Anyone entering the Ulster County Office Building in Kingston can see an intimate history of the construction of the Ashokan reservoir, put together by County Clerk Nina Postupack, on display in the hallway near her office. The siting and construction process was a contentious one, with Catskill Mountain residents being forced to relocate from their homes by a distant government, New York City.
It was not a friendly affair. The county’s collection includes the first page of each court transcript, a collection comprising thousands of pages contained in 377 volumes. The Ashokan reservoir was completed in 1917, but court proceedings continued into the 1950s. In the end, the needs of millions of New York residents took precedent over those residing in the valley to be flooded. New York City’s water history was always thus.
The first mention of water as a turning point in Manhattan’s history appears in the book ‘Water For New York City’. It contains a record of a drought in September 1782, recorded in the journal of Hessian Soldier, Lieut Von Krafft.
- September 3rd “Our foragers could find no water on account of the great heat this year which had dried up everything.”
- September 27th “All the men will soon die for want of water.”
Although this was a year after the conclusive Revolutionary War battle of Yorktown, Manhattan Island was still occupied by the British who employed this Hessian soldier. Surrounded by the Continental Army and suffering a severe drought, Britain’s will to continue a ‘lost’ war ebbed while peace negotiations dragged on. While there was hope of British withdrawal as early as December of 1782, it was a year after Von Krafft’s diary entries before the imminent became reality. On November 25th, 1783, the guard changed and the British left lower Manhattan. The Revolutionary War had ended, but Manhattan's search for potable drinking water had just begun.
Work began on the Croton Dam in 1837, with an eye towards supplying all of Manhattan’s water needs from the Hudson Valley. No doubt the citizens of Westchester County suffered the same fate that their neighbors to the northwest still did not anticipate. Soon even Croton Reservoir was not enough for the growth of Gotham, and covetous eyes were cast upon the plentiful waters of the Catskills. It wasn’t long before the valley of the Esopus Creek in the foothills above Kingston, New York, was identified as most desirous, and, speeded by the droughts of 1895 and 1896, plans were put in place to acquire sufficient water for the 3 ½ million residents of Greater New York.
Another drought after the Ashokan dam was built caused newspaper headlines to deride the empty reservoir as a ‘Folly’. The book ‘Last of the Handmade Dams’ and various displays in the Empire State Railway Museum document weather’s involvement in the project that destroyed nine towns and countless lives. Surely the same occurred as New York City took land in the western Catskills for more reservoirs.
The display in the Ulster County Office Building takes up the history at the planning stages of the Ashokan reservoir and brings it forward using photographs, maps and personal accounts of the hardships endured by people forced from their homes by New York City.
The fight did not end in the courts of the 1950s. In the 1990s, New York City established controversial land use regulations within their watershed. Property acquisitions, property tax court cases, massive aqueduct leaks and illegal water releases blamed for flooding and historic trout stream degradation, all are part of New York City’s overriding designs to avoid spending billions to filter their water. All rely upon the pure water of upstate New York, and the usurpment of the rights of upstate New Yorkers.
From the prologue of the book ‘Water For New York City’ comes prescient words written nearly two decades ago: “Today we can be sure that whether it is the people of New York City who pay, or the people living within the Catskill Mountain watershed who are forced to pay for a resource they cannot use, the results will be the same . . . New York City will have the pure water it needs to continue to grow.”
To search the Ulster County Ashokan Project records
Further reading: (Ulster) COUNTY EXECUTIVE HEIN CALLS UPON NYC DEP TO FUFILL ITS “MORAL OBLIGATION” TO THE PEOPLE OF ULSTER COUNTY to learn of the continuing problem.
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