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Cache is placed with permission. It is available 7 days a week from dawn to dusk. Please, no after dark searching. Cache is accessed from Cemetery Road off route 30 on either end. There is a chain across the drive, but there is room to park a car off the road near the entrance. At times there may be muggles about. Bring your own pencil to log in. Cache large enough for small trades and travel bugs. Please be sure to close cache properly.
The Historical Society of the Town of Middletown (HSM). Formed in 2004, HSM has grown to an organization of more than 100 history lovers who enjoy and support our programs and preservation projects. The Margaretville Covered Bridge, which spanned the East Branch of the Delaware River on Bridge Street from the 1860s until 1933, is our logo, symbolic of the ‘bridge’ we hope to make between the past and our contemporary lives.
The Historical Society of the Town of Middletown (HSM), finally has a home of its own, thanks to the generosity of the New Kingston Valley Grange.
For the past seven years, the Historical Society has held its programs and meetings at various sites around town, and has kept its files in Board members’ homes. The move to a central location will provide the Society with an identity, and room to consolidate and grow.
The Cemetery Road property was once farmland that was purchased in the 1940s by Julius and Frieda Meinstein and deeded in 1950 to Stephen Meinstein. In the mid-1960s it was sold to the Catskill Mountain Chapter of the Izaak Walton League.
The IWL, a conservation and sportsmen’s group which was established in Margaretville in 1927, had built a clubhouse on NYS Route 30 in 1938. (The windows had once graced Bussy’s Store in the village, and the hardwood flooring was taken from the former school on Church Street that was vacated in 1937 for the current Margaretville Central School.)
The widening of Route 30 in the 1960s prompted IWL to move its headquarters to the Meinstein farm site just up the hill, where the avid fishermen soon added a pond. A memorial stone to its founding president, F. Lee Keator, remains nearby.
When the chapter disbanded in the mid-1990s, it gave the building and surrounding acreage to the New Kingston Valley Grange, which had been established in 1968. The Grange made significant improvements inside and out.
For many years NKVG met monthly for pot luck meals, game nights, songfests and speakers. It held fund raising activities to benefit the Margaretville Memorial Hospital Auxiliary and needy local families, and to provide an annual scholarship to a graduating Margaretville Central School student. Both IWL and NKVG rented out the building and grounds for special affairs, and many area people remember it as the site of family parties, wedding receptions, alumni gatherings and other functions.
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