

Stations Along the Way: The O&W Railway in Hurley

Winslow Homer’s Hurley – An Artist’s View

Post Offices of Hurley: 1837 –  Present

Both Bruce and Gail have presented local history lectures for HHS and other groups. They have been integral to our Autumn Auctions, Hurley Heritage Days, and have placed their indelible and invaluable fingerprints on numerous other Hurley Heritage Society activities.

Bruce, a master of many trades, was born in Queens and moved to Hurley in 1954, the first three years being on Hurley’s historic Eagle’s Nest. His memoirs have been immortalized in his book “Real Stories from a Hudson Valley Boy.” Gail, a Master Gardener Volunteer, is an Illinois transplant who came to the Hudson Valley in 1972 and Hurley in 1983. She has nurtured a love and knowledge of our area greater than most natives. Gail and Bruce have twin sons, Andrew and Bradley.

Congratulations Gail and Bruce on this very well deserved recognition!

The Winner of the Hurley Heritage Day Raffle of his home painted on a Hurley Rooster by renowned artist Judy Howard was our own Hurley Historian, James Decker. Jim owns the Ostrander/Elmendorf house on Main Street.

Congratulations Jim, and thank you Judy for donating your time and talent.    

The result is stunning!   

In the fall of 1688, a Dutch army led by Prince William of Orange invaded England and overthrew its reigning monarch, James II, because he was a Roman Catholic who was promoting Roman Catholic interests more than his Protestant British subjects could tolerate. In England, where almost nobody died during this invasion, this surprisingly peaceful return to Protestant rule seemed like a divine intervention. There, the event came to be known as the Glorious Revolution. In Ireland, where Irish Catholics fought for James' right to the throne, the change in rulers was unwelcome and disastrous. For New York, the change was unexpected and perplexing, because it was named after James, who been the Duke of York before he became king, and it had been governed by James ever since the English conquered the territory from the Dutch in 1664.

When news of the Glorious Revolution finally arrived in New York in the spring of 1689, some colonists, like the Protestant patriot Jacob Leisler, were delighted. Others, including most of the elite in Albany and Ulster County, hesitated. When Leisler then led a revolt that overthrew the rulers appointed by King James, it divided New York into two parties. Those who supported his enthusiastic support for the international Protestant cause, and cautious conservatives who believed Leisler and his followers were dangerous ideologues. In Albany and New York violent confrontations took place between Leislerians and anti-Leislerians.

Ulster County, by contrast, was distracted by a scandal involving Kingston's Dutch Reformed minister, a man of Walloon origins named Lawrence van den Bosch. Fluent in French, Dutch, and English, he had seemed like the perfect man to preside over Ulster's mixed population of Dutch, Huguenot, and English colonists. Unfortunately, Van den Bosch had issues with women, especially his wife, who was related to Albany's elite. An investigation started just before Leisler's revolt broke out revealed that Van den Bosch had also been harassing many of the women in his congregation. The extraordinary testimony that gave provides a rare glimpse of local life. It also reveals that Van den Bosch had something of a persecution complex. Rather than accept the judgement of New York's other Dutch ministers, he headed out to the countryside around Hurely. With their support, he defied the authorities in Kingston for several years until Leisler's revolt ultimately collapsed.

Historians quickly forgot this strange incident at the controversial Dominie (Dutch Reformed minister) at its center. This talk brings it all back to life to illuminate early Ulster history, and how the community responded to a badly behaved minister who seems to have had a strong love-hate relationship with women. As a result, we have access to women's voices from a time and place where they are usually almost impossible to find, giving a rare glimpse of local life in the seventeenth century.

BIO

An historian of colonial North America and the Atlantic world at Texas A&M University, Evan Haefeli specializes in the political, religious, Indigenous, and imperial history of the colonial northeast. Born and raised on eastern Long Island, New York, he previously taught at Princeton University, where he received his PhD, as well as Tufts, Columbia University, and the London School of Economics. He has held a variety of fellowships, most recently from the NEH and is currently a Fulbright Lecturer teaching American History in Tokyo. His published books relating to colonial American and early New York history include New Netherland and the Dutch Origins of American Religious Liberty, Accidental Pluralism: America and the Religious Politics of English Expansion, and (with Kevin Sweeney), Captors and Captives: The 1704 French and Indian Raid on Deerfield. This talk is part of a longstanding research project of his on New York and the Glorious Revolution of 1688-1689, a decisive and divisive turning point in early New York history.

Pre-registration required:

Our annual Holiday Boutique at the Museum was held on 11/30 and 12/1, and as usual was a smashing success! Most of the holiday items and collectibles donated by you, our generous community, have found new homes.  It’s always a fun, festive way to kick off the season and we enjoy seeing so many repeat visitors.

Our shelves will need replenishing for next year’s sale. When the holiday season is over and you are packing away your decorations, if you find the need to downsize, please consider donating your gently used holiday items, decorations and vintage items for the sale.  We will pack them up and store until next year. Donations are much appreciated and  can be left on the Museum back porch.  

Proceeds help support our Museum.

The Museum gift shop is now closed for the season, but will reopen in May with  Hurley memorabilia,   delftware, Hurley t-shirts, ball caps, books, rooster mugs and more. We look forward to seeing you then.  

Looking for a unique holiday gift?

Our Heritage walk on the front lawn of the Museum grounds continues to grow! Show your support for the HHS Museum by purchasing a brick in your family’s name or to honor someone close to you. For a $125 donation your brick will be added to the walk.

The inscription may be composed with as many as four lines of eighteen characters. If interested, please contact Wally Cook at (845) 338-2193 or send an email to wally.cook@gmail.com.

 If you have a passion for Hurley and local history and are looking for a way to become more involved in the community, the Hurley Heritage Society offers many opportunities! Founded 50 years ago, our mission is to protect and preserve materials, documents and artifacts pertaining to the Hurley area, and raise awareness and educate the public of the town’s special heritage through events, lectures, programs, tours and community initiatives. 

We are an all-volunteer organization, and sponsor a variety of activities including walking tours of historic Main Street, our popular ZOOM  and in-person lectures on local culture and history, children’s activities in partnership with the Hurley Library, and informative demonstrations. We also operate the Museum which remains free and open to the public, and houses the Dutch room and gift shop. Our current exhibit , Post Offices of Hurley:  has been popular with our visitors. 

Volunteers are always needed to greet visitors, volunteer in our gift shop, assist with events, and maintain our collections, the museum, and grounds. If you are interested, please go to the volunteer link on the HHS website: Hurley Heritage Society | Hurley Heritage Museum | Hurley NY