Mary McTamaney

Last weekend, my neighborhood held its annual block party. As summer comes to an end, and families chart new courses, we gather in the middle of our street and catch up as well as reminisce. My husband and I have lived on our block for fifty-three years and the tradition of a covered dish party has been an intermittent tradition since the 1980’s and a regular event for the last quarter century. Our street applies for a permit to close a section of the block and we all carry our folding tables and chairs to the middle of the road and share food and stories. We listen to stories of vacation adventures and encourage children into a new year of school.

We share music too thanks to the DJ services of one generous neighbor who comes through each year with a great variety of songs – always including Mr. Rogers’ “Won’t You Be My Neighbor?” This year we added a medley of Dolly Parton songs and joined in singing the words of “Jolene” and “9 to 5.” I knew we were continuing a tradition of fellowship that spans all the centuries of local life around Newburgh Bay.
Chronicles of past times in this area include many mentions of end-of-summer get-togethers.

Mr. James Brown of Fishkill Landing, who kept a daily diary from 1829-1866 is one of my most reliable and revealing sources for times gone by. His diaries for these August to September weeks each year reveal that there were many outdoor fairs and many religious camp meetings in both Newburgh and Fishkill Landing (now Beacon). People brought the literal fruits of their labor to share and sometimes to sell or trade with neighbors. At the camp meetings, families brought food, similar to today’s picnic food, to share and the ladies of the church sponsoring the meeting made batches of cider and lemonade. The Methodist faith grew quickly in pre-Civil War America and their get togethers under the trees and the shelter of canvas tents became particularly large and popular events.

The fairs were organized around the height of garden glory and were sponsored by local agricultural and horticultural societies. Everyone in the region got together for a couple of days to admire and sample the many things neighbors produced. Of course, plates of specimen fruits and vegetables and flowers were spread out and often awarded prizes but so were lots of domestic crafts like basket-making, canning and preserving and needlework. James Brown, whose diaries are such a wonderful source of understanding for our community, was a master gardener himself and bought and traded plants with Newburgh colleagues for his extensive gardens in today’s Beacon. Those gardens at Mount Gulian can still be visited since the core of that big estate farm and its old colonial homestead are now a historic site open to the public. See mountgulian.org. The story of James F. Brown, a runaway slave from Maryland who rose to a respected position in his life here beside Newburgh Bay can also be explored through the Mount Gulian website where there is a link to the scanned copies of his journals housed at the New York Historical Society. Each season, his diaries provide something new to learn about unexpected events in the lives of local folks who lived here almost two centuries ago.

This neighborhood around Newburgh Bay, despite its massive growth from the days of camp meetings at small crossroads, still has places where folks know each other and interact in the personal and helpful ways our ancestors did. Maybe a hymn from the Methodist songbook will be heard drifting out from the windows of a church or maybe it will just be old friends in the middle of a road singing “9 To 5.”