Black Creek
Lloyd NY
7/16
∆ ∆ ∆
emotions expanding
sensed cautionaries
small step falls pool with Creek upstream and downstream, entering Beaver dam formed Lake Chodikee (where's my stone canoe!) draining and continuing with creek form North to Burroughs' site... Lake Chodikee has one powerless boat access surrounded with Cattail, Arrowroot and swamp brush, next to an Orthodox Jewish Camp Karlin Stolin, across from Highland Residential Center, a razor bladed fenced youth detention facility...
"...According to one of Lloyd’s earliest historians, Warren G. Sherwood, Chodikee is an Anglicized spelling of an Algonkian phrase “shadakee,” meaning the place of the signal fire. It’s speculated that light-colored rock cliff visible from Camp Stuts Road was used by the Esopus to build fires visible from Mohonk. ..."
"...Cultists and hillbillies
Chodikee’s first group of settlers who arrived en masse happen to be a controversial religious group, the Pang Yang — followers of a woman named Jemima Wilkinson. Wilkinson was a former Quaker from Rhode Island who had a brush with death during the Revolutionary War.
She contracted the plague, was presumed dead and was set to be buried by her family. Wilkinson surprised mourners by sitting up in her coffin during the wake. Her miraculous recovery she attributed to an entity called the “Publick Universal Friend.” She took this second chance at life to start a new religion — one which preached simple living in a shared commune. She preached equality between men, women and people of other races.
Mainstream Quakers found her message too unorthodox — perhaps even no longer Christian, because of her claims to be inhabited by the spirit of the genderless “Universal Friend” — and they shunned her.
Wilkinson’s Society of Universal Friends moved out of Rhode Island, gathering followers in Connecticut, Pennsylvania and Massachusetts before venturing into New York. Penn Yan and Jerusalem, both in Yates County up in the Finger Lakes, are other settlements made by the group.
Pang Yang and Penn Yan are both shortenings of the phrase “Pennsylvania Yankee.”
The religious settlement in Highland, our local Pang Yang, started in about 1800. They rented the land from Henry Elting and Thomas Rogers. Outsiders seem to have been suspicious of them, deriding them as witches or Satanists.
Sometimes, the term “Pang Yanger” seems to have been misapplied to people living in the Chodikee Lake area during the 1800s who weren’t related to the religious group.
A New Paltz Times article from 1860 talks about the Pang Yang settlement lobbying Ulster County to succeed from the Union, because they felt upset by local wins for the “Black Republican Party.” That slur “Black Republican” was usually leveled at the GOP from people who did not want to fight a Civil War on behalf of slaves.
Pang Yanger also seems to have been used as a term for hillbillies living off the land in the area. Articles in the New Paltz Independent and New York Times capture a time when the Chodikee Lake region became home to wild men and women.
“In the summer, they pick berries on the mountains and sell the fruit to speculators. In winter they live by begging in the neighboring towns and villages. The language spoken is a dialect of Holland Dutch mixed with the Indian Tongue as spoken by the Mohican or Delaware before the Revolutionary War,” an 1888 New Paltz Independent article reads.
Newsmen of the day seem shocked by these simple folk living off the land — partly because of their mixed ancestry of black, white and Native American, which did not conform to racial attitudes of the past.
On May 31, 1897, the New York Times wrote about the same group of people, only calling them the “Binnewaters.” These people tended to live around lakes throughout Ulster County from here to Kingston.
“About the shores of these lakes lives a peculiar people, utterly different from the other white stock of Ulster County — so different, in fact, that their origin has been lost in obscurity,” the New York Times article reads. “The majority have names which lead to the idea that they are of Holland stock originally.”
Both papers paint the Binnewaters or Pang Yangers as savages, criminals, degenerates and outcasts living in shanties and hovels. Readers sensitive to matters of race should be aware that the next paragraph uses some rough, insensitive language.
“Whole families, running through several generations, have not only the taint of African blood in them, but Mohican Indian was well, and this mixture of races has been so worked, over and over again, that whole groups of families have become as swarthy as the darkest Italians,” the article states.
For the members of this group, when they did run afoul of the law, Chodikee Lake seems to have been a refuge.
“In Ulster County, when a Binnewater wanted for the commission of any crime has fled, the first place in which the officers look for him is at Pang Yang in the Paltz Mountains,” the New York Times wrote.
map shows East - West relationship with Black Creek confluence Hudson River site and triangle Rifton/Esopus/Rosendale...
will be working smaller tributaries with Hudson, Wallkill and Rondout locally... with reading North Carolina Cherokee lore smaller tributaries were "grandchildren" Waterways... did/do Esopus peoples conceptualize similarly? ..."
this source link has many more stories...
https://hudsonvalleyone.com/2013/08/17/chodikee-lake-area-has-storied-colorful-history/
lands have memory and character
art with Earth blog, charcoal, collaborative with Nature, eco-environmental land art, fractals, webh
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