Brenda Shufelt

Brenda Shufelt was born and raised in Claverack, but left home at a fairly young age for education and career with no particular intention to return.  Older, looking toward retirement, and married she found that Columbia County and Claverack were calling her back.  There aren't many places like this, are there?

We talk about her background and how the things she experienced away from here gave her the self-confidence and drive to not only come home but to find ways to contribute to the town and county's future.  Brenda has been an educator, a mentor, a candidate for local government, and runs - with a team - the history room at the Hudson Library.  Lots of interesting local knowledge here - I hope you enjoy the conversation.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

All right. Hello, my fellow Clavracans. My name is Jeff Kiplinger. This is the Claverick Podcast. Welcome. This is a show where I talk to a variety of people from Claverick and from the surrounding area here in Columbia County, New York. What I'm interested in is what people see in Claverick that makes them want to come here, what makes them want to stay, what makes them care about the future of this little town. I talk to people who have been here all their lives. I talk to people who are recent transplants to this area. I'm happy to talk to you if you have an interesting story to tell. For each episode, I'm going to give you a quick rundown of who I'm talking to and why, and we'll get right into a conversation. I hope that you'll follow us. We're on all the major platforms. I intend to drop a new episode every week or two. And over time, I think we'll get to know our town a little bit better and some of the people in it. You'll meet some of your neighbors, you'll meet some people with interesting stories, and maybe these interviews will start up a deeper conversation for you. Okay, let's get into it. My conversation today is with Brenda Schufeld. I've known Brenda for a long time. We're friends, but there's a lot of things I didn't know about her background. There's a lot of things that she's done since she moved away from Cloverac as a teenager and came back as an adult. And we get into a lot of different stuff. It's really interesting. But first, I'll tell you a little bit about me. Those of you that have asked, thank you for can for your concern. I did have a total knee replacement two weeks ago. I'm doing fine. I'm doing interviews right now around my own kitchen table because I'm not very mobile, but that's okay. What can I say about a total knee replacement? They take a while to recover from, and they involve a lot of cruel and torturous physical therapy along the way. And there's a lot of pills I have to take every morning, and that's not always fun. But I'm getting along okay, and hoping by the end of the summer to be back on my bicycle and back out hiking in the mountains across the river that I love. All that said, when Brenda and I spoke, possibly 10 days ago now, when Brenda and I spoke, she and I had a great conversation, but you'll hear that my voice is coarse, and that's because I was only three, four days out of surgery. And you know how it's surgery is they put a mask on you and they run dry gases into your lungs and throat, and obviously to keep you alive, but in my case they gave me a little bit of laryngitis. So apologies for my voice during that interview, but I hope you enjoy my conversation with Brenda Schuhfeld.

SPEAKER_02 2:47

Okay, if you want to know something about me, you will know that I was born in Columbia Memorial Hospital.

SPEAKER_00 2:55

It's a true native Claverakian.

SPEAKER_02 2:58

Yes. And I grew up in West Ghent. My father had Schufeld's Autobody Shop on 9H and in the in West Ghent, and I went to Icawod Crane Central School District, and I left this town when I was 17 never to return. Although now I live in Ghent.

SPEAKER_00 3:17

When you say never to return in that ominous kind of voice, what do you mean? What were you thinking at 17?

SPEAKER_02 3:25

I wanted I wanted to get away from my family. That really colored a lot of what was going on.

SPEAKER_00 3:32

But I also felt Was that typical teenage stuff?

SPEAKER_02 3:35

I think it went a little further than that, but it was definitely that also. And I think I really wanted to see what was out there. I was in this little town. Our closest neighbor was a herd of cows, and I always loved nature. I could talk about that. I loved being in the woods and running through the meadows and all that kind of stuff. But I wanted to see what was out there.

SPEAKER_00 4:02

And where did you end up going first? 17's a young age to take off, right? Or did you go to college or school immediately?

SPEAKER_02 4:10

Yes. So I had converted to Mormonism when I was 15. There's a church on 9H in Clawric. It's just north of the Dutch Reformed Church.

SPEAKER_00 4:20

Yeah, I know that.

SPEAKER_02 4:21

And it happened my English teacher in the 10th grade was a Mormon, and I approached her, because obviously she should not be soliciting in the school. And I was very interested. I was in a lot of trouble as a teenager and doing drugs, and that was in the 70s, could be very scary. And one of my friends, things happened, there were overdoses and things like that. So I was looking for something, and looking particularly for something from God. And actually prayed at one point shortly before I met this English teacher. And I said, Look, if there, if you have anything, if you exist, I would like to know because there's nothing in the world to live for. It was very dramatic, right? As a teen. And I went to her church and really liked the everyday, that it wasn't just, it's Easter, put your dress on, we're going to church. But I remember the first kind of sermon that I heard was about if if you're if you want to be paint your barn, make your property lovely, things like that. So I was like, oh, this is every day.

