Hatched by Bruce Coville

Author:Bruce Coville
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Children's Books
Published: 2016-10-18T04:00:00+00:00

From Myths and Magic of the Catskills

By Trevor Montrose

One of the more unusual stories to be found in the Catskills is attached to a little town called Vande Velde’s Landing, which is tucked away in one of the region’s most rural areas.

The name of the town itself is a bit of an oddity. “Landing” would indicate a place where something came to dock. However, Vande Velde’s Landing is located far from the mighty Hudson River and has only a medium-sized creek (or “kill,” as the Dutch would term it) for waterfront—something that would hardly require a ferry for crossing.

So what is the reason for the name?

Gnomes!

At least that’s what local lore would tell us. According to the legend, hundreds of years ago a migrating colony of Dutch gnomes made its way up the Hudson River, then by connected creeks westward to this isolated spot! This little town is where they pulled up their ships and decided to settle.

It is delicious to imagine a gnome ship, or perhaps several, each scarcely ten feet long, sailing the tributaries of the Hudson to this place. As gnomes are said to be but six inches tall, a ten-foot ship for them would be equal to a human three-master longer than 120 feet. For these little folk, such a vessel would have been half again as roomy as Henry Hudson’s Half Moon, the ship that first navigated this river!

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