Sanctified Landscape: Writers, Artists, and the Hudson River Valley, 1820–1909 9780801464232

Table of contents :
Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1 The Tourists’ River: Experiencing the Hudson Valley
2 The Artist’s River: Thomas Cole
3 The Writers’ River: Washington Irving and N. P. Willis
4 The River in a Garden: A. J. Downing
5 Change and the Search for Continuity at Midcentury
6 Elegy for the Hudson River School: Jervis McEntee
7 The Naturalist’s River: John Burroughs
8 A River in Time: Preserving Landscape, Celebrating History
Conclusion
Notes
Index

Citation preview

Sanctified Landscape



Sanctified Landscape  Writers, Artists, and the Hudson River Valley, 1820 –1909 DAVID SCHUYLER

C ORNELL U NIVERSITY PRESS Ithaca and London

Publication of this book was made possible by the kind support of Franklin & Marshall College, and Furthermore: a program of the J.M. Kaplan Fund Copyright © 2012 by Cornell University All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850. First published 2012 by Cornell University Press Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Schuyler, David. Sanctified landscape : writers, artists, and the Hudson River Valley, 1820–1909 / David Schuyler. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8014-5080-8 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Hudson River Valley (N.Y. and N.J.)—History—19th century. 2. Hudson River Valley (N.Y. and N.J.)—Description and travel. 3. Landscape protection—Hudson River Valley (N.Y. and N.J.)—History—19th century. 4. Hudson River Valley (N.Y. and N.J.)—In literature. 5. Hudson River Valley (N.Y. and N.J.)—In art. I. Title. F127.H8S34 2012 974.7'303—dc23 2011045945 Cornell University Press strives to use environmentally responsible suppliers and materials to the fullest extent possible in the publishing of its books. Such materials include vegetable-based, low-VOC inks and acid-free papers that are recycled, totally chlorine-free, or partly composed of nonwood fibers. For further information, visit our website at www.cornellpress.cornell.edu. Cloth printing

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For my brothers and sisters and all of our family

Contents

List of Illustrations Acknowledgments

ix xi

Introduction 1

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

The Tourists’ River: Experiencing the Hudson Valley The Artist’s River: Thomas Cole

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The Writers’ River: Washington Irving and N. P. Willis

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The River in a Garden: A. J. Downing 69 Change and the Search for Continuity at Midcentury

92

Elegy for the Hudson River School: Jervis McEntee 110 The Naturalist’s River: John Burroughs

133

A River in Time: Preserving Landscape, Celebrating History Conclusion 173 Notes 177 Index 199

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Illustrations

Map of Sanctified Landscape’s geographical center 4–5 H. Adlard, View near Anthony’s Nose (Hudson Highlands) 12 G. K. Richardson, View from Hyde Park (Hudson River) 19 R. Brandard, View from the Mountain House, Catskill 21 J. C. Bentley, The Two Lakes and the Mountain House on the Catskills 24 Thomas Cole, ca. 1845 29 Thomas Cole, River in the Catskills 44 Detail of Washington Irving and His Literary Friends at Sunnyside, painting by Christian Schussele 48 S. Richardson, engraving of an old Dutch burgher 50 Sunnyside—On the Hudson, ca. 1850 55 Nathaniel Parker Willis, n.d. 58 Calvert Vaux, “North-East View [of Idlewild]” 65 T. Addison Richards, “Up the Glen, from the Foot-Bridge” 66 Andrew Jackson Downing, ca. 1852 70 Andrew Jackson Downing, “Landscape Gardening, in the Graceful School” 73 Andrew Jackson Downing, “Landscape Gardening, in the Picturesque School” 74 Andrew Jackson Downing, “View of a Country Residence, as Frequently Seen” 75 Andrew Jackson Downing, “View of the Same Residence, Improved” 75 Andrew Jackson Downing, “Residence of the Author, near Newburgh, N.Y.” 77 Plan of Downing’s property 78 North Pavilion, Montgomery Place 82 The Conservatory, Montgomery Place 84

