NRPLUS MEMBER ARTICLE {U} pstate New York used to be known for religious revivals. For about a century, it has mostly been known for economic decline.

Researching my family’s history, I saw that the first Dougherty in my lineage to have made the trek was Robert Dougherty, my grandfather’s grandfather, who immigrated from Ireland in the worst year of the famine — Black ’47 — to Wurtsboro, N.Y., in Sullivan County. He was seven years old. He started his life helping on a neighbor’s barge until he could buy his own. He made enough of a living as a boatman to build a large home along the Delaware and Hudson Canal. Robert and his wife, Sarah Malone (from County Clare), filled that home with ten children and a barn with a few horses. Then came the New York, Ontario and Western Railway. The family enterprise closed, and the family started to disperse. Many of those children moved to the cities.

I grew up in the suburbs of the city — first in New Jersey, then back in New York. My own childhood, like those of many others, featured little sorties back upstate for ethnic indoctrination. My father-in-law, in his childhood, went upstate to be surrounded by other Slovaks. My Jewish friend from Catholic school went to Jewish camps. I went to Gaeltacht weekends for Irish-language immersion sponsored by Daltaí na Gaeilge. The thing that made upstate fit for this was its natural beauty, cheap land, vacated large houses and institutions, and the fact that it was just a couple of hours from the thriving megalopolises that stretch across I-95.

There are technical definitions about where upstate New York begins. I think you should ignore the maps and trust the spiritual and moral exactitude of your author. Upstate New York begins on Route 22, somewhere between the Watchtower Educational Center with the farms owned by the Jehovah’s Witnesses in Patterson and Daryl’s House Club, owned by Daryl Hall of Hall & Oates, in Pawling. The former marks itself as a place where the religious ructions of the 19th century continue on. The latter is an undisputed gift of the Almighty, where the greatest blue-eyed soul man invites his favorite acts to play for a small room. From this point up to Quebec, and a short boat ride west to Ohio, is upstate in its terrible beauty.

It should be an American version of Germany’s Bavaria, a network of small, beautiful, and productive cities and bountiful farmland separated by mountains, glacial lakes, and seemingly endless dark forests. Instead of chocolate, apple-cider donuts.

And there are spots where upstate almost works. Cooperstown pulls in tourists who want America’s pastime as it was, in the past. For years, almost no matter which smartphone you chose, you were touching glass that was developed in Corning’s New York labs, although it was manufactured in Kentucky, South Korea, and Taiwan. Around the Finger Lakes there is a thriving industry of winemakers and, thanks to a few well-chosen New York subsidies, even a few distillers as well — all of them far more accessible and friendly than what you’ll get in California’s wine country.

Upstate’s place-names suggest a very different, unique conception of American civilization — at once closer to, prouder of, and more ennobled by its roots in America’s first peoples. Upstate New York still acknowledges our confederate heritage, that is the confederation of Cayuga, Onondaga, Seneca, Oneida, Tuscarora, and Mohawk. And it combines this with a profligate reappropriation of classical Greece and Rome. And so Troy, Utica, Syracuse, Camillus, Cicero, Lysander, and Pompey are part of the Empire State, ringed by those Native names Chautauqua, Genesee, and Niagara.

Here, the Syracuse that reminds us of Archimedes sits in a county named for the Oneida who broke with the rest of the Iroquois to join the rebels, making friends with George Washington and Marquis de Lafayette. Corinth, which reminds us of Paul preaching to the Romans, sits in the county of Saratoga, the Mohawk term for “the hillside country of the quiet river.” Taken together, upstate suggests an American civilization revivified by its rough dependence on untamed land yet freer to pursue the great political truths of Aristotle and Marcus Aurelius.

And that is why upstate New York is so sad. The opioid crisis afflicted all places. But when New York City experienced a 45 percent increase in annual drug deaths, parts of upstate New York saw an 84 percent increase in the same. In Erie County, drug-related deaths jumped 256 percent between 2010 and 2015. The state has fed upstate New York false promises and false hope in rumored casino projects, but it can barely do the basic management of Lake Erie to keep it from overflowing into Rochester. Instead of American Bavaria, we have the rust-belt Northeast — and the political class in Albany has no incentive to fix it so long as finance in New York City keeps state coffers full to the brim. In recent years Americans have been fleeing to places just as cold and beautiful as New York — but out West, in the halo of Mormon civilization, the greater Deseret of Idaho, Utah, and Montana. I suppose upstaters today are imitating Joseph Smith and heading out for wider pastures, lower taxes.