Samsonville, New York

Native American hunters made use of a natural rock shelter beneath a cliff in the area now called Samsonville as early as 2000 BC and possibly as late as AD 1600. Excavations at the site yielded stone blades, potsherds, arrowheads and spear points.[2] The modern town grew up around a tannery established by the Palen family in 1831 below a falls on Mettacahonts Creek.[3] In 1848, the Palens sold the business to fellow tannery operator Zadock Pratt, with Henry Samson as operating partner. The area around the tannery had been known as "Palentown" but acquired the name of Samsonville, leaving Palentown as the name of the adjacent area of Rochester, Ulster County, New York.[4]

Henry Almanzo Samson, for whom the hamlet was named, was born April 4, 1818 in Woodstock, Connecticut, where he learned the tanning trade. In 1853, having established himself as a wealthy local businessman, he was named a Lieutenant Colonel in the 20th Regiment, New York State Militia and the following year was commissioned Brigadier General, 8th Brigade. In 1853, Zadock Pratt gifted his share of the Samsonville tannery to his son George Watson Pratt. Samson became the sole owner in 1856 and also had an interest in four other tanneries. In 1857, he built a grand Italianate villa at 32 West Chestnut Street in Rondout, New York. General Samson performed his Civil War service in New York state, but raised local troops for the Union: "Employees of the big tannery at Samsonville responded well to the patriotic activities of its owner, General Samson of Rondout. 43 of these sturdy men from the back country enlisted in the old 20th and 27 more entered the 120th the following summer."[5] In addition to his tannery interests, Samson was a member of the Board of Directors of the First National Bank of Rondout, one of the original trustees of the Rondout Savings Bank, a founding officer of the Rondout and Oswego Rail Road Company and president of the Washington Ice Company. He died on February 9, 1869 and is interred in Montrepose Cemetery in Rondout, now a district of Kingston.[6]

The name of Samson Mountain, which stands above the upper reaches of Rondout Creek, commemorates Samson the tanner. The peak now known as Ashokan High Point, which looms over Samsonville, was also called Samson by older residents, and is so named on a 1942 United States Coast and Geodetic Survey benchmark at the summit.[7] "Little Ashokan" (also known as "Round Mountain"[8] or "Ashokan Cobble"[9]), a lesser summit below High Point, was known locally as "Samson's Nose."

Historian Harry Albert Haring wrote that, in its heyday, "Samsonville was the most important town in the entire Catskill Mountains, - its population was the largest, its payroll the greatest." [10] The Civil War created a high demand for the hemlock-tanned sole leather that was the Samsonville tannery's main product. After the war, demand declined, as did the supply of hemlock bark. As bark cutters wiped out the local hemlocks, all the Catskill tanneries eventually closed. Historian David Stradling wrote: “In many locations...when the tanneries closed, the settlements around them closed too. Samsonville, the site of General Henry A. Samson’s large tannery, was once an important town. In 1854, the Samson Tannery employed seventy men, processing a remarkable 31,000 hides a year. By 1930, Haring declared Samsonville nearly a ghost town; it had never found a replacement of the jobs lost when the tannery closed.” [11]

In 1871, an Ulster County directory noted that Samsonville "contains a church, a hotel, three stores, a grist mill, a saw mill, a tannery and about 100 inhabitants." [12] At that time, tanning was still being done in Samsonville by William V.N. Boice & Sons.[13] In 1873, however, the tannery burned down (for the third time) and was not rebuilt.[14] In 1880, historian Nathaniel Bartlett Sylvester still identified Samsonville as a "thickly-settled neighborhood" but added: "Since the abandonment of the tannery business the importance of the place has declined." Not all was gone: "There are two stores, one by Pratt Shurter and one by Peter Barringer, – Mr. Shurter is also postmaster, – a grist mill, owned by Anthony Shurter. There is also a saw-mill at this place, and a blacksmith." [15]

1812 War veteran John "Captain Jack" Shurter was the first known resident of Samsonville, one of the original Town Officers when Olive was founded in 1823 and a Justice of the Peace. The mills he and his descendants operated for six generations at the top of the Samsonville Falls on Mettacahonts ("Markham") Creek preceded Samson's tanning business and long survived it. The Shurter grist mill ground local buckwheat, wheat and corn, as well as clover for animal feed, until a flood knocked it off its foundation in 1928. That mill ("where the grain is ground, with a rumbling sound, that feeds all Samsonville") was celebrated in "The Tall Pine Tree" ("The Samsonville Song") collected in the 1950s from local residents Celia Krom Kelder and Mary Avery.[16]

The Shurters also operated saw mills that produced excelsior and, later, headings (barrel tops) and shingles, and that side of the business continued after the loss of the grist mill, with a gasoline-powered engine supplementing the sometimes unreliable water power. A turbine installed between the mills provided electric power to Samsonville well before it was available in other remote Catskills communities.[17]

After the tannery era, bluestone quarrying, timber harvesting and shaving hoops from saplings ("hoop poles") to bind the barrels that held Rosendale cement, as well as growing oats and hay, provided employment and income for a reduced population.[18] In 1895, a Rand McNally Atlas gave Samsonville's population as 111.[19] 1940 census records counted 115 persons in Samsonville.[20] In recent decades, urban emigrants and second-home owners have added to the population, though many members of old local families - Barringer, Boice, Quick, Shurter, Van Kleeck, Krom, Haver, Davis, Beesmer, Palen, Roosa and Kelder - are still living in the area.

The tannery, mills, stores, hotel and schoolhouse that once stood in Samsonville are gone, as is Abey Kelder's saloon, celebrated in the local folk song "Kintey Coy at Samsonville"[21] The post office, opened in 1849 with Henry Samson as the first postmaster, closed in 1965 [22] and Samsonville is now included in the Olivebridge ZIP Code, 12461. A handful of older buildings remain, most notably the Samsonville United Methodist Church, built in 1873.[23] In that same year, the Reformed Church of Samsonville, founded in 1851, was taken down and relocated to nearby Krumville.[24] Tetta's Market, a gas station, convenience store, pizzeria and former tire store operated since 1952 by four generations of an Italian-American family, is the hamlet's major commercial business.

Public school students in Samsonville are in the Onteora Central School District and attend Bennett Elementary, Onteora Middle and Onteora High School in the Olive hamlet of Boiceville.

Since 1954, Samsonville has had its own volunteer fire company, Olive Fire Department Company No. 4.[25]

• "1875 Inset Map of Samsonville". showing Shurter Head Mill and Grist Mill ("G.M."), Saw Mill ("S.M."), Chambers Hotel, Union [Methodist] Church, Schoolhouse, etc.
• "1855 view of Samsonville".
• "Tetta's Market".
• "Peter B. Markle, the "Rip Van Winkle" of Samsonville".

• Larry Shurter (1917-2005), midget car and NASCAR race driver, track director of Onteora Speedway in Olivebridge. "Historic Racing".
• Edwin Dubois Shurter (1863-1946), Professor of Public Speaking in The University of Texas from 1899 to 1923, organizer of The University Interscholastic League "UIL newsletter" (PDF).
• Sufjan Stevens, singer and songwriter
• Vernon Chatman, television producer, writer, voice actor, comedian and musician
• Heather Hitchens, president and CEO, American Theatre Wing
• Sara Lee, bass player, singer and songwriter
• Scott Kelder, town of Olive board member[1]