The Back-story
by Michael Sullivan Smith with Audrey Klinkenberg
It's funny how the term "history" is used now. We're all familiar with the "Historic Saugerties" signs and can name the attractions. But it's the visitors that every day frame these attractions into GPS coordinates in the selfies they send to big data collections through their social media postings that is the "history" record of today.
So we've relegated "history" as a term to these cold facts. That means that what we're really interested in here is what we'll call the "back story". This is also not what's considered history in an academic sense but really something like the flash of memory that is found in a movie story where you're given what motivates a character.
That notion we have about Saugerties' back story we can thank Benjamin Myer Brink for. Our most popular "memory" of our past; a selfie for all Saugerties; was written over a hundred years ago. Brink produced a magazine covering every history topic of the region; "Olde Ulster"; and also published a book about Saugerties; "The Early History of Saugerties 1660-1825".
If you "Google" Brink's full name you'll find a Library of Congress copy of this book you can save to your computer for free. For half a century most in Saugerties have been buying reprints of it and coveting the rare original found in a used book store. You probably have a copy on your bookshelf if you've been here for more than a generation.
For those who binge on this kind of thing Brink is just the tip of the iceberg. There are many "historic" accounts from the late nineteenth and early twentieth century that document Saugerties history. Brink's interprets it as a view of his time, just the most recent of these many, and draws on the earlier ones for his facts. As a summary it is the most recognized reference for Saugerties' historic identity.
The past few years have seen the availability of these "historic" (pre-copyright protected) books become digitally available on the Internet. Comparison reading of all the viewpoints has become a history geek pastime. This is no longer for just a select group sharing an expensive library. Those originals are now artifacts; rarely cracked.
Saugerties is probably better represented in these regional and local accounts of the past than most other communities. While the game elsewhere is often to debunk histories as folklore; Rip Van Winkle and all; in the case of the mid-Hudson region it is usually to fill in the blanks. Much has become important that was considered insignificant in the narrative the early authors of histories were concerned with.
Having a "feel" for the times of the author has become part of the back story of reading in general. Recently we've discovered a way to get this back story to the back story of our past.
Audrey is transcribing the hand written diaries that Benjamin Myer Brink faithfully kept from the age of 33 until his death. At the same time she is transcribing a newspaper clippings scrapbook of stories that parallel this personal account with entries from 1880 to 1915. This is revealing the motivations of our key motivator!
Transcription takes a lot of time. As of now Audrey's work is twenty years of Brink's entries away from when he started writing his history of Saugerties. To "jump ahead" you'd still have to read straight through a few thousand pages of the handwriting of Brink. And you'd still need to have absorbed the content of the 35 years of newspaper reports that matched the timespan. It remains to be seen whether the "smoking gun" or guns are there, by which is meant, the factors that influenced life, the efforts taken to do the research and what the sources were.
Add to this a "plot twist".
A note discovered in the State Library Cockburn Collection gives a time-line of past events between the earliest record and the date of this note in 1770; our earliest history document. Were these facts unavailable when our "1660-1825" history was formalized by Brink?
This note is for a legal argument of the rights of Lieutenant Swords to a 2000 acre bounty overlaying most of the mid section and village of today's town. It covers nearly every concept regarded as key to Saugerties' origins; from the Sawyer to the settlement of the Palatines to Indian treaty boundaries; and it is written within the personal memory or directly transmitted memory of those living at the time.
Brink is writing over a century and a quarter after this document. How did the mutations of fact between Brink's names and dates and those of this record occur and does this show a trend that had a beginning point and a cause?
As Audrey transcribes the nearly 13,000 daily diary entries the sources that influenced the facts that formed the story of our past will become part of a body of evidence. These digital transcriptions of Audrey's make the field wide open to mass participation. It's now a game more and more are able to play; an ADA ramp giving accessibility, finally, to the facts of history.
What we intend to do is supply some training wheels. All these new understandings need perspective. We'll do this by presenting new takes on old Saugerties. The digital era is bringing something new to light every day. These small weekly steps will add a contemporary perspective to what you never knew or always wondered about.
I, for one, will not pass the "Historic Saugerties" sign again without a sense of expectation. We hope to build this for you over the weeks and months ahead.
