Later Years

Homer C. Kuhlmann was born 1898 in Ellenville, son of John A. and Barbara Homer Kuhlmann. As a young man, he was a bookkeeper at the family brewery. While Kuhlmann later ran an automobile dealership in Kingston, his hobby was horse racing. One day at the 1925 Ulster County Fair his horses won all three races; his famous pacer Don the Orphan broke a record held by a Kuhlmann mare. Homer is pictured here with four of his horses.

By 1920, automobile racing was one of the events at the Ellenville Driving Park, exclusive to Ford cars here. The first motorcycle race was held that year during the Ulster County Fair. Early races consisted of ten laps around the half-mile track, with exciting turns, since the track had originally been designed for horse racing. The bandstand in the background was moved here from Liberty Avenue in 1911.

This photograph shows Robert J. Goldsmith, age 17, with his race car in 1926.

After a financially unsuccessful year for the Ulster County Fair in 1931 due to bad weather and another polio epidemic, the fairgrounds were sold the following year to School District 29, and the annual fair was moved to Forsyth Park in Kingston. The fair remained in Kingston until it moved to New Paltz in 1967, where it remains to this day. The original site of the Ulster County Fair is now the location of Ellenville Central School District.

This exhibit includes only a sampling of the extensive group of photographs, postcards and ephemera in the collections of Ellenville Public Library & Museum, and was created by Sandy Marsh, digital archivist for the museum. Visit us to see more of the Ulster County Fair Collection.