One of the most unexpected, but interesting things about America’s Semiquincentennial this year is that it has motivated some people to remember other significant celebratory years. Naturally, the nation’s Bicentennial in 1976 has been invoked often in recent months, often in comparison to what is happening this year. Sullivan County’s 2009 Bicentennial has also been remembered fondly by some.

It is perhaps a good thing that one commemoration that has not been talked about at all this year— at least until this column appears in print and online—is what this historian has dubbed “the Golden Jubilee that wasn’t.”

By now, regular readers of this column can tell you that tourism in this county started back around 1840, when fishermen, enticed by articles in the sporting journals by stalwarts such as Alfred B. Street and Charles Fenno Hoffman, began visiting area lakes and streams to try their luck.

Before long, there were enough of these sportsmen regularly arriving in White Lake that one entrepreneur got the idea to construct a hotel just for them.

“For many years, a few summer boarders frequented the place,” James Eldridge Quinlan writes in the chapter on the town of Bethel in his 1873 book, History of Sullivan County. “In 1846, J.B. Finlay put up the first hotel for the special benefit of this class of people. But the business was not remunerative until the Mansion House was built (in 1848).”

By the 1890s, Sullivan County was home to hundreds of hotels catering to thousands of summer tourists looking to escape the oppressive heat of the city. Places like the Wawonda, the Swannanoa, Columbia Farms, the Glenwood and Trout Valley Farm offered guests wide verandas, spacious lawns, even golf, tennis, and croquet, and were central to a period of prosperity many now refer to as the Silver Age of tourism here.

So just where The New York Times got the idea that it all began in 1903 is anybody’s guess.

“Fifty years ago, Sullivan County had its first visitor and look at it now!” the Times trumpeted in its May 10, 1953 edition under the headline “Catskill Birthday.” A lengthy feature followed, authored by Bernard Kalb, a Harvard educated journalist who later worked for CBS News, NBC and CNN, as well as the State Department. Although Kalb no doubt got the information for his piece from someone in the hotel publicity racket here, a little homework on his part should have been in order.

“Of the 3,070 counties in the United States, one of the most talked-of, flocked-to and built-up is a 986-square-mile diamond of Catskill territory by the name of Sullivan County, ninety miles from New York City, which is currently celebrating its fiftieth anniversary as a resort, or as they are saying in the carpeted lobbies around Monticello these days, its Golden Jubilee,” Kalb wrote in what must rate as one of the lengthiest lead sentences in journalistic annals.

“Just who it was who made the maiden voyage back in 1903 to the rejuvenating atmosphere of Sullivan County isn’t known; he, unlike Christopher Columbus, another discoverer, has been shortchanged by history. Yet this turned out to be no worthless find. Summer after summer, millions - vacationists as well as greenbacks - have descended on the county. Now, in contrast to the old farmhouse days, the vacationists have quite a choice of stopovers - 538 hotels, 50,000 bungalows, and 1,000 rooming houses, to be exact.”

This no doubt represented the peak, or nearly so, of the county’s Golden Age. But the notion that tourism began here in 1903 is just plain wrong. One need only peruse the various vacation guides put out by any of the three railroads that served the county to see that. As far back as the 1870s, the railroads were promoting the region as a tourist destination, with the Erie hailing the Delaware Valley of western Sullivan as a “sportsman’s paradise” and the O&W announcing to prospective vacationers that “Doctors say, ‘go to the mountains!’”

One assumes that most of Kalb’s other information is more accurate, and therefore more interesting. He notes that as of April 20, 1953, there were 11,000 inquiries about county hotel rooms, nearly double those of one year earlier, and that reservations were running 20 per cent ahead of the year before.

The interesting thing about that is that 1952 had been so successful—with every hotel room, bungalow and boarding house booked solid for the entire season—that it would become known as “the perfect summer.”

Kalb goes on to point out that there is no such thing as a typical Sullivan County resort.

“Its diversity is remarkable,” he notes. “Stucco and clapboard hotels accommodating about seventy-five persons each line the same country road as the California redwood and Allegheny stone resorts accommodating 400 or 500. In recreation, there are places that haven’t much more than a pool and a casino, just as there are places that have an outdoor pool, an indoor pool, a lake, a casino, an indoor theater, an outdoor theater, a night club, a bridle path, a nine-hole golf course, an eighteen-hole golf course, and an indoor skating rink. The biggest hotels feature a Saturday night program built around entertainers like Milton Berle, Sophie Tucker, Sam Levenson, and Tony Martin; the smaller feature the Washington Heights Jazz Combo and a bellhop turned baritone.”

Overall, Kalb’s article is entertaining and well written, but there is no doubt that he was terribly misled on at least one point: not only did Sullivan County’s resort industry considerably pre-date 1903, so in fact did its Golden Jubilee.

John Conway is the Sullivan County Historian. His e-mail address is jconway52@hotmail.com. Join him next weekend (July 17-19) as the Semiquincentennial Commemoration continues with Patriots Weekend at the Minisink Battleground Park.