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“Washington’s Head-Quarters at Newburgh” 102 John H. Duncan, Tower of Victory at Washington’s Headquarters, Newburgh, N.Y. 108 Jervis McEntee, ca. 1867 111 Calvert Vaux, Design for the Studio and Residence of Jervis McEntee, ca. 1854 114 Joseph S. Harley, engraving after drawing by Jervis McEntee for William Cullen Bryant’s Among the Trees 122 John Burroughs, ca. 1909 134 Riverby 138 Slabsides 141 Benson J. Lossing, “Stony Point and Verplanck’s Point” 153 The Half Moon with Crew on Forecastle 165 “Float No. 54: Father Knickerbocker Receiving” 167 Newburgh Ceremonies: Half Moon and Clermont in Bay 168 Color plates follow page 82 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14.

Thomas Thomas Thomas Thomas Thomas Thomas

Cole, Falls of Kaaterskill Cole, The Course of Empire: The Savage State Cole, The Course of Empire: The Pastoral or Arcadian State Cole, The Course of Empire: The Consummation of Empire Cole, The Course of Empire: Destruction Cole, The Course of Empire: Desolation

Unknown artist, Sunnyside from the Hudson R. Wallis, Entrance to the Hudson Highlands, near Newburgh Asher B. Durand, Landscape—Scene from “ Thanatopsis” Jervis McEntee, Grey Day in Hill Country Jervis McEntee, The Fire of Leaves Jervis McEntee, Early Spring Jervis McEntee, Winter Storm C. Cousen, The Palisades, Hudson River

Acknowledgments

E

ach day as I walk to school Marsha Schuyler’s voice reminds me that today is a gift to be cherished. As I greet my students I often think of how much my teachers have meant and mean to me. Ken Jackson, John Kasson, and Charlie Beveridge have shown me, by the example of their teaching, their scholarship, and their lives, what an honor it is to share with my students what I have learned. I am deeply grateful to Franklin & Marshall College, both for the institutional support of my research and for my students, who have listened to and challenged my ideas of the American landscape in general and of the Hudson River in particular. As a Hackman Scholar, Molly Briere was enormously helpful at an early stage of my research, and I am proud that she transformed what she learned about the Hudson into an exceptional honors thesis on the Pioneer Valley of the Connecticut River. Micah Wood helped in the tedious work of checking everything and getting the typescript ready for copyediting. I am also grateful to the deans and members of the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, National Gallery of Art, where I was an Ailsa Mellon Bruce Visiting Scholar at the beginning of this project, and to the Winterthur Museum, where I was a Robert Gill Research Fellow. I am also indebted to many libraries and archives that have shared their collections with me. As is true of so many scholars, I am also grateful to institutions that have digitized their holdings, which made research less a travelogue than I anticipated. Jonathan Harding, curator of the Century Association, was especially helpful. I am, as usual, in the thrall of librarians at Shadek-Fackenthal Library, Franklin & Marshall College, particularly Mary Shelly, who is a marvel at obtaining materials through interlibrary loan. Archivists Christopher Raab and Michael Lear have been enormously helpful in this as in many other projects. My colleagues in American studies have generously supported my efforts, as have other friends at Franklin & Marshall College. Alison Kibler and Greg Kaliss

