Place:Cochecton (town), Sullivan, New York, United States

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source: Family History Library Catalog

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Cochecton is a town located in west-central Sullivan County, New York, United States. The population was 1,372 at the 2010 census. The name is derived from the lenape word "cushetunk" meaning "place of red stone hills".

The Town of Cochecton (its official name) is situated on the Delaware River, directly across from Damascus, Pennsylvania, to which a bridge over the river provides access.

History

the text in this section is copied from an article in Wikipedia

In the original charter of 1664, Cochecton marked the border between New York and New Jersey. Along the Delaware River, a spot was marked named "station rock." This point formed the meeting point of the borders between New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania. After a long dispute - the New York-New Jersey Line War - the final border was set further south, near Port Jervis.

The town was formed from the Town of Bethel in 1828. The Town of Delaware was formed from part of Cochecton in 1869.

The town once had a station on the former Erie Railroad's Delaware Division mainline (Erie Lackawanna Railway between 1960 and 1976), but passenger service on this line ceased on November 27, 1966. It has since been taken-over (1999) by the Norfolk Southern Railway and is currently (2022) operated by the Central New York Railroad, a short line railroad, under lease from NS. The Cochecton train station is the oldest surviving railroad passenger station in New York State. Moved from its original site in the early 1990s, a local group of people banded together to save the station from destruction. The local business Cochecton Mills, owned by the Nearing family, gave the group, called the "Cochecton Preservation Society", one year to dismantle the ancient building and get it off their property so that its business could continue. In that time, the station was carefully and successfully moved roughly one mile upstream to a spot on NY Route 97, still resting along the former Erie Railroad. More recently, various proposals were made to restore passenger service on the line, but none have yet been adopted.

The correct pronunciation of the town's name is "cuh-SHEK-ton," leading many to mistakenly believe the name is of French origin; the name is, however, more likely derived from the Lenni Lenape word ksch-itchuan, meaning "foaming water". A conflicting, and probably outdated, interpretation appears in the writings of James Burbank, an amateur local historian who wrote in the 1950s that the word "Cushektunk" meant "low land" and "land of red rock" indicating the abundance of red mudstone throughout the area.

The Drake-Curtis House, Ellery Calkins House, Cochecton Presbyterian Church, Cochecton Railroad Station, Reilly's Store, Parsonage Road Historic District, Page House, Old Cochecton Cemetery, and Valleau Tavern are listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

Cochecton was reportedly the home of Tammany, a Native American sage of the Lenape who became an American symbol and a fixture in popular culture during and after the Revolutionary War.

The Woodstock Festival was held in nearby Bethel, but after the festival and because of conflict with the local postmaster, the Yasgur family that hosted the festival on their farm changed their address from Bethel to Cochecton.

Cochecton has four ZIP codes — 12726 (for Cochecton), 12752 (for Lake Huntington), 12727 (for Cochecton Center) and 12764 (for nearby Narrowsburg). The town is also divided among five different telephone exchanges — Lake Huntington (845-932), Narrowsburg (845-252), White Lake (845-583), Jeffersonville (845-482), and Callicoon (845-887) — a highly unusual situation considering the town's small size and population.

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