The Last of the Handmade Dams Turns 40: Bob Steuding Reflects

Transcription by Jerome Kazlauskas

[00:00:00] Bob Steuding: After the talk, two people came up to me, a man and a woman, Wray and Loni, and they said, "Gee, we really like what you said, and we understand that you finished the book and so on, and we'd like to take a look at it." We're thinking about going into publishing. We've been printers and various other things, and we've put out other people's books, but we want to have our own press.

[00:00:26] Brett Barry: Bob Steuding is the author of "The Last of the Handmade Dams: The Story of the Ashokan Reservoir," first published in 1985 and celebrating its 40th anniversary with Purple Mountain Press. It was the very first in a long line of regional history titles by the Fleischmanns-based publisher, founded by Wray and Loni Rominger. Purple Mountain Press has since been sold a couple of times, and as it so happens, my wife, Rebecca, and I are two of the partners in its latest iteration, no longer Fleischmanns-based but still rooted in the Catskills and very much focused on its history. On today's show, Rebecca dons another hat, one of many as Kaatscast literary correspondent, and we visited Bob and Martha Steuding at their 18th-century stone farmhouse right near the Ashokan Reservoir, where Rebecca chatted with Bob about "The Last of the Handmade Dams," a life in the Catskills, and work on his latest book on a sense of place. Stay tuned for a visit with Bob Steuding, right after this...

[00:01:34] Campbell Brown: This episode is supported by Hanford Mills Museum. Explore the power of the past at their 2025 events that feature woodworking, historic machines, and even ice cream! You can find a calendar of events and more information about visiting the museum at hanfordmills.org.

[00:01:52] Rebecca Rego Barry: So we're here today to talk to you, Bob. You know, Brett and I have recently become involved with Purple Mountain Press, and in doing so, I realized pretty recently that your book, "The Last of the Handmade Dams," was the first book that the press put out under its own name. Like, you know, it had been in business since the seventies, but it wasn't until 1985 that they published their own book, so I found out about that recently, and then, of course, you know, 1985, this being the 40th anniversary of your book and it being sort of the, you know, first baby of this press, I thought we have to come and talk to you about it. I guess we'll just start out and ask, "Did you grow up here, and what's your relationship to the Catskills and to the reservoir specifically?"

[00:02:40] Bob Steuding: I did grow up here. I was born in Kingston and spent a lot of time in the Catskills even as a young boy. We had relatives up here, and we would come up and go swimming and things of that sort, so I guess I've known the Catskills ever since I've known anything about this area. My wife and I were married back in the sixties, went out west and to China and places like that, and we realized that we wanted to be back home again. We wanted to find a place where we could settle, you know, and belong and be a part of things, put down roots, whatever, and coming back home again was a way to do that, and it's worked out for us at least so far. You know, the book that I'm working on now is about that experience of wanting to find our place and finding it again where we came from and putting down roots and belonging to someplace, you know, being a part of it, and the writing has really come out of that. If you want to know about a place, study its local history, and then you meet all these interesting people that have lived here and gone through it, like the reservoir book that we're talking about and celebrating its 40th anniversary. It was such an interesting experience for me, not only because it was the first—I had written other books, but it was the first local history book, regional history book that I did, and I was kind of like learning the ropes, and in many ways, I learned more about history from talking to the people who had lived here, like in this case, who had experienced being driven out, you know, by the city and losing their homes and their cemeteries and stuff like that, and to be able to talk to people at that time. They, many of them, were still alive when I was doing that work in the late seventies and early eighties. They could tell you what it was like to walk along a street that was no longer there, you know, that was underwater, or go to a church here, or be a part of, you know, what was going on in the life of that time, and they were a tremendous education for me. I got to know a number of them better than I thought I ever would, you know, and it was a very moving experience. I mean, even today, looking back over the book again for our talk together, it brought tears to my eyes, you know, because these are people who I would say, "Well, what was it like, Harlow?" And he was a man who worked as many people did. I mean, they didn't want the city to take their property, but it was a source of income too. It was a dilemma for them, but many of them worked for the City of New York building the dam, and part of what he had to do was to clear the reservoir. They cut down all the trees of any size and things of that sort, cleaned out where the privies had been and purified it, and so on, and also either removed, tore down, or burned houses that were in these sevensome villages that were there, and he actually burned his own family's house. Just by coincidence, he was asked to do that, and they didn't know that he had lived in it or whatever, and he said, "It was like the end of the world." He said, "It was like the end of the world," and then he started to cry, you know, and this was a man at that time who was probably in his eighties, something like that, so I learned a lot about regional history and about writing it and how important living sources are. You know, you write about something else, and you're dealing with only materials, manuscripts, and videotapes, or whatever it might be, but these are the people who had actually been driven out. You know, some 2,000 people were driven out of this small area, some 12 square miles or so, and Harlow was one of them, and so many [Jenny Carr and Ollie Burgher], and those are names that still are a part of this world, but they all had to move out. I'm getting too sentimental here, so forgive me.

