Before we closed on our home, I was determined to find out it’s history. I have stayed up countless nights, even till 4am just digging for more information.. and I did just that.
I call it ‘Project Clarke’.
The first step we took into researching our home was going on Rocklandcounty.gov & looked back at the land records. Through some tedious researching, it was found that our home was in quite a few hands including PREL (the notorious Orangetown developers) who had plans to demolish the home and build a road…but luckily that wasn’t the end result! As we searched till the very end of the webpage we saw the home was owned by a James V. Clarke. I felt a surge of excitement just knowing we found the man who lived here from the beginning.
Finally.
The super sleuths (Kyle & I) were on another mission to find out who James really was, what he looked like, who the family was & what this area used to look like before it became overdeveloped. Our local museum & archives (Orangetown Museum & Archives) was able to help us in our research. The town museum happened to have numerous photo albums, two diaries, a box of negatives.. we were in our GLORY and truthfully , I felt like a kid in a candy shop… we didn’t know where to start and didn’t know we were about to jump into a rabbit hole.
This was only the beginning.
OTown History 
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