From Supervisor to Storyteller
Matt Veitch Charts a New Course as Saratoga’s City Historian
From Making History to Preserving It
For nearly two decades, Matt Veitch has been a central figure in Saratoga Springs civic life, shaping the city’s present and future from his seat on the Saratoga County Board of Supervisors. Now he is turning his attention from making history to preserving it.
“I’m going to learn more about this in my future life,” Veitch said at the outset of our conversation, hinting at a transition that is both a professional pivot and a personal homecoming. As Saratoga Springs’ new City Historian, he brings a perspective rooted not only in public service but in five generations of family history interwoven with the city’s own story.
To understand Matt Veitch’s commitment to Saratoga Springs, you have to start with his family. His passion for local history is not academic or distant; it comes from stories told at kitchen tables and in backyards, grounded in real places that remain part of the city’s landscape today.
The Veitch family arrived in Saratoga Springs in the 1920s, drawn by the city’s booming racing scene. “They were racetrack people first,” Matt explains. His great-great-grandfather was a steeplechase owner, trainer, and jockey, and his sons followed him into the business. The most prominent among them was his great-uncle, Sylvester Veitch, a Hall of Fame trainer whose name is etched into the sport’s history.
The family’s connection to the city deepened through a classic Saratoga love story. The Veitch sons, in town for the summer meet, needed their silks and jockey clothes washed. They brought them to Burnham’s Hand Laundry on Rock Street, a business operating out of the building now known as the Olde Bryan Inn. There, Matt’s great-grandfather met his great-grandmother, who worked at the laundry. They married, and the building that brought them together eventually became the Veitch family home.
Matt’s connection to that site is vivid and personal. His father grew up in the house, and he remembers family reunions in the side yard—the same space now filled with restaurant seating.
“My family lived there for many, many years. My grandfather and my uncle owned it together. The Veitch family sold that house to Steve Sullivan and the folks from the Olde Bryan Inn in the late 1970s. There are home movies of me running around that side yard as a kid.”
In his new role, Veitch hopes to trace those roots even further back. While the Veitch name has been in the city for a century, the Burnham and LaMontain families they married into “go back further than that,” he notes. He wants to understand how those earlier families came to own the house and how their paths converged with his own.
This heritage—anchored in specific addresses, lasting landmarks, and a strong sense of place—helped forge a feeling of responsibility that would eventually lead him into public service.
The Unofficial Historian: A Career in Public Service
Veitch’s 18-year tenure on the Saratoga County Board of Supervisors was more than a series of policy debates and budget votes; it was an immersion in how government actually works over time. In an era that prizes speed, he became fluent in the slow, deliberate rhythm of public decision-making.
“The world of government works in a way that today’s society doesn’t,” he says. “It’s a lot slower. You need long-time people there to shepherd an issue from beginning to end—to know the arc of a five- or ten-year program.”
As others cycled in and out of office, Veitch became a keeper of institutional memory. He could recall why an initiative started, who opposed it and why, and how compromises were crafted. That context proved invaluable on long-range efforts, such as the multi-year push to adjust the county’s occupancy tax.
“For maybe the last four years, I was the historian on the council,” he says. “Even though I wasn’t a commissioner, I was the one who could go to a commissioner and say, ‘Back in 2009, we had this conversation,’ or ‘In 2012 we talked about this issue.’ That’s where the knowledge was.”
This instinct to remember and connect past and present did not emerge in a vacuum. It flowed naturally from his family’s example. His grandfather directed the city’s Urban Renewal Agency. His father was a teacher. One brother became business manager for the Department of Public Works; two others served in the police department.
“There was always this sense of duty for public service and to get involved in your community,” Veitch reflects.
By the time he left office, he was not just a policymaker. He had become, informally, the person others turned to when they needed to know not only what the city had done, but why and how it had done it. That experience laid a clear path to his next role: moving from the maker of policy to the official preserver of the city’s story.
The Next Chapter: Saratoga Springs City Historian
Veitch’s appointment as Saratoga Springs City Historian is a natural culmination of his personal and civic life. It formalizes a passion he has carried for years and aligns it with a role explicitly dedicated to memory, context, and public access.
3.1 A New Appointment and a Clear Vision
Appointed by Mayor John Safford, Veitch approaches the historian’s office with both humility and clarity. His goals fall into two intertwined commitments:
Deepening his own understanding.
“I have kind of narrow topics that I know well,” he admits. “But the amount of other topics out there is huge.” He looks forward to exploring areas of Saratoga’s past that are new to him, expanding his expertise beyond the subjects he has already studied in depth.Serving as a resource for others.
Just as important, he wants to support residents in their own explorations of the past. “My job is going to be to help them get the best information they can—to build the best project they’re working on, whether it’s family histories, house histories, or something else.”
3.2 Unlocking the Archives for a Modern Audience
Veitch sees the historian’s office not as a private archive but as a public asset that needs to be opened up and modernized. A priority is digitizing fragile documents, photographs, and records to preserve the originals while making them easier to access.
He also plans to establish a social media presence for the office, sharing images and stories drawn from the city’s vast photographic collection.
“It’s public stuff,” he says. “It’s not my stuff. At the end of the day, people should have access to these old photos. I’m really excited about that.”
3.3 Inside the Historian’s Office
The City Historian’s office, located in the Visitor Center, includes a secure vault—complete with an old-style bank combination lock—housing official village records dating back to the mid-19th century, along with books, clippings, and photographs.
Stepping into that space for the first time, Veitch felt both exhilaration and reverence.
“All I want to do is open up all the boxes and see what’s inside,” he recalls. “And at the same time, I don’t want to touch anything, because it’s all so delicately organized.”
That blend of curiosity and care will guide his work, particularly as he continues to explore complex subjects like urban renewal, where his family’s history intersects with the city’s most contested chapter.
4. Confronting a Complex Past: The Urban Renewal Legacy
Of all the topics that draw Veitch’s attention, the era of Urban Renewal may be the most revealing of his approach. It is both civic history and family history: his grandfather led the city’s Urban Renewal Agency during the 1960s.
As a former president of the Saratoga Springs Preservation Foundation, Veitch is strongly committed to protecting historic buildings. Yet he is equally determined not to flatten Urban Renewal into a simple story, whether of heroes or villains.
“You can’t say that urban renewal was the greatest cure for all our problems—because that’s not true,” he says. “And you can’t say it was absolutely, 100 percent racist—because that’s not true either. The real history is somewhere in the middle.”
He is clear, however, about what was lost. A vibrant African American community on the west side was largely erased. Streets vanished. Black-owned businesses like Jack’s Harlem Club, and the city’s only two Black churches—AME Zion and Mount Olivet Baptist—were displaced from their historic locations.
One advantage Saratoga has, he notes, is an unusually thorough documentary record.
“The record-keeping for urban renewal was amazing,” he says. “It gives us a detailed account to work from, and that means we can have an informed debate in the community about what happened.”
His goal as historian is not to settle that debate once and for all, but to equip the community with the evidence and context needed to wrestle honestly with its own past.
Conclusion: A Steward for Saratoga’s Story
Matt Veitch’s journey has come full circle. It began with a childhood spent in a house that is now one of Saratoga’s best-known historic landmarks, continued through nearly two decades of public service, and now returns to the archives and stories that first drew him in.
For Saratoga Springs, placing the city’s history in the hands of someone who is so plainly a product of that history is both rare and fitting. With one eye on fragile paper records and another on digital platforms and community projects, Veitch is poised to ensure that Saratoga’s rich, complicated story is not only preserved, but shared—and continually reexamined—by the people who call the city home.
