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Hello High Falls Take a tour of our picturesque village. High Falls, founded in 1669, used to be a canal town. The Delaware & Hudson canal was the route for barges carrying coal to the Hudson River and New York City. It was used from 1828-1898, when it was made obsolete by trains. Just before Mr. Apples' entrance, the D & H Canal Society has placed a walking tour guide of High Falls. The first stop is the canal museum, which is part of the High Falls Historic District. Here you can see how the canal functioned. Eight other places are included in the walking tour. (845) 687-9311 www.canalmuseum.org

If it is Sunday you can check out the canal society's flea market. Across from there you will find a fine pottery shop. Walk down a block to antique & gift stores.

Hungry? If apples are not enough, High Falls has several places to eat from a deli to a four star restaurant. Right at our driveway there is an eatery that is named for an apple variety.

The famous naturalist John Burroughs taught school here in a one room schoolhouse. He studied nature in the woods next to the orchard. There is an historical marker about him just past the museum.

If you want to know anything else about High Falls (or about anything else) ask Philip Apple.

HIGH FALLS, N.Y.--- I first came to this Hudson Valley village 10 years ago for the food a four star restaurant was to be found there, in the middle of the woods, where the owner and a handpicked staff of whiz kids were working wonders with nouvelle cuisine. . . . The one hundred mile drive, most of it along wooded parkways and country roads, is soothing in itself. High Falls, 10 minutes on back roads from the Mohonk Mountain house resort, is a settlement . . . dotting a half-mile stretch of route 213 . . .

But the ties that bind New York and High Falls run deeper still. A decade before the civil war (And a full 30 years before his masterpiece opened to traffic in 1883) the [Brooklyn] Bridge's designing engineer, John A. Roebling, came to High Falls to build a new aqueduct for the 108-mile Delaware & Hudson Canal.

Experimenting with suspension design, revolutionary at the time, Roebling replaced the [former] arched aqueduct with what was essentially a miniature Brooklyn Bridge. . . .

Behind the towpath house are remains of lock 16, the most nearly intact of the 6 locks built in High Falls . . . like stone vertebrae on the town's spine, the locks lead through the heart of High Falls. . . .

Nearby is a series of historical markers detailing the evolution of High Falls from a tiny farming community to a thriving center of commerce after the "discovery of natural hydraulic cement." (There are maybe more such informational plaques in High Falls than any other village its size in the state). I found out that the local cement rock was formed as a tidal settlement deposit more than 400 million years ago when the land we now tread was open sea floor. . . .

An intriguing idea: if Roebling hadn't lived in High Falls while building his suspension aqueduct for the D & H canal, decades later he might have searched in vain for the proper cement needed to build his great bridge to the future.

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