SPEAKER_00 5:33

A little bit more community and family roles based.

SPEAKER_02 5:36

Yes, and also more integrated into your whole life. So it wasn't like how my family ended up where you went on holidays, but it was this is who you are, this is what you do, this is how you carry your everyday life forward.

SPEAKER_00 5:52

Now, what did your family think of you joining the Mormon Church? I not that there's anything that's not considered mainstream about the Mormon Church, but it is a little bit less, it's a little bit less Columbia County than some of the other Protestant sects.

SPEAKER_02 6:10

They were glad that I wasn't doing drugs anymore and being angry with them all the time. And then, of course, I had to come home and tell my father, you need to quit smoking so we can be together as a family in heaven. Like really obnoxious.

SPEAKER_00 6:26

Yeah, well.

SPEAKER_02 6:27

Not the way to leave.

SPEAKER_00 6:28

I think we've all been there.

unknown 6:30

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 6:31

Teen teen years are fun. But they were glad, they were relieved because there were people around me that were getting into a lot of trouble, and it was scary. It was a scary time.

SPEAKER_00 6:40

Yeah. So, all right, so the Mormon church took you to a better place, and then you decided at 17 to go to college?

SPEAKER_02 6:49

Yes. So I went to Brigham Young University in Rombo, Utah and was there for a couple of years. And then I just real, you know, just felt like I needed something different also. And I had met this woman there who was from New York City, and she told me, if you want to live in New York City, you can become an au pair, and you will have a place to live in someone's apartment as a maid or a nanny or something, so you can get your start that way. So that's what I did. I went to the Ann Andrews Agency and I became a nanny.

SPEAKER_00 7:28

So did you want to get out of college at that point, or had you finished a preliminary degree program or something, or what?

SPEAKER_02 7:34

No. So I was in the film and theater department, and there was a professor there that everyone was looking up to. He was from New York City. He was actually a Polish film director and acting coach, and he had trained like James Earl Jones and Sicily Tyson, and he had an amazing story. He was a Holocaust survivor. And meanwhile, he made a pass at me. And so me too. And I was so enthralled with him that I felt like I had to leave. I couldn't stay there. So that's what happened.

SPEAKER_00 8:11

Okay. So you didn't stay at Brigham Young, but you stayed part of LDS, part of the part of the Latter-day Saints True.

SPEAKER_02 8:17

Yeah, for a few more years.

SPEAKER_00 8:18

Okay. And now you're in New York.

SPEAKER_02 8:20

And now I'm in New York.

SPEAKER_00 8:22

And you're in Au Pair, and you're trying to find a new direction?

SPEAKER_02 8:26

Yes. And I kind of knocked around the city and figured it out. I worked at Laura Ashley, had my own apartment. At one point I was in Hell's Kitchen with the bathtub in the living room and the pole, the toilet tank at the top.

SPEAKER_00 8:42

Ah, New York in the 70s. Or is this the 80s by now, maybe.

SPEAKER_02 8:46

Then it was 80s, yeah. And it was interesting because I was quite safe because I lived in the drug dealer's building where they would not want to bring police attention if anything happened to me.

SPEAKER_00 8:59

I hadn't thought of that as a strategy myself, but it does sound like a good way to go.

SPEAKER_02 9:04

Neither did I, but God protects fools and angels. So he protected me.

SPEAKER_00 9:11

All right. So you had a variety of jobs. And then where next? You eventually end up back here in Columbia County, but I know that's a while.

SPEAKER_02 9:19

Yeah. I was in this city for probably, let's see, when I was 21 until I was almost till I was 55, because that's when I retired. So that's four, is that 44 years?

SPEAKER_00 9:33

No. No, that's oh 34. 34. Yeah, don't give yourself too much credit.

SPEAKER_02 9:38

I know. I was an elementary school teacher, which explains where students are in math right now. So I became an elementary school teacher, and I was very shy.

SPEAKER_00 9:48

Did you have to get a degree for that?

SPEAKER_02 9:50

Not in the beginning because they at that point in New York City, teachers were woefully underpaid, and there wasn't a mayor who would raise the salaries. So no one wanted to teach. So it was they basically felt my pulse and hired me. That was about it. And it was unfortunate for the city to be in that situation. But it was a high needs, hard-to-staff school, high poverty. And I just fell in love with it. And you cannot be shy and hold a class in that situation. So somehow the passion that these children would learn overcame my shyness, and I learned, you know, how to be and how to be strong, and but also caring. And it really changed me in so many ways. I learned I'm sure I learned as much as my kids did.

