THE CATSKILLS GEOLOGISTS BY ROBERT AND JOHANNA TITUS - The Willows I A Glacial Lake

CATSKILL - We had never even heard of the Willows until recently. It’s a very old (Ca 1788) and very large Dutch, Georgian style farmhouse, located on 65 acres of land. See our first picture. That property rises above the Hudson, along Rte. 385 just a bit south of Athens. It was built by the Brandows, a family of Palatine Germans who came to America in about 1710.  It’s now a preserve, managed by the Greene Land Trust and open to the public. We spoke there recently and immediately started looking into its geological past. We were surprised at just how much there was. The first thing that we spotted was that the old farm lies upon the sediments of Glacial Lake Albany. We wrote about the lake just last week. We always carry a barbeque skewer in our car in order to spot the old lake sediments. If we can easily shove that skewer into the soil, then we know that there are few if any rocks in the ground. That means it’s not gravelly soil but that it’s very likely all lake silt. It did just that so we were sure. That made us wonder if this was not a coincidence. Did the Brandow family settle here by accident or was it intentional? We checked out the glacial geology map from the New York State Museum and sure enough: the Willows sits upon an isolated mass of lake sediments. That’s the brown triangle right at the center of the map.

So, our next question was why did the Brandow’s settle upon ancient lake sediments? They weren’t geologists; they didn’t know about Lake Albany. Why did their farm conform so well with a modern ice age map? We, of course, had some research to do. We got out our copy of the Greene County soil survey and went to work. It turns out that the Brandow farm lies upon something called the Hudson and Vergennes soil. That corresponds closely with that same brown triangle. The farm, the soil and the geology match almost perfectly. We went on to read about this soil. The survey told us that it was “well suited to cultivated crops.” We had just done a lot of explaining; we had learned so much about the Brandow farm. No, they knew nothing of Lake Albany, but they were good judges of good soils. We knew there was a lot more to learn here and so off we set out to explore the Willows trail system. We were off to a good start. Let’s do some of that next week.

Contact the authors at randjtitus@prodigy.net. Join their facebook page “The Catskills Geologists.” Read their blogs at “thecatskillgeologist.com.”