Seager is a hamlet in the town of Hardenburgh in Ulster County, New York, United States. It stands in the upper Dry Brook valley of the Catskill Mountains, inside Catskill Park, at the southern end of Dry Brook Road. The United States Geological Survey records Seager as a populated place and names the Seager 7.5-minute topographic quadrangle for it. The hamlet takes its name from Hiram Seager, an early settler of the valley. A Department of Environmental Conservation parking area on Dry Brook Road is the trailhead for the yellow-marked Seager Big Indian Trail into the Big Indian Wilderness of the Catskill Forest Preserve.
Geography The USGS Geographic Names Information System locates Seager in Ulster County at and classifies it as a populated place. The feature appears on the Seager topographic map. Ground elevation at the GNIS point is about .
Dry Brook is a tributary of the East Branch Delaware River. The lower valley lies in Delaware County and the upper valley, including Seager, in the town of Hardenburgh in Ulster County. Graham Mountain rises south of the hamlet. Eagle Mountain and Big Indian Mountain stand to the east, on the divide between the Delaware and Hudson watersheds. The USGS has used the toponym for a water-quality station, Dry Brook near Seager, on the stream just below the present trailhead.
History Dry Brook was a farming valley by the nineteenth century. Hamilton Child's 1871–72 Ulster County gazetteer reported that the valley was settled from Connecticut before neighboring Beaverkill, and that the early families included the Seagers, Todds and Grahams. Local historian Ethel H. Bussy wrote that Samuel Merwin was claimed as a settler before 1800 and that Hiram Seager and Derrick Hynes located in the valley about 1800. The first town meeting in Hardenburgh was held on May 31, 1859. Older sources often spell the town Hardenbergh, after patentee Johannes Hardenbergh. New York State's 1993 unit management plan for the wilderness east of the valley lists Hiram Seager among the settlers who left their names on the map, alongside Derrick Haynes (Haynes Hollow) and Barney Rider (Rider Hollow).
Hemlock-bark leather tanning was the leading nineteenth-century industry in the surrounding Catskills. The 1993 plan says the business was more extensive in the town of Shandaken than in any other Ulster County town, with tanneries at Big Indian and Pine Hill. After the bark was cut out, sawmills operated on many streams in the unit, including several on Dry Brook. A Seager Mill was still a landmark on April 8, 1908, when Hardenburgh's highway commissioner discontinued the old Tappan Road "leading from the top of the mountains near Balsam Lake to the Seager Mill to Dry Brook".
The place remained a named settlement into the twentieth century. In a 1934 account of the Long Path, New York Post outdoors columnist Raymond H. Torrey described Seager as a "tiny hamlet" where the yellow trail from Biscuit Brook met Dry Brook Road, about from the West Branch of the Neversink River.
Recreation The Seager Parking Area is on Dry Brook Road south of New York State Route 28. It is the western access to the Seager Big Indian Trail (yellow markers) in the roughly Big Indian Wilderness, which occupies Forest Preserve land in the towns of Denning, Shandaken and Hardenburgh. The 1993 unit management plan recorded the lot as a five-car trailhead on private land outside the wilderness unit. The first of trail to state land at Shandaken Brook was used by verbal permission of the landowner. A trail register and the Shandaken Brook lean-to stand along that approach. From the junction with the blue-marked Pine Hill-West Branch Trail, hikers can continue toward Eagle Mountain or Big Indian Mountain.
The present trail is not the route shown in the Conservation Department's 1928 guidebook Catskill Trails. That edition listed a Seager-West Branch Trail, which followed the headwaters of Dry Brook into the col between Big Indian and Doubletop and then dropped to the West Branch of the Neversink, and an Elk Bushkill-Seager (Shandaken Creek) Trail. The Dry Brook headwaters segment was abandoned in the mid-1950s after a connection was built over Big Indian Mountain to the West Branch Trail.
See also Tappan Bridge Dry Brook (East Branch Delaware River tributary)
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