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A sneak peek at one of the panels planned for the Harlem Valley Rail Trail’s new outdoor classroom, which features geological information about the region. The project is expected to be installed in time for Millerton’s 175th anniversary next summer.
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MILLERTON — More than eight months before construction is set to begin, several colorful, museum-quality panels that will be installed along the Harlem Valley Rail Trail as part of its new 27-panel outdoor classroom were previewed this week.
The immersive learning space, expected to be completed this summer, will feature vibrant, educational displays exploring water ecology, natural and social history, birds, insects and other elements of the local landscape. Designed to engage visitors of all ages, the outdoor classroom aims to transform a stretch of trail near Millerton into an inviting place for discovery and reflection.
The project has been more than a decade in the making. The original concept came from Dick Hermans, a member of the HVRTA Board of Directors, who envisioned the bridge over Webatuck Creek near Millerton as a center for education and gathering. Hermans also serves on the board for the Lakeville Journal and Millerton News.
“I hope people who’ve never been on the trail before stop and think, ‘Oh, that’s pretty cool — I didn’t know that,’” said Hermans. “Those mountains you see off in the distance are the Taconics, and they actually stretch all the way into Vermont. Most people don’t realize it’s one of the oldest mountain ranges in the country — once more than 10,000 feet tall.”
According to one of the panels on geology, “The Taconic Mountains are the result of a very slow yet powerful collision between what is now North America and a series of volcanic islands about 460 million years ago.”
Hermans said that history is what gives the area its rich soil and distinctive terrain. Even after all these years, he said, he has learned a lot working on the project, especially about the region’s geology.
The 27 panels will make up five different educational stations that will be set slightly off the trail for safety but easily accessible to anyone who wants to stop and learn.
With designs now complete, the HVRTA will conduct a final round of edits before having the signs manufactured. Through a combination of grants and community fundraising, the organization partnered with Dutchess County Parks and the New York State Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation to ensure signage meets all state standards. One requirement calls for the text to be written at roughly an eighth-grade reading level to keep the material accessible to visitors.
“It’s called a classroom, but it’s not a course,” said Hermans. “It’s something to intrigue people – to make them stop and think, ‘I wonder what that tree is,’ or ‘what happens underground?’ We’re very excited about it.”
The panels will mark the latest milestone in a project nearly four decades in the making. The long-running effort has so far preserved 26 miles of scenic trail, with approximately 20 additional miles to go from Hillsdale to Chatham.
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Filmmaker Philip Milano of Dover Plains holds the Scotch U-matic cassette containing his original 1970s documentary about Millerton and the Harlem Valley Transportation Association. The film sat in his attic for nearly 50 years before being digitized.
Photo by Aly Morrissey
MILLERTON – While the Harlem Valley Rail Trail Association continues to pave the way for preserving the region’s historic railroad corridor, Board Chair and longtime local business owner Dick Hermans was reminded recently of how much the region has changed since its railroad days.
That reminder came in the form of a resurfaced documentary film that had been tucked away in an attic in Dover Plains for more than 40 years. The film’s subject was the Harlem Valley Transportation Association – a grassroots group that fought to retain passenger and freight rail service between New York City and Chatham, New York in the 1960s and 1970s. Hermans recalls being an early member after founder Lettie Gay Carson “handed over the organization’s checkbook” before retiring.
Opening his laptop, Hermans played the video – grainy but clear, with crisp audio. A young woman stood in the corner of a bookshop, speaking passionately into a handheld microphone about the loss of rail service and its impact on rural businesses, farms and residents.
“It brings in the whole question of rural powerlessness,” the woman said, warning that locals would soon become “highway hostages,” forced to drive gas-guzzling cars. She asked, “Do the small towns of America have a right to have their needs voiced? Have a right to say how decisions are made? We’ll fight 'til the very end to prevent these lines from being ripped up.”
With a smile, Hermans recognized the speaker instantly. “That’s my former partner, Holly Nelson, in our original Oblong store,’ he said.
Then located in the 750-square foot space most recently occupied by Demitasse, Oblong Books and Records was founded by Hermans, who also serves on the board of the Lakeville Journal and Millerton News, and Nelson in 1975. The film serves as a time capsule of the region’s transportation struggles and provides a rare glimpse into Millerton in the 1970s.