SPEAKER_00 10:42

Yeah, I taught high school for two years. I taught high school chemistry, and it was the same sort of thing. I was surprised more than anything else at how much I learned.

SPEAKER_01 10:51

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 10:51

But I wasn't with it long enough to develop that sort of strong sense of self that you're talking about. That really sounds like a real benefit.

SPEAKER_02 10:59

Yeah, it really was. And it also, I was in Upper East Harlem, right where i the island ends and then it becomes the Bronx. It's where the Third Avenue Bridge is. And it's a very particular area that even to this day hasn't developed in the same way that other parts of Harlem have. It's a lot of it is composed of public housing. There were four giant public housing units, not units, but complexes that fed our school. And it was in particular, the demographic when I first came was 99% African American, almost exclusively part of Northern migration from North Carolina. So it was a very particular culture. There's a lot of different cultures within African American culture, obviously.

SPEAKER_00 11:49

Is this part of that section of of Harlem and the Bronx that was divided by the Cross Bronx Expressway that cut off people from a lot of neighborhood resources that they used to have? I know Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez talks a lot about this, but I don't know too much about that period of history.

SPEAKER_02 12:07

Yeah. This is because it's on the Manhattan side, I'm not as familiar with what that particular area of the Bronx is, but it's where the East Side Bus Depot is. So there's not a lot going on. It was a giant deal about 10 or 15 years into my career when we got a supermarket. Before then, you went to the bodega or you had to travel somewhere, which people didn't have the means to do. If you talk about a food desert, it was shocking.

SPEAKER_00 12:34

Yeah. I'm sorry if I'm moving my leg here to try and get it straightened out less painful in some way. I think my listeners know that I had Demi surgery a few days ago. So you'll hear us, you'll hear us creaking chairs and things like that. And Brenda are Brenda and I are both hoarse. You had flu or something like that a few weeks ago. One of those colds, one of those lingered ones. And I had oxygen running into my mouth during the surgery. So we're both gonna dry.

SPEAKER_02 13:03

I think you're doing wonderfully. And the other thing we have in common.

SPEAKER_00 13:06

We're holding it together here, Brenda.

SPEAKER_02 13:07

Yes, we are. The other thing we have in common is that I've also had total knee replacement. So in this living room with two beings right now, there's one knee.

SPEAKER_00 13:19

One remaining good knee. One remaining knee. And it'll be replaced, I'm sure, at some point in the future. They told me that this is the most common surgery that there is out there now for orthopedic surgery. They say the surgeons are doing six to ten of these a day each. Yeah. And it was pretty amazing how fast they moved me through it and how fast I'm recovering.

SPEAKER_02 13:39

It is amazing. I just thought I had, because we're this is a podcast about a local town. My knee replacement surgery was at CMH, and I had very good results, but it was in the same hospital I was born. And when my parents brought me home, I don't think they were thinking I would ever return to get artificial knees. Not in 1960.

SPEAKER_00 14:04

So you came back. Sorry, I lost my voice there a moment, but you came back after teaching when you retired fully from teaching?

SPEAKER_02 14:13

Yes. What had I'm gonna use this phrase because I think it's hilarious. What had happened was when I was teaching one year, there was a woman who came to our school, part of our cohort of people that were hired specifically to work with high needs students, and they were it was second career. It's called Teaching Fellows. It was like similar to an AmeriCorps or something like that, but they were actually hired as their second career. And so that's how I met Linda. She came to my school. Linda, who is now your wife. Yes, Linda Ackerman, who taught at Taconic Hills and just retired in January. And we started coming upstate, and because of my family, and of course, my family fell in love with Linda, as everyone does, and we spent a lot of time here, and we just loved it. And she in particular, the city girl, loved it. And she actually wanted to move here.

SPEAKER_00 15:09

Did that surprise you?

SPEAKER_02 15:11

Yes. I wasn't expecting it. We loved the city, we do all kinds of things in the city, but it really called to her. And she said, Oh, I'm gonna sign up for the online system where you can look for jobs and things like that. Oh, I'm just gonna try out an interview. Because we thought maybe in five to ten years we'd move up here. And because she was at the beginning of her second career, she was gonna work longer than I was. She said, Oh, just interview at Taconic Hills, and they hired her right away.

SPEAKER_00 15:40

And when they were first starting to build up the faculty at Taconic Hills, it was in the new school.

