Category: Local history

Contributing writers will sally into archives and recover stories and voices from the past, from many communities in this independent stretch of hills between wide rivers and the Taconic and Hoosic ranges and the Green mountains.

  • Issue:

    From Congress to the battlefield

    It wasn’t a typical congressional message to constituents.Instead of boasting about bringing home the bacon, U.S. Rep. James Bedell McKean, R-Saratoga Springs, called on his constituents to risk their own hides. “Traitors in arms seek to overthrow our Constitution and to seize our Capitol. Let us go and defend them,” McKean wrote in an Aug. read more

    From Congress to the battlefield
  • Issue:

    Honoring black history in the Berkshires

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    Group aims to transform former church into visitor, cultural center Beth Carlson and Wray Gunn Sr. stand in front of the former Clinton A.M.E. Zion Church in Great Barrington. Carlson and Gunn both serve on the board of a 2-year-old nonprofit group that hopes to transform the building into a visitor and cultural center celebrating read more

    Honoring black history in the Berkshires
  • Issue:

    Father and son reunited at war’s end

    It could almost be a New Testament parable, but for the specific reference to “Bronco Charlie” Miller, a colorful historical figure who was buried in Bay Street Cemetery in Glens Falls.A parable would identify the main character as “a certain father.” And Charles Miller, better known as “Bronco Charlie,” definitely was a character. Harold “Bud” read more

    Father and son reunited at war’s end
  • Issue:

    Lessons from the ‘professor’ of the road

    It doesn’t rise to the level of a bucket list item, but for about three decades I’ve contemplated traveling coast to coast by Greyhound bus and writing a travel narrative. You can imagine my intrigue recently when I came across the epic poem “A Gregarious Greyhound” that Walter Brown Leonard wrote in 1936 about a read more

    Lessons from the ‘professor’ of the road
  • Issue:

    Local suffragist tried to upend a party machine

    A Hudson Falls suffragette tested the muscle of local political bosses in 1918 and attracted statewide attention as the first woman in upstate New York to compete in a Republican primary for a state Assembly seat. When Elizabeth Mitchell launched her campaign, it had been less than a year since New York amended its state read more

    Local suffragist tried to upend a party machine
  • Issue:

    Antiques that challenge assumptions

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    Boston artist plans local installation with a Berkshires theme Pat Falco’s “Campaign Headquarters,” set up in Boston’s Faneuil Hall in 2016, established the artist’s reputation for immersive installations that mess with viewers’ sense of reality. Falco will bring his taste for mischief to North Adams this month with a new show, “Antiquitacky,” at Installation Space. read more

    Antiques that challenge assumptions
  • Issue:

    A political alliance that broke a racial barrier

    GLENS FALLS, N.Y.Newspaper clippings in the Addison B. Colvin scrapbooks at Crandall Public Library’s Folklife Center tell the story of Charles W. Anderson, a civil rights and political activist of the late 19th and early 20th centuries who had connections to Glens Falls and Saratoga Springs.Anderson was a spirited orator who would later be called read more

    A political alliance that broke a racial barrier
  • Issue:

    A case of campaign name-calling that backfired

    William Randolph Hearst, as the Democratic candidate for governor of New York in 1906, delivered a campaign speech so full of guttural ire that it went down in history. Hearst coined a nickname for his Republican opponent, Charles Evans Hughes, that reporters would repeat for years to come. He branded his opponent the “animated feather read more

    A case of campaign name-calling that backfired
  • Issue:

    Restoring an American giant

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    Pittsfield project advances efforts to develop blight-free chestnut trees Local arborist Robert Presutti shows off the chestnut tree orchard at Springside Park in Pittsfield. The orchard, which Presutti was instrumental in starting, contains 3,000 tree seedlings and is part of a much broader effort to develop a blight-resistant variety of the once common American chestnut. read more

    Restoring an American giant
  • Issue:

    Bottling a revolutionary spirit

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    Southwest Vermont’s lone distillery stresses tradition, local history Ken Lorenz shows off some of the products made by Spirits of Old Bennington at its distillery in the old Vermont Tissue mill building on Route 67A. The distillery is open for tastings on Fridays and Saturdays. Joan K. Lentini photo   By TELLY HALKIASContributing writer BENNINGTON, read more

    Bottling a revolutionary spirit