Alf Evers

Generous. That’s the word most use to describe Alf Evers. Evers was born during a blizzard on February 2, 1905, but there was nothing cold about this warm-hearted bard of the Catskill Mountains who, at the time of his death on December 29, 2004, just two months short of his hundredth birthday, was more famous regionally than most of the mountain men and women he’d spent a lifetime rescuing from the shadows of history. His own life spanned almost a century of violent global history: two world wars; the Holocaust; the Atomic Bomb; the assassination of an American president; and, finally—and refreshingly—American astronauts cavorting on the moon, which surely appealed to the boy in Evers, who had so loved Jules Verne.

1905 was the year that Einstein proposed his theory of relativity; it was the year that Freud published his theory of sexuality; it was the year of “Bloody Sunday,” when blood soaked the Russian steppes and launched a revolution that would last another century. It was also the year Alf Evers slipped quietly into human history in rural Bronx, New York to Anna Lucas Evers and Ivan Evers. Bronx County, more commonly known as “The Bronx,” is one of the five boroughs that make up New York City. Tucked into the northernmost corner of New York City, it is the birthplace of such luminaries as Derek Jeter, Babe Ruth and Edgar Allen Poe. This area of New York City was once open farmland belonging to a family named Bronck. When travelers set out to visit this distinguished American family, they referred to it as “going to the Broncks.” The phrase has stuck for more than two centuries. Ironically, the story of the Bronck Family in New York State would make up an important part of Evers’ most well-known book, The Catskills: From Wilderness to Woodstock, published in 1972 and still in print.

A bird’s eye view of Evers’ life finds it filled with momentous events: the invention of the Model-T; the flight of the “Kitty Hawk,” and the production of the Great Train Robbery, the world’s first silent movie. Like a perfect pair of parentheses, Evers life opened with the first telegraphed message to travel around the world and ended with the construction of the information superhighway.

A worm’s eye view of Evers’ life finds him living with his family in a number of rambling old country houses along the Hudson River until August 1914, on the eve of World War I, when the 11 year old historian-in-the-making walked down the gangplank of a Hudson River nightboat and into a horse-drawn surrey that would bring him to his next childhood home on a farm in Tillson, Ulster County, New York, close to the City of Kingston, a great American city that would be the subject of his last major historical work.

At the age of 17, Evers moved once again, this time to New Paltz, where he and his parents moved into an eighteenth century stone house known as the Abraham Hasbrouck house. Evers’ father, Ivan, who was an architect and artist, set about restoring the stone structure with his son, Alf, close by his side. Evers’ sense of history was growing. Like a sponge, he soaked up history from every direction. His Sunday School teacher Ralph LeFever, author of The History of New Paltz and its Old Families; country school teacher Byron Terwilliger, collector of Native artifacts and scribe of fading inscriptions on pitted gravestones, and New Paltz psychologist Dr. Margaret K. Smith, who chronicled the lives of colonial women of the Hudson Valley for the Dutchess County Historical Society were just a few of his early inspirations.

In 1926, after a year of study at Hamilton College, Evers’ life took a turn away from history and towards art. Staking out a new life for himself in New York City, he enrolled in the prestigious Art Students League, to study drawing and painting. It is here that he met his wife and eventual partner in the creation of over 50 children’s books, commercial artist Helen Bryant. Before their personal and professional collaboration ended in 1952, they had created three children—Jane, Barbara and Christopher—and some of the most memorable children’s stories of the '30s and '40s, including “A Day on the Farm,” “Moony Mouse” and “Plump Pig.”

The history of the Catskill Mountains was Alf Evers’ cosmology; it enticed his mind to far-flung galaxies. “You can’t understand a town without understanding the surrounding towns,” he once told an interviewer. “As you go more and more deeply into it, it takes you farther and farther from your base. You start accumulating books about your town’s history, then you begin to collect books on the surrounding towns, and then on the county and surrounding counties, and then the state and the surrounding states. The process can go on until you reach the limits of the planet, and by that time, possibly, there will have been discovered that, somewhere in space, there are planets surrounding suns that we know nothing about, in which there are other towns, which have their local histories. And, so, eventually, there will be space travelers that may bring back local histories to people like me….”

The center of Evers’ universe was his book-lined home in Shady, New York, now listed on the National and State Historic Places. Evers had moved to Woodstock in the 1940s. It was to Shady that Bill Moyers came to do a documentary on the Catskill Mountains and it was from Shady that the modest-but-well-known historian answered requests from school children and others who wrote or called him at all hours of the day and night to inquire about the area’s history with ever increasing frequency. Even noted composer John Cage, when he came to the Catskill Mountains, sought Evers to take him on a mushroom hunt in the green forests near Evers’ home.

