Town of Neversink

Neversink is located in Sullivan County, New York, which is one of the eight counties in the state classified as “most rural.”[3] It is located approximately 120 miles northwest of New York City, had a population of 1,660 in 1940 and was equidistant from the much larger, towns of Liberty to the west (population 8,632 in 1940) and Ellenville to the east (population 5,334 in 1940).[4] In 1798, town borders were arrayed to include 12 separate dairy farming communities centered on the hamlets of Montela, Eureka, Neversink, Bittersweet, Aden, Bradley, Claryville, Curry, Grahamsville, Lowes Corner, Unionville and Willowemoc. Although a town supervisor was elected since its founding, the political, social and economic gravity of the town was decentralized. It was found in the individual hamlets which served the needs of families living on surrounding farms. Besides serving as central meeting places for recreation and business, each hamlet had a post office, store and school. Some additionally had hotels, fire departments and recreational facilities. Due to their relative independence, citizens only had a vague sense of a greater town community beyond the hamlets.[5]

The Reimagining of Neversink

In his ground breaking work Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, Benedict Anderson argues that all nations are imagined political communities. They are imagined because “the members… never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion.”[1] They are communities because, “regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation that may prevail in each, the nation is always conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship.”[2]

The creation of the rural New York State community known as “Tri-Valley” in the mid-20th Century is a case study showing that the ideas of Benedict Anderson regarding the reasons and methods nations were created also applies to small communities. Tri-Valley formed from parts of three towns made up of small dairy farming communities known as hamlets. The political, social and economic gravity of the towns were decentralized and found in the individual hamlets which served the needs of families living on surrounding farms. Due to their relative independence, citizens only had a vague sense of a greater town community beyond the hamlets. After WWII, the survival of these communities were threatened by a changing economy, the construction of two reservoirs in the area and the attempt by the New York State Education Department to close all schools in the area as part of their school consolidation plan.

As with the creation of nations, the creation of Tri-Valley became necessary because of the decline of older economic and governmental systems that were no longer viable in a changing world. However, this re-imagining could have easily been dictated to the town from an unchecked and directive state government unconcerned with local sentiment and ideas. Just as it was when nations were first created, the success of imagining The Tri-Valley Area in a way that embraced change, while at the same time gaining legitimacy from residents and their collective memory was dependent on several factors. First, the horizontal alignment of an expanded electorate allowed the town the opportunity to resist the more vertical institutions of the New York State Education Department with a coordinated populist sentiment manifesting itself in votes. But, this coordination was only possible due to links between the isolated hamlets within the emerging community. These links included physical connections such as roads and agreed on meeting areas for business, recreation and political events. But far more important were the collection of ideas and the vision for the town formed in a newly created newspaper called The Tri-Valley Townsman. Community leaders ineffectively fought the change being forced on them from 1945-1947. It was not until ideas, votes and popular will could be focused and coordinated through the creation of The Tri-Valley Townsman in 1947 that the fight to imagine a unified, progressive, successful and independent community was possible. The community newspaper embodied the will of the collective population to seize control of their community from the state and form the community in the image that its citizens created in its pages.

Citations:

1. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (New York: Verso, 2006): p. 6.
2. Anderson, p. 7.
3. Janet Fitchen, Endangered Spaces, Enduring Places: Change, Identity and Survival in Rural America (Boulder: Westview Press, 1991), 6.
4. 1940 U.S. Census for Liberty, accessed 1 October 2012/available from www.ancestory.com; Internet.
5. James Quinlan, History of Sullivan County: An Account of its Geology, Climate, Aborigines, Early Settlement, Organization; The Formation of its Towns, with Biographical Sketches of Prominent Residents (Liberty: WT Morgans & Co, 1873)

Daniel Curry
George Mason University
Last Updated 14 May 2014
copyright May 2014