Some of the most intriguing artifacts in Morris Rosenblum's cabinet of Judge Charles Davis records are two maps of farms subdivided into lots; one called the Swart Farm and the other the Tjerck Schoonmaker farm. The Swart Farm is from 1825 and the Schoonmaker purchase is from 1828. Both are by the surveyor John Kiersted.

Both of these surveys are labeled with street names and are the first time these names are recorded in the Village of Saugerties.

The Swart Farm had been purchased by Robert R. Livingston in 1803 and his brother, John, had constructed a large store there as early as 1805. This is where Asa Bigelow set up his first business when he came from Connecticut, and left in 1810 to build the trade at Malden. It is the first place of business of Jeremiah Russell when he moved out of West Camp in 1814. When this subdivision map was created the lot with that store is marked as George Gay's. That store was featured on period post cards as a drug store and was still there forming the corner of Market and Main when Morris took his aerial photographs in 1955.

This survey borders on Main and Market streets with Livingston street through its center. Outside of the division lots, opposite them on the Main street side, is a sketch of the Mynderse tavern, marked for its current occupant, James Woodruff.

The symbol of a much more defined two story house labeled J. Russel is on the opposite side of the subdivision. Far down at the end of Livingston street is another symbol of a smaller house that is labeled Tjerck Myer.

The Schoonmaker division is keyed to the Mynderse tavern too, but by 1828 James street runs along its side and it is at this corner. This map also names Main street and Jane street parallel to it. Partition street is also drawn in and named but the lots that are laid out face Main and Jane. Partition is not a commercial street at this time and only large farm lots are shown fronting on it.

A decorative cloth map by John Kiersted in colors of 1825 shows a larger area of divisions and all the farms in what is in six years the incorporated village are marked on it with their owners names. Among the sketched-in symbols for houses on each of these large parcels the tight subdivision survey of the Swart Farm stands out as the future center of a village. On this map all of Market street opposite this village layout is the land with Jeremiah Russell's brick store.

Jeremiah Russell's successful business was likely what put Livingston's village center here just like latching on to Henry Barclay's plans and selling most of the other land holdings to him made something of that Livingston investment.

In 1833 Jeremiah transferred the business to his son William and William's brother-in-law, E. J. McCarthy. They were doing all their business closer to the mills where the population growth was centered by that time. That potential wasn't even imagined on Kiersted's map of 1825.

But by the end of the 1830's, though, the center of business shifted decisively back to Market street as commercial bluestone quarrying developed along the turnpike that terminated there. Jeremiah Russell had become the financier of this new industry and Russell & McCarthy had shifted their operations toward marketing bluestone. In just a few years the industrial traffic from the countryside along the turnpike so filled the widths of Market and Main streets with commercial opportunities that these streets became the merchant center of the town.

The residents of this area around Market street controlled all the commerce in Saugerties and for a time held positions of power for the broader region. In 1842 Jeremiah Russell was elected to the State legislature and shortly after to the United States Congress. William F. Russell was elected to the State legislature in 1851 and to the U. S. Congress in 1856. Around their houses and merchant centers grew the early banking, social and political interactions of a village establishment.

What had been called Turnpike street for most of the growth of Saugerties village ended at Market street where William F. Russell's stately house looks down its center. On the right of this view is the large 1814 frame house of Jeremiah Russell with its two tiered, columned porch facing his son's house across what was once a village green. To the left of this view down the turnpike is the Dutch styled house of Jeremiah's other son David, captain of the sloop “Livingston” and a major bluestone dealer in the earliest days of its sales in 1836. All three of these houses sat on grounds that provide open views of the village on one side and extensive farms with the Catskill mountains in the distance on the other.

William F. Russell's house has been the offices of Rosenblum and Lamb since 1955. Just down Market street where the Sawyer Savings Bank is now, was Luther Laflin's comfortable estate house, within the space that associated it with this enclave of Russells. As time went by Luther's son, Fordyce's large house would occupy the whole block on Main street between John and Washington and Col. H. Dwight Laflin, Luther's other son, would have his estate house at the head of West Bridge Street.

