§12 “Sound Bites”

Huntting notes that in 1815 Bethel resident Captain Jacob Bockee, the former proprietor of the land on which the Quaker Meeting House was built, freed his slave Clara and her two year-old son, Charles. Although Jacob was not a Quaker, perhaps he was inspired to do this by his Quaker neighbors, for the Quakers were among the first groups in the North to outlaw the possession of slaves; it did not become illegal to own or trade slaves in New York State until 1827.

Quaker society was very tight. Huntting relates the story about Gerardus Winans, who built what later became the Edward Huntting house. Gerardus, a Quaker, married the widow of Benjamin Knickerbocker and was then disowned by the society because she was not a Quaker.

According to Charlotte Kester, Buttermilk Pond was named for the "marl" or white sediment of the lakebed, which her father-in-law George Tuttle, as supervisor of Briarcliff Farms, mined for fertilizer in the early days of the farm's operation.

Probably every community has a part of its past that it would rather forget ever happened, and Bethel is no exception. Certainly reading about the early settlers' ill-treatment of the Moravians and Native Americans makes us a little uncomfortable today, but it is a fact nevertheless. Isaac Huntting was so disturbed by a feud that took place within the Bethel Union Church that he did not even wish to write about it in his definitive history of Pine Plains, thereby doing a great disservice to future historians wishing to know what happened here.

Miss Angie Keefer, who lived in Bethel with her family, was a schoolteacher at Attlebury School, a one-room school house on Route 82 south of Pine Plains that has recently been restored. She was a teacher there when it burned in 1909 and is praised by former pupils with helping her charges evacuate the school in a calm, orderly fashion, and by other accounts she seems to have been a well-liked young woman. A year after the fire, Miss Keefer left the Attlebury School to teach somewhere in or near Pine Plains.

On October 2, 1919, she was killed by a man named Fred "Tip" Snyder, who would pick her up every morning and take her to school. Whether he was actually a suitor is not known; however, he apparently became jealous when she went to a party one night with someone else, and the following morning he shot and killed her as she was coming down the stairs of her home. He then shot and killed himself. Seventy-five years later, this tragedy, which must have sent shock waves through the tiny community, is still felt very deeply and not often discussed by those who remember it and who knew Miss Keefer and the families involved.

An item in the Register Herald of March 18, 1943, reports that a chalice and flagon used in the Round Top Church, two of the earliest examples of church pewter in this country have been given to the Albany Institute of History and Art by Deuel Richardson. This was the communion service which tradition says Alexander McIntosh traveled on foot from Bethel to Albany to purchase in 1760. According to the newspaper account when the second Round Top church was demolished in 1827, the pewter service was given to Samuel Deuel, great-grandfather of Richardson. This, of course, is contrary to Huntting's account of the communion service being taken by German Reformers to the Red Church in 1772.

In 1969, at the time of the original Woodstock festival, some misdirected concert-goers showed up in Bethel asking locals where the concert was. Mort Jackson remembers in particular one such group that arrived in a reconditioned hearse. The concert was, of course, in the Town of Bethel in Sullivan County. Since then, however, whenever there is a Woodstock anniversary, someone invariably shows up in our Bethel looking for the site of the original concert.

An early family in the Bethel area was that of Robert Hoag, who had thirteen children, one of whom was Tripp, born October 10, 1794. Tripp Hoag was well known as an accomplished carpenter, and in addition, in 1829 he and his wife became proprietors of the tavern on the corner opposite the Stissing House, in later years known as the Ketterer Hotel. During their term as landlords, Mr. and Mrs. Hoag had their portraits painted by the popular itinerant primitive artist, Ammi Phillips. Eventually these portraits came into the possession of the Chancellor Livingston Chapter, Daughters of the American Revolution, and in the early 1970's were sold by an art auction house in New York City.

Industries	Table of Contents		Epilogue
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