JIMMY FALLON grew up here, and he called his childhood here idyllic. Then Saugerties, New York would have to be an ideal place. Friendly too, as the road sign expresses, “Saugerties welcomes you.”
And yet.
Yet something seems off. Yes, there’s a Mynderse Street that runs through town, named after the old Colonel Wilhelmus Mynderse, but Seneca Falls way upstate has also such a road. What it is, must be the lighthouse, Saugerties Lighthouse. We’re not by the ocean here, only by a river, and a tributary flows into it. Lighthouse: it suggests turbulent water.
So again, something strange is going on with the welcome sign. Not the Saugerties word, not “you”, but welcomes, singular. Where there’s fast-running water, there is or once was a mill. And if indeed they built a mill that was powered by water, then anything was possible. You could grind, saw, make paper, and eventually even generate electricity.
AND SURE enough, Barend van der Volgen was the first who recognized the location as perhaps not idyllic, but certainly as ideal. He built a sawmill there and turned trees into planks and two-by-fours. Half of early Albany was built with Barend’s wood. And downstream his lumber went to Manhattan, also for construction. So he set up quite a company by that turbulent water, and soon a community was built around it.
Barend eventually left, for along the tributary lived the Esopus Indian tribe, whose chief was named Kaelcop, Bald Head, probably for obvious reasons, and fights broke out. But not much damage was done, the sawmill continued to function, business was booming, and the demand for lumber only increased.
Moreover, a quarry was created outside town. And in a creek that was called kil in old Dutch, such as in Sluiskil, Dordtse Kil, Kil van Hurwenen, which in America still today is spelled kill (Catskill, Schuylkill, Plattekill), they built an ice company. Blocks of water that froze in winter were sold to customers in Boston, New York, Philadelphia in spring and summer. They named the creek after the sawmill, now Sawyerskill, but originally Saugerskill, zager’s kreek.
WAIT a second. Sauger is originally Zager? In that case…
Correct. The town of Saugerties is named after all those lovely people who earned their living with hard work and helped build two large cities. They were called zagertjes, the Dutch diminutive of sawyers. And that’s how the name of Saugerties actually ought to be pronounced.
Zagertjes, plural. They welcome you.
* Saugerties Lighthouse, the river lighthouse where Esopus Creek flows into the Hudson and where the water can be tricky.
