Mountaindale is a hamlet in the town of Fallsburg in Sullivan County, New York, United States, situated at an altitude of 1,010 feet.Mountaindale changed drastically in character from a rural farming hamlet, beginning with the arrival of the New York, Ontario & Western Railroad, and the name change of the local post office, in December 1880, from Sandburg to Mountain Dale. Around that time a number of farmhouses that were more hotels than farms opened, and beginning in 1899 the ethnic character of the area began to change from predominantly gentile to predominantly Jewish.By the time of the crash of 1929, several Jewish welfare organizations were engaged in resettling Jewish families whose breadwinners were unable, due to health reasons, to make a living in the New York City sweatshops, onto subsistence farms in the Mountaindale area. While good-hearted this effort may have been, in some cases it simply replaced urban poverty with an even more extreme form of rural poverty.