But it was not until his death that Alf Evers really came into his own.

On October 30, 2004, Mayor James Sottile of Kingston, NY hosted a reception in honor of the publication of Alf Evers’s book Kingston: City on the Hudson. Evers, by now the region’s most preeminent historian, took up his pen at the age of 86 to begin his 500-page history of the City of Kingston, completing it 14 years later before his death in 2004 at the age of 99. On hand to take part in the celebration were Overlook Press’s publisher Peter Mayer, distinguished poet/musician Ed Sanders and crowds of Kingstonians and other lovers of regional history who have long-awaited the publication of this important contribution to American history.

To many, Alf Evers and the Catskill Mountains are synonymous, and for good reason. In 1984, Evers wrote Catskills: From Wilderness to Woodstock, a seminal work about the importance of the region from the time of its first settlement right up through the original Woodstock festival and beyond. This book was followed in 1995 by In Catskill Country: Collected Essays on Mountain History, Life and Lore, a collection of essays on a variety of subjects including Kaaterskill Falls, the Ulster & Delaware Railroad and steamboats on Halcottsville Pond. In 1997, Evers published Woodstock: History of an American Town, an up-close-and-personal look at that larger-than-life small American town in Ulster County, New York. Somewhere in between these books he managed to find the time to research and write his last and perhaps his most important work. One may legitimately argue that From Wilderness to Woodstock was his greatest work, but with his Kingston book, Evers has written a great book about a great city.

Once the capital of New York State, a fact that still seems to surprise some of residents, the City of Kingston has a rich history that includes its pre-historic ice age era around 12,000 B.C.E., the struggles of the Esopus Native Americans with the early Dutch and British settlers, the further struggles of Dutch settlers with their British brethren, the success of the steamboat industry through the creation of the D&H Canal, the coming of the railroads, the rise of baseball, on-into-and-through the twentieth century and into the twenty first.

Evers’ sympathy for the Esopus Native Americans and the rough treatment they received at the hands of early Dutch and British settlers, though indirect, is moving. Here, finally, is an American history that tells the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but. Not that we haven’t heard it all before. It’s just that Evers tells it so matter-of-factly without fanfare or sensation that he makes it a part of our history, rather than apart from our history, if you know what I mean.

The most important thing about Evers’ book, besides its meticulous research and impressive breadth and depth of knowledge, is its author’s prescience about the need for such a book at this time. The present and potential future of Kingston, the renewed Rondout waterfront, a keener awareness of the uptown old Stockade area, restoration and greater appreciation of the City’s seventeenth and early eighteenth century Dutch stone houses all add up to a greater awareness and appreciation of the more than 350 years of written European history and who-knows-how-many-more centuries of oral tradition of generation upon generation of Native Americans before the coming of the white man add up to a proud—and sometimes ignominious—history that Kingstonians have a right to celebrate, honor and use as a yardstick for the future. For his part, Alf Evers takes his place along that other great chronicler of the Catskill Mountains, Roland Van Zandt, as the region’s most talented and revered historian.

Now, it is Alf Evers’ turn to be remembered in history.

According to Maureen Nagy, who worked closely with Evers on In Catskill Country, Evers’ slim-but-scintillating volume of essays on mountain history, which Overlook Press publisher Peter Mayer brought out in 1995 in honor of the historian’s 90th birthday, “Alf was a passionate historian. A reader senses the urgency beneath the surface of his writing-his desire to communicate the [Catskill] area’s unique history to his audience, as a foundation for their practicing good stewardship of the region he loved.

“His legacy is his work and his books which inspire readers, especially those just discovering the Catskills, to love the region as he did,” Nagy added.

Like many creative men, Evers was multi-talented: poet, painter and historian. Unfortunately for his readers, Evers burned his poetry during a period of creative insecurity, a fact he confided in his friend and amanuensis, Ed Sanders, himself a noted poet, writer, musician and intellectual.

“I think Alf enjoyed his paintings,” said Sanders, “and there were many good ones, one of the best the excellent oil of the Shady Church in Woodstock, with the background of Lake Hill, or the truck-farms of New Paltz he painted around the late 1930s-1940s.

“It’s always difficult to know what you do best,” said Sanders, “And I think Alf has left a definite legacy of painting, but his position as an American genius is in his histories.”

GUIDE MAGAZINE