As a trained historian, I frequently need reminding that not everyone feels as I do about preserving the past. The past is there until it gets rundown and buried or pushed into a pile and burned. The past is a delicate thing, like a mirror, and once you break it you can’t put it back together again, at least not with the same qualities. In Orange County our past is running for the hills. The pressures for development are ringing in our ears, like unceasing tinnitus.

Warehouses the size of the Pentagon Building are popping from the soil like radioactive mushrooms from a Grade B 1950’s horror flick. Where’s Godzilla when you need him? Even warehouse-building moratoriums can’t stop them. Just ask for permissions to be exempt! A company called RDM wants to build a warehouse on Neelytown Road, the section of Neelytown Road that runs south to Campbell Hall. The building would be built on spec which means the locals have no idea who it is being built for, and so a complete understanding of the potential impacts cannot be assessed. Yet the developer wants to make sure whoever occupies the new structure can run their business 24/7, nonstop.

Windfall Farms is a 140+ acre organic vegetable farm holding down the fort on this old, back-country road. Don’t get confused. Neelytown Road is also the name of the Town of Montgomery’s Industrial Corridor, otherwise known as the Louis Heimbach Highway – kinda like renaming the Tappan Zee Bridge after Mario Cuomo. Is it a failure of planning when a road can run in three directions simultaneously? Just asking. And don’t forget Old Neelytown Road over by Hoeffner’s Farm. Once you get all that sorted out, you can find a bit of country, and part of that country is the Neelytown Cemetery abutting Windfall Farms on the north. The RDM spec warehouse is being planned for the south side of Windfall Farms. Kathi and Morse Pitts own Windfall Farms and they have been straining against the odds to protect this area against over-development and to preserve some of the best, most productive soils in New York State. Such strain includes details like noticing that the roadway is 22 feet wide and not 24 feet, as claimed by the developer. We can fix that, the developer says. We can widen the road two feet.

The question becomes will widening the road undercut the stone walls of Neelytown Cemetery? Don’t worry, we will study that, said the developer. Tectonic Engineers submitted a report on March 21, 2021. Raising the most basic concern with the report, it maintains “The cemetery area that is bound by the wall measures roughly 100 feet by 50 feet, with the longer dimension along Neelytown Road.” Kathi and I took a stroll past the cemetery yesterday. We measured the east wall along the road as 154 feet, plus the dimension of the central gate. It just makes you wonder.

A report on the cemetery by Hudson Valley Cultural Resources to the State Office of Historic Preservation was a little more comprehensive. The developer offered $20,000 to grease the project along and discussions were held as to what to do with the money to help the cemetery walls. One troubling conclusion was to leave intact the trees which are undercutting the walls, as removing them might cause additional damage to walls and the interned. This is called “kicking the can down the road.”

The Neelytown Cemetery, east and west, is a gem of archeology, serene in its green summer repose. The names on the headstones are fully American – Bull and Eager and Booth– and the dates from the 1700’s are numerous. The front walls need repointing. Some spots need rebuilding. Trees and tree stumps need removing, their areas of impact, repaired from the ground up. Then the side walls, the dry walls built without cement, they can be relayed too, rebuilt with the original stones. It can be saved completely if the commitment is made. If the walls are not repaired, I believe the increase in truck traffic, Tectonic Engineering’s vibration statistics notwithstanding, without air brake mitigation, and with the widening of the road into the grass embankments holding the stone walls, and with the tree roots still expanding, the walls will become ruins in no time.

I pointed out to Kathi that the columns, or piers, on the east cemetery wall were later add-ons. I pointed out to her that the west wall was completely different (blockish, squarish stones) in stonework from the east wall (long running, lateral stones). The walls were not likely to have been built at the same time. They were built by different masons. These notations make it all the more interesting.

When the Japanese break a valuable antique piece of pottery, or a vase, they have a technique of repairing the precious item called Kintsugi or Kintsukuroi. The repair makes it look like the broken pieces have been secured in their original places with gold, or another precious metal. Like welding with gold. The philosophy of Kintsugi is that there is great beauty not only in the prefect but in the imperfect. The broken piece does not hold the original quality, but now it holds a new, added quality, an enrichment. Our heritage, written in stone, needs restoring, saving, even in an imperfect way, the best we can, as most beautifully as we can achieve. We are losing so much.

Richard Phelps has spent much of his life studying and working on the oldest stone structures found in America: barns, homes, and walls. He has repaired the Crawford Family Cemetery on Collabar Road in Crawford, the dry stacked walls, and the cemented gates of Wallkill Valley Cemetery on Rte. 52, Walden, Saint Andrew’s Cemetery on Plains Road and the Berea Cemetery Wall.

The stone houses are too numerous to mention, but start with the oldest – The Sarah Wells/William Bull House in Hamptonburgh, 1720.