Catskill Park - History

History

The area was used by the Mohawks primarily for hunting. Later it was heavily exploited by the Dutch, English, Irish and Germans; local industry included logging, bluestone quarrying, leather tanning, wintergreen and blueberry harvesting, trapping, fishing, and later, tourism. The old-growth hemlock and northern hardwood forests on the steep mountainsides and remote valleys were sufficiently inaccessible that they survived the logging, tanbarking and charcoal industries of the 18th and 19th centuries.

Inhabitants of the region often tell visitors the Park was created to protect New York City's water resources. While one could certainly be forgiven for making that assumption looking at the present-day park map, the park itself was created 30 years before the first reservoir (Ashokan) was built, before the city had started looking north to fulfill its growing water needs.

The truth is far more mundane, and almost sordid.

In 1885, as the state legislature was considering the bill that created the Adirondack Park, Ulster County was trying to get out of paying delinquent property taxes that, under the law passed over its objections six years earlier, it owed the state. The lands, mostly around Slide Mountain had come into the county's possession when loggers looking to extract tannin for use in tanning leather from the bark of the many Eastern hemlocks growing there at the time, took the trees, made their money and then left the region without paying taxes.

The lands left behind were, if still good quality, often snapped up for use as private hunting and fishing clubs for wealthy businessmen from outside the region, whose determined enforcement of trespassing and poaching laws stirred resentment among the local populace long accustomed to the food provided by those lands; the lesser quality lands were wasted, producing nothing except destructive fires.

A team of forest experts, led by Harvard professor Charles Sprague Sargent, had visited the region when the original Forest Preserve bill was being studied and recommended against including the Catskills in its protections, as its forests "guard only streams of local influence," unlike the Adirondacks, whose preservation was motivated by a desire on the part of the state's businessmen to prevent the Erie Canal from silting up and thus becoming unnavigable.

At the same time Ulster had lost a lawsuit against the state and had been ordered to pay the back taxes. Two Assemblymen from the county (one of whom, Cornelius Hardenbergh, was a descendant of Johannes Hardenbergh, the original crown grantee of much of the Catskills in 1708) who had been elected because of their firm stands against paying the taxes, lobbied their fellow legislators heavily to pass a second version of the Forest Preserve Act, one that not only forgave the county's tax debt in exchange for the lands at issue, but required that the state would henceforth pay whatever local property taxes were required on the land as if they were intended for commercial use (i.e., logging). That provision was later applied to the Adirondacks as well; it remains in force today and makes the difference between survival and insolvency for many towns and other local governmental entities in both parks.

As the timber industry kept making determined efforts to undermine the bill, its original sponsors took the occasion of New York adopting a new constitution in 1894 to enshrine it in that document, with language that plugged all the loopholes that loggers and officials on the state's Forest Preserve Advisory Board had been using. Article 14 has survived several other major constitutional revisions.