Copyright 2005 The New York Sun, One SL, LLC
The New York Sun January 4, 2005
By STEPHEN MILLER, Staff Reporter of the Sun
Alf Evers, who died last Wednesday at age 99, was the town historian of Woodstock, N.Y., and the author of several exhaustive works of local history, including "The Catskills: From Wilderness to Woodstock."
In 821 pages, Evers laid out the history and folklore of the mountainous region, starting with the granting by Queen Anne in 1708 of 1.5 million acres of mountainous land to Johannis Hardenbergh.
The Catskills are more of an idea than a precisely delineated territory, however. When Evers asked an old resident where the Catskills began, he received the reply: "You keep on going until you get to where there's two stones to every dirt. Then b'Jesus you're there."
In the early days, trappers and lumbermen vied to extract what they could from the land while speculators looked in vain for gold. Legal battles over the real estate raged for decades.
Later, the region became the national center for tanning hides, which were imported from around the world and brought upriver on the Hudson to be treated with bark extracted from the Catskills's vast hemlock forests.
In the mid-19th century, legions of farmers began colonizing the cleared land, and the region, with its dramatic views from resort hotels perched atop mountains, also became one of America's first tourist destinations.
If the Catskills produced lumber, hides, and agricultural goods, it also has been one of the nation's more productive centers of folklore, and Evers rooted around in the back woods for decades in search of entertaining episodes to add to the Rip Van Winkle tales popularized by Washington Irving.
Evers uncovered an 1862 letter to the editor of a Catskill, N.Y., newspaper that said the village of Big Indian got its name from "a monster of a red man who prowled the neighboring mountains in Revolutionary days, and now and then swooped down on the settlements to kill and burn the inoffensive inhabitants."
Woodstock was the site of an early artists' community, and Evers was particularly good on the generations of aesthetes who made pilgrimages to the region, starting with the Hudson River School of artists.
Evers was born in the Bronx, where his father worked as an architect. According to an interview with a reporter from the Poughkeepsie Journal, he was born infected with malaria and was a sickly child.
His parents were from Sweden and had planned to send Evers home to be trained for a career in the Swedish navy. The year he was scheduled to go was 1914, and with the outbreak of World War I, the Evers family decided to move to Tillson, in the southeast foothills of the Catskills, to try their luck as novice hog farmers.
Evers recalled learning to farm from a local man, an alcoholic who had "poured three farms down his throat."
"Every once in a while he would say, 'Someday this will be your farm when your father is gone and you'll have to know how to run it and I'm going to teach you to do that.' And he did, even down to the witches that haunted the place."
Farming didn't work out for the family, and after a few years they moved to nearby New Paltz, into the Hasbrouck House, a 17th-century building that they set about restoring.
Despite reputedly encouraging B.F. Skinner to take up science instead of literature while the two were studying at Hamilton College, Evers eventually moved to New York and attended the Art Students League. He then had a stint as a Fuller Brush salesman before going to work as an inspector for an agency that investigated potentially risky policies for insurance companies. Once, Evers found himself working on the case of Ciro Terranova, the greengrocer-mobster known as the Artichoke King of New York. "That was really the foundation of my ability to uncover information that's of use in writing history," he said, noting that the information he was turning up could destroy a man's reputation. "You had to be rigid."
Evers married a girl he met at the Art Students League, Helen Baker, and the two went into business together writing and illustrating greeting cards. Later, they collaborated on a successful series of children's books with titles like "A Day on the Farm," "Plump Pig," and "Hungry Baby Bunny."
After moving to Fairfield, Conn., where Evers oversaw fuel oil distribution during World War II, they moved back the Catskills, eventually settling in rural Shady, a hamlet just outside of Woodstock.
Evers began contributing historical articles to local newspapers and occasionally sent letters to the editor of the New York Times concerned with such rural matters as the origin of Jonathan apples (which came from Woodstock, were not named after Johnny Appleseed, and were, oddly, known locally as "Rickeys") and exploding the myth that rattlesnakes are attracted to milk ("no more attractive to a rattler than a Waldorf salad is to a tiger.")
A New York editor with Doubleday proposed that Evers write a book on local history, and he undertook the assignment with abandon. "I bought a jeep," he recalled. "A blue jeep with red wheels, and I went around the mountains in it. I went on roads that no motor vehicle had ever been on before and I talked to people who hadn't seen a stranger for years in odd corners of the mountains. I had a wonderful time."
The result was "The Catskills," first published in 1972, a book that has become the standard reference work for local history and remains in print. In 1987, Evers published "Woodstock: History of an American Town," another 800-page tome. He also wrote "In Catskill Country: Collected Essays on Mountain History, Life, and Lore," as well as more advanced children's titles such as "The Three Kings of Saba" and "The Deer Jackers."
A charismatic figure who often spoke before local groups regarding the need o limit development in the Catskills, Evers seems to have been preserved into a lucid old age by his dedication to his work. In the days before his death, he put the finishing touches on his final book, "Kingstonon-Hudson: An American Historical City," another massive production, which he wrote with the secretarial assistance of Ed Sanders, a poet and friend. It is scheduled to be published this spring.
He was nearly blind, nearly deaf, had cancer and diabetes, and got around with the aid of a walker that he had ingeniously turned into a portable desk. Despite this, he had embarked on a new project, a biography of Hervey White,founder of the Maverick arts colony. "He was singing when he passed," Mr. Sanders said. "Bemusement, that's how he lived so long. The divine comedy passed over his eyes."
