Editorial Noble Barns The Swart-Wilcox House, the oldest in Oneonta, is looking for a 19th-century English barn to replace the original one destroyed by fire in 1968. Upstate New York is rural. Its towns, villages, and cities are spread out and difficult to reach. There are fields and forests and lakes. For most of its over-200-year history agriculture has been, and still might be, the main industry. Upstate New York is beautiful, bucolic, serene, clear, compelling. Rolling hills encircle cool…
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Editorial In Honor of Rural Women This Saturday, October 15, the world will recognize, as it does every year, the importance of the contributions of rural women and girls, including indigenous women, who live and work in remote and rural, often poverty-stricken, communities of the world. These strong women and girls play a key role in enhancing agricultural development, managing natural resources, adopting climate-resilient agricultural approaches, and planning against malnutrition and food insecurity. The International Day of Rural Women was…
Editorial Goodbye Columbus? On October 8, 2021, President Joe Biden proclaimed October 11 as Indigenous Peoples’ Day. At the same time, he acknowledged Columbus Day as a federal holiday that would continue to recognize the contributions of Italian-Americans. This exercise was, in part, designed to placate a growing constituency in a widening “cancel culture” that opposes a celebration for a man who was nothing short of beastly to the indigenous populations that he and his Spanish patrons conquered and enslaved.…
Editorial The Great Turkey Hunt September is pretty much behind us, with its very warm and, at other times, quite chilly days and nights, and some torrential rains. It’s been like most of the Septembers around here, only the temperature fluctuations this year have been more drastic, and the thunderstorms have been more ferocious, felling trees and scattering branches and scaring children and dogs. And now, as we run smack into the pumpkins and foliage and the eventual Jack Frost…
Editorial Re-Charge! A little over a year ago The Freeman’s Journal put forth an editorial on the subject of electric vehicle chargers, which were at the time pretty scarce within the Village and, in fact, even outside the Village. The reason we explored the local availability of these chargers was, of course, that our tiny historic Village has been, and is, the destination of myriad urban baseball, sports, scenic and music explorers whose mode of transportation to Cooperstown is increasingly…
Editorial A-maize-ing Grace Last weekend, along with everyone who happened to venture out-of-doors the evenings of Friday and Saturday, we witnessed the September full moon — one of the most spectacular events on the lunar calendar. Called the Harvest Moon, as it appears the closest to the autumnal equinox, which falls on September 22, it is the moon that, before electricity, provided farmers with three days of extended daylight hours by which to harvest their crops. According to Native American…
Editorial Looks Like We Made It Labor Day. The end of an exceptional summer in Cooperstown. Dare we say exceptional? Yes we can, despite the ominous glooms of COVID and recent blooms of algae. Our Main Street businesses are still here. They may not have had their best summer, and they may still be sadly short-handed, but they are proudly displaying their wares and energetically inviting shoppers into their establishments. The Hall of Fame reopened its doors for Induction Weekend,…
Editorial Looking an Aqua Pandemic in the Eye Recently, we at The Freeman’s Journal have become aware that some of our readers, and others who may not be our readers, still have questions about the toxic algae blooms that of late have been creeping up on us from the depths and edges of our beloved Otsego Lake. So here goes an effort to get it right. According to NOAA, whose satellites, along with those of the EPA, NASA and the…
Editorial What Lies Beneath When one looks about and takes in the bustling commercial activity of Otsego County during the busy tourist season and anticipates the impending return of the thousands of college students who keep things humming through the “off-season,” one feels confident that Otsego County has a healthy, perhaps even vibrant, economy. And while that may be true, beneath the shiny veneer of commercial success lies a dark reality. Otsego County, like many of its neighbors, has a…
Editorial Saving Fido and Creating Memories A few months ago the New York State House and Senate voted to approve the shutdown of the puppy-mill-to-New York pipeline, ending the retail sale of dogs, cats and rabbits in pet stores across the state. The bills await the governor’s signature. They have taken an inordinately long time to reach Hochul, having been first introduced in March, 2019. Among the relentless fighters for this shutdown is our own Stacie Haynes, Executive Director of…
