OLD HURLEY

NAME: Old Hurley COUNTY: US ROADS: 2WD GRID: 1 CLIMATE: Snow in winter, mild summers BEST TIME TO VISIT: Summer

COMMENTS: Please go to the following link: http://www.hopefarm.com/owh01in.htm REMAINS: Foundations, roads

Daughter completes father’s history of a 1ost town By BLAISE SCHWEITZER Feeman staff When a Hurley man’s labor of love, writing a history of Old West Hurley, ended with his death in 1992, the friends and family he left behind were shaken. They knew the project was important to him, however, and seven years later finally pieced together and published the history that was so dear to him. The man’s name is Alien M. Rowe, the book "Old West Hurley Revisited: A Nostalgic Tour" and the woman most responsible for reclaiming Rowe’s research and seeing it through to publication is his daughter, Candy Rowe Hopkins. Hopkins said the motivation in putting the book together from her father’s notes and records was "preserving what he loved so much." When Rowe died, he also left Richard Frisbie, owner of Hope Farm Press and Bookshop in Saugerties, feeling there was a gap in his local history section. Rowe, who was a Hurley Town Councilman at the time of his death, and Frisbie had known each other from the bookshop and had agreed to put the book out well before Rowe died. "This was his passion," Frisbie said of Rowe’s history of Hurley in the years around the turn of the last century, before the community was flooded by the waters of the Ashokan Reservoir.Fortunately Hopkins was able to make sense of her father’s work and team up with Frisbie to put it into book form. She hadn’t done anything like this before, she said, and was unaccustomed to the sort of detail work Frisbie required. "He’s very particular," she said, describing painstaking checking and rechecking of facts. When she saw her first copy of the book, she decided it was worth all the effort. "I just cried," she said. "It was perfect." Among the book’s fans is Hurley Town Historian David Baker, who is also a friend of the Rowe family. He appreciated the voluminous facts laid out in the book, and the unusual way father and daughter collaborated to guide readers through the town with a running commentary voiced by a fictional character. "It’s just as if it were a diary," Baker said, a diary that is complimented by 61 photos, four pages of maps and reams of news accounts from area newspapers. The tone is almost gossipy, Baker added, "in a good way." With all the names and snippets of family news it offers, the book is a genealogists dream, said Frisbie. It is also an unusually valuable resource for those interested in architecture from the turn of the century. The photos in the book, taken in 1909 by William H. Longyear for the New York City Board of Water Supply, show everything from utilitarian shacks to barns to homes with large open porches. http://www.hopefarm.com/owh01in.htm Submitted by: Eric Hughes

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