Annual Justine Legg Hommel Memorial Lecture

Join us for the 2026 Justine L. Hommel Memorial Lecture on July 18, starting at 2 p.m., at the Twilight Park Clubhouse. Richard Sears Walling will speak on the Indigenous Peoples of the Catskills, and, in commemoration of the 100th Anniversary of the Twilight Inn fire, Town of Hunter Historian, Dede Terns-Thorpe, will offer a brief remembrance of those who perished in that devastating fire in 1926.

In a preview of his talk, Mr. Walling stated: Humanity has shared the Catskills for nearly twelve-thousand years, beginning with Paleo-Indians who survived on the natural resources of the mountains. Over millennia, these small family groupings saw the arrival of others. The Algonquian people migrated into the region from the west and were very present in the Catskill and Hudson valleys and developed into the Lenape, Mohican and related tribes. Meanwhile the Iroquois people dominated along the Mohawk and western Catskills having ancestrally developed in the St. Lawrence and Great Lakes region.

Mr. Walling will present an overview of the dynamism of this indigenous transformation and also speak about efforts (in which he participated) to save a Mohican village site in Leeds from being destroyed by modern development.