Town Board

The Town Board of the Town of Schaghticoke met in regular session on October 14, 2026 at the Town Hall, 290 Northline Drive, Melrose, at 6:30 p.m. This summary is drawn from a community recording, not from town minutes, which had not been posted as of October 14. The recording does not capture a roll call, so attendance is not listed, and the motion makers and seconders are not audible. Motions below passed by voice vote with no opposition heard.

Minutes

The minutes of the previous meeting were approved.

Reports from department heads

The only report was the Town Historian’s. Town Historian Chris Kelly reported:

• She toured a group of Civil War reenactors through Elmwood Cemetery to identify the gravestones of men from the 125th New York, one of the Rensselaer County regiments. The group is restoring Civil War veterans’ stones around the county and will work on the roughly 20 stones from that regiment over time.
• She attended a conference at Historic Deerfield, Massachusetts, on King Philip’s War, the 1675 to 1676 war in New England that sent about 200 Native people north to Schaghticoke, where Governor Edmund Andros invited them to live in peace and the Peace Tree was planted in the spring of 1676. About 20 speakers, half of them Native American, told the story from the Native point of view; one speech was about the journey to Schaghticoke, by a scholar she had been corresponding with. One idea she took away: the tree may have been a metaphorical one, “which adds a whole other layer to hundreds of years of history.” (The conference was “Revisiting King Philip’s War: The War for New England after 350 Years,” held September 26 at the Deerfield Community Center and hosted by Historic Deerfield; its program lists a paper by Karim M. Tiro of Xavier University titled “King Philip’s War Viewed from the West: the Haudenosaunee, New York, and the Creation of Schaghticoke.”)
• On October 2 she attended a ceremony at the Buckley Cemetery, a small fenced burial ground on Kardas Road near the Easton line, where all the stones were restored after two years of work by a local gravestone restoration company, paid for by the landowner and by a descendant of Jabez Buckley, the Revolutionary War veteran buried there, who served in Dutchess County and bought the land after the war. Reenactors and the Hoosic Valley Fire Department took part, local businesses donated soil, seed and flowers, and she called it a fine thing to do for America 250.
• The Evans grist mill, taken down around 1989 and stored in a barn in Massachusetts, is still for sale at $95,000, complete. After a front-page Times Union story, the Berkshire Eagle interviewed her for its own.
• A plug for the Knickerbocker Mansion’s Knick at Night, October 23 and 24 from 5 to 9 p.m., supper in the pavilion and ghost tours of the mansion, themed this year to the anniversary of the tree, with a ghost of King Philip among the characters. Reservations are required for a tour time.

Financial

To approve the bills totaling $343,953.22. Ayes: All · Nays: None.

New business

• To set a public hearing for Thursday, November 5, 2026 at 6:00 p.m. on the proposed local law permitting the town to override the tax levy limit. Ayes: All · Nays: None. (The recording is garbled for the next half minute, during which the chair repeats “public hearing is approved” several times; it is not clear whether a second hearing was set in the same run of motions.)
• To spend $9,000 from the technology reserve for continuing upgrades to all computers. Ayes: All · Nays: None.
• To spend $51,000 from the highway reserve fund for road salt. Ayes: All · Nays: None.

Public comment

A resident asked whether the Town Board’s next meeting is November 5; the answer was that November 5 is for the public hearing and the next regular meeting is Wednesday, November 11. The same resident asked about the override hearing notice that had been removed from the town website. The answer: it was pulled because it carried the wrong date, listing October 14 as the hearing date, and it is being corrected.

Adjourned at about 6:42 p.m. Ayes: All · Nays: None.

Not on the recording: the 2027 tentative budget and the garbage and recycling contract. Sources: a community audio recording of the October 14, 2026 meeting, transcribed and summarized by speigletown.org, with the Deerfield conference details from Historic Deerfield’s event page and program (PDF). The Town Historian’s own writing on the Peace Tree is on her blog, History of the Town of Schaghticoke. The town had not posted an agenda or minutes as of October 14; when it does, the signed PDF is the record and this entry will be updated. Private individuals are not named.