Customer Reviews

The Huckleberry Pickers: A Raucous History of the Shawangunk Mountains

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Marc Fried has reached back into a forgotten corner of New York State history and discovered a culture that has all but been lost. In doing so, he brings alive a way of life that is both fascinating to learn about and highly entertaining. These are the "berry-pickers," those folks who were drawn to the mountaintops of the Shawangunk Moutains of Ulster County (near Ellenville on Western slope and New Paltz to the East)for a variety of reasons: escape, subsistance, merriment, and those undefinable attributes of mountain scenery and air. They lived, many of them, in tar-paper shacks; traded wild blueberries (huckleberries) for food and grog; formed, dissolved, and reformed relationships of meaning and vivedness. Fried has painstakingly researched these folk, from archives and personal interviews made all along the Eastern Coast, from New York to Florida. From his own perch atop the highest of the Shawangunks, he has visited and documented every cellar hole and rusted remnant. The mountain comes to life in the lives and loves of these fascinating and forgotten people.

This is a study of a northern Appalachian subculture indigenous to a small but scenically and historically fascinating mountain range in New York State. The author wisely chose to structure his narrative from a perspective of location and subject, rather than from a strictly chronological perspective, which would not have been effective for this kind of work. Much of the book is presented as a walking tour along the old, abandoned mountain road on which the berrypickers' shantytowns were located: Fried relates history and anecdote of each former berrypicker community as they are encountered along the road, interspersing scenic description and thus providing the reader with a valuable trail guide as well as an anthropological and historical study of great humor and empathy. Many of these folks were related to one another by ties of kinship as well as community. The three abbreviated genealogical charts the author provides give added depth and clarity to the personalities we meet in this highly readable and often entertaining book.

The Huckleberry Pickers is the story of a community of people who lived and worked in and around the Shawangunk mountains. Fried relates the stories of this group in terms of recollected memories of the various participants. There is really no chronological order to the stories, skipping from the 20's to the 50's to the 40's and back again. It's difficult to keep tract of the characters at times. Fried gives extreme details of who was related to who which I feel only distracts the reader from the stories. This narration of the various relations takes up a good portion of the book, almost half, and frankly, I didn't care. The few short stories that are told were slightly interesting and not all that `raucous'. Overall, for the average reader, the stories would have little interest to anyone who wasn't already interested in the history of the area.

A rambling account of just a few people in just a small section of the Shawangunks, covering a comparatively short time period. A homey, folksey book, but as "History of the Shawangunks" it is quite incomplete.