This year marks the sixtieth year anniversary of the Livingston Manor Volunteer Ambulance Corps. Prior to 1962, the earliest of emergency ambulance service was provided by the railroad, hauling severely medically ill patients and accidents victims to either Middletown or New York City hospitals. With the opening of then-modern hospital facilities at both Monticello and Liberty in 1925, local ambulance service expanded beyond to merely dropping patients off at the local railroad station to catch the next scheduled train.

Here in Livingston Manor, as in other Sullivan County communities, the transporting of medical patients was performed by the village undertaker, the funeral wagon serving also as an ambulance, certainly not a good omen for the transported patient. Locally, providing that service were Manor undertakers Harley Russell and his son James.

With the opening of medical facilities in the county, the Russell undertakers remodeled its facilities in 1925, enlarging their parlors and creating new garage space. They then acquired the first documented motorized ambulance in the village, a fully equipped Meteor Ambulance. As the Livingston Manor Times described the new ambulance, “the interior is comfortably furnished in the newest and most approved manner, with cot, chairs for attendants and all necessary equipment.”