Doodletown, New York: The Hamlet the Park Swallowed

4 min read

State: New York
County: Rockland County
Coordinates: 41.300° N, 74.003° W
Founded: 1762
Abandoned: 1965

Doodletown, New York, was a hillside hamlet of loggers, miners and a few dozen families, and it was erased on purpose. Doodletown sits in the Town of Stony Point, in Rockland County, and is now part of Bear Mountain State Park. The Palisades Interstate Park Commission bought up the land parcel by parcel, and by 1965 the community had ceased to exist. Its stone foundations, broken roads and family graveyards remain in the woods.

01A Hamlet Settled in 1762

Doodletown began in April 1762, when Ithiel June bought 72 acres in the hills above the Hudson. The area was settled at least partly by descendants of French Huguenots, whose family name was anglicized to "June." The June name runs through the hamlet's history. Two of its cemeteries are linked to the family, and families with that name are still tied to the place.

The Revolutionary War left a mark here. A 1935 New York State Education Department marker calls Doodletown a "pioneer hamlet" through which the British army marched in 1777 on its way to attack Fort Clinton. A second state marker, on Buckberg Mountain Road, describes an important military route "over the Dunderberg to Doodletown" during 1776–1783.

02Loggers, Miners and an Edison Experiment

Doodletown was never large. Loggers and miners settled the hills, and the hamlet grew a church, a school, several small businesses, two cemeteries and about 70 houses. The Rockland Times gives a peak of about 300 residents in 1945. Other accounts place the high point earlier in the 20th century, so the exact date of the population peak is uncertain.

Iron brought one famous visitor. Thomas Edison bought a defunct iron mine in Doodletown in the 1890s to test a method of refining ore, beginning in 1890 to acquire nearly 200 acres on the north slope of Dunderberg Mountain. The mine's remains lie southeast of Doodletown Reservoir, near the hamlet rather than in its center.

03What Happened to Doodletown?

The park commission, not a mine closure or a disaster, ended the hamlet. Accounts disagree about when the Palisades Interstate Park Commission began buying land. One student history says 1910, and Wikipedia's Bear Mountain article says the 1920s. One account adds that some owners sold during the Depression. By the 1950s most residents had left, many for Stony Point or southern Orange County.

The last holdouts held on longest. Historian Binnewies writes in Palisades: 100,000 Acres in 100 Years that park development plans in the 1960s convinced them to sell, and that the hamlet "ceased to exist in 1965." The remaining owners lost their land to eminent domain by 1965, and the last family left that April. Demolition ran through the late 1960s. Most buildings were torn down or moved, and the debris was buried.

04Can You Visit Abandoned Doodletown Today?

Yes, on foot. The land is public park, and hikers have long walked the old roads. The hamlet's story is the subject of Elizabeth "Perk" Stalter's Doodletown: Hiking Through History in a Vanished Hamlet on the Hudson, published by the PIPC Press in 1996. Stalter was a former resident.

The stone schoolhouse survived the demolitions and was kept as a shelter for hikers. The park commission tore it down in 1980 after vandalism. Doodletown and nearby Iona Island were designated a New York State Important Bird Area in 1997. Visitors who go looking for an old Doodletown ghost town should expect woods, not buildings.

05What Remains of Doodletown Today

What is left in this corner of Doodletown Rockland County is mostly stone and memory. Visitors can still find foundations, stairs and stoops that lead nowhere, and crumbling roads. A dam on Timp Brook, built in the early 1970s, created a pond where the hamlet's streams once ran.

The cemeteries are still in use. Former residents and their descendants, including the Junes, retain life rights to the old burial grounds. Atlas Obscura describes Arthur June, who died on March 31 at age 72, being buried there. Reunions are held on Columbus Day, and the first official one drew roughly 200 people. Many park employees carry the surnames of former residents, since the families who lost their homes often found work with the park that replaced them.

Rockland County, New York · Primary industry: logging and iron mining

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Sources (15)

Note on sources: Sources differ on the date of the first settlement (April 1762 versus the "1760s") and on who was the last to leave in 1965 (an unnamed family versus a June).

Binnewies, Palisades: 100,000 Acres in 100 Years (Fordham University Press / PIPC, 2001), via Fordham Digital Collections: library.fordham.edu
Stalter, Doodletown: Hiking Through History in a Vanished Hamlet on the Hudson (Internet Archive record): archive.org
Stalter book listing (Amazon): amazon.com
Historical Marker Database, Doodletown marker (1935): hmdb.org
Wikipedia, "Doodletown, New York": en.wikipedia.org
Wikipedia, List of New York State Historic Markers in Rockland County: en.wikipedia.org
Rockland Times, "Explore Doodletown: Rockland County's Ghost Town" (2013): rocklandtimes.com
Shane Cashman, Atlas Obscura: atlasobscura.com
Nyack News & Views, 2012: nyacknewsandviews.com
MidAtlantic Daytrips: midatlanticdaytrips.com
"Doodletown – Ghost town of the Hudson Valley" (student blog essay, 2008): doodle-town.blogspot.com
ghosttowns.com, Doodletown: ghosttowns.com
Wikipedia, "Dunderberg Mountain": en.wikipedia.org
Wikipedia, "Bear Mountain State Park": en.wikipedia.org
LDEO/Columbia hiking journal, 2016: ldeo.columbia.edu

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