I have begun writing a story about the superstitions of the Catskill Mountains as inspired by Washington Irving, and I'd like to use some real villages of colonial days as my backdrop. The events taking place within will be completely fictional, and so do I intend to make any mention of surrounding geography. However, I did want to use a real name. Here is an old Dutch(?) map of the region. Thanks for your help!
You might want to check out the small book "The Matchlock Gun" by Walter Edmonds. It is a fictional story of a small boy that uses an early 1600s matchlock musket to protect his mother and sisters from an Indian attack on his Dutch family's farm in the 1750s. His father was in the militia and had marched north towards Albany. The book has place names for the upper Hudson Valley in the 1750s. This book won the 1942 Newberry medal for children's literature and is less than a hundred pages long.
