Sometimes voting for a ballot proposition that you haven’t thoroughly researched can turn out to have surprising consequences — and not necessarily in a bad way. On Election Day 2024, Ulster County voters approved a cluster of amendments to the County Charter that the Ulster County Charter Revision Commission had recommended and the County Legislature had voted in 2023 to adopt. Legislators and voters alike placed their trust in the commission as having done its work diligently.
Most of those changes involved requiring the legislature to confirm appointments of county officials; one required the county comptroller to be an Ulster County resident. But another provision took a position out of the legislature’s control, both for appointment and budget allocation: the office of county historian. As of January 2025, it’s now under the purview of the Office of the County Clerk, an agency that has long taken very seriously its responsibility to preserve and interpret the remnants of our region’s colorful history.
The late Nina Postupack, who served nearly two decades as county clerk before her retirement in August 2024, treated that role as much more than a custodian of records. She was a passionate history buff who turned up at practically every event in the county commemorating some historical milestone or reenactment. She was particularly active in nurturing the county’s ties with the descendants of the Indigenous peoples whose homeland this once was, including taking the initiative to revive the long-neglected practice of annually renewing the Nicolls Peace Treaty that ended the Second Esopus War in 1664. The original wampum belt that sealed the treaty is stored in the county archives.
Postupack also reinvigorated the use of the Matthewis Persen House, which has been the property of the County Clerk’s Office since 1912. Built in 1661, it’s one of the four pre-Revolutionary War stone structures occupying the fabled “Four Corners” of John and Crown Street in the Stockade District. It was used mainly as an office building and for records storage for decades, until the roof collapsed. The Friends of Historic Kingston had the resources to restore the structure, but not the staff to maintain it as a museum. It was on Postupack’s watch that the Persen House became a full-fledged museum, open to the public for self-guided tours during the warmer months and made available to various organizations for history lectures, with a new themed exhibition installed each spring.
Postupack left big shoes to fill, and the person she designated as her deputy and successor, Taylor Bruck, was ready to follow in her footsteps in terms of a commitment to bringing local history to life. He was working as county archivist in 2018 when Kingston’s city historian Ed Ford decided, at the age of 100, to retire. Bruck took over as city historian while also continuing to work for the county. He will face at least one challenger in the Democratic primary, Village of New Paltz deputy mayor Alexandra Wojcik, when the remainder of Postupack’s term expires at the end of this year. But in the meantime, one of the new “acting” county clerk’s first acts was to appoint a new county historian to replace the retiring Geoffrey Miller — and this time, that official will be answerable to the County Clerk’s Office, where the history action is, rather than to the County Legislature.
What difference will that make to residents and visitors? Well, the County Clerk’s Office has a more generous budget line for historical preservation, interpretation and education, which means that the post of county historian will now become a full-time professional gig, rather than a volunteer slot. “I’m the first full-time historian in Ulster County history,” says Edward Moran III, better-known as Eddie. An Ulster County native, Moran earned his BA in History at SUNY New Paltz in 2020 and shortly thereafter became a part-time tour guide and then full-time Tour and Interpretation manager at Historic Huguenot Street.
“The role of county historian has existed as an unfunded mandate in New York State law since 1919,” Bruck explained in his announcement of Moran’s appointment. “Our office, as keepers of a large portion of the most historic records of the county, has often shouldered the burden of interpreting that history for the public. Having Mr. Moran as part of our team ensures that we can continue the vital work of preserving these records while giving more attention and scrutiny to the stories these records represent.”
Still in his 20s, Moran brings irrepressible youthful enthusiasm to his new position, fueled by a personal heritage of both deep local roots and more recent immigration. “I grew up with a sense of history,” he says. “I grew up cutting hay on the farm that has been in my family since 1898, on Route 32 between Modena and Plattekill… There still are generational stories handed down.” His great-great-grandfather Patrick Moran emigrated in the 19th century from Ireland to America and went to work for a dairy farm in the Ireland Corners neighborhood of Gardiner, he says, but “My father’s mother was a Janssen. She was related to all seven of the New Paltz Patentee families.”
