Since our inception in 2017 Foothills Arts Council, Inc. has offered art projects to this community to foster the idea that art is essential. We have also aimed to present our projects to fit in and support the community’s goals, as we understood them. We have had programs in Fulton and Montgomery and Schenectady Counties, and our next project is our most ambitious yet: a one-hour documentary titled “Amsterdam – Its History and People.”
The film will explore the history and appeal of the city’s geography focusing on the history of its migrations beginning with the Proto-Indians and ending with the Puerto-Ricans and Latin Americans.
As you can imagine, this is a large undertaking, and this is where you can help. On our website, you can help us meet our expenses by donating what you can to help defray the cost. Donations will go toward narrators, writers, directors, for instance, as well as film technicians and staff at all levels. All donations will go towards the entire production cost.
The city of Amsterdam’s history is a reflection of both the geology and geography of the Eastern Mohawk Valley.
Ten thousand years ago at the end of the last ice age what came to be known in recorded history as the Mohawk River Valley served as the conduit that released the melted waters of the Laurentide glacier. That sheet of ice had buried the earth for thousands of square miles. From western Alaska North to the arctic, south to the upper Midwest and east to Nova Scotia and Greenland the land was buried under miles of ice.
Then the earth gradually warmed and the melted waters from that ice broke through a ridge of what would come to be called the Appalachian mountains. The break, just west of a place the indigenous tribes would know as the settlement of Canajoharie, the water gouged a riverbed for some eighty miles east, then turned south for another hundred miles until it met the Atlantic Ocean. So were borne the Mohawk and Hudson River Valleys.
During succeeding centuries, human settlement came to the area. and the geography of the region grew in importance.
At first, the climate was too cold for year-round settlement, but as the climate warmed, groups began slowly to populate areas along the river banks where tributaries entered the swiftly flowing water.
With the growth in immigration from northern Europe in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, and the transition from the original thirteen colonies into an independent nation, the transplanted European settlers soon realized that the only navigable passage through the mountain range that stretched from Maine to Georgia was that provided by the Mohawk River. The Valley of the Mohawk thus became both a destination and a passage to create a new country whose settlers believed its destiny was to stretch from the Atlantic to the Pacific oceans. Such was the process by which the geology of the region thus had enabled the realization of a geographical and political dream.
Dave Northrup-screenwriter
Foothills Arts Council, Inc is a 501c3 non-profit. That means that any donation over $250 is tax deductible. We, of course, will gladly accept any amount that you might offer.
We look forward to hearing from you and to sharing our progress with you.
Thank you!