Each year in New Paltz on the morning of September 11, local dignitaries, first responders and other citizens gather for a solemn ritual at the 9/11 memorial located beside the New Paltz Fire Station at the corner of Henry W. DuBois Drive and North Putt Corners Road. The annual event is organized by New Paltz resident Butch Dener, who spearheaded the campaign to establish the memorial site and also serves as master of ceremonies. A fire bell is rung twice, at 8:46 and 9:03 a.m., to mark the times when the World Trade Center towers were struck by hijacked airplanes on that date in 2001.
After Dener welcomed the attendees on Wednesday morning, a group of volunteers from the New Paltz High School Band performed “The Star-Spangled Banner,” led by band director Sam Newsome. Rabbi Moshe Plotkin of Chabad New Paltz delivered the invocation: a traditional Hebrew prayer for peace, Oseh Shalom.
Dener reiterated a common theme of such gatherings in noting, “We all remember where we were that day.” Echoing Rabbi Plotkin, he drew parallels between the Hamas attacks in Israel on October 7, 2023 and the terrorism of September 11, 2001, but also recalled the unity of purpose demonstrated by Americans seeking to assist one another in the wake of the 9/11 disasters: “America is greater than any of the hate and the rhetoric that we hear.” Dener thanked all who contributed to the event and the upkeep of the memorial site, pointing out such features as a fragment of metal from the North Tower, a US flag inscribed with the names of the victims and a Callery pear seedling from the “Survivor Tree” found beneath the rubble of the towers.
Expressions of appreciation for the contributions of first responders are a key component of such ceremonies, and many members of the New Paltz Fire Department, Police Department and Rescue Squad were on hand. Fire captain Steve Greenfield stepped forward to recite the “Firemen’s Prayer” to introduce the bell ceremony, during which Newsome played “Taps.”Afterwards Greenfield acknowledged the many 9/11 survivors, including first responders who flocked to Ground Zero while the air was filled with ash, fumes and fine debris, who went on to suffer serious lingering health effects.
The featured guest speaker at this year’s gathering was Taylor Bruck, acting Ulster County clerk. After serving as county archivist and then deputy of records management, he was next in the line of succession to take up longtime clerk Nina Postupack’s mantle when she stepped down from her post last month for health reasons. The New Paltz event was only Bruck’s third official public appearance, following his swearing-in on August 22 and a naturalization ceremony for a group of new citizens on September 6.
Postupack had 14 months left to go on her current term, after which Bruck will need to campaign to be reelected to the county clerk post. Though his promotion means that the position of deputy of records management is currently vacant, he told HV1 after the 9/11 commemoration that it hadn’t yet been decided whether to hire a replacement or simply spread his old responsibilities around. Greene County historian Jon Palmer was hired last year to fill Bruck’s former position as Ulster County archivist. “It’s remarkable how competent the staff is,” Bruck said. Learning the ropes of the “purely administrative” tasks of the county clerk, such as overseeing the Department of Motor Vehicles, will be his first order of business.
Bruck will continue in his current role, separate from his Ulster County position, as City of Kingston historian, which he took over in 2019 after Ed Ford retired from that post at the remarkable age of 101. “I had big shoes to fill with Ed, and I’m having a similar experience with Nina,” he said. “My goal is to go in the same direction as them. Both Ed and Nina had the same mentality, in that their focus was on serving the public… The goal is to not overthink.”
Many of Postupack’s notable achievements involved maximizing the role of the Office of the County Clerk in preserving local history and making it accessible to the public, collaborating with educators and community groups and boosting the county’s appeal as a heritage tourism destination. Bruck is well-suited to pick up that torch, being already deeply immersed in a “massive digitization project” to put archived historical images online, funded by a grant from New York State’s Local Government Records Management Improvement Fund. “We’re hoping that sometime in the next six months it’ll be live,” he said.
The county has recently acquired several new collections of images, according to Bruck, including some 40,000 photographs donated by the Kingston Daily Freeman when it moved to a new building. These new acquisitions are in addition to a treasure trove of historical documents dating back four centuries thatBruck described as “more than virtually any other county in New York, other than New York City and Albany.” The office holds “early land records,” including those recording the partition of early colonists’ enormous land grants into smaller parcels, as well as all the minutes of the trustees of the City of Kingston since its founding.
“All of our Dutch records are scanned, going back to 1658,” Bruck said, though he noted that the translations from Old Dutch made at the end of the 19th century by Dingman Versteeg were “mediocre at best,” and that very few people still alive are fluent in that language. Bruck waxed enthusiastic about the translation work of Dr. Charles Gehring of the New Netherland Project of the New York State Library, pointing out that Gehring has been collaborating with the curator of the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. “There has been renewed interest in the Netherlands to research New Netherland, especially because the original Dutch West India Company’s records burned.”
Besides being responsible for a prodigious store of paper records that are being microfilmed and scanned to preserve them for posterity, the Ulster County Clerk’s Office is the only such entity in New York State to own and operate a historic site: the 1661 Matthewis Persen House. It’s one of the pre-Revolutionary stone structures occupying the fabled “Four Corners” of John and Crown Street in the Stockade District. Purchased by Ulster County in 1912, it served as an office building until the roof collapsed. “The Friends of Historic Kingston restored it and wanted to turn it into a museum, but they didn’t have the staff,” Bruck explained. Now the County Clerk’s Office keeps the Persen House open as a museum and site for lectures during the warmer months. “It gets over 5,000 visitors a year.”
Postupack initiated the practice of mounting historical exhibits at the County Office Building as well, and Bruck is already brainstorming new ones. Wearing both his city and county hats, he has been working with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission for the past three years on raising awareness of the history of slavery in Ulster County. “The Juneteenth exhibit came down yesterday,” he said. “We haven’t decided on the next one yet; there are too many good ideas. It’ll probably go up in January.” Traveling exhibits for Black History Month and Women’s History Month are also in the works.
It seems clear that, while Taylor Bruck gets up to speed on the more mundane tasks of being the prime keeper of modern-day records for Ulster County, his fervor for preserving and honoring the past will be undiminished. Memorial events such as the 9/11 commemoration ceremony in New Paltz fall squarely within his bailiwick, and his face should soon become as familiar around the county as Nina Postupack’s.
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