The Russell's houses were modest compared to the Laflin's. They would set the tone for the style of the village. When Saugerties reached its centennial in 1911 with H. D., at eighty three, leading the parade, from what's to be found in the “Old Home Week” parade program one wouldn't imagine there was anything that was “home” outside of the townhouses that lined the streets that branched off the then Main and Partition streets nucleus of the Village of Saugerties. Most of the rest of the town in its own celebration was decidedly unrecognized.

The Laflin's arrived with the first wave of manufacturers but there was no room for them in Ury. Winthrop Laflin was involved in the largest paper manufacturing firm in Massachusetts in 1829 when his brother, Matthew, appeared in Saugerties to purchase from Henry Barclay a mill site for manufacturing axes. That site was directly beside the new machines of Barclay's paper mill and everyone knew axes weren't the primary business of a Laflin.

By 1831 Matthew had accomplished what he came for but he had gotten used to the place and his attention was drawn to an opportunity that he felt worth speculating in. About the same time Edward Clark was setting up his lead manufacturing at Glenerie, Matthew Laflin also moved from the Village into the remote reaches of the countryside and set up mills to manufacture gunpowder on the Plattekill and Cauterskill Creeks.

Both Clark and Laflin recognized productive uses for native materials abundant in the countryside. Clark used vinegar for corroding lead into powder. Laflin used manure and urine to make phosphorus to mix with the native charcoal. Their processes gave both of them more of an opportunity to be personally involved with the older country population then any of the other recent arrivals of the village had. The Laflins were most popular because they employed so many in the mills and so many more making barrels, teaming the product to the magazines built near the river, and supporting the quarrying of bluestone with the powder used to remove top burden from the bedrock. Of all the manufacturers they were most recognized as supplying the greatest benefit to the community. Matthew's brothers Winthrop and Luther, and Luther's brother-in-law Solomon Smith had come from Massachusetts over the course of the 1830's as the Laflin business increased. By the time the Laflins began to show the extent of their wealth by building their village residences after mid century the generation of Fordyce L. and H. Dwight Laflin was being groomed to run a business that was fast growing into manufacturing plants stretching across the United States and into Canada and close to the size of its nearest competitor, Du Pont. Their choice to keep their home base not just in Saugerties but in the area of the village around Main street reserved for them the good will of the mercantile business sector there for the next half century and more.

The Laflins supplied the example needed for merchants to build new residences as well as new commercial buildings in a part of the village where farmsteads and scattered roadside stores and taverns were still the norm. This was not done alone. Once they had established themselves they were followed by the successful farmers and quarry operators from the countryside that found this was the way to show they were also established. In the decade following the Civil War a pace of building was set by the surge in this caliper of villager that expanded the street system in a growth pattern that would go on for the next eighty years. The grand houses of the Van Etten, Seamon, Maxwell, Blackwell, Cantine, Cooper, and the Davis families all were initially influenced by the Laflins.

These residences were not periodically occupied like those of the elite of Barclay Heights. The Laflins had set the example by living in their homes off of their wealth and being attentive to their businesses while also being patrons of the local saloons and dress shops and tobacconists in a village that was a public extension of their personal living space.

The population that emulated this Laflin lifestyle created a completely new level of clientèle for the stores of Main and Partition streets before the turn of the century. Shop owners began to demand styles in the architecture of their buildings, and seek out decor and merchandise for their businesses that was attractive to a more refined taste. This spread along Main and Partition streets and soon developed into an entire village where everyone was boasting the local origins of their wealth through their patronage of businesses.

The Victorian era was in full bloom and welcoming porches and door yards allowed the residents of the village's houses to extend their greetings to the strollers on the promenade-width sidewalks that had become the main feature of every civilized urban scene. As a sign of this gentrification, ordinances that required wide tire widths on the massive bluestone wagons allowed the tram stone reminders of rural roads to be removed from the streets. With the arrival of the railroad station this part of the town was annexed to the village and the expense of improving the ancient terminus of the turnpike brought its length into full compliance with the paving standards of the rest of the village streets. The Turnpike was transformed into Ulster Avenue.

