Sherret Spaulding Chase: Beloved Catskills Legend

In the early 1950s, Sherret Chase got a bird’s-eye view of the Catskills from a DeKalb Ag Company plane. He wrote about it in a speech to the Catskill Center: “One autumn, at the height of the foliage season, I flew with the company pilot en route from Virginia to Max Shaul’s farm in the Schoharie Valley, where we had an experimental hybrid corn trial plot. I told him where the old Winchell farm was on the south slope of Ticeteneyck Mountain and asked if we could fly over it. We did. We flew at low level through the Peekamoose Clove, over the northwestern tip of the Ashokan Reservoir, over the Winchell farm very low, through Winchell Hollow, over Bearsville, through Mink Hollow, and on over the Platte Clove and plateau to the north. ‘That was fun!’ I cried. We circled to the west and south over Delaware County and flew through the cloves of the Catskills once again.”

Chase’s foresight – a belief in the promising future of the region and its people – led him to write a paper during his fellowship at Harvard. “The Catskills: Past, Present, Potential” caught Kingdon Gould’s attention when it was re-published from the American Forests to the Catskill Mountain News. The two men shared a common goal: to protect the environment and stoke the economy of the region. Together, with the help of a veritable “Who’s Who” of the Catskills, including Armand Erpf, they founded the Catskill Center for Conservation and Development in 1969. Sherret Chase was the Founding President.

Chase’s roots to the region first took hold when his Aunt Carmelita Hinton, his father’s sister, hiked through the Woodstock Valley in 1920 and discovered a near-abandoned farm – the Winchell farm. Chase’s grandparents bought it, and his family began trekking 200 miles in a Model T Ford from Wayne, Pennsylvania to the Ashokan farmstead every summer and holiday. His deep kinship with the Catskills began with those pilgrimages.

By 1933, Chase’s immediate family were full-time residents of Olive, in the homestead on Ticeteneyck. All through high school, college, and graduate school – interrupted by three years’ service in the Army Air Corps during World War II – the Catskills were home base. Childhood explorations had borne a deep interest in botany and forestry, which he studied at Yale, Cornell, and Harvard, conducting research in the field of genetics and the hybridization of maize (corn). Sherret Chase’s ground- breaking work in “doubled haploids” has revolutionized corn breeding, facilitated the improvement of other field crops and has high economic value in the field of agribusiness.

Under Chase’s leadership, the Catskill Center focused then – as it does today – on the Catskill region. It set twin goals of conservation and development. “Those two ideas may have seemed antithetical to some,” Chase says, but the goal was to use the two principles together to protect against “mis-development” of the pristine Catskill region. The goal was that ideas of conservation would guide appropriate development.

The organization was membership-based and member-run. He remembers fondly the regular but “informal” forums held on a variety of issues – agriculture or housing, for example – wherein “all kinds of everyday people” as he puts it, could raise concerns, get help, and vote on issues. “The forums in the early years were very important in learning what the people of the Catskills needed.” Everyone had a voice – that was important to him. “There were some arguments at some of these forums. There were people who came with an idea that might have been really good, might’ve been really bad, but there was consensus reached,” Chase recalls. “One good idea was to have me approach the Governor with a request to create a Catskills Study Commission building on the experience of the Adirondack Study Commission. This was passed by the Assembly and we got our Catskills Study Commission, whereupon we declared our relationship to the Study Commission as ‘their best friend and severest critic.’”

In the early days, he sought and found critical assistance from folks like Alf Evers and Bill Ginsberg, who became long-time supporters of the Center. The Center’s first full-time director, Peter Borrelli, was hired in 1973.

With the Center’s leadership, other organizations and agencies were founded (some incubated by the Center). The Catskills Interpretive Center (now the Catskills Visitor Center, a part of the Catskill Center), and offshoots like the Hanford Mills Museum and The Catskill Forest Association, and the preservation of the Thomas Cole House, all grew out of the sense of regionalism that had been sown throughout the area. “Our policy has been to spin off such organizations as these. One very solid development was the Visitor Center. It’s a place where lots of things are done,” Chase says. Due in large part to the work that the Catskill Center has done on behalf of the people of the region, these agencies and organizations (many of which are represented on these pages) today are working together towards common goals.

At 101-years-old now, Chase has spent much of his life advocating for the Catskills. He says there are “pluses and minuses” in the changes that have taken place over the past fifty years. But, overall, “there is more concern for the region. The ordinary person has more leverage. There are more agencies and organizations that can help.” He continues to hope that the forest – and the Catskill terrain that he flew over so many years ago – will continue to be protected; and that the city and the state will continue to work together to preserve our natural resources. He is quick to point out that those natural resources include the people who live here – the very “mixture of people” that make the Catskills home.

Natural Resources: 50 Stewards of the Catskills

This biography has been extracted from the Catskill Center’s publication, Natural Resources: 50 Stewards of the Catskills. In 2019, the Catskill Center celebrated 50 years of protecting the Catskills from when Sherret Chase first founded the organization in 1969. Chase is the first of 50 individuals throughout the region featured in the book for their contributions to the Catskills’ environment, economy, and culture. To purchase your own copy of Natural Resources: 50 Stewards of the Catskills, see here.

Sherret Spaulding Chase Legacy Society

The Catskill Center has created the Sherret Spaulding Chase Legacy Society to give you the same opportunity to leave your own philanthropic impact on the Catskills.

Legacy Society members are supporters who have included a gift to the Catskill Center through their estate plans. We urge anyone who has included the Catskill Center in their plans to let us know, so we can give you the opportunity to be honored by the Catskill Center and included in the Sherret Spaulding Chase Legacy Society’s membership. Please read the full details on the Sherret Spaulding Chase Legacy Society and the Catskill Center’s Planned Giving Program here.