Levitz Family Farm

Along Beaver Dam Road near Grahamsville, this 112-acre farm in the town of Neversink was assembled from two sixty-acre parcels bought by Levitz family members in the early twentieth century. Harry Levitz, a New York City house painter, purchased the first lot in 1910 from a Christian farmer, and the second parcel was added in the early 1940s. The surviving buildings include a 1913 farmhouse built as a duplex for two families, a 1932 dairy barn from Sears Roebuck plans, milk houses, chicken coops and a brooder house. Stone walls, tree lines and field divisions still mark the earlier farm landscape. The farm matters because it shows how Jewish settlers in Sullivan County bought worn nineteenth-century farms and moved from subsistence farming to commercial dairy and poultry production, a pattern central to the county's economy. It has remained in agricultural use by one family for over ninety years.