On Main street first the Davis store was laid out as a sidewalk-exposure environment to show its interior shopping experience through large panes of glass. Then the Whitaker Block went up with its stylish cornice four tall stories above the street. This was followed by the Russell Block with even more glass area, height and expanse along both Market and Main streets. As the remaining space for store fronts became less available the stylish Iron Fronts were employed in new and renewed buildings to attract the gentry.

All of these changes can be observed as they happen in Jernegan's photos of 1875 for the Pearl, up to De Lesser's for his Picturesque Ulster published in 1905. A multitude of post cards from the height of their popularity between 1890 and the late teens fills the gap and extends it to its climax. Large gable front frame stores are replaced by the multi storied brick structures that dwarf them and then the remaining antiquated stores' spaces are replaced with designs to carry a cadence of windows and doors and walls that climb to fill a unified skyline. This effect is still intact when Morris Rosenblum's aerial photos captures all angles of the business district in 1955.

A full page article in the New York World in 1889, illustrated with a sampling of the great houses; including H. D. Laflin's and William Sheffield's; and a tour-style map, sings the praises of this “city”... not that it means to imply it is a city but that it has the sophisticated air of a city. That impression is still evident where these commercial buildings and side street residences have been allowed to survive among the despoiled character of the setting they now must share with a present reality of heaved bluestone sidewalks, removed porches, parked car-crammed streets, and the impact of kitschy and commonplace taste in idiosyncratic store front and home improvement schemes.

This business district part of the village of Saugerties was accepted as a landmark on the National Register of Historic Places in 1982. By that time it had been taken for granted for so long that it, and the entire village, was beginning to be treated as ordinary. The pace of the twentieth century set by the windshield experience of the automobile left an attitude in its community that their village was no different from thousands of downtowns that grew up along highways they'd seen in their travels.

Saugerties suffered from this image doubly with its business district a merging place for one federal and two major state highways. Added to that is the singularly unique position of having the Esopus Creek gorge's terrain and only one bridge crossing it to carry two of these roads.

Before mid century the traffic had already intensified enough to focus business interests on its advantages. Service stations and parking lots filled the open spaces of the few residences left along the commercial blocks. And once the Thruway opened the 1950's saw two of the venerable Laflin estates became super markets and a score of iconic commercial structures demolished so parking lots could keep the downtown competitive.

Excluding the grids of residential districts that filled every large farm within walking distance of the village over the course of the twentieth century, the basic street map had changed little in two hundred years. The village was featured as an enlarged detail on the wall-size county maps of 1853 and 1858 and rates two double page spreads in the 1875 county atlas. The importance of roads converging on a geographic feature and the services clustered there for the convenience of travelers had always explained its prominence. It is where roads met steamboats and trains and the bridge here connected them all.

Catskill up the river, and Rondout south, were similar transportation hubs for the same reason but only Saugerties had the Kings Highway so close to the river and later, to the railroad. So when the Thruway took the course of the Kings Highway, and subdivisions grew across its bridge, the demands this placed on all the heritage built up in Saugerties' business district over the centuries were extreme.

None of the basic geographic factors that caused the village center to grow where it did are different. It is still a transportation hub with residential neighborhoods surrounding a downtown for the purpose of supporting whatever this hub motif may draw. But the factors that made what it draws have changed significantly.

Of all that represents the ghostly image of Saugerties' past in ancient post cards and published photographs from the past century and a half only the landmark structures of the historic business district remain as a public display to continue a heritage. This is the pride of Saugerties, and its identity. The steamboats are gone. The railroads don't stop here. The mills have gone. The estates to the extent that they are identifiable with the patriarchs of the community, have gone.

There is an estranged relationship with history that is most pronounced in a resistance to accepting responsibility for what critical identity with the past is still preservable in the nearly universally recognized historic business district of Saugerties. A timidity that has been bred over three generations of avoidance and the acceptance of the interests of the undeveloped, unprepared and opportunistic occupants of the business district threatens what little is left of the true character of historic Saugerties.