Karen Ranucci is a community-oriented gardener and former journalist who has been living at her historic property and farm in Olivebridge for the past 18 years. The legend of her property on Lower Sahler Mill Road originates from a larger-than-life man whose mission was simply stated: to desegregate America.

Father Divine, born circa 1876 and died in 1965, led a large following of parishioners and was one of the first people to advocate for desegregating Ulster County. Local author, SUNY New Paltz professor and Pulitzer Prize winner Carleton Mabee was the first historian to write a book about Divine’s influence in Ulster County, in a book titled “Promised Land: Father Divine’s Interracial Communities in Ulster County, New York”, published by Purple Mountain Press in 2008.

“Born in 1879 as George Baker, to a poor family of ex-slaves, in a rural Afro-American neighborhood in Rockville, Maryland… Divine grew up, historians believe, accustomed to poverty, alcohol abuse, and segregation,” Mabee wrote. “Rejecting racial segregation, he brought Blacks and whites together in defiance of Southern custom. Such unconventional behavior led, historians believe, to Divine’s being jailed, coming close to being lynched, and being pushed out of town.”

Divine was inspired by the “New Thought” religious movement, which enforced ideas that were “liberal, individualistic, [and] decentralized,” according to Mabee.

This streak of defiance was part of Divine’s character throughout the rest of his life. Ranucci said he was known for disrupting conventions in Ulster County when he lived here as well, alleging that “he had the [Olivebridge] farm stand and gas station and they said you have to pay taxes but he said he didn’t because he was the church, so he would only come up [to the farm] on Sundays when the tax collectors didn’t work.”

After leaving the South, Divine established himself and his Peace Mission in New York City, in Brooklyn and Harlem, and later in Sayville, Long Island, before coming to Ulster County in 1935. During that time, Mabee claims, only 1.7 percent of the population in Ulster County was Black, which was less than the state average and even that of the surrounding counties. The reaction from locals to Divine and his followers buying land in New Paltz and moving there fit the prejudicial mindset of many white Americans during pre-Civil Rights Movement society.

The mothers and fathers of New Paltz, Mabee wrote, “resented the very thought of Divine’s followers moving into their town.” Despite this, Divine sought to bring his movement to areas that were “highly white” and clearly prejudiced against Black people because, according to Mabee, he wanted to desegregate them and create interracial societies where Black and white people could live without conflict.

Within a few years, Divine was beginning to change the overwhelming sentiment in the village; by this time Divine had enlisted his followers to purchase properties for his mission in Stone Ridge, Kingston, Saugerties, Milton, West Park and Krumville. The farm in Olivebridge which Ranucci now owns was purchased by Divine in 1935 and was some 175 acres with two medium-sized houses and a large barn in between. All buildings are still on Ranucci’s property to this day.

A big part of Divine’s mission was to provide free food to those who needed it, and his farms in Ulster County were “producing so many chickens, eggs, watermelons, and vegetables that Peace Mission trucks were carrying them daily to New York,” Mabee wrote. He added that “there was so much cabbage that a truck carrying it to New York, one thousand heads at a time, was obliged to make several trips carrying nothing but cabbage.” The food was delivered to Divinite rooming houses, restaurants, groceries and pushcarts, with Ranucci adding that he “fed around 1,000 people a night in Harlem with the produce they got up here.”

There is no question that Divine’s mission made an impact on Ulster – his efforts to bring the races together in the county were both progressive and, in a way, foreshadowed and established the highly diverse county we live in today. In its heyday, Father Divine’s Peace Mission was, according to Mabee and his research, not only “the only organization in America” that achieved “racial integration” during that time, but his efforts to provide free food to the unemployed people of Harlem cemented him as creating the nation’s “most successful religious movement.”

Ranucci seeks to keep the mission of Divine’s farm alive at her eponymously named Sister Divine Farm, which sits on 38 acres and provides her community with access to fresh, affordable produce while enlisting the help of community members to teach their craft to create a fully donation-based farm. “We wanted to keep that spirit going and the spirit of the way the community came together to fight development,” Ranucci said.

A former TV and documentary journalist who worked at organizations like NBC, the Today Show, other news outlets and a media center in Chinatown where she taught free video workshops to the community and lent them equipment to make their own documentaries, Ranucci has always been surrounded by community-oriented work. She and her family have been living part-time in the area for 18 years but moved up here full-time during the pandemic to escape the city. She’s always loved to garden and recently got her Master Gardener certificate from Cornell Cooperative Extension, where she also volunteers on their hotline.

The farm stand, Ranucci said, was built by a neighbor after seeing how much produce she was growing. “We had goats and couldn’t handle them so my daughter advertised on Nextdoor and one of our neighbors took them. We kept bringing food for the goats from the garden, and he said, ‘I think you need a farm stand.’”

When explaining the idea behind the farm stand, Ranucci said, “It's pay whatever you want. I have a ceramic jar my daughter made in the fifth grade so people will pay whatever they want and put money in the jar. While I’m working in the garden, people will pull up to the farm stand and I will invite them into the garden, and I’ll give them lettuce and herbs. We’re just able to share and people are very appreciative, and they leave whatever money they think they can. It’s a great feeling because people stop by.”

In her garden, the produce Ranucci grows includes anything from pollinator-friendly plants for the bees, herbs like cilantro, parsley and tulsi, several kinds of kale, lettuce, squash, peas, carrots, tomatoes, potatoes, beans and peppers. There are also fruits like apples, pears, paw-paws, cherries, and truly everything in between. When asked if her farm was affected by the spongy moth infestation, Ranucci replied that they ate the leaves off her apple trees, which are now no longer able to produce fruit this year. But she’s been attentive to make sure that the rest of her crop is unaffected.

The farm currently offers different workshops, all related to cultivation and agriculture. They, too, are donation-based, with all of the funds going towards the individuals Ranucci finds to conduct them.

The farm also has an artist-in-residence who lives at another historic site right across the street from the farm: the old Krumville one-room schoolhouse/Krumville Reformed Church. The story behind this site deserves an article all its own, but essentially the historic site was rebuilt into a replica of the original building and granted residential status. Even though Ranucci fought to have it be a community space as it had historically been, she was unable to get approved and wanted the site to still function communally in some way.

Through her artist-in-residence program, artists work on their craft while living rent-free; at the end of their stay, they present what they produced to the community. Their only requirement to stay in the building is that they have to help work on the farm for one hour each day. Her current resident is an herbalist, photographer and fiber artist and got along so well with Ranucci that she was invited to stay as long as she’d want, continuing to work with Ranucci in her garden daily.

Although they cannot advertise the farm, those interested should check out the farm stand on Lower Sahler Mill Road in Olivebridge. Carleton Mabee’s book referenced here can be found and purchased at Purple Mountain Press, a publishing company that has been specializing in books about the Hudson Valley region and the surrounding areas for over 30 years, https://www.nysbooks.com/.