[00:07:17] Rebecca Rego Barry: It's so important to document those voices while they're still around.

[00:07:21] Bob Steuding: Yes, yes.

[00:07:22] Rebecca Rego Barry: It's easy to forget.

[00:07:22] Bob Steuding: I mean, the work that you do is so important, and Brett, because it does disappear, and as we know now, things change so fast in a society, and then you think, "These are people who [the milk that they drank came from the cow that they owned that they milked, you know, and the vegetables that they ate, they grew]," and that's a sense of reality that we're kind of searching for again in a society that's become so automated and so fast-paced and so connected to the rest of the world.

[00:07:59] Rebecca Rego Barry: What were you doing? What kind of work were you doing? What was your career when you started writing this book?

[00:08:06] Bob Steuding: Martha and I left here the day we got married in an old trailer and car, and we went out west, and we were in California for a few years where we taught, and then we were in China, Hong Kong, and traveled throughout Asia, and then we came back, and we started teaching again in Michigan, and Martha taught. She was a school principal for a while, and I taught, so teaching was a way that in those days you could write, but you also had an income. Freelancing, as you know, is difficult, and so we were teaching all that time, so coming back here, finding out this is where our place was and where we could put down roots and where we had some family and where we could make a home, you know, to live in, and to begin to feel like we belonged somewhere when we were on the road for almost 10 years. We had a wonderful time, and we were very young, but you never belonged anyplace. It was very interesting, but you weren't of that place, and to experience that again was wonderful, but without the teaching, we couldn't have survived, you know, so I had done a book on Gary Snyder. We met Gary. I first started reading him in the early sixties/mid-sixties, I guess, in Hong Kong, and then in Michigan, I got a chance to meet him just by coincidence, and I more or less apprenticed myself to Snyder because he was writing the kind of things that I wanted to write, you know, and out of that came the first book that was done on Snyder at full length, which was published in the Twain Authors Series [U.S. Authors Series], and Gary has been a friend ever since then, you know, that sort of thing, and Gary, in many ways, was a guy that said, "If you want a home, go home, you know, and see what you can do there," and that's what we did, but we taught all that time. I taught English and philosophy.

[00:10:19] Rebecca Rego Barry: So you came home to Olivebridge, and you're here. You're about a mile from the reservoir here?

[00:10:26] Bob Steuding: Just about, yeah.

[00:10:27] Rebecca Rego Barry: Was it that proximity that inspired you to start researching the story of the building of the Ashokan Reservoir?