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read some of the following pages in their early stages, usually at times when I felt particularly frustrated and needed a fresh eye. Thanks to them, to our department coordinator, Peggy Bender, to my other colleagues, and to everyone else who helps make teaching at Franklin & Marshall so special. Peter Potter was my editor for a previous book, A City Transformed, and I greatly appreciated his efforts. It was an easy decision to entrust this book to Peter, who combines high scholarly standards with a seemingly innate ability to help an author do his or her best work. Kitty Liu was enormously helpful in reorganizing the illustration captions when Peter made the decision to have a color gallery. Marian Rogers copyedited the book with skill and care. Susan Specter oversaw production efficiently, and Dave Prout compiled the index. Friends who have read all or part of this book and taken time from their lives to give me the benefit of their criticism include Charles Beveridge, Mark Carnes, Tom Daniels, Alice Drum, Harvey Flad, Timothy Gilfoyle, Jed Horne, and Tom Lewis. Daniel Peck provided comments that were as thorough, creative, and challenging as any author could ever hope to receive. John K. Howat, Nancy Siegel, and Michael Clapper read the chapters on Thomas Cole and Jervis McEntee, while Alan Wallach gave me a perceptive critique of the chapter on Cole. J. Winthrop Aldrich offered valuable criticism of the final chapter. I could not have brought this book to completion without the support of John A. Fry, who stood with me during difficult times and has been steadfast in his friendship ever since. Michael Birkner and Matthew Pinsker, kindred spirits though historians of different interests and eras, are always eager to talk about projects under way and anything else. Friends of many years—Mary Sies, Chris Silver, Jack and Barbara Bauman, Howard Gillette, Gretchen Sorin, Sally Griffith, George Thompson, Mel and Laura Hess, Michele Bogart, Russ and Janet Roseman, Genie Birch, Sid and Betsey Marland, Tom Ryan, and Jim Baughman—have given generous support in ways I could not possibly describe. I hoped to complete this book while Whitfield J. Bell Jr. was with us. In the midst of our busy lives we somehow managed to find time for lunch frequently, and even as he neared his centenary Whit’s mind had an acuity that I still find marvelous. Whit was a terrific historian, librarian, and executive officer of the American Philosophical Society, as well as a raconteur who made me feel as if I were present in discussions or events that took place decades before I was born. He also made Marsha Schuyler, who was not a historian, a welcome part of the conversation. Whit’s embrace of Marsha, and his friendship generously offered to me, are gifts that I cherish. This book is for my brothers and sisters and their families, who still live in the Hudson Valley and whose love enriches my life every day. To all I am deeply grateful.

Sanctified Landscape



Introduction

T

his book takes its title from a passage in the landscape painter Thomas Cole’s “Essay on American Scenery.” Writing in 1836, when many Americans were more likely to look to the future than to the past, Cole insisted that the United States had a glorious history, one that was especially evident in the Hudson River valley. The valley, he wrote, was full of “historical and legendary associations” because “the great struggle for freedom has sanctified many a spot.” Although few of his contemporaries were as appreciative of this history as the English-born Cole, over the course of the nineteenth century a number of individuals would come to share his sense of the important intersections of landscape and history that define the Hudson River valley and its people. Joining Cole in the celebration of the river were writer Washington Irving, landscape gardener Andrew Jackson Downing, historian Benson J. Lossing, and painter Jervis McEntee, among others, who collectively defined the Hudson as America’s river.1 As Cole’s words suggest, the Hudson Valley was important to the development of an American national identity in the nineteenth century. The United States was a very different place when Cole published his “Essay” than it would become a century later. The trans-Mississippi West was still largely unsettled, and the West Coast was not yet part of the nation. At a time when Americans were only beginning to learn about and understand their land, artists and writers as well as tourists found in the Hudson Valley new ways of thinking about the human relationship with the natural world. Here, in the writings of Irving and James Fenimore Cooper, American literature first became embedded in the American landscape. Here, American painters developed a stylistic idiom that became known as the Hudson River School, which was widely recognized as the first truly national style of art. Here, through the influence of wealthy families that built tasteful houses and ornamental gardens, and through Downing’s influential writings, the Hudson Valley became the iconic

