SUGAR LOAF.
Sugar Loaf is one of the oldest communities of Orange County and as a trading center was established shortly after the settlement of Goshen.
It is one of the villages of Chester township to which we may look with interest in these early times. It was named by these pioneer settlers from the cone-like mountain which towers above the quiet village to an elevation of 1,226 feet above sea level. The mountain, which consists mostly of greywacke slate, resembles in appearance, as viewed from the village, a loaf of sugar, such as was used in the homes of the early settlers before the day of granulated sugar as an article of commerce. This sublime eminence, the highest in the county, affords from its summit one of the most commanding views in the county. This view is best secured by entering the field near George H. Mapes's place on the road to Sugar Loaf Valley and walking, as it were, from the tail to the head of the lion-like mountain, for this is the shape of the mountain as viewed from Chester depot.
N. P. Willis, the American poet and literary genius, who loved old Orange County's hills from Butler Hill on the Hudson, which he renamed Storm King, to Adam and Eve in the drowned lands, speaks of Sugar Loaf Mountain when viewed from the Chester Hills as being like a crouching lion ready to spring upon its prey.
The earliest record of inhabitants includes Hugh Dobbin, who lived near Sugar Loaf Mountain in 1738. Mr. Perry lived near the pond, which bore his name and later was called Wickham Pond. This was prior to the middle of the eighteenth century, when Clinton, the surveyor, marked the Chesekook claim line, which extended from the base of Goose Pond Mountain to Bellevale and thence to the Jersey line.
Stephen W. Perry, who lived in the Sugar Loaf Valley a century ago, was probably related to the Perry with whom the surveyors stopped in those Colonial days when the Indians still lived in the mountains and the surveyors were accustomed to use the Indian wigwams for shelter during their journey, blazing the trees on the Chesekook line through the trackless forest.
Nathaniel Knapp lived for a time on the Levi Geer place, and a headstone with the date 1804, the initials N. K., aged sixty-four years, marks the place of his burial. For some sentimental reason he was buried under a great oak on the farm upon which Hugh Dobbin probably lived in the year 1738. According to tradition the old log house of this early pioneer was at the curve of the road near the entrance to the meadow. Among other men that have been prominent about Sugar Loaf were Henry Wisner, Horace Ketchum, Squire James Hallock, Jesse H. Knapp, Vincent Wood, who lived on the Asa Dolson farm, and John Holbert, born 1773, who lived on the farm now occupied by his grandson, Samuel Holbert.
The Knapp family came from Connecticut, and settled on three different farms. Some of the family emigrated later through a trackless forest to the Butternut Creek in Otsego County.
The Nicholas Demerest family, of Chester, descended from James Demerest's family, who came from Bergen County, New Jersey, and settled on the ridge near Sugar Loaf, occupying a farm of five hundred acres. John Bigger is mentioned by John Wood, the assessor, in 1775, as a taxpayer, together with David Rumsey, Samuel Wickham, Jacobus Bertholf and Barnabas Horton.