On Saturday, May 16 at noon on the historic M.A.C. Grounds at Fleischmanns Park, the Mountain Athletic Club will welcome the Westfield Wheelmen for a nine inning match of 1895 rules base ball to open their season.
A pregame ceremony will honor longtime Skene Library trustee Roy Todd who recently passed away, and dedicate a handmade archival storage cabinet curated with M.A.C. photos, newspaper clippings and other items illustrating the club’s 130 year history in the village.
The cabinet is made by Michael Asbill and Ripley Butterfield from the art department at SUNY New Paltz. The duo teamed up for a series of public art installations in libraries across the Catskills in a project called “Processing Collapse” to illustrate and come to terms with loss of tree species from pests and pathogens in our region. To that end, the cabinet was made from lumber sawn from an ash tree that succumbed to the emerald ash borer in nearby hamlet of Pine Hill. According to experts at the U.S. Forest Service, 99% of ash trees in North America will die from this invasive beetle that is believed to have first arrived in the wood of shipping crates in Detroit in 2002 and is considered a “slow moving natural disaster” working its way through our neighborhoods and forests.
M.A.C. has raised over $1,000 to support the making of the display and will donate the leftover proceeds as well as any funds raised during the event to Skene Memorial Library to honor its importance as a historic and much revered community asset in the village of Fleischmanns. Using archival inks and paper, Asbill and Butterfield were able to reproduce all the items for the display so that the originals can be preserved in the Nicholas Juried Archive room at the Middletown History Center in Margaretville. Last month, the club historian Collin Miller donated an original 1897 team photo to the archive and will work with the Fleischmanns Museum of Memories to put original items from the museum into permanent archival storage at the Juried Center.
Admission to the ballgame is free.
For more information on the M.A.C. visit macvintagebaseball.org
