The Roeliff Jansen Historical Society
PRESERVING THE HISTORY AND HERITAGE OF THE ROE JAN COMMUNITY
COME SEE Our 2026 Summer Exhibition!
Patriots, Plowshares & Post Roads: Chapters from our Local Journey to Independence explores the American Revolution from a distinctly local perspective. Rather than focusing on famous battles and generals, the exhibition tells the stories of the people, industries, transportation networks, and communication systems that sustained everyday life and helped lay the foundations for American independence.
Created in collaboration with local historians, museums, historic sites, and traditional businesses throughout the Roe Jan region, the exhibition transports visitors to the late eighteenth century, when growing self-sufficiency, improved roads, local agriculture, mills, ironmaking, and an emerging postal system all played essential roles in the Revolutionary era.
Among the featured topics are the Ancram Iron Works, which supplied iron for cannon shot and links in the Hudson River's Great Chain; the region's fulling and gristmills; the Noble Train of Artillery led by Colonel Henry Knox; Revolutionary War veterans buried in local cemeteries; and the evolution of Columbia County from colonial New York to the early republic. Artifacts, maps, photographs, documents.
Patriots, Plowshares & Post Roads: Chapters from our Local Journey to Independence is open now through October at the Roeliff Jansen Historical Society, 8 Miles Road, Copake Falls, New York. The museum is open Saturdays and Sundays from 2:00 to 4:00 p.m. through October. Admission is free. A complete schedule of programs and registration information is available HERE.
See the Exhibition!
Watch the video!
What made the American Revolution possible? Not just soldiers and generals—but mills, iron furnaces, farms, post roads, and ordinary people.
In recognition of our nation's 250th anniversary, the Roeliff Jansen Historical Society proudly presents Patriots, Plowshares & Post Roads: Chapters from our Local Journey to Independence. Created to accompany the exhibition, this fully illustrated 18-minute introductory film—written and narrated by RJHS
Board President Lesley Doyel—offers a fresh perspective on the American Revolution.
Rather than focusing solely on battles, generals, and military campaigns, Patriots, Plowshares & Post Roads explores the hidden infrastructure that made independence possible. Through the stories of iron furnaces, mills, post roads, tenant farms, taverns, textile production, and local industry, the film reveals how ordinary people, working landscapes, and networks of labor, transportation, and communication sustained the Revolutionary cause throughout the Hudson Valley.
The American Revolution was, in many ways, a tapestry of local actions, individual decisions, and community efforts that gradually merged into a coordinated movement for independence. Against the backdrop of the Revolutionary War, both the video and the exhibition tell the smaller—but no less significant—stories of innovation, self-sufficiency, and perseverance that helped lay the foundations of a new nation.
Exhibition open July 11, thru October 2026. Running time: 18 minutes