Gregg Berninger, the Ghent, NY town historian, offered an interesting rule of thumb to determine how Hudson Valley towns came to be, based on their geography.
Those near rivers and streams employed their power to run mills. Others with picturesque village greens might have served as a crossroads for commerce and social life. And those distinguished by their flatness may have been where railroads created junctions, people and businesses following in the locomotives’ footsteps.
Such was the rationale behind Ghent, a Columbia County town and the subject of a history walk Mr. Berninger conducted last Sunday. When he’s not diving back into the past and leading bicentennial tours of the village he’s an English professor at Columbia-Greene Community College.
Mr. Berninger pointed to a woods behind the VFW hall where a hundred years ago the Boston & Albany Railroad and the Harlem lines met. Then he stepped even further back in time to the early 1800’s when the lives of its farmers bore closer resemblance to their 18th and even 17th century forebears than to the modern age.
The railroad changed all that.
“In 1818 the hamlet didn’t even exist,” he said. Life was what he described as “hyper local.” Time even ran differently, ruled by the cadences of nature, the sun and darkness, night and day, rather than by rules imposed by humanity. “Only one out of eight people in Columbia County had a watch or clock,” he reported.
One of my main regrets is that the trees and soil, the timber to construct our 19th century Ghent farmhouse, the horsehair we once discovered used to insulate our walls, and our hand dug basement, can’t speak.
Perhaps they can if you understand their language. But I don’t. Indeed, I find it had to imagine what our land looked like a hundred years ago and conjure the lives of the people who lived here then.
But Mr. Berninger was there to help. He’s also the author of an enjoyable new book, “The Town of Ghent 1818-2018,” at least if you’re of a local mindset. It’s filled with photographs of the way the town and the surrounding countryside looked in the 19th and early 20th centuries and how its citizens went about their lives.
Maybe the hardest thing to imagine is how denuded of trees the landscape used to be. Actually, I knew that. I have a photograph taken from our front porch in the 1940s where you can see hills several miles away. In the ensuing seventy years the unfarmed land has grown up so much that we can’t see to the end of our driveway.
But it’s one thing to learn something. It’s another thing to absorb and appreciate it.
Looking through the book’s photographs: freshly scrubbed school children at a one-room schoolhouse on Old Post Road circa 1880; Ester Sweet proudly posed with her bicycle in 1893 – “You will forgive me when I tell you I am learning to ride a bike,” she wrote a friend; a legion of railroad workers shoveling the tracks after a 1920 snowstorm; farmers plowing their fields with horses as late as 1945 – you realize that you inhabit but a single brief chapter in a town’s history, that you’re part of something larger, part of a continuum that stretches from the distant past into the unknowable future.
And we owe it to ourselves, even those of us who are only part-time residents, especially those of us who are part-time residents, to understand about those who trod these beautiful hills, farmed the fertile land, and forded these clear streams before us.
The urge to do so seems strong. Twenty-eight people showed up on Sunday morning for our walk, the last in a series of them celebrating the town’s first two hundred years.
Our tour reached from those former railroad tracks, past the handsome brick schoolhouse that closed in 1985 and that’s now the town hall; some of its students, including Mr. Berninger, posed for a photograph in front of it.
We also passed the Dairy Queen, a more modern caloric contribution to town life, our journey ending at the site of the former county poorhouse that shut its doors in 1955, once home to about 200 residents.
“Ghent in 1900 was buzzing,” Mr. Berninger told us.
While the surrounding countryside is lovely, and the town seems to be enjoying something of resurgence as a hotbed of local agriculture and political activism, I’d lying if I said that Ghent today is especially picturesque.
Unlike nearby towns such as Kinderhook with its storybook town green, Chatham with its lively main street or even Valatie, which seems to be getting its second wind (or is it its third or fourth wind) Ghent doesn’t have much of a “downtown.”
That may have something to do with the Great Fire of 1923 or the haying operation or Borden milk plant that went out of business years ago.
Perhaps in a way the town is reverting to its diffuse early 19th century roots abetted by technological advances such as broadband – if it ever reaches many of the homes still without.
“It’s people commuting from home,” Mr. Berninger observed of the town’s future, while predicting that a hundred years from now its citizens will look back and think of our fiber optics as being as quaint as we do the one-room schoolhouses that these days exist only in faded photographs.
Ralph Gardner, Jr. is a journalist who divides his time between New York City and Columbia County. More of his work can be found at ralphgardner.com
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