“Enslaved: People as Property in Delaware County, 1790-1830” will be presented Saturday, Dec. 9 at 1:30 p.m. at the Catskill Watershed Corporation auditorium, 669 County Highway 38 (the “cut-off road”), Arkville.
This presentation by historian Diane Galusha is sponsored by the Catskill Folk Connection’s lecture series, Catskills Folk Lyceum. Galusha will examine what the institution of slavery looked like in Delaware County as farms, towns and industry developed following the Revolutionary War. The talk will identify specific slaveholders – wealthy professionals including doctors, lawyers, merchants and politicians who brought their servants with them from the Hudson Valley and New England - but also ordinary homesteaders who operated small farms and mills.
The slave-holding histories of the powerful Livingston and Hardenburgh families who owned thousands of acres of land in Delaware County will also be examined. The talk will - to the extent possible - describe enslaved individuals, the work they did and what might have become of them following the abolition of slavery in New York in 1827. Most remain unidentified, except by first names, and in some cases by surnames of their owners. There were also free Black individuals and families who lived here simultaneously with enslaved people, some of them remaining for generations.
Galusha’s ongoing research utilizes personal documents, official records, memoirs, wills, diaries, church records, newspaper accounts and other period sources. She is the author of several books on local and regional history and is president of the Historical Society of the Town of Middletown, Delaware County.
