Hot off the presses, Saugerties Bios: Amazing People from a Small Town is an engaging compendium of life stories of notable Sawyers past and present, going right back to the settling of West Camp as a haven for Palatine refugees at the outset of the 18th century. The book, written by Edward Poll with considerable assistance from his daughter Erin, was “just released last month” by Little Sawyer Publishing, says the author, and is now available at Inquiring Mind Bookstore in Saugerties.
A New Jersey native, Ed Poll is a retired Special Ed teacher who came to the Hudson Valley about 30 years ago to work with blind students at Ulster County BOCES. His interest in local history was sparked by a lifelong love of photography. He discovered a copy of Richard Lionel De Lisser’s Picturesque Ulster and decided to make a “then and now” project of taking contemporary photos of the same scenes documented in that book’s Saugerties section, dating back to 1905. The results led to Poll being offered the opportunity to author the Saugerties edition of Arcadia Publishing’s Images of America series, released in 1997 and still in print.
It was in the process of researching Images of America: Saugerties that Poll encountered some of the characters who eventually made their way into Saugerties Bios. The longer he lived in the town, the more he learned about eminent people who had either been born and raised there or moved there from somewhere else.
Trips to the Saugerties Library with his daughter Erin when she was a young girl became mutual expeditions into local history and its more colorful denizens. Ed continued compiling their stories as Erin went off to finish school and launch her own career; but she eventually returned to the area, and became his primary editor — and author of the final chapter, about Big Pink and the enormous role that the “basement tapes” recorded there by the Band had on popular music in the latter decades of the 20th century.
The first of the Saugerties Bios chronicles the life of the reverend Joshua Kocherthal, born in 1669 in the Lower Palatinate region (a/k/a die Pfalz, source of the name of New Paltz) of what is now Germany. Louis XIV’s series of invasions of the Palatinate, followed by harsh winters and famine, motivated thousands of the area’s residents to emigrate. Kocherthal was one of several agents negotiating with Queen Anne’s regime to find the refugees a new home in either England or America. He led a small group of Palatines to London in 1708, settled about 40 of them in Newburgh in 1709, only to discover some 13,000 of them encamped in London upon his return, expecting free land. In 1710 he led a massive flotilla of about 3,000 souls – many of whom died in mid-passage – to New York.
The Palatines were given small plots of land in West Camp, near Saugerties, and across the Hudson in East Camp. To pay for their passage, they were indentured to supply tar for the British Navy, but that didn’t work out too well; the Hudson Valley’s native white pines didn’t produce much pitch. The settlers mutinied and many left the area, but descendants of the Palatine families can still be found in Saugerties. Kocherthal became the town’s first Lutheran pastor.
Ed Poll next goes on to relate the hair-raising tale of Jeremiah Snyder, born 1738, captain of the First Ulster Militia — a patriot whose Saugerties home was surrounded by those of Tories. He fought at the Battle of Saratoga and commanded a fort at Mount Tremper. But mostly he’s known for having been taken captive for two years by Tories and allied Mohawks. He and his son were marched hundreds of miles westward to Fort Niagara, then shipped to Montreal and imprisoned. They eventually escaped and made their way home via New Hampshire.
Subsequent chapters tell of Andrew Brink, captain of Robert Fulton’s Clermont, the first commercially successful steamboat; also Levi Hill, a typesetter-turned-minister-turned-photographer who claimed to have invented “heliochromy,” the first color photography – a claim that remains disputed to this day. John Bigelow, born of a family of Saugerties bluestone merchants, led a fascinating life in politics and diplomacy, eventually becoming Lincoln’s consul in Paris at a time when European public opinion was split on the subject of recognizing the Confederacy. He played a key role in halting construction of ironclad warships in French ports for the South, and later went on to reform prisons in New York State and facilitate construction of both the Panama Canal and the New York Public Library.
Irving Fisher was a math prodigy who earned Yale University’s first-ever PhD in Economics. He got involved in the debate over the gold standard versus “bimetallism,” devised the precursor of the Consumer Price Index, was sent to Germany after World War I to try to solve its hyperinflation spiral, made a fortune on inventions and lost it again in the stock market crash. The brilliant sculptor Augusta Savage was born in Florida, studied art at Cooper Union and in Europe, spent her middle years as a fixture of the Harlem Renaissance, but ended up retiring to Saugerties. Her massive sculpture Lift Every Voice and Sing, also known as The Harp, was a highlight of the 1939/40 New York World’s Fair.
Another prominent 20th-century woman, Dorothy Frooks, was born in Saugerties but made her career as a “lady lawyer” in New York City. Her life is a study in contrasts: Called the “Baby Suffragette,” she began giving speeches for women’s suffrage at the age of 7, but in later life she opposed the Equal Rights Amendment. She spoke at recruitment rallies for World War I, and Woodrow Wilson personally recruited her to join the Naval Reserve and sell Liberty Bonds, but she later regretted her support for that war. As an attorney she successfully defended a woman who murdered a man who had raped her at age 12 and stalked her for years thereafter. She advocated for social services programs that evolved into Legal Aid, Small Claims Court and Aid for Dependent Children, and for 12 years wrote the column in the New York World that later became Eleanor Roosevelt’s “My Day,” but she opposed the New Deal and later supported McCarthyism. She dated Harry K. Thaw, Fiorello LaGuardia and Cornelius Vanderbilt IV, eventually marrying Jay P. Vanderbilt. Frooks appeared as one of the “witnesses” in Reds, Warren Beatty’s 1981 biopic about John Reed, and lived to be 101.
More contemporary characters profiled here include Joe Sinnott, longtime inker for Marvel Comics, who won every imaginable honor for comic-book artists including the Will Eisner Award; colonel Roger Donlon, a Green Beret who won the first Congressional Medal of Honor ever conferred in the Vietnam War, for his defense of Camp Nam Dong in 1964; and SNL alum and late-night talk show host Jimmy Fallon. Erin Camp’s vivid account of the music scene that swirled around Big Pink in West Saugerties rounds out the book.
Saugerties Bios is a lively, entertaining overview of, in Ed Poll’s words, “how people from a small town had an impact on the state, the country and the world.” It also taught me a lot of things I didn’t already know, or fully appreciate, about the larger tides of American history. Pick up your copy at Inquiring Mind, and keep an eye out for author talks and readings in the near future.