A Winter 2007 hiking preview of Sleeping Beauty, of the Southern Adirondacks ...

Catherine Light, a member of HIKING MATES, send on us a message telling us she about used to live atop Harvey Mountain Road. Her
ex husband Dick Light, a great guy, filled us in on some historical information about this area ...

It turns out that the Edna St. Vincent Millay Colony borders the property to the top of Harvey Mountain. Edna St. Vincent Millay was America's
most renowned poets ... aside from her success in literature, Millay was also an outspoken feminist -- and a talented pianist. The Millay Colony
for the Arts provides residencies to visual artists, writers and composers at Steepletop, the hilltop property in Austerlitz, NY where Millay
(1892-1950) lived and wrote for 25 years. A not-for-profit organization, the Millay Colony was founded in 1973 by the poet's sister Norma
Millay Ellis, whose goal was to honor Millay's life and work and to enable other artists to be inspired by Steepletop's natural beauty. You can
learn more about Edna St. Vincent Millay Colony For the Arts here: http://www.millaycolony.org/about

Anyway ... Dick told me his family moved to the Austerlitz area around 1940; his parents began a victory garden up there during WW II.
He told me about the Austerlitz Historical Society, an educational non-profit community organization founded in 1988. Besides offering a
quarterly newsletter and year-round calendar of events and programs, it maintains a growing museum site, Old Austerlitz, where artifacts,
photos and memorabilia relating to the town are collected and preserved, along with a collection of 18th and 19th century buildings. These
buildings surround the sites original one-room schoolhouse (c.1818) and 1850s church. Austerlitz, first settled in the mid 1750s, is a rural
community of beautiful mountains, lovely valleys and small hamlets, 40 miles southeast of Albany, "a wonderful place to live and to visit"
according to the website (http://www.oldausterlitz.org/). And here's the history page from the Town of Austerlitz web site:
http://austerlitzny.com/history.htm

Who knew? If we have time, we'll make a stop and travel through time ... and explore some of Eastern Upstate New York's historical treasures.