I hope my Halfway Brook friends will find the new series of posts (which start in 1600s Connecticut) of interest. There is a connection to Lumberland. Around 1800 Connecticut descendants were running out of property. New York (including Lumberland) was one of the areas they moved to.
My Leavenworth, Hickok, and Austin ancestors, originally from Connecticut, arrived in Lumberland in the years 1812–1839. In 1854 Abby and Laurilla Smith (second Hickok cousins to Mary Ann Eldred Austin) visited Mary Ann, her parents James and Hannah Hickok Eldred, and her uncle Justus Hickok.
Quotes from The Mill on Halfway Brook:
In the early 1800s, land cost two dollars an acre; sometimes less. Water power was free and sawmills were cheap to build. Credit was available and creditors would wait to be paid until the timber had been rafted to market and sold.
Men from the nearby states of New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, as well as other New York counties, purchased large parcels at the low prices, and built sawmills on various streams, including Halfway Brook.—p. 4.
North of The River [Barryville] settlement, some 16 miles, was Bethel [originally in Lumberland], where some of its first settlers set up homesteads in 1798.
In 1807, around 30 to 40 families, many from Orange County, New York, or Connecticut, arrived in Bethel by way of the Sackett Road or the Newburgh and Cochecton Turnpike.—p. 10.
All of the area was originally in Mamakating Precinct, Ulster County. There were large clusters of Connecticut Settlements in Damascus, Cushetonk, and Harford, PA—part of Connecticut Claim that cut through Pennsylvania to Ohio.
Louise: Thank you Judy!