[00:10:35] Bob Steuding: You know, it might have been. The Snyder book really was about a very different world, you know, and the West Coast, California mountains, Asia, and Gary's connections with Buddhism, things of that sort, so when I finished that book, I was looking for something else to do, and it was really Martha. You know, she's my focus in the universe. Martha said, "Well, why don't you write about the reservoir?" You know, you've always been interested in it. I grew up in Hurley, so I could come up on my bike and ride around and look at it, and when we were courting, as a matter of fact, we went to Shokan, and we would just sit on the beach somewhere, and in those days, you had to stay away because, you know, you weren't supposed to go on the reservoir unless you were fishing, but we would just go there and watch it and think, "What are we going to do with our lives when we get married? Where are we going to go, you know, those kinds of things?" And so that was there too, so yeah, I think probably being here precipitated that, and then out of that came all the other books that Purple Mountain Press has published on the local area, but I always loved the reservoir, but I didn't—I didn't know what pain and suffering was associated with this beautiful body of water, you know, that preserves open space and purifies the air and all those wonderful things and provides water for people in the city, but I didn't realize the expense that it was to local people and how there's always that tension between urban areas and rural areas and rural areas don't usually do so well. They don't have the political clout or the money or, you know, things of that sort, so then I asked around, and I said, "I'm thinking about doing some research on the reservoir [building the reservoir]," and some people had written on it, and I said, "Who do you think I should talk to?" And then, I would talk to someone and say, "Who else should I talk to, and is there anybody else?" And, I think, by the end of the book, I had talked to almost everybody that had some connection in some way with the reservoir that was still alive. I talked to a man that was well in his nineties or something, and he had been a water boy, and other people, a state senator, you know, who had done something on the reservoir, and so many people worked on it, and some of the stories are in the book, but I think almost all those people are gone now. That was 40 years ago. Obviously they are gone, but that's how it started, and it was a real education for me. I had written books before, as I mentioned, but not when you talk to living people about something that had occurred when they were young. That sense of time was so moving, you know, how it happens, and one of the fellows that the book is dedicated to was one of the first people I went to by the name of Elwyn Davis, who lived in West Shokan at that time, and he was really an interesting person. He lost a hand, you know, working on the dam, things like that, and the sense that you get of the past and how different it was for people and where you live is so important to who you are and how it shapes how you live in a particular area that was important to me and that ran through the two or three other books that were written about local subjects. People are very interesting, you know, and particularly people who come from a world that's like yours but was very different, you know, in so many ways.

[00:14:34] Rebecca Rego Barry: So you were doing this research, and then you told me that you went and did a library presentation, and this is how you met the founders of Purple Mountain Press.

[00:14:43] Bob Steuding: That's right. It was fortuitous. I had researched the book over a couple of years and then written the book, and I tried to write as much as my heart was with people who had lost and didn't choose to lose their property, you know, in their lives in many, many instances. I still had to write something balanced, you know, that there were other issues and other people who weren't bad people, but they just needed water, you know, that sort of thing. That dynamic was always there, so, you know, I finished the book. I thought I had told the story and told it adequately and as best as I could, and so I started going around and giving talks. Libraries are always looking for people to give presentations, as I'm sure you've experienced, and I was invited to give a talk up in Pine Hill at that lovely little library that they had, so I came up and the book was done, and it was in TypeScript, you know, in manuscript form. I gave this talk, and after the talk, two people came up to me, a man and a woman, Wray and Loni, and they said, "Gee, we really like what you said, and we understand that you finished the book and so on, and we'd like to take a look at it." We're thinking about going into publishing. We've been printers and various other things, and we've put out other people's books, but we want to have our own press. I don't even know if they had the name Purple Mountain Press yet at that time, and they said, "So, you know, could you send us one?" I said, "Sure," and they looked at it, and with a couple of days, they called back on the phone, and they said, "Yeah, this is what we're looking for. We'd like to probably book. Is that okay?" And I said, "Sure, fine, let's do it," and we shook hands, and that was it. We never had anything beyond that, and...

[00:16:42] Rebecca Rego Barry: There's no contract.

[00:16:44] Bob Steuding: ...that was it, you know, and they were just nice, really? They worked very hard, and then they expanded. They started taking books on the Adirondacks and the Lower Hudson Valley and things like that, but that was the first one, and we had no idea how many people would want to read the book or not, and the book sold out in one day. It was an incredible thing, and they said, "Boy, this is great!" We're going to, you know, we're going to be able to do this for the rest of our lives, and I think that they went through two or three printings. They called the printer again and called them again, and then I remember one of the times it came on the Trailways bus, but from wherever it was in, maybe the city or something like that, it was very exciting, and we thought, "Boy, this is great, you know?"

