Keep history alive.

D&H TV has increased our audience significantly but requires funding to enable us to continue producing its lauded content. Additionally, our collaboration with the excellent Siren Theatre troupe requires support that goes beyond ticket sales to fairly pay the many thespians for all their hard work writing, rehearsing and performing. We deliberately price tickets low enough so as to make the performances accessible to a wide audience. Because we stage the works in our museum and surrounding land, audience size is necessarily limited. Plans are also in the works to produce a video of our latest production, The Raging Canal.

Trails are a popular resource that were especially treasured when the world shut down during the Covid pandemic. Our Five Locks Trail sees as many as 1,000 visitors a week! It needs constant maintenance to keep it safe for the many visitors it draws to High Falls. In addition, we are looking to implement the feasibility study we completed with grant funding from the Hudson River Valley Greenway to extend the Five Locks Walk into a loop trail that would traverse DePuy Road and then parallel the old, pre-1850 alignment of the D&H Canal in High Falls. With the purchase of the 1850 telegraph and toll collector’s office building, we plan to extend the Five Locks Walk to include this important historical gem and its adjacent 1850 NY Lock 15, transforming the trail to be the Six Locks Walk. That trail extension will also allow visitors to see the south abutment of Roebling’s suspension aqueduct over the Rondout Creek.

This fund will help the Society restore the recently acquired telegraph and toll collector’s office building. The building was initially constructed in 1850 to collect tolls from the boats that continued to use the earlier route of the Canal from before the final enlargement- mainly to service the many mills using the falls for power. In 1862, when the D&H Canal Company installed a telegraph line on its entire New York roue, it then housed the D&H High Falls telegraph office. That structure was subsequently enlarged with an addition on its north end in 1868. The building is pretty much in original condition, the latest work being the metal roof that was installed in 1884. Volunteers have removed the literal tons of detritus that accumulated in the building in the 20th century. Scan2Plan has digitally mapped the structure and Alfandre Architecture is creating the plans we need to get bids. While we have some funding allocated to the project, we will most probably resort to using that as a match for a restoration grant. In addition, we will then need to rehabilitate the towpath as a trail and eventually create interpretive signs.