The daily morning journal and courier., 1895-01-29
SHOLUM,S ODD FOLK.
A Queer Sort of Community of olannish
 Tastes,


 From the Hartford Times,T
 Up in the Shawangunk mountains, in
 Ulster county, New York, there lives an
 odd race of people called sholumites
 The name of their settlement--it Is
 about five miles from Ellenville--is call
 ed sholum, which is the Hebrew word
 for place of rest. These people are
 called odd from the fact that they are
 supposed to be of Hebrew origin, all
 though strange as it may seem, none
 of the present members, of the commun-
 ity know anything about their origin,
 and every trace of the Hebraic religion
 has disappeared from among them.
 They have every characteristic of the
 Semitic race in regard to features, hair
 and complexion, and many old Jewish
 words and expressions are still in use
 among them, yet they are Christians. They have all the racial love of display in dress, yet in their case, not being | able to wear diamonds, they effect | bright colors.
 For over one hundred years these peo- pie have been an enigma to the people descended from the Huguenot French of the Waikiki valley and the hardy Dutch who settled the fertile valleys of the Rondout and the Neversink. Where they came from or what time they set tied in Sholum no local records or leg ends tell, yet they can be traced back as far as the Revolutionary war. Whether they were at Sholum when the Iroquois Indians perpetrated the horrible massacres at Minisink and Warwarsing is not known, but it is be- lieved that while the country was prac- tically depopulated after these terrible slaughters a colony of Portugese Jews fled from New York into the moun- tains and stopped at Sholum
 Having slawys lived the lives of mountaineers the Sholumite men are magnificent specimens of manhood. A man under five feet ten inches in height is a rarity among them, while men of six feet in stature are common and of ten men of several inches above that are met with. This is remarkable from the fact that the families have inter- married until the same strain of blood flows through every person in the set clement, and the Tn-breeding seems not to have caused deterioration of the race like it has in most cases The women are generally buxom, smaller than the men, but hardy and tough as pitch knot
 There is another theory for the origin of these strange people which seems more likely to be true than the one ad- vanced Tn Toulouse, in France, there lived as far back as the beginning of the thirteenth century a people called | Albigenes--a race of people swarthy of skin, with black hair, beard and eyes and strongly marked aquiline noses | who are said to have peen Christian Jews who fled to Gaul to escape the | fury of the Roman emperor Nero These people, like the Waldenses of the Pied | mont, always held to the primitive faith | and never acknowledged any authority | of Rome over their consclences. At the | time of the apostdsT q Prince Louis of Toulouse, who was an Albigene, they | were practically externilnated. The | few who remained however, two cen turies later set going the flames of Hu- guenot Professionalism in France and | formed some of the most stalwart sol uleIS III lIlt dIIly OL I lllNE Iltilly bl Navarro when he promised to make France protestant country. After this prince became king of France and turn e q Roman Catholic these people fled from Holland. It Is supposed that they later on came to America, and that they settled first among the Rochelois Hu- guenots in the Walldll valley, but be- ing a different race of people and speak ing practically different language, they naturally separated themselves from the others, went into the noun tains and settled at Sholum. This is the most reasonable solution, it seems, as the origin of these strange people; but who they are and what they sprung from is a problem for only an ethnolo- gist to determine.
 The Sholumites are handy, indus trious and thrifty people. Their homes are humble, most of them living in houses built of clapboards or logs, yet there are none of them but what live and it is said that nearly every male member of the community 7an command neat sum of cash. They are all producers and many thousands Of shaved barrel hoops are turned out n their settlement annually. They op- crate heading and shingle mills, and he women in the winter time weave strong, heavy baskets from the splint of he mountain ash, which finds ready sale in all the towns about the settle nent. During the summer when the are covered with the succu- ent whortleberry or as it is more com nonly called the huckleberry, men, and children turn out on the mountains and pick thousands of bush is of the tart blue fruit, which they ell to wholesalers fo1. the New York l