WJFF - The Local Edition - Special Report

Residents and visitors will get a rare chance to step back into the Catskills’ past this weekend when the Roscoe O&W Railway Museum hosts a special presentation on the history of Cooks Falls. The event, The Rich History of Cooks Falls, takes place Saturday at 3 p.m. at the museum on Railroad Avenue in Roscoe.

The talk will be led by Rich Hascha, a longtime history enthusiast who has been piecing together the story of Cooks Falls through original postcards, old photographs, and years of research. What began as a personal curiosity has grown into an unexpected treasure trove of local history.

Hascha, who has fished and visited the area since the early 1980s, moved to Cooks Falls permanently in 2010. He said the project started almost by accident when a neighbor mentioned that a postcard of his house—dating back more than a century—was being sold online.

“I looked it up, and sure enough, there was my house on Maple Avenue in a postcard from the early 1900s,” Hascha said. “That opened the door. I started collecting more, reading up, and realizing just how vibrant this hamlet once was.”

Postcards were booming in the early 20th century. With cheap mailing costs and limited access to personal cameras, visitors relied on them to share their travels. Cooks Falls, despite its small size, produced hundreds of these cards—many of them real photographic postcards, some taken by German photographers known for high-quality equipment.

Through these images, Hascha discovered a Cooks Falls that looked nothing like the quiet hamlet people know today. In the mid-1800s and early 1900s, the area was home to thriving industries: acid factories, lumbering operations, bluestone quarries, and even a dye works facility that supplied dyes used for U.S. military uniforms during World War I.

“It was a very industrious area at one time,” Hascha said. “A lot of people don’t realize what was produced here, or how many locals were employed by these factories and mills.”

Tourism also played a major role in the region’s growth. The Ontario & Western Railway brought visitors from New York City to hotels throughout the Catskills. Cooks Falls became a popular stopover, home to multiple hotels—including the once-grand Francisco House and Mountain Lake Hotel.

Hascha’s presentation also highlights smaller, colorful pieces of local history: a nickel ferry that once carried passengers across the river, the dynamiting of a waterfall in the 1850s to move lumber downstream, and the massive log rafts—some 100 feet long—that floated all the way to Philadelphia.

Beyond industry and postcards, Hascha hopes audiences appreciate how much of this history survives because people held onto physical artifacts—items that don’t always persist in the digital age.

“Fifty or sixty years from now, there might not be a record of our lives the way there is for previous generations,” he said. “These postcards and photographs are pieces of someone’s story, and they still connect us.”

Saturday’s presentation doubles as a fundraiser for the Roscoe Shepherd’s Food Pantry. Attendees are encouraged to bring a canned good or make a small donation. There is no admission fee.

For Hascha—who jokes that he’s “not a big public speaker”—the goal is simple: share what he’s learned and keep this local history alive.

“The more people that come, the better,” he said. “If it fills the room, that just means more people care about keeping this history alive.”

The Rich History of Cooks Falls
Saturday, 3 p.m.
Roscoe O&W Railway Museum
7 Railroad Avenue, Roscoe, NY
Donations of canned food are encouraged.