B-roll footage shows the former Saperstein’s building – now Westerlind – and its famed railroad mural, along with shots of the old Sharon and Millerton stations.
The late Frank Perotti, who served as the supervisor of North East for more than a decade, also appears, speaking about how the loss of freight service affected his dairy farm. Standing in front of the barn of Lone Pine Farm, Perotti said, “We’ve depended on the railroad for our freight coming in here. We see the loss in the economy since we’ve lost the service to the railroad.”
The filmmaker behind the 28-minute documentary is Philip Milano, a longtime Dover Plains resident who made the project while studying at New York University.
“It took me about a month to make,” Milano told The News. “I played all the music myself, lined up the interviews and edited it.” His dedication even left him with battle scars. He strapped his camera to a hand car, “the kind Buster Keaton used,” he noted, and pumped it by hand from Copake to Sharon to capture a moving shot. “By the time I got back, I had blisters all over my hands.” He said with a grin, “But I got the shot.”
Milano was recently contacted by a former Copake Falls resident who wanted to view the film for research. Skeptical that the old Scotch U-matic cassette – a bulky, professional-grade videotape used in the 1970s – would still play, Milano agreed to ship the only existing copy of his movie out west. To his surprise, it was successfully digitized in Las Vegas.
He remembers making the documentary “vividly.” Though it began as a school project, it went on to air on cable television, which was only available in Manhattan at the time. Milano watched the premiere from his aunt’s city apartment, surrounded by friends and bottles of wine. “This must be what the Beatles felt like the first time they heard one of their songs on the radio,” he remembers thinking.
The film was also screened at The Moviehouse in Millerton for a one-night showing that drew many of its local participants.
Though Milano didn’t pursue filmmaking after NYU, he stayed rooted in the area, opening and running Milano’s Restaurant in Pine Plains for 14 years. The establishment, now Back Bar Beer Garden, still operates today.
Nearly 50 years later, Milano says he is content with how history unfolded. “If the trains had stayed, this whole area would look completely different,” he said. “In a way, I’m glad it didn’t happen because I still like bouncing along these scenic back roads. It’s one of the prettiest parts of New York.”
While Hermans and others once fought to keep the railroad from being torn up, it’s not far-fetched to think that its demise – and the halt of further development – may have helped preserve the rural character and charm of the Harlem Valley, best seen today from the rail trail that follows the old line.
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Millbrook Listens is listening. Project Leader Christopher Wilson paused for a photo at The Millbrook Library on Monday, Oct. 27. The year-long project to gather residents’ ideas for the village’s future is now underway.
Photo by Leila Hawken
MILLBROOK — A year-long effort is underway to help Millbrook residents define their vision for the community’s future and identify priorities that would enhance life in the village for generations to come.
The Millbrook Listens project, led by Christopher Wilson and a 20-member volunteer committee, aims to collect as many ideas as possible. Volunteers in colorful T-shirts have been attending community events, eager to hear residents’ thoughts.
“We have had over 200 idea submissions since Community Day that cover everything from walkability and town park improvements to community dances and masquerades to road safety concerns on Franklin Avenue to the need for more afterschool teen programming,” Wilson said in response to interview questions on Thursday, Oct. 23.
Residents can share their ideas using the Project/Idea Submission Form on the Millbrook Library website (www.millbrooklibrary.org) under “Resources.” The form also lets participants vote for their top three priorities.
Praising the commitment and talent of his volunteer team, Wilson said the project aims “to enhance, not to change” the village experience.
“I believe that the simplicity of just listening to what people care about will be the wellspring toward success,” Wilson said. “We are here to celebrate the traditions and heritage that continue to inspire people every day to choose Millbrook.”
Wilson said the project’s reach extends beyond the village limits, encouraging all residents—both in and around Millbrook—to share their ideas.
Broad in scope, the initiative invites open-ended input on everything from future development and infrastructure to the conservation of the natural environment, recognizing that all aspects of community life are interconnected.
“My education is in Parks and Public Management. Understanding and fostering the relationship between human and natural worlds is critical. If we continue to talk about them separately, we will continue to undermine the effectiveness of calls to action, Wilson said.
“Our environment includes the forest, the streams, the wildlife, as well as the businesses, houses, roadways, and people. So many speak about nature as something apart and different; it does not have to be one or the other, it is the harmony between accessibility and stewardship that needs to be achieved,” Wilson explained.