SPEAKER_02 15:48

I think they had been there for several years. She was hired because they were building the technology department more. And at that point, she was part of a special grant that trained teachers in technology. She was no longer teaching in the classroom in New York City. So when they saw her resume, they were very interested. And she worked in the computer lab almost exclusively. I think there was was there more than one? No, I think it was just the pandemic year that she taught fourth grade, starting from home, and then they moved to the classroom by the end of the year.

SPEAKER_00 16:21

Yeah, and she's just recently retired, right? Yeah. So now you guys have, I should disclose, you're not actually in Claverick, you're just across the Gandaline. Yes.

SPEAKER_02 16:32

So close to Claverick. And I we wanted to be able to do that.

SPEAKER_00 16:35

We were in Melanville Square for so many years, and then yeah.

unknown 16:38

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 16:39

Then we found a wonderful house.

SPEAKER_02 16:40

Yes, we did. And we had a wonderful house in Mellonville Square that we made wonderful. It was a lot of work, but we really, really were proud of it. So we bought it originally as a second home, and we were the youngest people on the block, and we loved our neighbors, and they were very generous to us. And when we left, we were the oldest people on the block 20 years ago.

SPEAKER_00 17:06

Actually, that said says something really important, I think, because we are seeing some renewal in the Mellonville Square area. I mean, Mellonville Square, given its small size, its walkability, that little train depot that's being developed there, is turning into a little town center for Mellonville that Claverick still hasn't gotten its act together on creating a town center out of the intersection of 23. But we'll get there, I hope.

SPEAKER_02 17:35

Yeah, it's too bad, but it to your point about Mellonville Square, and since you bring up politics a little bit, local politics, I will tell you a story. Is it Jim Keegan that was the supervisor years ago, even before Robin Andrews, the town supervisor? And we had just moved in, and Guy and Mary Pults were across the street from us. I really loved them, they were wonderful. And Jean and Harry Carl were next door to us, and we loved them. I could tell you a million stories about all of them. So we had fun. But Mike Lehman and his wife were Melissa were down the road, and they had two young boys, and it was a two-way street, Mellonville Square. So people would come swinging off nine, as people are wont to do, and racing to get to Gabe Hour Road. So Mike did everything he had to do, went to the town board to get a one-way put in, which makes total sense. And we were, Guy came to us and said, You have to go to this town board meeting. And we were like, Yeah, we'll go to this town. We're all excited because like a town board meeting. But you don't have a big say in your city council when you're in New York City with four gabillion people. So we show up at the meeting, and Mike lays out his case, and then the public gets to comment. So this woman raises her hand and she says, I'm on Gabeauer, and I have a son too. Why should he get a one way when I don't get a one way? Anything could happen to my son. And Guy Polts stands up and he says, Jesus Christmas woman, you know we're right. And then he sits back down and then everybody voted for the one way.

SPEAKER_00 19:19

That's your that's your first experience with a town mental media or town board meeting.

SPEAKER_02 19:24

Maybe it was Jiminy Christmas. I don't want to say anything bad about Guy Polts because he was a great guy. But yeah, Jiminy Christmas. And we were like, wow, that's a town, and that's it in a nut. That is a town board meeting worth going to. And if anybody in listening range of this podcast has not been to a town board meeting, you are missing something.

SPEAKER_00 19:46

Yeah, I always tell people that. And that's that's the reason that I'm talking to you, talking to a lot of other people, I think, in the county, is that my interest is in what we can do for the future? Because we had this sort of static situation in the county for a long time, right? Where we're the people that lived here were maybe they were getting a little older, but they were raising their kids here, they were raising maybe even grandkids here. But the county was stable in population, in demographic, in sort of income and so forth. And then basically beginning in the mid-2010s, I would say, things began to change very rapidly. And we got discovered by people from the city, and now property values have gone crazy. We're trying to deal with tax situations that come up out of that. And people are now starting to look at what is the future of this newer version of Columbia County. And so that's the people that I'm talking to on the podcast. It's it's people that that are trying to develop some vision for that. And it does come into conflict sometime with the town boards because they were used to doing things a certain type of way, and that worked for many years, and they have that experience and they draw on that. And now they're being pushed, and that's not always comfortable.

