May Local History Book Club

Washington County Historical Society’s Local History Book Club will meet from 12:30 to 1:30 on Wednesday, May 13, at the Sanford’s Ridge United Methodist Church,1919 Sanford’s Ridge Road, Kingsbury, NY.  Membership in the historical society is not required.

The topic is George S. Brown, builder of stone walls.

George was born a free Black in Newport, RI in 1801. After years of being a traveling musician and drunkard, he was converted, first to the Baptist faith and then to the Methodist religion. In 1825 he built the Beach schoolhouse on Vaughn Road in Kingsbury. While living on the Gould Sanford farm in Kingsbury, he began to preach at the nearby Methodist Church. He supported himself by building stone walls using the dry-stacking method. Some of these walls remain standing today.

He sailed to Liberia as a missionary in 1836, returning in 1844.  He continued preaching and building walls in this area. He died after falling on ice in 1886 and his gravestone is in the Sanford lot, Quaker Cemetery, on Ridge Road, Queensbury.

Articles on Rev. Brown are available online at  https://vermonthistory.org/journal/89/V8902SermonInStone.pdf and https://www.chapmanmuseum.org/made-to-last-stone-walls-and-a-man-with-a-mission/. The meeting will be held in one of the churches where Rev. Brown preached, having been built in 1832 and subsequently enlarged.

                  

Future sessions of the club will feature topics related to the larger Adirondack area as well as works by local authors.  Upcoming discussions include: Le Loup’s Bloody Trail from Salem to Argyle (1859), flax and linen in Washington County, and Floyd Bennett’s flight over the North Pole.  For additional information, email Connie Harris Farrington at  conniehfarrington@outlook.com.