Local Luminaries

Jay Ungar and Molly Mason

by Brian K. Mahoney and photographs by Jennifer May, March 24, 2010

Perhaps you’ve listened to their monthly music program on WAMC’s “Dancing on the Air.” Or you watched Ken Burns “Civil War” documentary miniseries and noted the haunting (and Grammy winning) soundtrack that won the couple international acclaim. Maybe you’ve attended Fiddle and Dance Camp in the Catskill Mountains sometime in the past 30 years, or one of their innumerable local performances. Suffice to say, Jay Ungar and Molly are local music icons, standard bearers for traditional American acoustic music.

Four years ago, Ungar and Mason started the Ashokan Foundation, a nonprofit which now manages the former Ashokan Field Campus, run by SUNY New Paltz, a 300-acre campus set in a Catskill Mountain hollow hard by the Ashokan Reservoir in the town of Olivebridge. www.ashokancenter.org


What was the motivation to form the Ashokan Foundation?

Mason: Jay and I were planning our summer Fiddle & Dance Camps at the Ashokan Field Campus in 2006 when we heard that SUNY New Paltz was trying to sell the camp. Our programs had been running for nearly 30 years, and the outdoor education programs for schools had been going for almost 40 years. We feared that a new owner might have other ideas for this beautiful and historic property, like housing developments, a shopping mall, or logging.

Ungar: So early on, we called together people who cared about Ashokan’s future, both long time visitors, and the people who work here. The Ashokan Foundation was soon formed and we were able to partner with the Open Space Institute and the New York City Department of Environmental Protection to save the place and the programs.

Mason: We soon began to learn more about the outdoor education and living history programs that were pioneered here in the 1960s and have attracted schools to Ashokan ever since. We learned that five or six thousand school children come here each year, and for many it’s their first chance to experience nature.

Ungar: We knew from our Fiddle & Dance Camps that adult groups can achieve community quickly at Ashokan and we soon learned that school groups tend to form strong bonds here as well. We kept hearing from teachers what we’d suspected for years—it’s something about the place and about hands-on learning. You come here to experience something, be it nature, history, music, and dancing, or just the great outdoors. You don’t see it on TV, you don’t read about it, you aren’t lectured about it—you do it with others and you build connections.

What’s it like for students who visit the site for the environmental education and living history program?

Mason: It’s like walking into the 1830s. You may get to hike through the woods to the Sugar Shack, collect sap and help make and taste real maple syrup, or visit the Indian Village and learn how our native forebears lived on the land.