SPEAKER_02 20:59

Yeah. And I think also one of the things that I've learned in attending town board meetings and in being somewhat involved with town politics is that people don't speak the same language. And if you think someone understands what you're saying when you're presenting your ideas, that is not always the case. So you really I think it takes a lot for us to come outside of ourselves and think what would it mean for that person to really understand what I'm saying? And I was thinking about this in relation to the interview because I feel like one of the people who has really worked on this, and maybe not even his strong suit, but has worked on it so hard is John Bradley. And he's gained the trust of the town board, and he should. But in his work on the Climate Smart Committee, and really you think not you, but the proverbial you think that if somebody's gonna talk about About climate smart, that's gonna be a left-wing Democratic, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, that type of thing. And what we don't understand is that all these people who are fishing and hunting, you don't think they love the environment. My uncles that I grew up with, particularly my uncle Doug, was in that woods. He was a crossbow hunter and was in there four or five o'clock in the morning. Of course, he had a whole case of beer, but we won't go into that.

SPEAKER_00 22:25

But and would tell I may edit that Alec. That's not the usual hunting story I want to tell. As a hunter.

SPEAKER_02 22:33

Okay, most people, I don't think that goes on anymore, but I don't I don't see very much of it at all. Anyway, okay. You do. I don't know. Now we're censoring. But so he would so Uncle Doug would go into the woods, and when he came back, he didn't talk to us. I killed the big bucket, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. He would talk about the sounds in the morning, and because you have to be very quiet, you have to be very still. That's my understanding, especially with crossbow. You're just waiting for that perfect moment.

SPEAKER_00 23:03

One of the people that I want to get on this podcast, and I'll just call him out here by name, is George Dunst, who's been on the town board for a number of years, and that's how I met him. But now I know him better from his involvement with youth programs in the town, and and in particular through his involvement with youth as a hunter, because I've become a hunter head instructor myself, and I see a lot of younger people coming into hunting and fishing, and more involvement with the outdoors than we've seen for the last few years. We went through this period of time when and still exists, where everybody's on screens and there are there are people that are afraid to go outside because of ticks or bugs or or whatever. And when that maybe is changing. So George is one of those people that I think not only gives so much of himself in this area, but he he's also very articulate about the beauty of it, uh what you say, right? Just sitting and observing what's going on around you as the world wakes up in the morning or goes to bed at night. It's it's really a fantastic way to get in touch with where we live.

SPEAKER_02 24:13

That's great. And he's very interested in working with youth too, so that could be a really powerful those two things combined. Yes.

SPEAKER_00 24:23

But you ran for Town Board at one point.

SPEAKER_02 24:26

Yes, I did.

SPEAKER_00 24:26

I know. And so you're bringing some of this ambition about being able to talk to people on both sides of an issue.

SPEAKER_02 24:34

Yeah. Yeah, I feel that very strongly. And when I was thinking about this interview, a lot of what I was thinking about was about politics, but in very in very particular ways. One of the things that kind of woke me up to this is when I was campaigning, I was outside the Claverick post office meeting, greeting people, and this older gentleman came up to me and said, Are you running for town board as a Democrat? And I said, Yes. And he said, Are you gonna take my guns away? And I said, Sir, I'm running for town board. I'm gonna make sure that Louis has enough road salt for the winter. I don't know. I have two semi-automatic weapons in my home. You're gonna try to take them away? I said, I don't even own a gun, so I am not coming to your house to take your guns away because it wouldn't end well for me.

SPEAKER_00 25:24

It's like, what do you but it's yeah, it is interesting because it all of that gets conflated with all of these national issues. And I think we see a tendency from both parties to try and bring national issues into stuff that is in inherently hyper-local, right? I mean, this is about Klopperick, this is about Columbia County. This is we're not going to have what would be a big issue, gun rights, abortion rights, things like that. We're not going to we're not going to have any influence on those. I've never seen anything come up before the town board about abortion.

SPEAKER_02 25:57

Surprising as that is. Yeah, it and it's so unrealistic. And it the the unfortunate part is that it stops the actual work. So if you stop the conversation, cold. Yes. And if you have people coming in not understanding and bringing up national issues at a town board meeting, then how is somebody supposed to get their petition for a one-way street to keep their sons safe?

SPEAKER_00 26:24

Exactly.

SPEAKER_02 26:25

It's just you're doing one thing and you can't do the other, also. So that's a big part of it. And it's really unfortunate. And one of the things that I think Linda and I are both grateful for in living in this town is that we know and have come to really deeply care for people who are not in our party, who don't agree on a lot of the national policies. And when we think about it, it we're shocked. Because but by the same token, like I was thinking, there are small business owners in Claverick, and I would not go to anybody else because I know they'll be fair, I know they'll treat me right, I know they won't overcharge me. And they're Republican. And those two things go can go together, and historically they have gone together.

