The Great Lithic Catskill Reveal
Open letter to all Historians, Pre-historians, Geologists, and all lovers of the great mysteries of the past
“We ascended the hill through a rock cut and walked over the backbone of the ridge. Ten steps furnished evidence enough that here beneath our feet was the most remarkable archeological monument in the state of New York. It was literally a mountain of arrowheads!” -Arthur Coswell Parker from The Great Algonquin Flint Mines (Coxsackie, NY) 1925 Page 109
Good tidings!
I hope this note finds you well in these curious times. I’ve posed a challenge to myself - and in turn, I am need of your help to either prove or disprove a claim I am making.
The claim: The western part of the town of Catskill, and down into Ulster County, contains “The Worlds Largest Ancient Bluestone Quarried Reservoir System.”
As some of you know, I wrote a book entitled: ”Talking Walls: Casting Out the Post - Contact Stone Wall Building Myth in the North East.”
Since the book was released in 2015, I am proud to say, no one has successfully refuted my research and the conclusions that my book comes to:
Many of the stone walls and stone structures (stone cairns, vaults, chambers, dams, wells, etc) we see all around us today are indeed of indigenous origins.
Today I write you asking for help - not with the more contested “who built the stone wall” debate - but a larger issue: who built the, mindboggling, large scale, ancient reservoir system that runs the 30 plus miles from lovely Leeds in Catskill, down through Harvey Fite’s Opus 40, and beyond?
I propose that this lithic earth sculpting project is as large – if not larger - than the famed Hohokam canal system that Jack Swilling discovered etched into the dry landscape when he first arrived in Snake Town, later renamed Phoenix, Arizona in 1867.
Some Historic Quarrying Background Basics
The quarrying industry for our area was very brief.
According to Michael Kuddish's book "Catskill Forest: A History," the quarrying industry flourished after the trains were built, and, then, it declined rapidly after the invention of Portland Cement in the early 1900's.
Kuddish notes that “because the quarries were often small, most were well under an acre, they occupied a small percentage of the area of the Catskills.” In general 3- 10 men were employed 6-8 months a year for the purpose of whacking away at stones that they sent down to New York City for sidewalks and other things. They were not making the giant reservoirs that run from at least Leeds, NY, down through Kiskatom, Quarryville and Opus 40. Utmost respect to those folks before us who created this hydraulic marvel!
When I brought up my project to a local geologist, recently, he asked if I was aware of the New York State Museum’s 1901 Bulletin #61 “Quarries of Bluestone and Other Sandstone in the Upper Devonian of New York State,” by H.T. Dickens.
I was pleased to say that this bulletin helped to support my research because it noted that near the still operating quarries, there were “a number of abandoned openings that had not been worked for several years.” There are no more details, but the open-ended nature of this statement leads one to wonder how many abandoned openings did Dickens observe, and how many years had it been since they had been worked on.
Also, the map included in this bulletin denotes in my area of study - sites of Quarries “no longer in operation”.
How do we know these reservoirs have been made by human hands?
• The shapes. Many right angles can be noted in the aerial photos. These are not naturally occurring shapes from some type of erosion process. A truism goes something like “There are no right angles in nature ---with the exception of crystals.”
• The amount of stone removed, while quarrying out the reservoirs, is often still present on the east side of the reservoirs. Large organized roadways, ramps, raised platforms, etc, are clearly still intact.
• The stone-built surfaces and structures are made with roughly quarried stone, with no metal tool marks present.
*Though one does find near these sites clear evidence from the brief historic quarrying industry… this evidence is only in very small concentrated areas.
A quick summary of the issues and problems surrounding the Euro-centric Stone Wall building storyline
People have been living under a false assumption that the unfathomable amount of built stone work in the North East was completely constructed post contact by the European new comers in less than 200 years. A rough tally of stone walls using government agricultural data from the 1870’s came up with something like 252,000 miles of walls!
This was supposedly after they used all of the trees for the much easier rail fences - 3 or 4 generations in - and prior to the mass farming exodus that began after the market panic of 1819. This exodus continued in 1825 after the completion of the Erie Canal, and soon after-the further opening up of the west after the train system was created. By the panic of 1837- New York wheat prices plummeted 70%. [i]
In the early 1700’s when the Plymouth and Virginia Colonies had something like 65,000 people each, we are told by Roland Van Zandt in his book “Chronicle of the Hudson” that upstate New York lagged behind with around 20,000 inhabitants. For upstate New York to have something like 95,000 miles of stone walls tallied (that’s 38 times as long as I-40 that runs across America!), with a very low population, is highly unlikely.
