Red Hill Fire Observation Station

The biggest challenge to New York following the establishment of the Forest Preserve in 1885 had been fire control and prevention. Illegal logging operations often disposed of their remaining slash by setting it on fire without remaining to make sure it burned out safely[3] and sparks from the steam locomotives of the region's railroads also caused conflagrations.[4]

In 1889 members of the Balsam Lake Club built the Catskills' first fire tower on the summit of Balsam Lake Mountain; twenty years later, after the fires two drought-plagued summers had taken a heavy toll on the forests, the state's Forest, Fish and Game Commission (FFGC) took it over as part of a new strategy, proven successful in Maine.[5] of putting trained observers in strategically placed towers to spot the first traces of fire and report its location via dedicated telephone lines. The state built its first tower on Greene County's highest peak, Hunter Mountain later in 1909, and within a decade there were several others throughout the range and in the nearby Shawangunks.

In 1919, the Conservation Commission, which the FFGC had become, found that there was still a large area of the southern Catskills, in Sullivan and Ulster counties, poorly served by the existing towers. Red Hill was chosen as the site for a new tower (supposedly after political pressure forced the state to reconsider Sullivan County's Denman Mountain to the south[6]), and early in 1920 a forest ranger brought the disassembled tower up to the summit via horse-drawn wagon.[7] A state crew cut a road through the Dibble farm up from nearby Red Hill Road, strung the telephone line along it, and put up the tower and cabin later that year.[1]

North elevation of cabin.

The cabin was replaced with the current one in 1931. There were no other changes to the site during its years of use. Former observers spoke fondly of the job, whose only serious risk was lightning strikes on the tower while they were in it, which slightly injured a few of them. Many of them kept busy during idle stretches by maintaining the road and telephone line, and hobbies such as woodcarving. They also entertained hikers and other visitors who came up the road from the Dibble farm. It was sometimes necessary for them to live off the land, harvesting wild plants, particularly leeks, and game in the nearby woods, as the cabin had no electricity. They drew their water from a spring at the base of a small cliff on the mountain's west slope, about 0.3 miles (0.48 km) from the tower via a short path.[8]

In 1971 the state briefly closed the tower, but it was reopened the next year due to problems with communications in that region. The Dibbles sold their farm in the early 1980s, and the new owner was not as hospitable to hikers, closing it off to all but state access per its easement. Shortly afterward it was closed, as the fire risk to the region had declined since the early 20th century due to the decline of the railroads and logging and the public's greater vigilance in reporting fires.[9] But a renewed period of heavy fires led the state to reopen it in 1987. This time it remained in use until 1990, the last fire tower in the Catskills to be closed.[1][2]

George Profous, a forester for what had by then become the state's Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) wrote in an early 1990s planning document that the aged, deteriorating tower should be dismantled and removed, not only due to its age but because, out of use, it was no longer permitted on state-owned Forest Preserve land, which New York's constitution requires be kept forever wild. Worried residents of Denning and the nearby hamlet of Claryville contacted the Catskill Center for Conservation and Development, a regional advocacy group, to see what they could do to save it, a development Profous had been hoping for.[10] DEC's guidelines governing the use of the Forest Preserve do allow the retention of otherwise incompatible structures within it if they enhance the public's understanding of the Forest Preserve, and many visitors and past observers wrote about how seeing the vastness of the Catskill wildlands at once helped them appreciate the importance of protecting it.

Within a few years, the campaign had gotten all five remaining Catskill fire towers listed on the Forest Fire Lookout Association's Historic Lookout Register and later the NRHP. State grants matched by money raised through local efforts such as bake sales, dances, fundraising drives,[10] raffling of a quilt and T-shirt sales raised enough money to begin restoring the tower and cabin in 1998. Volunteers from the New York–New Jersey Trail Conference extended the path from the tower to the spring into a trail that would remain within state land down the mountain's never-logged northwestern slope to a new trailhead, avoiding the closed road.[2] When all these efforts were complete, in 2000, the Red Hill tower became the first of the restored Catskill fire towers to be reopened to the public.[6]