Wallkill is a hamlet (and census-designated place), generally identified as coterminous with ZIP Code 12589, telephone exchange 895 in the 845 area code and most of the Wallkill Central School District located mostly in the eastern half of the town of Shawangunk, Ulster County, New York, United States, but partly spilling over into adjacent regions of the Orange County towns of Newburgh and Montgomery.

The Waronawanka (Waranawankong), known to history as the Esopus Indians, were the Munsee tribe present in the region of the Shawangunk Grasslands Refuge.

They inhabited the Rondout-Wallkill Valleys/Shawangunk Mountain region southward to their boundary with the Murderer's Kill Indians (Moodna Creek, near Cornwall) and southwestward along the Shawangunks to their border with the Minisink tribe, near where present Interstate 84 crosses the ridge in western Orange County (Fried 2005).

A number of Indian tribes served as mediators between the Esopus and the Dutch during the Esopus Wars, including not only nearby tribes such as the Mohicans and Wappingers, but also the Mohawks, Senecas and Hackensack Indians, whose proximity to the major Dutch settlements at Fort Orange and New Amsterdam made them useful to both sides (Fried 1975).

[3] Wallkill is also a destination for international visitors to Watchtower Farms, which draws tens of thousands each year to a free guided tour of its printery.

[4] The Watchtower Society (a legal entity of Jehovah's Witnesses) has operated the facility since 1963,[5] initially to produce food cost-effectively for volunteer workers at its offices and printeries in Brooklyn, New York.

[8][9][10] Aside from those run for the federal government, Watchtower's Wallkill plant is the largest in-plant printing operation[11][12] in the United States.

B. Crowell and Son Brick Mould Mill Complex, Andries DuBois House, and Reformed Dutch Church of New Hurley are listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

[15] At the request of Watchtower, Muller Martini has designed a very "tour-friendly" layout of the machinery for efficient "visitor management".

At the annual meeting of the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society of Pennsylvania on October 5, 2002, an announcement was made that the Governing Body had approved the consolidation at Wallkill.

Two new MAN Roland Lithoman rotary presses were ordered, and the additional building to house them was scheduled to be ready by February 2004.

Later that month, the first hardcover books came off the new bindery line, which is over a quarter of a mile [400 m] long and consists of 33 machines connected by 70 conveyors.

As of November 2004, the new Wallkill Shipping Department has been processing congregation literature requests by means of a new computerized system that occupies 45 percent less space than its predecessor in Brooklyn.

Should a malfunction occur at any point in the line, the control system automatically compensates the speed of all active assemblies accordingly.

In that time, the press applies and dries the ink and cools the paper so that it can be folded into magazines that speed along overhead conveyors to be boxed and shipped to congregations.

Other presses are busy printing book signatures, which are swiftly moved to a floor-to-ceiling storage area until they are sent to the bindery.

Operating with the precision of a well-made watch, the printery’s high-speed, state-of-the-art machinery is a marvel of modern technology.