By Suzanne M. Walsh
GILBOA — Six minutes of found, most likely never seen before, pre-talkie film outtakes actually shot in Gilboa 100 years ago has been reassembled, reformatted and premiered as the highlight of the presentation event on Saturday at the Gilboa Museum and Nicholas J. Juried History Center.
This original, immersive history experience about the flooding of Gilboa presented those present with a little of the uniqueness of what it must’ve been like to be an on-the-ground eyewitness to history in the making of our region.
“NYC Needs More Water” is the title of Saturday’s program and Gilboa Museum’s newest exhibit this season depicting how and why the prosperous 19th-century town of Gilboa was signaled out for destruction. If you weren’t able to make it on Saturday, please try to get there sometime this season—it’ll be well worth it.
The history of the town of Gilboa has been known for the irony with which New York City’s ever-growing thirst for water was the cause of the town’s drowning, but over the weekend the museum’s presentation fleshed out more of the backstory with the re-creation of newly resurrected newsreel footage recorded by Fox Film Company’s top-notch cameramen in both 1923 and 1925. At the time, these silent newsreel outtakes would have been the means alerting Americans across the nation to the story of upturned lives, lost ancestral homes and the colossal engineering achievement in progress with a dam being built in tiny, rural upstate New York. The total effect of it all is captivating.
The original film and talk presentation is the brainchild of author Lee Hudson, Board Member of the Gilboa Historical Society and co-founder and editor of Catskill Tri-County Historical Views. Hudson introduced Saturday’s event and later provided the interesting body of the subject of Gilboa’s demise. Retired from previous careers in higher education and public service, Hudson has more recently been focusing on Gilboa’s vast and multi-faceted 385 million-year-old history. Saturday’s event was designed around the created newsreel presentation with narration contributed by herself and three other local professional speakers.
Journalist and author Diane Galusha--founding president of the Historical Society of the Town of Middletown, and retiree of 21 years working with the Catskill Watershed Corp.—provided the foundation story of the how and why New York City’s water demands were met through invoking the law of Eminent Domain.
Brett Barry, owner and producer of Silver Hollow Audio, including the award-winning “Kaatscast: the Catskills Podcasts”, was the digital magician who reassembled the original film outtakes of Gilboa. Barry spoke of the peculiarities of transitioning century-old film negatives into the silent newsreel format presented on Saturday. Among many other things, Barry is also a lecturer in SUNY New Paltz Department of Digital Media and Journalism.
Original music scored for the six-minute newsreel was composed by Harvard-trained Tony Coretto, whose talk touched interestingly on finding the right balance in reproducing music during the period when silent movies were always accompanied with a live piano player seeing the films for the very first time.
Kudos to the museum staff, all the hard-working volunteers and regional support that made Saturday’s event a very memorable one, including University of South Carolina Moving Image Research Collection, Brimstone Bakery, and Nicholas J. Juried.
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