Reflections

This collection of interviews with local residents offers a glimpse of life from pre-World War II through the 1980s in a small Hudson River Valley hamlet, located between Rhinebeck and Hyde Park, New York. The narrators recall what is was like to work on the Great Estates, play all summer in and on the river, get through the Depression, encounter Roosevelts, and live in a once bustling village in simpler times. Each of the narrators interviewed has passed away; but in the stories they left us, each in their own voice, we see how this community, like so many others, is truly a family. From those heartfelt memories, we learn that just as families thrive and struggle together, so did the hamlet of Staatsburg.