Today Wilson’s Deli, at the far end of Ellenville’s Canal Street, is known for being just about the best deli in the area. Certainly Wilson’s draws regular customers from far and wide, who come for the sandwiches, of course, but also for the custom-made salads, especially the potato salad.

However, the building itself has a long history and connects back to other eras, other very different versions of the village of Ellenville. Tom Gil places his family into that context.

“My grandfather bought the business, back in the 60s. It was more of a market, a grocery store at that time.”

Indeed, it sold Texaco gasoline at some point in the mid-20th century and was one of Ellenville’s half-dozen grocery stores. But the building itself goes back to some point in the mid-19th century.

In around 1891, Patrick Hanley, an immigrant from Ireland, opened a dry goods business in the building, as it was then. He combined that business with a livery stable Wawarsing Town Historian Henry “Bucky” Green has a photo of it in this state.

The building had previously hosted Bloomers Store, a long-standing Ellenville business in the latter part of the 19th century.

The intersection of Canal Street, Irish Cape Road, and Center Street was known as “the Points,” or even “Five Points.” Irish Cape Road crossed the Beer Kill on a pair of small bridges at that time. The stream was later constrained into one channel and one bridge.

Today’s Wilson’s sits in the surviving part of the original structure. At the rear of Wilson’s there were stables, set down below, which was Hanley’s livery business side. Tom Gil has an interesting window hanging in the deli on the wall. About a foot high, or deep, and five long, it seems an odd shape for a window until you learn what it overlooked.

“It was set right down at the bottom of the back wall,” Gil explained. “So you could look through it and down into the stables, which were built on the lower level out the back.”

Hanley’s livery business existed at the tail end of the horse and buggy era. Ten years later, the Texas Fuel Company was started in Beaumont Texas, a harbinger of the end of horse-drawn traffic and the origin of Texaco whose gasoline would be sold from that site decades later.

In the late 19th century, though, Ellenville was a village for horses, and the streets were unpaved. On a quiet evening in any street the sound of horses' hooves and the creak of wagon wheels were the traffic noise of the time. Where the Ellenville schools are today, especially the baseball field, was where the Ellenville “Driving Park” was established in the 1860s. The Driving Park was a circular track, half a mile around used for carriage and buggy rides, or just to exercise a horse. The Ulster County Fair was held in the Driving Park in that era.

Back at the western end of the village, the property that became Hanley’s Livery and Dry Goods store had been recorded in the 1875 map of Ellenville from the County Atlas of Ulster New York, which is one of our best records of that era. On that map the property is accorded to one J.M. Low, who also owned the parcel across Canal Street that today is an auto repair and sales business.

The other map available to us today is the Burleigh Litho pictorial map of the village. On this map the property, by then hosting Bloomer’s Store, is visible on the upper right side where the Points are shown. Just a few years later, Mr. Hanley bought it and established his store and livery stable. The Driving Park is very clear down in the northwest corner of the village. Many other details, especially of well-known buildings today, are visible, which makes this map particularly fascinating. For example, the grand Reformed Church, erected in 1858 on Canal Street, still lacks its magnificent steeple. Only St. Andrews Catholic Church boasted such a steeple in 1887. At that time, St Mary’s, the other Catholic Church was still in existence, today that site is occupied by an Autozone outlet.

Ellenville, which began around 1800 with a lean-to structure on the south east corner of a crossroads of narrow trails that became Liberty Square, was a late arrival in the area’s villages and towns, but thanks to the glassworks, tanneries, and later the knife factory, Ellenville blossomed into a quintessential rural New York village with distinct municipal pride.

Dropping into Wilson’s today, for the lunch special, the great potato salad, a sandwich, take a glance at that window on the wall, literally a window back in time to an era of horse-drawn traffic, great hotels and inns, when the D&H Canal and the O&W Railroad were both in business and Ellenville was a small, vibrant industrial hub on the edge of the Catskill Mountains.