SPEAKER_00 27:12

I personally never met one of my neighbors that I couldn't talk to, no matter which they fly at campaign time. So it's uh it's really not a matter of again, I I just think conflating national politics, which is all about grabbing people's attention bipolarizing. We see this with the media, we see this with people's stump speeches and so forth. And it's designed to just fire up your base and nothing else. It's not designed to have conversations, I won't even say across the aisle, right? Because we don't have aisles here. But it's not designed to have a conversation with your neighbor when he's out cutting his grass and looks like he could use a bottle of water.

SPEAKER_02 27:56

That's sweet.

SPEAKER_00 27:59

So you're firmly committed to Columbia County, but you're not running again for town board, or could you be convinced?

SPEAKER_02 28:06

I don't know.

SPEAKER_00 28:07

My my Now you're against, so you're a confidence.

SPEAKER_02 28:10

I don't I never have time for anything, so I don't know how to do it.

SPEAKER_00 28:13

Well, tell me about your work now.

SPEAKER_02 28:14

I work for the Hudson Area Library since I retired, so it's 10 years, over 10 years. And right now I'm part-time. I've I've chose to be part-time since the pandemic, and I'm the history room coordinator, so all things local history. So it's the history of the library service areas, which are Hudson, Greenport, and Stockport, and then by extension, Columbia County. So actually, our next history room exhibit at the library in January is going to be about a business that was Clover-based, which is the Jonas Studio that it's in was in Church Town. The building is still there and it's being used by an artist, Misha Khan. But they made the dinosaurs for Dino Land, the 1964 World's Fair exhibit from Sinclair Gas or Oil Sinclair Oil Company.

SPEAKER_00 29:07

Wow, that was the one done in Queens, right? They still have some of the structures. There's a big globe, and that I remember there there's like a huge map of New York that is like a diorama. It's laid out in a huge room, and you can see all this stuff going on. It's I loved that as a kid.

SPEAKER_02 29:26

Yeah. We went about three or four years ago. It's now that building is now the Queen's Museum, and that's they all that's a permanent part of their exhibitions.

SPEAKER_00 29:38

I don't remember seeing the dinosaurs there though. Are they still there?

SPEAKER_02 29:41

No. So one of them or a couple of them are in Texas. One is at Berkshire Museum. I think the Stegosaurus is at Berkshire Museum. It's outside, and they're just finishing their renovation. We were going to try to get it for the lawn of the library, but a little ambitious. But back in the day when they made the dinosaurs, they brought them to 7th Street Park, where there's going to be Flag Day Parade today. They had a parade down Warren Street to the waterfront, put them on barges, and floated them down the Hudson River to Queens, where they were unloaded for the exhibit. Wow. And they were life size. Yeah. What a dinosaur. They were huge.

SPEAKER_00 30:22

And built out of what fiberglass and metal frames, something like that.

SPEAKER_02 30:26

Find out when the exhibit opens. I don't know. I don't know. But we have a lot of information. There's a lot of people who remember this and are very excited about it and sharing information with us.

SPEAKER_00 30:37

And that's got to be f really a family-oriented kind of thing, right? Because our unless I've completely lost track of life, kids are still actually interested in dinosaurs, right?

SPEAKER_02 30:49

Oh, definitely.

SPEAKER_00 30:50

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 30:51

It was funny because I can't I was leaving the library for lunch and I saw that we have starting place pre-K down in our in the basement of the building. It's not ours, it's the program. And the kids were outside with little dinosaur models doing something with the teachers. It was hilarious. I was like, oh, we could, I should take photos, but we could use this for the exhibit.

SPEAKER_00 31:16

So you've had some other really well publicized and well-received exhibits over the Wailing One, the Patriots from the Hudson area back in the Revolutionary War era. And I remember the the gosh, what was the name for the exhibit with the black settlers that were here? Yeah, the B. All again all the back all the way into the 18th century.

SPEAKER_02 31:38

The BLACC, the Black Legacy Association of Columbia County. And that extends out into Claverick, too all north Columbia County. We inherited, or it was donated to us, a collection from the 1980s, donated by Columbia Opportunities, who oversaw this collection that was made by a group of retired seniors who said in early 1980s, there's no black history of Columbia County, but we know there is. So they actually went through all of the old newspapers by hand and found anything that was related to black folks and copied it out. It's just amazing the amount of work that they did. And then they did a series of oral histories. So talking about people who were alive at the turn of the century, if there be they're in their 80s and they're interviewed in the 80s.

SPEAKER_00 32:32

And so you brought it all back together with some more contemporary voices?

SPEAKER_02 32:36

Yes. Yes. And we actually got an IMLS grant, Institution of Museum and Library Services federal grant, to have that all digitized and it's on a website. So you can hear the oral histories.

