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Ulster historian uncovers field where the 'broken people' lie
NEW PALTZ: A local historian finds the graves of 1,000 forgotten poor people.
By Jeremiah Horrigan
The Times Herald-Record
jhorrigan@th-record.com
It was the last place on earth you'd want to be. Parents would invoke its name to frighten their children into obedience:
"If you don't do your chores, I'll send you to the poorhouse."
Everyone knew about the poorhouse then. The buildings loomed, as real and mysterious as a church, near the banks of the Wallkill River at what is now the Ulster County Fairgrounds. They were demolished in 1985.
Then as now, a day after the county's Darmstadt homeless shelter closed, the poorhouse was a place people didn't like to talk about. For more than 150 years, it was a house of misery. People went there and people died there and nothing more was ever heard of them.
Until now.
Susan Stessin-Cohn, who recently uncovered evidence of a forgotten graveyard at the poorhouse grounds, unfolds and reads a copy of an old poorhouse record she's discovered – the last words ever written about a man named Michael Brennan.
"This man Michael Brennan was a gentleman in all respects," she reads. The document contains other bits of information. He was Irish, he was temperate (moderate with alcohol) and he died in 1890.
Michael Brennan is among perhaps a thousand other forgotten people whose bodies lie today in an unmarked, overgrown field on the edge of the Ulster County Pool.
The poorhouse housed the destitute, the damaged and the mad – people who ran out of money, luck or both or people who never had much of either to begin with. There were "freed" slaves, farmers who went bust, "debauched" women, the friendless elderly and the certifiably insane.
Stessin-Cohn, an adjunct professor at SUNY New Paltz and amateur historian, deduced the presence of the county's forgotten "potter's field" three months ago from aerial photographs, local lore and field work. Since then, her life has been consumed with what she calls the "broken people" of the poorhouse.
"Sometimes it's like I'm in a movie with all these people," she said looking up from the charts and maps and newspaper clips that contain the cross-referenced shards of life stories she's pieced together.
She's become, in her own words, obsessed with discovering everything she can about the broken people. And she believes these forgotten dead deserve today what they were denied long ago: remembrance and respect.
"The history of these people is everyone's history. They deserve to be remembered," she said.
To that end, Stessin-Cohn has begun an effort to involve New Paltz High School SUNY art students in designing and building a memorial at the site. And she wants to get her research online.
Since the site is on county property, she's asked for financial help but so far, she says, she's seen more interest than action.
Legislators who doubt the value of Stessin-Cohn's discoveries need only talk to Ruth Feldt of Plattekill, who was researching her family's history. She'd come to an impasse, until she met Stessin-Cohn.
Her great-grandfather, a man named McDonald Frost, had been a canal worker in Wawarsing who was put out of his job by the railroad. Feldt knew only that he'd died in the poorhouse.
"People like him built this county," Feldt said. "We need to pay attention to people like him – to the little people."
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