[00:17:34] Rebecca Rego Barry: Yeah, they sold thousands of copies in the first few weeks.

[00:17:37] Bob Steuding: It got them launched, and they continued to do it till the ends of their lives, really, pretty much.

[00:17:44] Rebecca Rego Barry: Mm-hmm.

[00:17:45] Bob Steuding: It was exciting, and then, so Wray said, "Do you have anything more?" And I said, "Well, I'll start. I'll work on another one," and we did that, you know, through three more books, four in total, and I guess they all sold, and most of them are still selling now, so there's an interest, but there was an upsurge there, a kind of Catskill Mountain Renaissance in the late part of that century of real interest in the Catskills. You know, let's not just always favor the Adirondacks. Let's see what's going on. We're, you know, they're doing things interesting too, so that was good. Catskill Center was developed by Sherret Chase and all other things of that sort, and Wray and Loni collected a bunch of really fine writers. Bob Titus and his wife and Mike Kudish and you know all these interesting Catskill Mountain writer characters.

[00:18:48] Rebecca Rego Barry: Okay, I have a question, a true or false question. When there's a drought, you can see church steeples poking out of the reservoir.

[00:18:56] Bob Steuding: I gave a lot of talks once the book came out for years, but I think it was at a school, and someone said to me, "You know, we know that when the water gets slow, you can still see church steeples and variations on that theme in something," but, of course, you can't. The reservoir was reamed. I mean, they took out everything pretty much—trees of up to a certain size and barnyards and privies and houses—so you can't see churches.

[00:19:27] Rebecca Rego Barry: So that is false.

[00:19:30] Bob Steuding: A long answer, but false, but people still feel that they see flying saucers over the reservoir and space people, and, you know, so there's lots of stuff like that.

[00:19:45] Rebecca Rego Barry: One of the things I really enjoyed about the book was its focus on the workers.

[00:19:49] Bob Steuding: Yeah.

[00:19:49] Rebecca Rego Barry: You really kind of delve into their—what their lives were like, their pay, their housing, the challenges they faced, and that I found really very interesting because it's, you know, there were real people involved.

[00:20:04] Bob Steuding: Yeah.

[00:20:04] Rebecca Rego Barry: You kind of forget that fact.

[00:20:06] Bob Steuding: You do, don't you? I guess when you're reading history, that's not about a place you really know yourself. You don't get that feeling, you know? I, and I agree. I found that as you did. I'm glad that's wonderful. The fact that so many foreign workers were used on the reservoir and they were from Lithuania and Poland and Russia. I mean, most of the clearing that was done and the grubbing, you know, pulling things out, and work of that sort was done by Russians, but I found out that one of the reasons why so many foreign workers were used, although everybody around here who could get a job, you know, would take it. I think it was a New York law [state law], but I'm not positive. I don't remember now. It decided that the ten-hour day was inadequate, that it wasn't fair, and they were going to go down to an eight-hour day, and so it was cheaper to hire foreign workers because they would work another two extra hours, but they came from all over the world, and they made anywhere between $1 and $3 a day for working initially, you know, a ten-hour day and then going down to the eight-hour day. I mean, it's uncanny for us to think about that amount of time to work for that amount of money. The best-paid people were people who set off the dynamite, the peterman, and yet they only got about $10, I think, a week or something of that sort. It's just astonishing, but the conditions were pretty good there, you know, which was not always the case with public works projects. I mean, they had good housing, and the commissary was good, and the food was good, and there was entertainment and priests [there for people] and rabbis, and, you know, stuff like that, so I think the conditions were pretty good, and the amount of people that died and the amount of people that were injured seems like a lot, but for a project of that size [at that time], it wasn't excessive, so there was, I think, a sense of care in some ways for the workers that were there.

[00:22:22] Rebecca Rego Barry: What are the exact dates of the building, and when was it completed?

