Hudson Valley’s best-kept village has a lighthouse B&B and a sculpture park in the woods

Saugerties isn’t Beacon, and that’s the point

About 100 miles north of New York City, where the Esopus Creek slides into the Hudson River and the Catskill Mountains rise to the west, sits a village most people drive past on the way to somewhere else.

Budget Travel once put Saugerties on its list of the 10 coolest small towns in America, and if you’ve been to Beacon or Rhinebeck lately, you already know what the fuss is about. Saugerties has the same ingredients but none of the crowds.

The lighthouse alone is worth the drive.

Three centuries packed into 64 square miles

The name goes back to the 1650s, when a Dutch settler named Barent Cornelis Volge ran a sawmill here. “Saugerties” comes from the Dutch word for little sawyer.

German Palatine families followed in 1710, settling along the river at West Camp.

By the 1800s, the town had a full-blown industry: about 2,000 men quarrying bluestone and shipping it south to pave the sidewalks of New York City, Philadelphia and Boston.

Then in 1994, Winston Farm hosted Woodstock’s 25th anniversary concert, pulling in over 350,000 people for a weekend.

Walk Partition Street before you do anything else

Partition Street is the spine of village life, lined with brick and clapboard storefronts that have been here long enough to mean something. Smith Hardware has been open for over 100 years.

The Main-Partition Streets Historic District, listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1982, counts 78 contributing buildings, making it one of the earliest commercial districts in the country to get that designation.

On the first Friday of each month, shops and restaurants stay open late with special events, and the Orpheum Theater runs independent films year-round.

Sleep inside a working lighthouse on the Hudson

The red-brick Saugerties Lighthouse went up in 1869 at the mouth of Esopus Creek, replacing an 1838 structure that had seen better days. The Coast Guard shut it down in 1954, and for three decades it sat empty.

The Saugerties Lighthouse Conservancy bought it in 1986 and finished a full restoration by 1990. Now it runs as a living museum and bed-and-breakfast with two guest rooms done up in early 20th-century style.

You reach it by walking a half-mile nature trail through Hudson River marshland, but check the tide tables first. High tide floods the path.

Harvey Fite spent 37 years building this with his bare hands

In 1938, sculptor Harvey Fite bought a 12-acre abandoned bluestone quarry outside town.

He had just come back from Honduras, where he’d been restoring Mayan ruins, and something about that work changed the way he thought about stone.

He started building terraces, ramps, and platforms by hand, no mortar, no machinery. Over 37 years, it became Opus 40, a 6.5-acre interlocking sculpture capped by a nine-ton monolith.

He named it for the 40 years he expected the project to take. He died in an accidental fall in 1976, three years short of his goal.

The park also holds the Quarryman’s Museum and over 60 acres of meadows and forested trails.

Herons, turtles and an Esopus Creek trail worth your morning

The Esopus Bend Nature Preserve covers 161 acres along a sharp bend in the Esopus Creek, less than a mile from the Hudson. Four trails cut through northern hardwood-hemlock forest, restored meadow and wetlands.

The land was farmland not long ago, but 40-plus years without agriculture have brought it back. Blue herons work the shallows.

Hawks circle overhead. Turtles sit on every log worth sitting on.

If you’d rather be on the water than beside it, launch a kayak or canoe from the Saugerties Village Beach and paddle the creek from the waterline.

Paddle the Esopus and see the valley from the water

The Esopus Creek runs calm and smooth through the village before it joins the Hudson, which makes it good water for kayaking or paddleboarding at most skill levels.

You put in at the Village Beach at the end of South Partition Street, then follow the creek as it winds past herons, hawks and the kind of riverbank scenery that doesn’t look real from a car.

The creek connects to the Hudson, so you can extend the trip if the water and the day are right. It’s a view of the Hudson Valley that most visitors never see.

Meet 5,000 rescued farm animals on 150 acres

Since 2001, the Catskill Animal Sanctuary has taken in over 5,000 animals on 150 acres in Saugerties. Ten species live here: cows, pigs, chickens, goats, sheep, horses and more.

Weekend guided tours run 60 or 90 minutes from April through October, and the animals aren’t shy. Each one comes with a rescue story, and the staff knows them all.

If you want to stay longer, the sanctuary runs The Homestead, an on-site bed-and-breakfast where you wake up with goats and horses just outside the window.

September means garlic, and a lot of it

The Kiwanis Club of Saugerties has been running the Hudson Valley Garlic Festival every September since 1992, and it draws thousands to Cantine Field over two days.

More than 100 vendors show up with fresh garlic, garlic spreads, garlic pickles and garlic ice cream, which is exactly what it sounds like. Live music, cooking demonstrations and kids’ activities fill out the weekend.

All the money goes back to community causes.

Come fall, the town also runs the Mum Festival, a chrysanthemum celebration with art shows and live music spread across the village.

Kaaterskill Falls drops 260 feet in two stages

Drive west from Saugerties on Route 23A and you hit Kaaterskill Falls, a 260-foot, two-tiered waterfall that Hudson River School painters were putting on canvas in the 1800s.

It’s one of the tallest waterfalls in New York and one of the oldest tourist destinations in the state. The hike from the Laurel House Road parking area to the upper viewing platform is about 0.3 miles on a gravel path.

The Catskill Park, which overlaps part of Saugerties, adds hundreds of miles of trails. Overlook Mountain in nearby Woodstock has a fire tower with panoramic Hudson Valley views.

Equestrian shows, puppet theater and a year-round ice rink

Saugerties keeps a packed calendar for a town its size.

HITS-on-the-Hudson brings international show jumping competitions to the area, drawing riders and spectators from across the country.

The Saugerties Artists Studio Tour opens up working studios of dozens of local artists each year. On summer Wednesdays, Arm-of-the-Sea Theater runs puppet performances at Tina Charvas Waterfront Park.

Cantine Field, the town’s main recreation hub, has a year-round ice rink at Kiwanis Ice Arena. There’s almost always something going on, which is easy to forget for a town that feels this unhurried.

Saugerties rewards the people who slow down

Three centuries of history sit alongside working art studios, a lighthouse you can sleep in and mountains you can hike before lunch.

The town has grown in popularity over the past few years, but it still moves at its own pace. Independent bookstores, local galleries and longtime shops like Smith Hardware hold their ground on Partition Street.

River and mountain are both within minutes.

Whether you come for Opus 40, a weekend kayak on the Esopus, or just to walk a block and eat something good, Saugerties gives more than it advertises.

Plan your visit to Saugerties, New York

Saugerties sits about 100 miles north of New York City in Ulster County, off the New York State Thruway at Exit 20. The village center is walkable, with Partition Street and Main Street forming the commercial core.

The Rhinecliff-Kingston Amtrak station is about 15 miles south if you’re coming by train. Woodstock is just a few miles west, with more galleries and dining if you want to extend the trip.

The official websites for Opus 40, the Saugerties Lighthouse and the Catskill Animal Sanctuary each carry current hours and admission prices before you go.

This article was created with AI assistance and human editing.

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