Thompson carries Catskills resort memory through Monticello

Thompson’s story begins before the resort postcards. The town history starts with Munsee Lenape presence before European settlement, then places farmers David Gray and Z. Hatch near Dutch Pond in 1749. William A. Thompson arrived in 1794, built a settlement near Albion, and gave the town its name.

Monticello adds the next turn. Thompson Together ties the Newburgh and Cochecton Turnpike to the village’s founding, which helps explain why this part of Sullivan County became a place people passed through, stopped in, and later came back to for vacation.

The Borscht Belt layer gives the town its most familiar echo. Sullivan County’s marker project began in Monticello, and that feels right: resort memory is not just old hotel photos in an archive. It is part of the way people still talk about the Catskills.

That span is what makes Thompson interesting. Dutch Pond, Albion, Monticello, the turnpike, and Borscht Belt markers are not one tidy story. They are a chain of arrivals, roads, hospitality, and memory. For someone passing through today, the town may look like a highway-and-village place. Under that surface is a long Catskills habit of welcoming, feeding, entertaining, and reinventing itself.