Drawing on his background in grants administration, Wilson said the project’s outcomes will help shape future goals for both the village and the town.
“We are looking to come out of this planning process with three priority projects that the community has voiced and voted on in order to show that we are unified in our direction,” Wilson said, a step toward seeking new funding sources and collaboration with potential funders.
Reflecting on his work as an outdoor educator, writer, and strategic planner, Wilson expressed a deep appreciation for the people, landscapes, and communities that have influenced his life.
“I have dedicated my life to articulating and securing funding for opportunities that inspire people and their communities,” Wilson noted. He serves as one of six select Fellows of the Funding Futures Program in conjunction with the Partners for Climate Action organization.
Two Millbrook Listens project information sessions are planned for November at the Millbrook Library. The first will be held on Monday, Nov. 17, from 1-2 p.m. and the second on Wednesday, Nov. 19, from 6:30-7:30 p.m.
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Industrial society is over
Nov 05, 2025
Ever since the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution about 200 years ago, the world has been shaped with the maxim to end of piece work, terminating most cottage (meaning single person) output, and transitioning to a cohesive workplace where workers come together, each as part of the process, manufacturing goods, services, and product. Factories became the norm, mines were reorganized to train miners each to a singular task, leather workers tasked with portions of the whole making shoes as component parts, wheelwrights tasked for single spokes instead of the whole wheel, engine builders becoming specialists with pistons, cranks, molding individually, never together.
The whole point of the industrial society is that you mastered a single task and were a repetitive integral part of that physical process, making corporate end product dependent on assembly of product designed and compartmentalized to allow corporate structure to oversee the whole. We became an industrial society — workers and management, services and delivery, sales and marketing.
Some say we are now in a new industrial revolution. Revolution? For sure, but industrial? When every component portion of industry can now be made by machine or robotics, the age of humans fitting into the old Industrial Revolution pattern is over, redundant. We’ve begun a move to the knowledge revolution, wherein only knowledge and individual learning and intelligence determine societal structure.
Look, a robot can easily replace a car assembly worker. $35,000 and you’re done; a new “worker” capable of 24/7 operation, no pension, no benefits. For every 50 robots you need a technician, a knowledgeable technician, a human currently (until robots simply unplug, allow a replacement automatically in place, and take themselves off to a scrapyard). Same goes for all miners, truck drivers along freeways, airlines wanting AI and only one pilot in the cockpit, Madison Ave. using machine learning to design marketing campaigns, or Amazon firing warehouse workers for robots.
Some current trades, often thought of as menial labor, will have to reap greater respect. The knowledge of a plumber, fixing existing pipes and sanitation, are very specifically specialist-empowered — plumbers are a knowledge based industry. As are electricians, doctors, nurses, astronauts, teachers, and a host of other “trained” humans with complicated variables in their learning and output. Training is gaining knowledge, experience is improving that specialist knowledge – knowledgeable people are indispensable in the new society we are forging.
But the truth is, the shift from industrial to knowledge-based societal structures will be painful. The least educated will be — as they were in the mid-1800s — the worst hit. Deemed marginal consumers, marginal capitalist participants, some in power will either seek to take advantage by claiming to be “on their side” for political control or politicians in power will degrade social and medical services to allow the poorest, least educated, to perish. Make no mistake, there are already restructuring forces at workin America — either by design or by inevitable outcome of the switch from industry to knowledge. Gone already are the lifetime jobs’ plans and structures, job mobility is already the norm. Education (gaining knowledge and therefore a place in the new societal structure) has become more and more expensive — increasing the societal divide. Apprentices are gaining traction — as they did in the 1800s — to ensure specialist knowledge supports a sustainable societal future — everyone needs a plumber, car mechanic, nurse, electrician.
It is a brave new world, one which may well flourish, but currently is being undertaken by subterfuge, hiding the reality from civilians, workers, families — all who want to plan for their future. Without knowing what the future may hold — unless you are an architect or purveyor of the new knowledge society — most people haven’t got a clue. And history has shown that deliberate — but secret except for a few at the top — new societal change is going to hurt everyone, everywhere. The question is: How big will the backlash be?
Peter Riva, a former resident of Amenia Union, New York, now lives in Gila, New Mexico.
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