To the Editor:

I am in Arizona and getting my Enterprise very late so I’m not sure what the current state of the Doctor Crounse House is but I would like to add a bit of history that has been overlooked about Dr. Crounse.

Dr. Frederick Crounse was not only the first doctor for Altamont (then Knowersville) but he was also very active in the Anti-Rent Wars in the 1800s. He took a role supporting the farmers who were fighting the old Dutch patroon system that had settled our area. He acted as informeer to the Hilltown farmers above Altamont as to decisions and movement of the Albany sheriff’s move to force rent payments to the patroon’s descendents.

These payments were a yearly rent for land usage of the farms that covered the hillsides and had been farmed with ancestors over a number of generations.

The farmers figured the Revolutionary War should have ended that practice. Unfortunately, some of that war’s prominent supporters were also patroon descendants, like the Schuylers and Livingstons, and they had nixed that idea.

The result: The farmers refused to pay the rent.

Rents were due yearly, on Jan. 1, of produce or livestock at the marketplace in Albany.

The sheriff and his deputies were sent out in force to collect the rents or arrest the offenders. Because of his wide-ranging practice, Dr. Crounse would discover these plans and make a path to the hills, informing farmers of the coming forces.

The mountain would reverberate with the sounds of tin horns blasting the alarm. The horns were in most of the households for the wives to call in their husbands from the fields for dinner.

Taking a leaf from the Boston Tea Party, the farm men would dress in homemade calico costumes as Indians, gather their weapons, and drive off the sheriff’s men.

In one outstanding battle, they captured the sheriff, tarred and feathered him, and sent him back to the city in disgrace!

Another time, there was a death — a farmer named Hungerford (yes, another of the Altamont Hungerfords). Dr. Crounse was invaluable in obtaining the uneasy peace that ensued.

P.S. Lansing Christman’s brother, William, who wrote “Tin Horns and Calico” about the Anti-Rent Wars, left notes of these events when he died and Lansing asked me to assemble them and write the story, which I did years ago in The Enterprise. The Enterprise also printed up booklets of that story for the Berne or Knox historical society.

Carol DuBrin

Altamont