PINE HILL, N.Y. — The building at 26 Academy St. in the Shandaken hamlet has lived a legion of lives.
Formerly Pine Hill’s one-room schoolhouse, the building served as a coat factory, multiple businesses, and a community center until the mid-1980s, when historians June LaMarca and Nancy Smith established the Shandaken Historical Museum.
Nearly four decades later, the museum continues to document the past of Ulster County’s second-largest town and its twelve historic hamlets: Woodland Valley, Oliverea, Chichester, Bushnellsville, Mount Pleasant, Mount Tremper, Phoenicia, Shandaken, Allaben, Big Indian, Pine Hill, and Highmount.
“It was the grade school for the hamlet of Pine Hill between 1926 and 1964,” said Joseph Prieboy, the museum’s director, in an interview with the Freeman. “It had