SPEAKER_00 32:49

And then there were photographs and documents and just a lot of great information that, in fact, if I could tell you one thing very quickly, because I think this is one of the best things that's come out of the Hudson area libraries. It was sometime after we moved up here, my wife Katie and I, when the new library opened down on Fifth and State. In the armory.

SPEAKER_02 33:18

So this is the fascinating thing with history. And since this is Claverick, there is new excitement and energy in the Claverick Historical Society. And there is an arm of the or a part of the Claverick Free Library called, I believe it's also called the History Room. So there's a committee there.

SPEAKER_00 33:39

I've done interviews there, and it's a nice quiet place to talk to people. And I did speak to Gary Davis about the history of the Trevor Burrus.

SPEAKER_02 33:46

He's responsible for a lot of that new energy. He's in the society, and I think he's also on the committee of the library's history.

SPEAKER_00 33:53

So they necessarily went into background mode a little bit during the pandemic. But yeah, this is the last couple of years they've really begun to resurrect.

SPEAKER_02 34:03

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 34:03

And that room, that history room in the library, has a collection of really nice old documentation associated with Columbia County in general, but also specifically Sorry, keep losing my voice specifically with Clover. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 34:20

So just one story, and I think I hope that people who may be interested in this and have some time will think about the Historical Society and the Library History Room. So in the BLACC collection, there was one manumission with a cover page that said deed book on it. And if for people who may not know, New York State had gradual manual free freedom for enslaved people. And it I never thought about this, but it all has to be legal, it all had to be documented, etc. So I went to Holly Tanner, our Columbia County clerk, and she's always very useful, very helpful for us. And she said, Oh, it just so happens my assistant clerk came to me the other day and said, What's a manumission? Because she saw it in a deed book. So they were able to point out the exact book, and I didn't have to look through the whole upstairs at the clerk's office because that would be daunting. And I got 48 manumissions, just click with Holly's permission, got photos from my iPhone.

SPEAKER_00 35:29

So each of these is a separate document, a deed of manumission.

SPEAKER_02 35:33

Yes. Yeah. Some had two in one, and they are now going to be online. There's a gentleman from John Jay College, part of the SUNY system, who it has developed this whole Northeast slave records database that's going to be online. So because we had them digitized, they're going to be able to be there. And there was one gentleman named Caspar Freeman, and I wrote about this for the Columbia Paper. We had his manumission for his son, and we believe he had purchased his son, which was not uncommon, and then manumitted him after he actually, in quotes, owned him. But I had found information from a book on runaway slave ads by Susan Stess and Cohen, where Casper had run away ten years before that. And I it was, I think it was a Van Hoosen that had that had been his enslaver.

SPEAKER_00 36:34

So he would not have been named Freedman, Freeman at that time.

SPEAKER_02 36:37

A lot of slaves took Freeman because they were free man now. So he ran away ten years earlier, and his enslaver was advertising. Let's get him back, I'll give you a reward.

SPEAKER_00 36:48

And then this was a New York-based enslaver?

SPEAKER_02 36:52

Clavert-based. Oh. Van Hozen, right? The name from around here. I think it was a Van Hoosen. And just wondering what is the story that he was able to come back and get his son, maybe purchase him and manumit him. He wasn't punished for c for running away. Was he did he have to buy his own freedom first? It's just a fascinating story.

SPEAKER_00 37:17

Yeah, and that's the kind of stuff that we need to work hard to uncover because it's so tempting, I think, to everyone. We're seeing a lot of this now with the current state of affairs in Washington, D.C., right? Where there is a desire to gloss over some of our less pleasant parts of our history. But by knowing that, we see the courage in people and we see the the heroism really that has existed as part of the spirit of this country for so long.

SPEAKER_02 37:43

Yeah, I could not agree more. The Jesus, since I used his name before, he said the truth shall set you free. Yeah. And when I started teaching elementary school to African American children, I wanted to learn their history because I didn't feel I could stand up there and teach history without also knowing what their history was. And I felt proud as a human being. I don't know why we separate. I if we shouldn't we'll feel bad if we learn that white people enslave black people and all that nonsense.

SPEAKER_00 38:19

Yeah, I think that's a done deal. We we should have learned that.

SPEAKER_02 38:23

Oh my god, I could maybe I could be as brave as that. Maybe I could that's a possibility in humanity, and I'm a human being. So that possibility is in me. Maybe that can help me be braver. And that's I didn't enslave anybody. I don't need to run around feeling bad.