[00:22:26] Bob Steuding: You know, preparations took a couple of years to find out where to build the dam. If they had built the dam where they originally had hoped to build the dam, it would've been a lot bigger, you know, many, many miles bigger, that sort of thing, but they couldn't find bedrock, so instead of, you know, building the dam closer to here, it was built up near where Bishop's Falls was, you know, that sort of thing, and a lot of testing was done and so on, but I think that the actual bottom of the reservoir, so to speak, was probably started about, oh, maybe 1908 or so, and I guess technically about 1914, so the project took probably about seven years, give or take [all of the other kinds of things, the road work and such that wasn't finished till a couple years later], but when you think about it, it was the biggest dam of its sort at that time, done in about seven years. That's pretty good right before World War I.

[00:23:31] Rebecca Rego Barry: Yeah.

[00:23:31] Bob Steuding: In the early stages of World War I.

[00:23:34] Rebecca Rego Barry: So when you walk in and around the reservoir, you're likely to stumble across a beautiful old stone tower dedicated to the chief engineer of the project, J. Waldo Smith. Can you tell us about him and about that monument?

[00:23:47] Bob Steuding: Yeah, he grew up in Lincoln, Massachusetts, where, as a young boy, he was involved in the building of their waterworks, so he was in the business and experienced, you know, at a very early age. I don't remember exactly how old he was when he took over the job, but he wasn't a young man, and he had been on other projects before that, like down in Croton and so on, but he seems to have been a straight ahead, honest person and very competent, very intelligent, and very good at hiring the right people for the job and then, you know, monitoring it but giving them space. I never saw anything that anybody said bad about J. Waldo Smith. It's a kind of interesting name, J. Waldo. He was always responded to with affection and with respect, and if he hadn't been involved in the project, of course, the contractors and all these other individuals are very important, but if he hadn't been the person that was hired—he was the first hire that New York City did—I don't know if it would have happened on schedule at the price that they said it was going to cost and with such little problems in comparison to what they could have had, so he was an impressive person, I would say. The major contractor was a guy named Winston, James O. Winston. He had been involved in some other projects too, but he took this project over, took it on, and they brought all their materials and all their machinery and everything by railroad up to the site from Katonah. That's where their officers were. He was a very commanding sort of person, very elegant. He was a southerner and had a certain sense of himself and his family and place in history, and he lived in Kingston. He and his wife lived in Kingston all the time that they were working up here, and he would take the train up the U&D, which ran through where the base of the rail reservoir is now, and he'd take the train up and go to work and that sort of thing, and it was said that if he didn't get up so early, they would stop the train in Kingston and wait for him. He was that kind of guy too. There were lots of interesting people. The women that were involved—there were women that worked in the commissary and women that worked as nurses in the hospital. They had a hospital there, but the women that I found most interesting were the ones that ran businesses, I think, in the basin of the reservoir. They owned boarding houses, which were a big source of income at that time, you know, things of that sort. There was a woman named Tina Lasher who owned a substantial boarding house in Brown Station, which was one of the little villages and communities that were taken. It's down where the tower is that you're talking about and where the dam is. You know, that's where all the action was. The camp was there, the major camp, that sort of thing. She applied for what they call indirect damages, which meant loss of income basically, and she had a very successful boarding house [10, 15, 20 people there and so on in the garden], so she applied for it, and she never got the money, and she went when there was finally a settlement. Her family was given about $1,100 from the city. She died before they got the check, you know.

[00:27:33] Rebecca Rego Barry: You close the book again. A book published 40 years ago with this statement. "Although the shadow of unrestricted and unrestrained development in the area does fall on the road ahead, with New York City firmly holding the reins at present, the near distance seems safe, for it is unlikely that the city will willingly relinquish its control to another outside authority, and in this way, the city inadvertently acts to preserve both open space and the rural quality of the area." Is this something you still agree with?

