The Faux Silent Newsreel of Gilboa

GILBOA — Prior to the 1920’s, the village of Gilboa was considered the largest town in Schoharie County, located at the halfway point between Albany and Cooperstown. It was a thriving community of close to 70 buildings that comprised schools, churches, farmsteads, shops, and businesses like blacksmiths, cotton mills, and tanneries. To the dismay of the locals however, eminent domain was declared over this land on October 1st of 1925, that they may erect a dam at the Schoharie Creek and repurpose the site of their former homes and jobs as a reservoir for clean drinking water that would serve the city of New York some 151 miles away. So it was that the people of Gilboa were forced from the settlement they had built and cultivated for generations and forced to reestablish the Gilboa that we know today, just a few miles north of their original position. After the locals were evicted, the village was burned down in a controlled fire that would remove all the standing structures and make room for the reservoir that swept old Gilboa from the Earth as its ruins disappeared beneath the waves for good, its memory poised to endure mostly as speculation if it were not for two very ambitious cameramen.

One of those two cameramen was Alan Brick. Brick would later receive national recognition by capturing footage (the only footage we have) of the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7th, 1941 and was an employee and cameraman of William Fox, owner of the Fox Film Company. As a cinematographer, it was Alan's job to scout for excellent footage material, which is exactly what brought him to the Gilboa area in 1923 while gathering moving images of the locale. He would again return to Gilboa in 1925 to shoot the construction of the dam for the new Schoharie reservoir alongside his daredevil colleague Jack Painter, whose signature camera angles and use of depth of field were taken from vantages so intense, one might use a modern  camera drone to reenact them today.  Together, they collected footage that included the building of the dam, the excavation of fossilized plants already famously known to this region, as well as the original village of Gilboa to be used in silent newsreels that would air before a film or cartoon was shown at the local cinema. If you were lucky, a piano player would be present and use appropriate music to help narrate the images you saw on the big screen.

Alas, the legacy of this old village would once again succumb to misfortune when a major fire broke out at the 20th century Fox films storage facility in Little Ferry, NJ where the Gilboa reels along with countless others were said to be stored. The flames took everything and sadly it seemed this part of history had been lost forever. Until a chance donation from 20th Century Fox to the University of South Carolina’s Moving Image Research collection in 1980 revealed nitrocellulose negatives of the lost Gilboa reels among the articles that were gifted to the institute. Through all odds,a part of Alan and Jack’s footage had survived after all!                               The Production Manager at the Moving Image Research Collection Mr. Singleton, reached out to the Gilboa Historical Society in an attempt to get these reels home to their rightful place. 

“Returning lost history to people has been my purpose.” Mr Singelton begins. “The Gilboa history is a perfect example of what motivated me to spend three decades preserving the precious nitrocellulose negatives' '. 

As of 2017, the Gilboa Museum maintains licensure over the found footage with tentative plans to digitally touch the reels up and prepare them for official screenings on site by the end of this month! I reached out to the Gilboa Historical Society’s Lee Hudson for more information on the footage’s current status. 

“We have six different clips that amount to roughly twenty minutes of footage and from that material I have decided that we can’t know if there ever really was a silent newsreel that came from these negatives.” The University of South Carolina called these negatives “outtakes”, so we took that literally and thought it was material that some editor chose not to use in the proposed newsreel, when it was in fact just unpublished material.” 

Perhaps these negatives are all there ever was to Alan and Jacks recorded material at Gilboa. 

To begin revitalization of the reels they decided to bring on local audio engineer Brett Barry.

Brett teaches a Podcast and Audio Production class for the Digital Media & Journalism Department at SUNY New Paltz, is the host and producer for the Kaatcast podcast from Silver Hollow Audio, and does voice work with Access Talent in New York City for television, radio commercials, audiobooks, promos, and narrations. Some of Brett’s recent work however has landed him at the Zadock Pratt Museum as well as the Gilboa Museum assisting on upcoming projects. One of which was the Gilboa newsreel. Brett was reached for a quote on the project stating  “We whittled down that outtake footage into something that we thought would approximate the right amount of time it needed to be since it was shown before a movie and you don't want it taking up too much time, organized the footage into categories that were compiled in the edit so it would make sense as a story, created vintage looking title cards to explain the footage which would have been the practice then, and then introduced all kinds of scratches and jitter on the title cards to give them a more authentic feel.” “Afterwards we paired them with music, we hired  a local pianist and composer Tony Coretto, out of Woodstock since he had a passionate talent for that 1920’s rag type music.” “Finally we produced a short companion documentary which is meant to be an introduction to understanding this whole process which will be available at a kiosk in the museum.”

By the time of the newsreel’s exhibition this month, the material will have completed a 99 year journey to finally come home for its debut in Gilboa. The reel itself will be able to give us a glimpse into a past we can no longer witness seeing as unfortunately  there is no one left to contact at this point who would have known the old village as it was back then. However, there are still those in Schoharie County whose relatives worked and lived on those lands before they disappeared for good. One of those individuals is a guide at the Gilboa Museum by the name of Janette Reynolds.

I reached out to Janette to chat a bit about her ancestors.

“My great grandfather Henry Brown, was the old undertaker for the original village of Gilboa, he was the first person to practice embalming there and he had a home in the village where he would stay mostly during the winters with my great grandmother Orpha Brown”. “I also had a great grand uncle who resided there by the name of Ezra Brown with my great grand aunt Haddie”. When asked her perspective on the reel’s near century long exhibition debut at the museum Janette had this to say. “To people who have never seen it before it is great!” “I show it over and over and over at the museum and I am still in awe of it every time I watch.”

The Gilboa Historical Society will be holding an event on July 27th, 2024 at the Gilboa Museum  & Juried History Center at 122 Stryker Road in Gilboa NY, 12076 featuring (Insert additional information here)