PHOENICIA, NY - Ulster County Historian Ed Moran and Ulster County Archivist Jonathan Palmer will present a joint lecture titled “Enslavement in the Hudson Valley: African Lives and Legacies,” with an emphasis on Ulster County, on October 25 beginning at 1 p.m. at the Empire State Railway Museum, 70 Lower High Street, Phoenicia.
This lecture hallmarks a new venture for the Empire State Railway Museum as it is not specifically about railroads and railroading. It concerns local history, which is also central to the museum’s mission.
Edward L. Moran III, better known as Ed Moran, was appointed Ulster County Historian in 2024. Moran graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in History from the State University of New York at New Paltz. While still a student in 2017, he began work as a tour guide at Historic Huguenot Street, where in 2022 he began managing tours and historic interpretation full-time. He is a lifelong resident of New Paltz and a descendant of the town’s Huguenot and Dutch colonizers.
Jonathan Palmer, a returning presenter at the Empire State Railway Museum, has served as Greene County Historian since 2021 and Archivist for the County of Ulster since 2023.
Palmer is a 2012 graduate of Columbia-Greene Community College, Siena College class of 2014, and a 2016 graduate of the Department of Information Science, College of Engineering and Applied Sciences, University at Albany with an Archives Concentration. A native of Athens, New York, Palmer is a descendant of the earliest Dutch colonists of Coxsackie and Catskill.
The Empire State Railway Museum's mission is to preserve the history of the Catskill Mountain and surrounding railroads and their impact on our culture, society, economy, and communities through education, interpretation, restoration, and preservation of not only railroad records, photographs, equipment, cars, and locomotives, but also that of the personal histories and recollections of those involved with and affected by the railroads.