[00:28:08] Bob Steuding: Things were different 40 years ago. I think, for me, personally, it's still hard to say. Open space is clearly a major issue in the country and certainly in rural areas, and the reservoir brought that about—that we would hope that these 24 square miles or whatever of land and water would not be used for something else, and so far that's been the case. They still have gatherings of what originally were families who had been driven out, you know, the 2,000-some families, that sort of thing, and there's still some sense of that after all these years, but it's now a couple of generations that have passed, so eminent domain and obtaining land for the use of a city that was owned by and used by locals is still, I think, a problem or should be a concern in contemporary life, so one part of me says it's great that we have this reservoir, how beautiful it is, and how it preserves open space and so on. I mean, if there weren't a reservoir there now, it would look probably like a lot of the rest of the country would have malls on it and parking lots and stuff like that. It wouldn't be farming in a small rural community. It would be gone like when you head north on Route 9W in Kingston. You know, did you see what that was? When I was a boy, that was all truck farms. You know, now it's lots of stuff, you know, things like that, so on the one hand you have that, but on the other hand, you still can't discount the fact that people's desire to live where they want to live was overridden. You know, it was a utilitarian decision that would benefit more people by taking the land away, but the land was taken away, and the people didn't want it to happen.

[00:30:16] Rebecca Rego Barry: And it wasn't even for their benefit. It was for the benefit of people living in a city 90 miles away.

[00:30:23] Bob Steuding: Yeah, exactly, so I don't know if I were to write that last paragraph again, it might be different, but it's still hard to say, you know, when you have a whole city that needs water and that was clearly the best place to look for. You know, they knew that 20 years before they came up here. I mean, they thought about the Adirondacks. They had taken all the water from Westchester County and so on, so you are asking me a question that I don't know if I can answer right now.

[00:30:58] Rebecca Rego Barry: And it probably really plays into that whole city versus rural...

[00:31:04] Bob Steuding: Yeah, it does, you know, it does.

[00:31:07] Rebecca Rego Barry: Because there's still that clash that continues.

[00:31:10] Bob Steuding: You know, there is. You want water, you need that, and you want open space. You know, people want open space. They want a place where they can unwind, and I think we all understand that.

[00:31:22] Rebecca Rego Barry: Yeah, and actually the reservoir now, it's almost like a landmark in and of itself, is a place where people go and walk and, you know, recreate.

[00:31:30] Bob Steuding: Sure, it's the watershed agreement that has made that possible. I mean, before the watershed agreement, unless you had a fishing license, you couldn't go on the reservoir. I mean, you couldn't just walk on it, you know, that sort of thing, but now it really seems to be open to people without a fishing license, and they're not being watched all the time, and, you know, that sort of thing. There was a lot of tension between locals and the city. It's beautiful. It undoubtedly has preserved, as I said, open space, and that's so important now. You know, every place is so crowded, but yet, you know, if it were us, we wouldn't have wanted it to happen, you know.

[00:32:16] Rebecca Rego Barry: So the title of the book is "The Last of the Handmade Dams." Can you just explain what that means?

