Place:Hardenburgh, Ulster, New York, United States

source: Family History Library Catalog

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

Hardenburgh is a town located in the western part of Ulster County, New York, United States. The population was 215 at the 2010 census. The town is located inside the Catskill Park.

History

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

Hardenburgh was established in 1859 from the Towns of Denning and Shandaken. The town was named for Johannes Hardenbergh, a landowner and patentee.

Between 1976 and 1983, 236 residents—more than half the town's residences—became ministers of the Universal Life Church (an organization allowing mail-in "ordinations"), as part of a bid to obtain tax exemptions and as a protest against high property taxes. The ordination movement, which included some subsistence farmers and loggers, were angered at the tax burden that fell on them, which was high because of the thousands of acres of land within the town owned by tax-exempt religious and civil organizations (including the Zen Buddhists' Dai Bosatsu Zendo, the Nassau County Boy Scouts, the Catskill Center for Conservation and Development, and a group of Tibetan monks). Ultimately, in 1982, the New York State Court of Appeals held that Hardenburgh's "mail-order ministers" were not entitled to exemptions from property tax unless the land was exclusively for church use.

The Balsam Lake Mountain Fire Observation Station, Coykendall Lodge, and Grant Mills Covered Bridge are listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

The town is almost exclusively residential; in the 1990s, it had a single general store. The town adopted its first zoning ordinance in 1992.^[1]

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