SPEAKER_00 38:41

That's a good way to look at that. And if I can just insert a small suggestion about future history room exhibits. Yes. There was a tremendous amount of Italian migration into Columbia County at some point. And I would guess it would be 20, 30 years after the Italian immigration that that hit cities on the East Coast with a dramatic new population of immigrants. And of course, there was uh there was uh a certain amount of xenophobia or racism or whatever you want to call it associated with those Italians when they first arrived. But I'm wondering what it was like for them, for the ones that came to Columbia County, away from New York City, maybe or away from Boston or away from Philadelphia to uh do were they trying to escape something? Did they come here because of new opportunity? What's the but we see so many Italian names?

SPEAKER_02 39:34

Yeah, no, I think you've really hit something. I know a couple things about it, and I think it would be worthy of an exhibit. A lot of Italian, and I believe I'm not sure, but I think also Ukrainian and Polish, there was a lot of immigration of you of people from that area. But the Italians in particular and African Americans, part of Northern Migration, were in the brickyards. And there was a brickyard in Hudson, and it was rough. And I remember in his oral history, because we also have a library open collection of oral histories that we continually add to. Leo Bauer, who's mostly known for trying to keep the shantytown, the fishing village in Hudson going, he said those people were so tough they could eat males. So that was a rough industry. It was very hard on people.

SPEAKER_00 40:31

Will you be doing something on the shantytown, or is it do you feel like that's been done enough? Because I know Gossip Survivor Town had a lot of pieces on Hunton. There was a lot of history floating around about that probably 15 years ago now. Yes.

SPEAKER_02 40:44

I think it's very important. So we'll see when the time is right. But I like your suggestion of immigrants and Hudson's fascinating. There's two Ukrainian churches in Hudson that are still active. So there's a very strong Ukrainian community and knowing where we came from.

SPEAKER_00 41:01

I mean, and as I understand it, at one point very early on after the re revolution, Hudson was one of the twenty th 20 biggest cities in the U.S. Sounds a lot. It was probably the uh the uh the shipping channel and you know the whaling exhibit as well.

SPEAKER_02 41:23

Hudson was part of Claverick. It was Claverick Landing where the wharfs were for and there was shipping business before the proprietors came from Nantucket and Providence and started the whaling business there.

SPEAKER_01 41:37

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 41:38

And extended out the shipping, obviously, to be global, but yeah, a lot of Dutch trading.

SPEAKER_00 41:46

Yeah, there's a point at which you have to get stuff past Hudson to the Erie Canal, the Mohawk River, and then the Erie Canal and so forth, and that begins to develop the whole eastern half of the country. But it's all fascinating to me.

SPEAKER_02 41:59

Yeah, it really is.

SPEAKER_00 42:01

So you're a dedicated Columbia County person. You will not be leaving us. No, you will not be retiring anytime soon. We're gonna be able to count on you being in place for a while.

SPEAKER_02 42:12

I will be around. Yeah. And Claverick is a very special place. And just speaking of history, it's it probably has the most history with the Revolutionary War of any town in Columbia County. The kind of deepest connections. That information is available, but it's also to be discovered. As we learned with the whaling exhibit, we found out things that people did not know. And that's the great thing about history. It stays there and it waits for the right person to come along.

SPEAKER_01 42:45

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 42:45

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 42:46

And then you know. And if you didn't know, now you know.

SPEAKER_00 42:50

Did we cover it, or is there something else we need to touch on?

SPEAKER_02 42:54

Or uh I guess we're You good? Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 42:56

Good. This was a great conversation. Thank you so much for coming to my house and tolerating my bad knee.

SPEAKER_02 43:02

Oh, you you're tolerating it. That's the main thing. It's not easy.

SPEAKER_00 43:07

Always good to talk with you, Brenda.

SPEAKER_02 43:09

Great to talk to you, Jim.

SPEAKER_00 43:15

So there you go, another great conversation. Brenda and I had so much fun sitting down together. There's so much interesting in her background that I didn't know. And the stuff that she's doing and the stuff that other people on the Hudson Area Library System are doing with these history room exhibits is fantastic, eye-opening stuff. And I think it will continue to be the exhibit that is on now, I think, through the end of this month, is still on the American Revolution and the revolutionaries that resided in this area. And they've uncovered some stories that I think have been buried in the archives for a long time. So go see it. Go see the Hudson Area Library. If you happen to see Brenda down there associated with the History Room exhibits, give her a shout and tell her you enjoyed this interview. We are the Claverick podcast. We are available on all the major platforms. I hope you'll follow us. I hope you'll subscribe again. I've told this to a number of people a number of times, but we are, I think, still the only podcast with the name Cloverick in the title. So if you Google Podcast and Claverick, or Claverick and Podcast, you will find us. Thanks for listening. Hope to see you next time.