[00:32:22] Bob Steuding: Yes, when I'd finished the book, I was, as you always saw, trying to think of a title that would be appropriate, and one of the books that I had read was by an engineer named, I think, Ridgway, Robert Ridgway, and he had written a memoir of the great projects that he had worked on as an engineer, so he knew everybody, you know, and was in on the project, and somewhere, maybe it was at one of these dinners—the engineers would have dinners at the hotels in Kingston, and they would give speeches, and they would write songs, and they would sing the songs to other songs of the day. There was one song that the words were about the project. It had to do with a scow that the Winston and Company had that when they started testing the reservoir, it would, of course, raise up a lot of the stuff that had been cut down and whatever came down the stream, and then it would collect on the dam and press on the dam, so they had a scow that they would bring out there. At first there wasn't enough rain, and then they thought about Noah's Ark and whatever else, so they started calling it "Noah's Scow," you know, and at one of these dinners that they had, they took the song, they put the scow into it, and they told the story of Noah and his ark, and they said, "Oh, well, Noah had built himself an ark. The dear old Christian soul put all his folks aboard and left his neighbors in a hole. When Noah pushed out in the stream onto the reservoir, right, with all his kith and kin, the neighbors stood upon the bank and cheerly said to him, 'Go to hell now, go to hell now, go to hell right now with your damn old scow.' It ain't going to rain anyhow. Anyhow, it ain't going to rain anyhow." At first, they didn't have enough water to fill it up, and so they were working these things into it. Anyway, they sang those songs, and Ridgway was at one of those dinners, and he talked, and somehow in some context, he said, "You know, this is the last of the handmade dams." They're not going to build dams like this anymore with workers, and on this, you know, driving the mules, they used mules and a pool of wagons, and, of course, he was right. The technology was going way beyond that. What they had was advanced for the day, but very quickly, that was replaced by much more advanced things. I mean, they used compressed air, you know, to run all the different machinery and so on. What was going on in the world, as I'm sure you know, at the same time was the Panama Canal, so it's interesting. If you read The New York Times, there's very little compared to the Panama Canal with articles and, you know, commentary and stuff like that, comparing it to the reservoir, and yet in some ways the reservoir was much more advanced and experienced and, to us here, of course, much more interesting, but it didn't get the press that you would think it would get. The press that it did get was that there were individuals and newspapers, like The New York World and so on, that didn't like the project. I don't think on humanitarian reasons, but they thought it was costing too much. When the bids came out, the City of New York gave the bid to Winston and Company, which was not the cheapest bid—oh, they made, you know, a big reaction to that, but it turned out that the other guy who had the cheaper bid—he didn't really know how to do the job. He underbid, not consciously, but because he had no idea what it would cost and it was interesting. Winston and Company did ultimately get the bid, and they said they would do it in between $12 and $13 million, and they did. Everything was done on schedule, but Ridgway, yes, Ridgway, was one of Winston's engineers, and there were many of them. Most of them came from Virginia, which is where Winston came from, and also great many African American people were brought up from Virginia from previous working projects, and they mainly drove the big wagons. The wagons had, like, bottoms that would open up, so they'd drive out over the dam and then open it up, and it would come out, and they were highly respected because they could drive these large mules and these wagons that were filled with tons and tons of rock and stuff like that. At the end of the day, everybody would get out of the streets. Five o'clock—when the whistle blew because these guys would be bringing the wagons and the mules back to the barn, so they commanded a lot of respect. They had their own camp too. You know, Italians had their own camp. Oh, lots of great stories [spaghetti hanging on the lines and singing Italian music], and it was very colorful, and people from the town, as much as they hated having the dam bill, did get money to work, you know, and many of them did, and they loved on Sundays to come down and watch these foreign people and listen to the music and lots of great stories, great stories. Italians tended to stay here. They were the largest group of so-called foreigners that worked on the dam, and many of them did stay. They were probably the largest group of foreign-born workers on the dam other than locals, and probably the greatest number of them of all of the groups that came here stayed. I don't know if many Russians or Slavs or people from Scandinavia or whatever, but it was amazing how many different groups of people. There's one Canadian, you know, on the job [a couple of English people, that sort of thing].

[00:38:42] Rebecca Rego Barry: You mentioned in the book that it was almost on purpose that they would hire all these different groups because it was a way to keep them from unionizing in any way, also because they couldn't really talk to one another, so they couldn't really organize well.

[00:38:55] Bob Steuding: Yeah, yeah, that's true. There was, as you know from the book, there was an attempt to unionize the workers there, but it was not successful. The story goes that Winston came out and talked to the organizer and talked to the people and said, "Sure, if you want to unionize, it's fine, but if you do, I will give you a ticket on the railroad, and you'll have to leave at the end of the day," or something like that, and apparently that took care of it.

[00:39:26] Brett Barry: We will return to our conversation in just a moment. To celebrate the 40th anniversary of Bob Steuding's book, Purple Mountain Press is offering a 40% discount through the end of October. No code required. Just head over to purplemountainpress.com for "The Last of the Handmade Dams: The Story of the Ashokan Reservoir." While you're there, check out Bob's other books, "Rondout: A Hudson River Port" and "The Heart of the Catskills," as well as books from Catskills historians like Diane Galusha, Michael Kudish, Bill Birns, and the list goes on. As Rebecca wrapped up her conversation with Bob Steuding, he revealed that he's at work on a new book about sense of place and calling the Catskills home.

