The Trapps Mountain Hamlet Historic District is located on the Shawangunk Ridge in Gardiner, New York, United States. It is a large area that covers the site of a settlement that thrived there from the late 18th to mid-20th centuries. Inhabitants practiced subsistence farming, making it one of the rare such communities in the East to have left any trace remaining. They supplemented that with a variety of other trades, primarily in the forest products industry, with most inhabitants gradually coming to work at nearby mountain resorts in the 20th century. The last resident died in 1956.
Only foundations remain for most of the buildings, and only six remain standing. Those that do show a unique structural system that suggests an influence of the Native American tribes that lived in the area at the time it was settled. Today most of them are on protected lands in the area, with a few privately owned. In 2000 the area was designated a historic district and listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
Geography
The Trapps historic district contains about 433 acres centered along the US 44/NY 55 highway and the Coxing Kill atop the Shawangunk in the northwestern portion of Gardiner, with some portions overlapping into neighboring Rochester. Most of that area is now reforested, part of the Mohonk Preserve or Minnewaska State Park Preserve, or privately owned. A network of hiking trails and unpaved carriage roads can be accessed from the two nature preserves.
The nearest large villages to the Trapps were New Paltz to the east and High Falls to the northeast. The mountainous topography of the area has been sculpted in large part by glacial action and stream erosion by the Coxing Kill and Peters Kill, which provided water and water power for the Trapps people. Over time, however, these two natural forces resulted in shallow, rocky soil, which helped to limit the hamlet's population.
The district's highest elevation is roughly 1,100 feet above sea level, falling to about 700 feet at its lowest point. Directly east are the Trapps and Near Trapps climbing cliffs, which face New Paltz and are managed by the Mohonk Preserve. The gap or notch between these cliff escarpments has provided access for traffics over the centuries, including the modern-day U.S. Route 44/55.
History
During the colonial era, much of the northern Shawangunks were first partitioned into two land patents, the Groote Transport ("Great Transaction") Patent of 1730, and the Nineteen Partners Tract of 1770. These land patents covered most of the eastern portion of the colonial Town of Rochester and opened the way for settlement of the Trapps after the Revolutionary War. Early settlers moving up from the surrounding valleys were primarily of Dutch descent, with one or two families of English descent.
A will of the 1780s refers to a sawmill site later associated with the Enderly family. For about a century, Enderly families operated their farm, sawmill, and blacksmith forge on the Coxing Kill at the intersection of a centuries-old path and an unpaved colonial road. The Trapps hamlet itself grew along the Coxing Kill in the upper Clove, a Dutch word meaning cleft or valley.
Trapps families built homes of log, plank, and frame. A plank house is unique as a type of American vernacular architecture. It consists of vertical planks, or rough-cut thick boards, which were nailed together to form walls, raised in place, and connected at the corners with simple lap joints. There are no corner posts or studs. Planks and hand-hewn beams provided the basic structure or skeleton of the house. Due to the hamlet's isolation, a cultural lag existed there, with the Trapps people continuing to build log and plank houses through the 1800s.
Thin, rocky soil prevented the establishment of large farms in the Trapps. Families grew a few acres of corn, buckwheat, rye, oats, or potatoes; they kept a horse, cow or two, a handful of chickens, perhaps a few pigs. They supplemented their subsistence farm crops by selling butter, fruit, and eggs. Trapps men also shaved barrel hoops; peeled hemlock and oak bark for nearby leather tanneries; carved millstones from conglomerate rock; and burned charcoal. The Van Leuvens were a Trapps family widely known for burning Shawangunk charcoal.