Transcription
Ted: Hi my name is Ted Shuart I’m the Schoharie County Historian. I grew up in the town of Carlisle. I was born in Rockland County. The family left when the Tappan Zee Bridge was built. So I wound up here in 1957 at the age of three, and so grew up in the town of Carlisle and Grovenors Corners. And all my life I’ve lived in the shadow of a mountain called Barrack Zourie. And it’s a big flattop mountain in the town of Carlisle, close to the Cobleskill line, and you could see it from everywhere. You could see it from Johnstown. You could see it from down I-88. It’s very visible because it rises up around the land around it. And the name, everybody gets the name wrong. And, there’s all sorts of, theories as to how it got the name, but actually, the first, part of the name is Barrack B.A.R.R.A.C.K and it’s actually German B.E.R.G is “Berg,” which is, German for hill. And, but the Germans pronounce it more like “beark”, and it came out Americanized. It’s spelled barrack. The second one is part of the Indian name, which is “Owelus Sowllus.” And, which I talked to the Mohawks. It might mean Spruce Mountain. It might mean duck, probably Spruce Mountain. But, anyhow, so they took the second half of the name “Owelus Sowllus” and it became Barrack Zourie and the spelling has changed over the years. But that’s all it is. It’s Mount Zourie or Mount Spruce if you want to throw the Mohawk in, and, as a landmark, it’s got quite a history.
The biggest, for a long time here in Schoharie County, where our origins are all German and Dutch. The biggest holiday of the year was not Christmas. It was not Easter. It was Pentecost. It was called Pinkster. The remnants of that holiday live on in Albany today. And the Tulip Festival in pinkster you elected a queen, a pinkster queen. And, it was all about pinkster flowers, the African American community continued to celebrate it for a long time, and some people mistakenly call it an African American holiday today, because, it was so popular with them. Back in old Dutch New York, all the slaves were set free for 48 hours from Sunday until Monday night or Tuesday morning. They were free to do whatever they wanted. They could travel, they could visit family. And that became, for the African Americans, the biggest holiday of the year. They continued to celebrate it long after the Dutch and the Germans did. But, in the 1800s, Barack Zourie became a very popular place on Pinkster. And people would congregate sometimes hundreds. And there were wild azaleas. That grew on the mountain. And people there’s stories of, one story of a mountain, wagon going back to Cobleskill at the end of the day, so laden with blossoms that it was dropping them off the back and leaving a pink trail back to the village. But people would picnic on top of the mountain. Generally, they’d get a baseball game going on a field at the foot of the mountain. And, so for a long time, the mountain was a very important part of a holiday for people in that region. It’s also the only place I know where the, where the Geographical Society has put a triangulation. And that case, they got three markers on top where surveyors can go, and they can check their maps and their property lines and all that.
And one last story I like to tell is, the Air Force apparently like to use it. People from Griffis Air Force Base in Utica and back in the 1960s, before it was illegal, jets would come screaming down route 20 and break the sound barrier. One of them, the explosion, was so loud one time it knocked me off my bicycle and then later on the C-47s and the big C-130s, you’d always see them following that line. They always seem to turn around over us. And it turns out that they were looking for that mountain. As soon as they saw Barrack Zourie, they knew they’re approaching Schenectady airspace and Stratton Air Force Base. They were getting too close, and they would circle and go home first the Jets and later the Air Force. The mountains have played a lot, important part of that history. And, I’m still living inside of it.