| The following column appeared in The River Reporter, August 6 and 10, 1998. |
By Bert S. Feldman
The Recusant Reporter
Thursday, September 3, 1998
Sullivan County has tentatively stuck its toe in the soothing warmth of tomorrow, and found it good. We found a renaissance known as A Day in the Garden and it has shown us a way out of the hole we have created.
A chart of the economic rise and fall of our county is quite different from the usual map of progress. Most such graphs show lines rising and falling in undulating curves. Our economy has been different in that our chart shows a new industry — note the singular — taking off like a skyrocket, reaching a plateau, traveling along the top for a while, then plunging down like a shot goose.
Historically, our first attempt at a business other than farming, which remains a constant source of income, was logging. While over 90% of our area was covered with hemlock forests, good stands of pine were to be found, especially in the Delaware River valley. These logs were assembled into huge rafts and floated downriver to places where they could be marketed, especially in the Philadelphia area. The tall pines were needed in the Philadelphia Navy Yard for masts.
The timber rafting industry was long a-dying. It started during the Colonial period, and lasted until 1924, when Grover Hermann sent a single raft downriver.
As rafting tapered off, the biggest money making boom got started. The tanning of hides into leather, using hemlock bark, was our richest period ever, even more profitable than the resort period, considering the difference in value of the dollar then and now.
With the advent of the Civil War in 1861, the tanning industry really took off. With a million men under arms in the Union armies, the demand for leather was unbelievable. From the peak of his cap to his boots, the Union soldier used leather. Today we use canvas webbing belts, canvas in knapsacks, ammunition pouches, bayonet sheathes, and more. Then it was all leather.
Over 80% of all that leather, which further made up harnesses saddles and boots as well, came out of five Catskill Counties: Sullivan, Ulster, Delaware, Greene, and Schoharie. And 50% of that was from Sullivan.
Almost every town today has a Tannery Rd., and with reason. Take two examples to see why. Out in Mongaup Valley, the Kierstad and Swan tannery had a payroll of 700! (Today you couldn’t find 700 chipmunks in that area.) Up in Willow, where the NYS Fish Hatchery is located, the Hammond tannery employed 900 workers. Similar figures existed throughout the 40-plus tanneries elsewhere in our county.
Other industries also profited. The D&H canal boats, loaded with anthracite coal from Carbondale to be shipped down the Hudson to the New York City area, did not return unloaded. Raw hides from all over the world poured into the Catskills. Read Richard Henry Dana’s "Two Years Before the Mast," which tells of sailing all the way around Cape Horn and returning to load up rawhides from Spanish California herds.
It was said you could smell Sullivan County all the way to Middletown. But, locally, it was the sweet smell of money.
Then came 1870, and it was all over. After the Civil War, a German chemist discovered a cheaper and better way to tan leather with chemicals rather than tanbark, and, besides, our trees were all gone, leaving the county an eroded desert, gullied, rocky, and infertile.
But out of that barren land arose a new industry — resorts.
