SHerret S. Chase

The forums in the early years were very important in learning what the people of the Catskills needed.”

Chase’s foresight – a belief in the promising future of the region and its people – led him to write a paper during his fellowship at Harvard. “The Catskills: Past, Present, Potential” caught Kingdon Gould’s atten-tion when it was re-published from the American Forests to the Catskill Mountain News. The two men shared a common goal: to protect the environment and stoke the economy of the region. Together, with the help of a veritable “Who’s Who” of the Catskills, including Armand Erpf, they founded the Catskill Center for Conservation and Development in 1969. Sherret Chase was the Founding President.

Chase’s roots to the region first took hold when his Aunt Carmelita Hinton, his father’s sister, hiked through the Woodstock Valley in 1920 and discovered a near-abandoned farm – the Winchell farm. Chase’s grandparents bought it, and his family began trekking 200 miles in a Model T Ford from Wayne, Pennsylvania to the Ashokan farmstead every summer and holiday. His deep kinship with the Catskills began with those pilgrimages.

By 1933, Chase’s immediate family were full-time residents of Olive, in the homestead on Ticeteneyck. All through high school, college, and graduate school – interrupted by three years’ service in the Army Air Corps during World War II – the Catskills were home base. Childhood explorations had borne a deep interest in botany and forestry, which he studied at Yale, Cornell, and Harvard, conducting research in the field of genetics and the hybridization of maize (corn). Sherret Chase’s ground-breaking work in “doubled haploids” has revolutionized corn breeding, facilitated the improvement of other field crops and has high economic value in the field of agribusiness.

Under Chase’s leadership, the Catskill Center focused then – as it does today – on the Catskill region. It set twin goals of conservation and development. “Those two ideas may have seemed antithetical to some,” Chase says, but the goal was to use the two principles together to pro-tect against “mis-development” of the pristine Catskill region. The goal was that ideas of conservation would guide appropriate development.

The organization was membership-based and member-run. He remembers fondly the regular but “informal” forums held on a variety of issues – agriculture or housing, for example – wherein “all kinds of everyday people” as he puts it, could raise concerns, get help, and vote on issues. “The forums in the early years were very important in learning what the people of the Catskills needed.” Everyone had a voice – that was important to him. “There were some arguments at some of these forums. There were people who came with an idea that might have been really good, might’ve been really bad, but there was consensus reached,” Chase recalls. “One good idea was to have me approach the Governor with a request to create a Catskills Study Commission building on the experience of the Adirondack Study Commission. This was passed by the Assembly and we got our Catskills Study Commission, whereupon we declared our relationship to the Study Commission as ‘their best friend and severest critic.’”

There is more concern for the region. The ordinary person has more leverage. There are more agencies and organizations that can help.

In the early days, he sought and found critical assistance from folks like Alf Evers and Bill Ginsberg, who became long-time supporters of the Center. The Center’s first full-time director, Peter Borrelli, was hired in 1973.

With the Center’s leadership, other organizations and agencies were founded (some incubated by the Center). The Catskills Interpretive Center (now the Catskills Visitor Center, a part of the Catskill Center), and offshoots like the Hanford Mills Museum and The Catskill Forest Association, and the preservation of the Thomas Cole House, all grew out of the sense of regionalism that had been sown throughout the area. “Our policy has been to spin off such organizations as these. One very solid development was the Visitor Center. It’s a place where lots of things are done,” Chase says. Due in large part to the work that the Catskill Center has done on behalf of the people of the region, these agencies and organizations (many of which are represented on these pages) today are working together towards common goals.

At 101-years-old now, Chase has spent much of his life advocating for the Catskills. He says there are “pluses and minuses” in the changes that have taken place over the past fifty years. But, overall, “there is more concern for the region. The ordinary person has more leverage. There are more agencies and organizations that can help.” He continues to hope that the forest – and the Catskill terrain that he flew over so many years ago – will continue to be protected; and that the city and the state will continue to work together to preserve our natural resources. He is quick to point out that those natural resources include the people who live here – the very “mixture of people” that make the Catskills home.

To mark its 50th anniversary in 2019, the Catskill Center published a book, Natural Resources: 50 Stewards of the Catskills, which celebrates 50 stewards of the Catskills, chosen for their contributions to the region’s environment, economy and culture.

Sherret Chase is one of those stewards — this biography has been extracted from that publication.