Prior to the arrival of the New York & Oswego Midland Railroad in the 1870s, there wasn’t much to Hurleyville, save for a few scattered houses and a place name on some maps. 

In fact, all of Sullivan County was a rugged and desolate area as late as the early 1800s. William A. Thompson had founded a settlement he called Albion (present day Thompsonville), and the Jones brothers had begun work on their dream of a magnificent city they called Monticello, but there was no civilization to speak of between those sparsely inhabited communities and the Blue Hills of Liberty.

An enterprising hunter named William Hurley decided that his property was ideally situated to become a town of great importance, being located on the only road then connecting Thompsonville, Monticello and Liberty, and began calling the new community he envisioned Hurleyville.

But Hurley had miscalculated, and soon equally enterprising and more resourceful men had engineered new routes connecting the major towns in the new county. Hurleyville, meanwhile, consisted of just one house: Hurley’s. 

Historian James Eldridge Quinlan, writing in 1873, noted that in the early years of the century “deer and wolves and panthers abounded in its vicinity after they had left the surrounding settlements, and the population of Hurleyville consisted principally of muskrats, raccoons, and foxes.”

 Hurleyville grew slowly, and had changed little by 1872, when the railroad constructed a station there. Quinlan wrote that with the arrival of the rail line, Hurleyville had become “a lively hamlet, and the day is not distant when the dream of its pioneer-settler will become a pleasant reality.” 

 By 1886, the New York & Oswego Midland Rail Road had long since become the Ontario & Western Railway, and as Sullivan County stood poised on the brink of what was to become the Silver Age of its resort industry, the Hurleyville area was home to nine farmhouses that accepted summer boarders and seemed destined to become a resort center of considerable stature and notoriety.

 By 1907, the Hurleyville station had become known as Luzon Station in order to avoid confusion with the Hurley station in Ulster County, and there were 34 listings for the hamlet in the O&W “Summer Homes” publication. 

However, in keeping with the trend throughout Sullivan County, what had been strictly Gentile hotels and boardinghouses began to pass into Jewish hands around 1910. The trend was noted in a 1912 newspaper story. “The Hotel Waldorf at Hurleyville was recently sold to some Hebrews of that village,” the story began. And in 1919, another headline announced, “Hebrews Buy Smith Farm: Pay Thirty-Six Thousand.” 

That story went on to note that the new owners planned to scale back on the farming and to take in summer boarders.  

For many years, Hurleyville was defined by its farms and its hotels, some of which got their start because farmers were looking to augment their income by taking in boarders who were drawn to the “pure air, pure water and pure milk” the railroad promised would be found here. 

By 1940, there were no fewer than seventeen hotels in Hurleyville, from the Admiral and the Astor to the Welworth. 

The Columbia was arguably the best known of these, and offered their guests a considerable amount of entertainment, including a bar, a dance floor, a swimming pool, a golf course, and eventually a ski hill. 

Hurleyville thrived as long as the railroad operated, and farmers and hotelkeepers subsisted side-by-side. 

At its height, the hamlet comprised multiple photographers, its own newspaper, a school, several places of worship, two grocery stores, a pharmacy, a creamery, four butchers, and many other businesses. When the O&W finally ceased operation in the 1950s, Hurleyville, like most of the other communities in Sullivan County that had grown up around the railroad, began to decline.  

But that decline has now been reversed, and Hurleyville has earned its new sobriquet as “the liveliest little hamlet in the Mountains.”  

On Saturday, October 1, the hamlet hosts another Hurleyville History Hike, led by the County Historian. The hike, co-sponsored by the non-profit history education group, The Delaware Company and Main Street business Morgan Outdoors, will last about ninety minutes, along the paved portion of the rail trail heading toward Ferndale. 

In addition to stories about the railroad, farms, and resorts, there will be a discussion of the gangsters who frequented the area in the 1930s, and the bodies found there as a result, as well as lessons about the eco-system, including some of the plant-based remedies employed by the Lenape in the days before the Europeans arrived. 

The hike begins promptly at 11 a.m. from the interpretive sign about Farms and Resorts in the west side parking area just off Main Street. The hike is free and open to the public. 

John Conway is the Sullivan County Historian. Email him at jconway52@hotmail.com. He will lead and narrate the Hurleyville History Hike on Saturday, October 1.