Also, we can’t forget the various wars and conflicts fought in the early days of our country, as well as the harsh winters that froze the ground. Both made stone quarrying and stone building activities much harder to carry on.
The Hard To Come By Historical Evidence
Any researcher who’s looked into these gigantic lithic mysteries can tell you that the primary sources and firsthand historical accounts of Europeans actually describing the building of these endless stone works are very hard to come by. Just ask stone wall authorities like Robert M. Thorson who wrote “Stone by Stone: The Magnificent History in New England’s Stone Walls” or Susan Allport, author of “Sermon in Stone”.
***This is where I really need your help as historians. As you comb our local histories please alert me to any references to the construction or destruction of the old stone work.
The Argument for Indigenous Origins to the Reservoirs-
If an ice-free Upstate New York was accessible 10,000 years ago[ii], isn’t it more plausible that the Indigenous People who lived here before us - and who had something like 9,600 extra years to have worked together - created this?!
I stand by the idea that we are, in fact, talking about an amazing, communal, sacred, act of arranging and sculpting their landscape in collaboration with Mother Earth, to benefit their whole community by creating reservoirs to hold and manage water. This idea is totally in line with current theories of archaeology from across the globe. In fact, even Christopher Columbus immediately took note of the advanced water canal system that the natives had constructed in present day Haiti[iii].
And if our local indigenous population was capable of making a mountain of arrowhead and flint tools at the Paleolithic flint mine in Coxsackie - why then could they have not made this reservoir system?
This is clearly the most logical answer. I strongly encourage everyone who’s interest is piqued by this prospect, to visit any one of the sites that are included in the areas I am including in this world record event.
In conclusion….
Could this collection of massively sculpted bluestone reservoirs have been made during Greene County’s “2,000 missing years” that the late great New York State Archaeologist Emeritus Robert E. Funk referenced in his 2004 book “AN ICE AGE QUARRY-WORKSHOP The West Athens Hill Site Revisited”?
“Where might additional Paleoindian sites be found in Greene County? The available data shows that sites, and isolated finds of fluted points, occur in much the same places as subsequent Archaic peoples. In other words, they are all over the landscape. Some Paleoindian sites including quarry-workshops might be found west of the Helderberg Escarpment, where there are a number of small quarry-workshops of largely unknown cultural provenience. … It seems clear that in the absence of an effective predictive model of site locations, new Paleoindian sites may only be discovered by extensive coverage of Greene County on foot.…Almost certainly, the area of Greene County was never completely depopulated after the close of the Paleoindian era. The same goes for the rest of the Northeast. But there are 2,000 “missing years” in the extant archaeological record of Greene County” (my bold) pg.129-130
The time is NOW to announce to the world that Greene and Ulster County’s Indigenous population - from the period prior to European contact - has created arguably the worlds largest quarry and reservoir system in the world, or at least in America.
My sincerest gratitude –
“Let not even a drop of rain water go to the sea without benefiting man” -The words of Parakrama Bahu I (1153-1186 c.e) concerning the purpose and determination in the construction of the Sri Lankan Irrigation Systems.
Please excuse any errors in my research, so many of these sites need to be field checked and studied more closely. I am working to follow the threads where they lead me. We’re just scratching the surface here --- As Lennon and McCartney sang “The deeper you go – the higher you fly,” and as Fred Allen Wolf said “The real trick to life is not to be in the know, but to be in the mystery”
Thank you for taking the time to read this letter and responding accordingly. Your wisdom, knowledge and input is very important to the success of this project.
For maps and more images- please go to
https://www.b-homebuild.com/new-page-1
-Matt Bua. October 2021
[i] Some of this timeline info is from Robert Thorson’s. book , Stone By Stone, page 165
[ii] A quick google search: “The most recent glacial advance covered nearly all of New York State about 20,000 years ago. When the climate turned warmer, the glacier gradually melted back to the north, leaving even the St. Lawrence Valley free of ice by about 10,000 years ago. ”
[iii] This reference is from the book: The Early Spanish Main :Carl Sauer’s Classic Account of the Land, Nature and People Columbus Encountered in the Americas
***“This project is made possible with funds from the Decentralization Program, a regrant program of the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Governor and the New York State Legislature and administered in Greene County by the Greene County Council on the Arts dba CREATE Council for Resources to Enrich the Arts, Technology & Education. “
Collage of one of the reservoirs in this line- see the full map at the bottom of this page
