Town of Gilboa

Town of Gilboa. Schoharie County. , Formed in 1848 from portions of the towns of Blenheim and Broome, the Town of Gilboa is the southernimost town in Schoharie County., Settlement began in 1764 by Matthew and Jacob Dise. Other families came from New England to continue the settling of this region after the American Revolution. In early times, even a village needed an inn and Gilboa's first inn was kept by Ruloff Vorhees in 1785., In the 1840s a company was formed to build the Gilboa Cotton Mill Co. It soon prospered, running as many as a hundred looms, employing eighty hands. The entire plant was destroyed in the flood of 1869 and was never rebuilt, Then on May 4, 1890, a tremendous fire destroyed virtually the entire village. Within a decade, the village was rebuilt and, as noted in The Schoharie County Directory of 1899, "the marks of the conflagration are hardly noticeable., Right up to the 1920s, the village of Gilboa had been a thriving community with three churches, two hotels, a creamery, a theater, a telephone office and its own electric company, But with the construction of the Schoharie Reservoir- one of the oldest of a chain of reservoirs that serve as the water supply for New York City - the village of Gilboa was abandoned., below: , Fossils the most ancient species of tree on the planet- known as cospermatopteris- survive and are on display a half mile from the overlook at the Gilboa Dam and 990V. These seed-bearing tree ferns grew on the muddy shore of an ancient sea that lay west of the present Catskill Mountains more than 370 million years ago.