Project uncovers lost history of Hurley and Marbletown
The Eagle’s Nest Lapala project seeks to tell the history of two tight-knit, multi-racial communities on Eagle’s Nest Road on Hurley Mountain and Lapala Road, also known as Lapla Road, in the town of Marbletown.
The project features a blog with regular posts about the families who lived there, their homes, and other community spaces like churches and one-room schoolhouses. The families’ stories will serve as the basis for a play by David Gonzalez, set to be staged at Old Dutch Church on Wall Street in Kingston on March 3 and 4.
Leading the effort are Wendy Saul, a retired professor of education and international studies professor at the University of St. Louis who now calls Stone Ridge home, and Lorna Smedman.
Saul said her interest in the project was first piqued by a trip to the Stone Ridge Library, where she came across a Freeman article from 1976 that talked about the bicentennial.
Later she met Smedman, who lives in a cabin on Eagle’s Nest Road and was researching the history of her neighborhood during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Saul said she locked in funding for the project through the National Endowment for the Humanities’ “A More Perfect Union” program, which is connected with the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, which will take place in 2026.
“It helps people unearth local history,” she said.
Smedman soon became the project’s lead researcher and the two were joined in the effort by Susan Stessin-Cohn, the New Paltz town historian and former SUNY New Paltz Social Studies Education professor, and Donna Dabney Jeffress, a retired Red Hook Central School District teacher.