[00:40:19] Bob Steuding: I'm working on another book, and it's tentatively called "The Distant Sound of the Creek," and it's about place: finding your place, home: making a home for yourself, putting down roots, and about, I guess, belonging. It's about living here and what it's like to live here and what you look for and how you find it. I mean, it's not a do-it-yourself book. It's about our experience and people that we talk to and that we know, and we'll see what happens. It draws on local history. It draws on the geography of this place and the animals and the people, and it, like, pulls together a lot of what I've written about in terms of other people's lives, you know, in terms of Rondout. The "Rondout" book is really focused on that—who lived there and who came there, and what did they try to do and how did they do it, and what made it difficult for them to do it, and that sort of thing—and the last book, "The Heart of the Catskills," is about the Southern Catskills and John Burroughs and, I guess, about The Catskill Mountain Journal too—that has a lot of material about that kind of thing. What is it to be one of the folk? We write about folklore and folk culture and all that, but we're all folk, you know, and why are we here? Why are we in any place? And I'm hoping to be able to use the material of the last 40 or 50 years to actualize that, but it's not—it's not "this is what you ought to do it" or "this is how you do it," or, you know, anything like that. It's—this is what that experience can be. We thought we would find paradise in California, you know, or in Asia, or in the Middle West—all wonderful places with a lot of good people and so on—but we found it back here, you know, where we had been born, and I mean, I was born in Kingston, you know, the hospital in Kingston. That's about 13 miles from here, and I've lived most of my life here, you know, and the distant sound of the creek is what I realized. It was just an image that came to me once in the Neversink, which is over, you know, by Claryville and over that way. That's what we all search for. You know, I mean, there's many things that we search for, but our place, you know, where are we to be, or where do we want to be? You know, who are we? Place and where we find it and how we find it is our life, really, and to be able to say—and I know many people who can say this—that wherever this is, whether it's Hollywood and Vine in Los Angeles, you know, or it's Bonham Highway in Hong Kong, this is where I want to be. This is why I want to be here. This is how that happened, you know, that sort of thing, and the distant sound in the creek is that sound that we look for. One day I was alone in the head of the Neversink [the East Branch of the Neversink] where it starts. It comes out of the base of Slide Mountain, and I could hear the sound of the other branch of the creek, you know, like about a mile or so away, and I could just—it was in there all alone, and I could hear this sound, and I thought, "That's what I'm looking for." Just lately, we've lost a lot of friends. You reach a certain age, and they start falling away, and these are people that you know, and you think to yourself, did they ever find that creek? You know, they must have heard it too and known where it was, you know—and it's for a lot of people. It's here in the Catskills. I think it was for Wray and Loni. Wray was from Nebraska, and Loni was German. He met—they met each other in a service, you know, and the chasers and all these people that were active and so on, but we're all listening to that creek, and we want to know where it is, and how do we get there, you know, and they talk to you. Greeks—you don't always know what they say, but it has taken years to really understand what it's saying. It's all just intuitive. You know, it's not rational. You say that that's what it's saying. It's about place and how central that is to human experience, and if you don't have a place, you know your children, you've given them a place, and no matter where they go, this is going to be where they're from, and that's an important part of human consciousness. I grew up in the Catskills.

[00:45:55] Brett Barry: Kaatscast: The Catskills Podcast is a biweekly production of Silver Hollow Audio. Today's guest host was our very own Rebecca Rego Barry. Transcription by Jerome Kazlauskas. Announcements by Campbell Brown. I'm Brett Barry, and I have some exciting news. Kaatscast is expanding with a weekly radio show on WJFF Radio Catskill every Saturday at 11:00 AM. That's in addition to this podcast, which we hope you'll rate and review if you haven't already, and please make sure you've subscribed so you never miss a story. You can sign up for our newsletter, search the archives, and even buy a tee-shirt at kaatscast.com, and we are on Instagram [@kaatscast]. Until next time, thanks for listening.

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