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Woodstock

• Town of Woodstock -- Woodstock was incorporated as a township on April 11, 1787. This date is referred to in several histories as "nineteen days before George Washington was inaugurated as the first President of the United States" a curious error. The township took in all of the present Shandaken, also parts of Hunter and Olive and some of Delaware County.
  Both Woodstock and Shandaken had existed as named and settled localities for some years. In 1762, Thomas and Henry Chadwick leased a farm from the Livingstons at Little Shandaken (Lake Hill). A young man who married, in 1780, is described as having been born in Woodstock, in the First Dutch Church records of Kingston. Chancellor Robert R. Livingston, in his letter of March 1,1778, to the Kingston trustees, offering free lands to distressed inhabitants of Kingston, mentioned Woodstock and Shandaken as places where settlements had already been made. When the Revolution broke out, Woodstock, though the home of ardent patriots, also became a refuge for Loyalists. John Burch, a Loyalist who afterwards went to Ontario, testified that he left "Tin tools and Japanning Tools, a mahogany bedstead, and 2 or 3 barrels full of things at the Mill House, Woodstock" during the Revolution, which were confiscated by the "rebels." This is the first mention of what was probably the gristmill on the Saw Kill by the present country club. Two suspected Tories were fleeing down the Woodstock Road from Kingston on April 9, 1777, according to the "Calendar of Revolutionary Papers." Frederick Rowe, a Tory from Saugerties, was living at the present Sickler place on Lake Hill and aiding young Tories there during the latter part of the conflict.
  A guard was kept at Little Shandaken, now Lake Hill, by order of Governor George Clinton, 1778-81. In October, 1778, this consisted of forty-one privates, besides sergeants and corporals, and was under command of Captain Jeremiah Snyder, of Saugerties. There was probably a log fort near Woodstock village, and further protection was given by the large fort at Great Shandaken (see Shandaken). In spite of these, however, the settlers lived in a constant state of alarm, and in June, 1780, two prominent patriots of Woodstock, Peter Short, Sr., and his son-in-law, Peter Miller, were captured on the Woodstock-Saugerties road as they were returning from the Katsbaan Church with their wives and families, by a band of Tories and Indians. They were taken to Fort Niagara and Montreal, finally escaping and reaching home after much hardship. Peter Short's descendants are still numerous in the town.
  Soon after the close of the conflict, settlers flocked to town from the Livingston neighborhood across the Hudson, from Kingston and Saugerties, with a few from New England. The site now occupied by Woodstock village was offered for sale much earlier than other lands and soon divided among such enterprising families as the Eltinges, Newkirks, DeForests, Snyders, Elwyns, Hogans, Dymonds, etc. Captain Elias Hasbrouck, a Revolutionary veteran of the Continental Army, was the first town supervisor. He bought land from the Livingstons on Hutchins Hill (near Lake Hill) and was probably allowed to buy outright because he had served in the Quebec campaign under General Richard Montgomery, who had married a Livingston heiress. Frederick Rowe, the Tory, also bought land at Lake Hill from the Livingstons on June 1, 1787, formerly leased to Thomas and Henry Chadwick on January 1, 1762. An interesting legend is still current among old residents as to this sale.

  The Livingstons at first wished to give him only the usual threelife lease, but Rowe, eager to own the land outright, wrote in the lease, first his own name; second, the name of his Negro slave, and "after leaving a blank space for Livingston's signature, added the name of the Devil, who, he declared, would never die. Livingston, the aristocrat, refused to sandwich his name between the Negro's and the Devil, and was obliged to give Rowe a clear title to the land."
  It was on this three-life system that most of the settlers in the township got their lands, which went back to the proprietors when the third person named in the lease expired. Besides the rent provisions, there were burdensome clauses in regard to sale or sub-letting of the leases. As the generations succeeded one another, and the results of backbreaking toil disappeared into the landlords' pockets, dissatisfaction grew, culminating in the Down Rent War of 1845-47, for an account of which agrarian disturbance the reader is referred to De Lisser's "Picturesque Ulster."
  At the first town meeting held in Woodstock in June, 1787, the list of town officers included many names still prominent in the township, as Hasbrouck, Rowe, Short, Mowers, Snyder, Riselar (Riseley), Krom, Newkirk, and Longyear. Town records from this date to 1804, quoted in Sylvester's history of 1880, are unfortunately lost, but the records from the partition of the township in 1804 to date are preserved in the town clerk's office, and well repay study.
  In the first week of June, 1937, Woodstock celebrated its sesquicentennial with a pageant, an exhibition of local craft, and other events in various parts of the township. This was a great success and firmly established the town's standing as an historic community with an interesting background as well as a vital present.

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