Life in the Mohawk Valley today is vastly different from generations ago. Long gone are the factory whistles calling workers to their shifts in old mill towns. Fort Plain still benefits from little-known inventor William Yerdon, and Utica baseball player George Burns was so skilled that fans called left field "Burnsville." Few realize that a local artist shared a special bond with John Philip Sousa, one of the nation's greatest musicians. The Tamarack Playhouse was once the venue of spectacular theatricals, and as time goes on, there are fewer alumni to remember Amsterdam's Bishop Scully High School. Local author Bob Cudmore shows that while lost, these and other compelling stories no longer need be forgotten.

Much of the history of New York's scenic Mohawk Valley has been recounted time and again. But so many other stories have remained buried, almost lost from memory. The man called the baseball oracle correctly predicted the outcome of twenty-one major-league games. Mrs. Bennett, a friend of Governor Thomas Dewey, owned the Tower restaurant and lived in the unique Cranesville building. An Amsterdam sailor cheated death onboard a stricken submarine. Not only people but once-loved places are also all but forgotten, like the twentieth-century Mohawk Indian encampment and Camp Agaming in the Adirondacks, where Kirk Douglas was a counselor. Local historian Bob Cudmore delves deep into the region's history to find its most fascinating pieces of hidden history.

Gilbert Martin and his new bride Lana, pioneers in the Mohawk Valley, live and protect their land through weather disasters, love and hate and Indian attacks.

Here is the story of the forgotten pioneers of the Mohawk Valley during the Revolutionary War. Here Gilbert Martin and his young wife struggled and lived and hoped. Combating hardships almost too great to endure, they helped give to America a legend which still stirs the heart. In the midst of love and hate, life and death, danger and disaster, they stuck to the acres which were theirs, and fought a war without ever quite understanding it. Drums Along the Mohawk has been an American classic since its original publication in 1936.

Pulled between the disparate spheres of homelife with his minister father and the world of sex, drugs, and violence of his closest friends, author Stephen Haven relates his journey of self-discovery in this poignant memoir. After a fourteen-year absence from his home in Amsterdam, New York, Haven returns to the streets that molded his character. Through memories of his adolescence, Haven relives his youth in this economically deprived community and explores the values of friendship, loyalty, and privilege. A true bildungsroman, The River Lock traces the forging of Haven’s identity from the clash of the two worlds of his youth-home and street. His return to his childhood past allows Haven to understand and describe how his growing understanding of art, culture, spirituality, and class melded to create a man able to live fully in two distinct worlds, the foundation of the man he is today.

Home to a community of hardworking farmers and mill workers, the village of Delta stood along the banks of the Mohawk River until it was evacuated by the state to raise the water in the Erie Canal. Before the flooding of the river, Delta was a small country village with the same postmaster for over 30 years and families farming the same land for generations. In order to raise the water, the state approved the construction of five reservoirs across New York. The town was evacuated soon after, and the land that generations of residents toiled over now sits at the bottom of Lake Delta.