Volume 11.3 Fall 2009 Hops Farming in the Schoharie Valley in the pre-Prohibition age is described by Mary Bowers (the historian of the Town of Seward), recounting the life and times of hop farming at its height; and a reprint from theKnickerbocker News describes the music played at the end of hop harvests at that same period of time.
The topic of hops farming came to mind because of Mark Simonson’s article in Oneonta’s Daily Star covers hops in Middleburgh after the end of Prohibition and until the 1950s, and we have a pdf of William Pindar’s article ” Hops in Schoharie County ” from the Schoharie County Historical Review on gilboahome.
Old Gilboa’s lead story shows Gilboa as it was in 1870, before the encroachments of the twentieth century, and was written in 1964 by the town historian, Katherine Harrington.
We also have the second article in the series on the DEP’s excavation of sites around the Gilboa Reservoir: “Various [smoking] Pipes Found at the J. Reed Site” by Richard A. Kastl; and a letter from Kristen Wyckoff of the Museum Committee in correction to an earlier DEP article on the “Archeology of the Village of Gilboa.”
Letters from the Front is a new multi-part series from Bob Morrissey, who has shared a number of letters that Jeremiah and David Reed, wrote home from the war starting on November 28, 1862. (Note: the transcriptions maintain the spelling of the original letters but have added punctuation for clarity.) The full four pages of this letter are on the gilboahome.com web site. Over the next several months, we will be”sending” these letters to you so that you can look forward to them much as Mother, Father, and Daniel Reed did.
Genealogically speaking, Teena Schroeder covers the wide variety of reports and charts that a genealogy program can offer (a few are included as examples in the Newsletter, but over 20 more report formats are also available as a.pdf for your review;Hiking for this issue is on the Huntersfield Mountain portion of the long trail and has spectacular views. We will be adding full color panoramas this fall at the gilboahome.com web site, so keep in touch; and Maude Haskin’s Recollections continues with the 1940s — as women went to work outside of the home and little girls grew up (her recollections of the war years will be covered in a separate issue).Weather or not: George Wilson’s thoughts on this year’s hay and corn crops in light of the wettest July in history.
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