When a fossil-fuel project threatens to unravel small rural communities in Upstate New York, residents take inspiration from their ancestors — 19th-century farmers who put on calico robes and leather masks and went to war with the landlords.
The Anti-Rent War of the 1840s was one of the strangest insurrections in American history. To resist the patroons who held legal title to vast tracts of the Hudson Valley, ordinary tenant farmers stitched together long robes from calico fabric, fixed spooky leather masks to their faces, and rode out as the "Calico Indians" — a flamboyant, theatrical rebellion against feudal land law that ultimately rewrote it.
A century and a half later, when a destructive fossil-fuel project threatens to unravel life in those same small rural communities, residents look back to the rebellion their ancestors staged on the same ground. Defending their rights and their environment, modern-day, ordinary Americans rediscover the power of community organizing — and the radical, progressive history hidden in their own town.