The Catskills have had more comebacks than Tony Bennett.

The first wave came in the late 1880s when summer vacationers filled boarding houses. Decades later, Jewish families arrived by train to play shuffleboard and swim in opulent hotels. Remember Woodstock in the 1960s? That’s when the hippies showed up. Nowadays, aging Brooklyn hipsters are bringing their Urban Outfitters aesthetic to Kerhonkson and Fallsburg.

But while much has been made of the mountainous area northwest of New York City, its most recent rebirth as a summer escape (Hamptons, anyone?) is as much a story of resilience as it is one of reinvention. “People keep trying to impose different things on this swath of land,” said Victoria Wilson, a senior editor with Knopf publishing who bought a home in Sullivan County 30 years ago. “It is different, but it remains the same. It exudes something that is a little mysterious.”

Phase one: The Victorian era

The Times has chronicled the changing culture of the Catskills, long a home to artists and the independent-minded. Dutch immigrants settled there in the 1600s where they grew wheat and rye, making way for dairy and egg farming later on.

A new group of artists and writers would arrive in the 1800s. The artist Thomas Cole settled there in 1825 after emigrating from Lancashire, England, seven years earlier, bringing a number of others with him. A painter and engraver, Cole became a founder of the Hudson River School, one of the country’s first great American art movements.