This article examines the contents of two segments of a map digitized and made available to the public freely through the New York State Archives. All images are taken from downloaded versions of these maps, which are available to study through the links in this article.
~
John Cantine’s 1798 Map of the Town of Catskill is one of those fascinating documents which we in the history business call an “RRDCM” (meaning Really Really Dang Cool Map). Cantine’s map is one of three maps prepared in the late 1790s showing the southernmost towns of Albany County which were soon to be partitioned into the new County of Greene. The other two maps are linked here, but to follow the descriptions in this article you should jump right to the two links for John Cantine’s map.
Leonard Bronk’s map of the Town of Coxsackie can be viewed through this link: https://digitalcollections.archives.nysed.gov/index.php/Detail/objects/36974
David Baldwin’s map of the Town of Freehold can be viewed through this link: https://digitalcollections.archives.nysed.gov/index.php/Detail/objects/36974
John Cantine’s map of the Town of Catskill can be viewed through these links: https://digitalcollections.archives.nysed.gov/index.php/Detail/objects/36925
https://digitalcollections.archives.nysed.gov/index.php/Detail/objects/36924
Examining the eastern half of the Map of Catskill the first thing observers should note is that along the river at the northern boundary of the Town the small hamlet of Loonenburg labeled as “Esperanza” can be seen with the Zion Lutheran Evangelical Church drawn in as its most prominent building. The lower village which became Athens in 1805 appears just south of Esperanza as a solitary little structure which could quite possibly be the Jan Van Loon House which still stands at the south end of the modern Village (it’s the little yellow cottage by Route 385 so many of us are familiar with). This illustrates an odd bit of trivia: the Village of Athens was incorporated within the bounds of the Town of Catskill a year before the Village of Catskill was incorporated. I assure you that your friends will find this fact very interesting if you relay it to them at social gatherings.
Looking at the southern end of the map one can easily spot the location of the modern Village of Catskill, shown with a rough grid approximately reflecting the street plan of the rapidly growing community at the mouth of the Catskill Creek. Following the many roads leading from the Village going west and south it is interesting to note that John Cantine not only drew the roads from actual surveys (roads with an “x” on their route indicate that these are accurate to their surveys) but that he also included important homes, mills, and taverns at their proper locations. This is remarkable because many buildings now otherwise lost to time appear in their accurate locations. The mill shown on the Hans Vosen Kill is a perfect example of this. It was possibly the earliest mill built in Catskill in the late 17th century, and Cantine shows it just east of Jefferson Heights in 1798 — giving us a more complete idea of its whereabouts on this small tributary, as no physical traces of the site now remain.
Out in modern Leeds it is curious to note how sparsely developed the hamlet looks. Leeds at that time was not yet graced with its two large textile mills and still reflected its earlier agrarian appearance. Following the road west out of the hamlet (marked by Schuneman’s House and Mill) one can trace where it crossed the Catskill Creek at the Leeds Bridge at which point the road turned along the flats heading near to where the Barnwood Restaurant now stands on Route 23. In 1798 the Dutch Reformed Church stood just west of there on Cauterskill Road, and Cantine faithfully rendered the old church at that spot on his map. A NYS Roadside History Marker is all that remains to indicate that this important early Church stood on that spot.
The second half of the map isn’t as jam-packed with interesting sights as the eastern portion, but it is still an equally intriguing window into the cultural landscape of Catskill. Starting at the eastern or right side of the map a few points of interest are immediately apparent. First is the route of the Town’s southern boundary which, after proceeding westerly from the Hudson River at the Embought, reaches a point at the center of the small spit of land which once divided North and South Lake. From that point the line proceeds westerly on a slight adjustment where it ends at a point in the woods west of the Pleasant Valley Cemetery in Ashland, probably somewhere near modern Campbell Road.
This southern boundary intersects several roads, the strangest of which is shown halfway between North-South Lake and Pleasant Valley. The road terminates just north of the boundary line at a small cluster of cabins which Cantine carefully drew in. This small settlement seems like it could probably be somewhere in the East Kill Valley around East Jewett, and the road shown reaching it could be a spur of the old road from Mink Hollow, though the map doesn’t show enough detail to confirm the possibility. Resolving the conjectures I’ve made will take much more study.
In a separate essay titled “On The Mountain Top” I covered an explanation of the westernmost corner of this map where Medad Hunt’s farm and tavern stand was shown in Pleasant Valley. The year after this map was made Medad Hunt donated land nearby to create the first meeting house in old Windham. More extensive write-ups on this history appear in Rev. Henry Hedges Prout’s “Old Times in Windham” series which originally ran in the Windham Journal in the 1870s and was published as a compilation by Hope Farm Press in the 1960s.
No details are shown along the northern boundary moving west to east across the map until it reaches a cluster of roads at its far right edge near the Shingle Kill in modern Cairo. This lack of detail can be explained in part by the boundary intersecting a lengthy stretch of inhospitable terrain along the escarpment of the Catskills. The roads and hamlet shown at the eastern side of the map are actually back down in the valley, though to look at the map one would never know there were any mountains or other geographic features sans the few creeks and streams Cantine added for reference. I’m at a loss why he decided to eliminate such definitive geographic features, but it may be that he decided not to include the mountains because he had no accurate survey of them to base his rendition on.
Down in the valley the hamlet of Kiskatom (later Lawrenceville) is drawn in northeast of North-South Lake and is described as the “Settlement at Kiskatammiska.” This name is one of the many attempts to derive a phonetic spelling of a name applied to what was variously called the Kiskataminiska Patent granted to Henry Beekman and Gilbert Livingston in the 1710s. The original patent covered a stretch of several hundred acres north of Palenville running below the escarpment of the Catskills. This land was divided and leased by the Beekmans and Livingstons prior to the Revolution, so the homes and settlement shown here, unlike the ones on the Mountain Top, were relatively well established and several decades old by that time.
By Jonathan Palmer, Greene County Historian