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    Monticello
    Monticello
    Monticello
    Ebook195 pages57 minutes

    Monticello

    By Tom Rue

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    About this ebook

    Latin for "heavenly mountain," Monticello's founders supported Thomas Jefferson's populist ideals, naming their village for his Virginia home. Center of the Town of Thompson and seat of Sullivan County since 1809, Monticello was founded in 1804 and incorporated in 1830 by John and Samuel Jones. Tanning, lumbering, farming, and manufacturing gave way to tourism. The railroad came in 1871. A fire in 1909 decimated the downtown, but automobiles and an artery nicknamed "the Quickway" connected New York City to the mountains and made Monticello a recreation center. The years 1920 to 1930 saw a population increase of 48 percent. Sidewalks brimmed with shoppers as Broadway, lined with stately and beautiful shade trees, clattered with traffic at all hours. Slightly over an hour from Manhattan, Monticello had two identities: a community built and sustained by workers, residents, and businesses and a busy "borscht belt" vacation center of boardinghouses, hotels, bungalows, and recreation.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherArcadia Publishing
    Release dateSep 18, 2012
    ISBN9781439638767
    Monticello
    Author

    Tom Rue

    Tom Rue is historian for the Village of Monticello and for the county’s Freemasons. He has volunteered and worked in human services for 25 years. He has drawn on private collections of photographs and many knowledgeable sources to reflect the diverse history of a charming village.

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      Book preview

      Monticello - Tom Rue

      past.

      INTRODUCTION

      Like many here, I am a transplant to Monticello. After spending my youth and young adulthood living in such diverse places as New Jersey, Utah, Colorado, Israel, Texas, and Pennsylvania, I came to Monticello in 1988 from Wayne County, across the Delaware at Skinners Falls. Commenting on the interest that I took in learning about and interpreting local history, a former village manager remarked to me years ago that I seemed to have an unusual sense of place.

      Local history is partly a matter of grounding one’s self in a location, literally focusing on where one’s feet are. It instills respect for the present viewed through the lens of its past. The history of a small area is a microcosm of a nation’s history—a method of viewing humanity at a cellular level.

      The toil and dedication to loved ones and social and community supports that went into building Monticello explain the motto on the village’s corporate seal. Crescit eundo (It goes as it grows) comes from the epic poem De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things) by first-century BCE poet Lucretius, in which he refers to a thunderbolt increasing in strength as it moves across the sky, and it is referenced by the selectors of the motto as a symbol of dynamic progress.

      Monticello has been the seat of Sullivan County, New York, since the county was founded in 1809. In the not-so-distant past, Monticello was known as the Garden Spot of the Mountains. With hope and nurturance, it will flourish again. At 1,512 feet (461 meters) above sea level, Monticello is embedded in the hills of the southern Catskill Mountains. The village was named for the Virginia home of Thomas Jefferson (locals pronounce the village’s name as mon-tah-sell-oh), a word Jefferson coined meaning heavenly mountain.

      Never in Monticello’s two centuries have local economic and social conditions been worse than now. In 1909, the whole downtown district was devastated by a huge fire. But business bounced right back. Reconstruction was immediate. The economy continued to prosper. In short order, Monticello was again a booming village. All through the Great Depression, local shops, newspapers, and tourist establishments thrived. My hope is that allowing readers a visual glimpse of Monticello’s past may generate not just nostalgia but hope and new vision for a prosperous future.

      Established in 1804 by John Patterson Jones and his brother Samuel Frisbee Jones, Monticello was born by an act of the New York State Legislature. Chapter 313 of the laws of New York passed on April 20, 1830, announced, The freeholders and inhabitants aforesaid are hereby constituted and declared a body corporate and politic, by the name of the Trustees of the Village of Monticello.

      Its municipal boundaries were originally described in 1830 legislation as a parallelogram half a mile in width and one mile in length (today it is 4.1 square miles). Had it not been for a slight turn taken by the Newburgh-Cochecton Turnpike, Monticello could not have become the thriving community that it did. The turnpike survey through the town of Thompson was done by Samuel F. Jones and his brother John P. Jones in 1804. They laid plans for a community they truly envisioned as the seat of Sullivan County. This turnpike cut a swath through dense forests and swamps by which, many generations later, we still find our way.

      John P. Jones himself built his home on the turnpike section then known as Main Street (Broadway) at Mill (Saint John) Street, opposite the plot he marked out for a stone courthouse. He also built a home for his brother Samuel, which became the residence of Gen. Archibald C. Niven in later years. The structures and personalities have faded. What remains are memories, bits of charred newsprint, faded photographs, and word pictures amplified and interpreted in the mind.

      —Tom Rue

      Monticello, New York

      www.tomrue.net

      One

      PEOPLE AND PLACES

      In 1801, the New York State Legislature chartered the Newburgh and Cochecton Turnpike Company to survey and cut a road through Orange and Ulster Counties connecting the Delaware and Hudson. Without this, there would have been no Monticello. The Monticello-Jeffersonville Turnpike tollhouse charged 6¢ to horse and carriage riders, 12¢ for a team, and more for cattle in 1875. (Courtesy of Richard Benjamin Sr.)

      Pictured above is the first house in Monticello, built by John P. Jones in 1804 and demolished in the 1950s to make way for a bank. In History of Sullivan County, James E. Quinlan wrote, For beauty Monticello is not surpassed by any village of an equal population. Its main or principal street is one mile in length, eight rods wide, and straight; its park or green is central, on the side of a gentle elevation, the summit of which is crowned with the courthouse, clerk’s office, and Presbyterian church. Its private residences are located back from the street, and generally have pretty yards in front, adorned with flowers and ornamental trees, and the buildings themselves indicate that their owners are wealthy and refined people. All these things (except the last) are the result of a fixed purpose on the part of two apparently utilitarian Yankees, who were not considered remarkable as lovers of the aesthetic, and this purpose was formed when the village-site was literally a cover for wolves and bears! (Courtesy of Sullivan County Historical Society.)

      John Patterson Jones (1779–1858) inscribed the following in his family Bible: "The Family Record of John P. Jones, who with his brother Samuel F. Jones, founded and

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