This mixed background, combined with the programming that he conducted at Historic Huguenot Street, has inspired Moran to want county historical interpretation activities to expand beyond the mold of the narratives of the early Dutch, Huguenot and English colonists that he heard on school field trips as a child. There are later immigrant stories as yet untold, he notes, not to mention the shameful history of slavery in the region and the far more ancient legacy of the Esopus people. “Growing up, I didn’t really resonate with the families on Huguenot Street. I was interested in the broader picture,” he says. “New York State is the most diverse place to have existed in the history of this planet.”
His time at Historic Huguenot Street coincided with an expansion of organizational interest in aspects of early New Paltz history beyond the founders known as the Duzine and their direct descendants. “I was blessed to work under supervisors who engaged with the Lenape people,” he says, as well as previous employees who had “laid down the groundwork” for the organization to launch enriched programming examining the lives of enslaved and freed people of African descent. As a result, “Researching enslaved people has become my primary interest.”
Inspired by work already done by historians Eric Roth and Susan Stessin-Cohn, Moran delved deeper into the lives of two free Black residents of the area, known as Susanna and Anthony, who were purchased by patentee Louis DuBois in Hurley in 1673 and later escaped. Their lives were “exceptional” in many ways, including being unusually well-documented, he notes. “I was able to find out a lot more detail that fleshes out their story.” Moran developed a multimedia presentation based on his research titled Agency and Ownership: The Story of Anthony and Susanna, Two Enslaved Africans in 17th-Century New York, which can still be viewed on the HHS website at www.huguenotstreet.org/virtual-programming. He’s also working on a book about them.
On his watch as county historian, we can expect that more of these lesser-known stories will be brought into the spotlight. Moran doesn’t seem overly concerned about the recent backlash in some parts of the nation against curricula that endeavor to weave the narratives of ethnic minorities and other marginalized people into the larger fabric of how history is viewed. “With inclusive narratives, you’re never taking away,” he points out. “We should probably say they’re ‘more accurate,’ rather than ‘more inclusive.’ You can’t claim you’re being accurate if you’re leaving them out.”
Being a stickler for accuracy comes with the territory of relishing jumping down deep rabbit holes of research. With all the fervor of a diehard history nerd, Moran is ready to debate, for example, whether it’s correct even to call the settlers who colonized New Paltz Huguenots, noting that they were originally Belgian and should probably be described as Walloons. But he’s also eager to explore fresh avenues of research and interpretation, such as a possible project on the socioeconomic history of the 20th-century shopping mall. History didn’t end before we were born, he insists: “We are our own kind of history.” Recent arrivals to the region are an integral part of that evolution. To illustrate the point, he cites 19th-century newspaper accounts of how tourist traffic to the mountain houses was ruining everything, in the same outraged tones heard in contemporary complaints on social media about “citiots” and traffic jams.
Collaborative projects are a big part of a county historian’s responsibilities. Moran plans to “maintain relationships with scholars who might not live in this area,” but who come to Ulster County to do their own research, as well as with historians affiliated with SUNY New Paltz, Vassar, Marist and “colleges abroad,” and to expand existing outreach programs in classrooms and school tours. “One of my goals for this position is to build a similar relationship with SUNY Ulster,” he says.
Moran is also working in tandem with fellow historians at the municipal level and at not-for-profit cultural organizations such as HHS, the Ulster County Historical Society, the Reher Center for Immigrant Culture and History, the Hudson River Maritime Museum, the D&H Canal Society, the Dr. Margaret Wade-Lewis Center for Black History and Culture and others to present talks and organize public events. Harambee Kingston will be curating the 2025 exhibition for the Persen House, set to open on Memorial Day weekend, while Moran works on making the museum more kid-friendly by expanding its collection of touchable objects.
Coming up later this month, the county historian, the Wade-Lewis Center and HHS will host the official public unveiling of a monument on Huguenot Street to the memory of Anthony and Susanna. The event is tentatively set for 11 a.m. on February 22; check the HHS website at www.huguenotstreet.org/calendar-of-events for updates.
Besides researching and developing interpretive materials and exhibits, the Ulster County historian’s job includes being accessible to the general public as a resource. You can direct your local history questions to Eddie Moran via e-mail at countyhistorian@co.ulster.ny.us or by phone at the Ulster County Records Center at (845) 340-3415. The county historian’s Facebook page is updated frequently with news about events of interest to history buffs at www.facebook.com/ulsterhistorian.
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