Voices of the Catskills:
Celebrating the Legacy of
Shirley Wiltse Dunn,
Leah Showers Wiltse, and
Doris West Brooks —
Three Trailblazing Mountain Top Women who Wrote History

Saturday, July 26, at 2 p.m.
Twilight Park Clubhouse, Haines Falls

Please join us for the Annual Justine L. Hommel Memorial Lecture to celebrate the legacy and writings of three outstanding Mountain Top women historians. These women, all born in Tannersville, studied, researched and wrote about the history of the Mountain Top, the Catskills and the Hudson River Valley.

Shirley Wiltse Dunn spent 20 years studying and researching the Mohican Indians of Eastern New York and Western Massachusetts. Prolific, she published 3 major books, plus numerous articles and chaired 3 conferences on Native Americans at the NY State Museum from 2000-2009. She also studied and wrote about the early Dutch settlers who lived on both sides of the Hudson River near Albany. She was a frequent lecturer and has been nationally recognized for her scholarship on Indigenous peoples.

Leah Showers Wiltse, Mrs. Dunn’s mother, wrote essays on the people and places in the Northern Catskills for a local publication. Later, her daughter published them in one volume entitled Pioneer Days in the Catskill High Peaks: Tannersville and the Region Around. Her essays chart the course of Mountain Top settlement which began shortly after the Revolutionary War. They are informative and often humorous descriptions of the early settlers and the lives they lived on the Mountain Top. She served as the Town of Hunter Historian in the 1950s.

Doris West Brooks wrote fictional tales and stories centered in the East Kill Valley. They were published as The Old Eagle Nester: the Lost Legends of the Catskills and relate the legends and superstitions of the people who lived and made a living in the East Kill Valley. Among many other volunteer roles, she served on the HTC School Board and was a member of the Boards of the MTHS and the Haines Falls Library.

A panel of historians will discuss the accomplishments and legacies of these women. The panelists include Heidi Hill, site manager of Crailo and Schuyler Mansion State Historic Sites, David William Voorhees, of the Jacob Leisler Institute for the Study of Early New York History, Richard Sears Walling, a student of African American and Indigenous history, and Richard Brooks, a land surveyor and historian whose mother was Doris West Brooks. There will be a video taped interview with Heather Bruegl, a public historian and citizen of the Oneida Nation of Wisconsin. The program will be Introduced and moderated by MTHS President, Adrienne Larys. This is an original program developed by the MTHS for the Justine L. Hommel Lecture Series.