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American landscape, the model that readers of national publications emulated in building their own dwellings and landscaping their grounds. Here, with the beginnings of historic preservation and the efforts of historians such as Lossing in recording the battles and places of the Revolutionary War, American memory, our self-awareness as the first new nation, gained coherent expression. As the century advanced, and as landscape and history became increasingly intertwined in the national consciousness, a regional identity grounded in literature, art, memory, and folklore took shape in the Hudson Valley. This book explores the Hudson Valley at this pivotal time in American history. Its focus is the literary and visual culture of a small group, really an educated elite. The first key theme is how their attitudes toward the landscape evolved in response to the tremendous economic, social, and environmental change the nation was experiencing. Indeed, at the very moment when artists and writers were exploring the aesthetic potential of the Hudson Valley, the transportation revolution and the rise of industrial capitalism were transforming the national economy, with far-reaching effects on towns and villages along the river. Competition from midwestern farms drove many Hudson Valley husbandmen to shift from wheat, rye, and other staples to dairy products and raising vegetables and fruits for urban markets. Small river villages almost overnight became cities as industrialism reached the valley in the two decades before the Civil War, and large numbers of emigrants from Ireland escaped famine at home to power America’s mills and build its infrastructure. Extractive industries, most notably lumbering and quarrying, adversely affected the ecology and scarred the landscape. Collectively, these developments led Cole and the small group of individuals who are the subject of this book to decry what they considered the senseless destruction of the natural world. A second key theme is the importance of historical memory, which became increasingly inseparable from an appreciation of the landscape. James Fenimore Cooper’s 1821 novel, The Spy, took as its subject the American Revolution in Westchester County, the neutral ground between British forces quartered in New York City and George Washington’s troops guarding the strategically essential Hudson Highlands. The Spy is fiction, of course, but its pages are populated with real individuals whose efforts secured American independence, and it introduced a new generation of readers to the importance of the Hudson Valley in the Revolutionary War. As the century progressed, and residents experienced dramatic change, many found in their local and national history a sense of identity in place and time. In retrospect it seems appropriate that historic preservation emerged in the Hudson Valley. The first building in the United States preserved for its historical significance, a vernacular stone farmhouse in Newburgh where Washington had lived during the anxious months the nation was awaiting the outcome of negotiations to end the Revolutionary War,

I NTRODUCTION

was acquired by the State of New York in 1850, three years before Ann Pamela Cunningham launched the effort to preserve Mount Vernon.2 A third theme is the domestication of the Hudson Valley. Irving, Cole, the writer Nathaniel Parker Willis, Downing, McEntee, and the literary naturalist John Burroughs all lived in or built houses and gardens that overlooked the river. Although these houses varied in architectural style, each took advantage of river scenery and civilized the landscape. Through their writings, their celebrity, and their art, these men promoted an aesthetic firmly grounded in the Hudson Valley as a model for the nation to follow. At the beginning of the nineteenth century the Hudson Valley was defined not just by the landscape but by a series of localities where people lived and worked. Certainly in 1820 most residents thought of themselves as members of the small villages that dotted the banks of the river, even as some of them were engaged in trade with distant places, especially the fast-growing city at the mouth of the Hudson. As the century progressed, farmers, quarrymen, and millworkers were increasingly involved in an economy that extended from the local to the regional and national. So were landscape painters, most of whom lived along the river but moved to New York City in the late fall of each year and remained there working on the art that they hoped to sell at the annual spring exhibition of the National Academy of Design or from their studios. Writers such as Irving, Lossing, and Willis relied on New York publishers to bring their works to a national and even international audience. The Hudson Valley was not insular or simply part of New York City’s hinterland but existed in a symbiotic relationship with the metropolis to the south. Over the course of the nineteenth century, at various times and with varying degrees of commitment, there emerged a growing recognition that the valley was more than farmsteads and local communities—that it was a place of transcendent importance to a regional and national cultural identity. During the 1830s, Albany jurist and horticulturist Jesse Buel, together with Downing and other organizers of the Horticultural Association of the Valley of the Hudson, came to understand that a regional vision was essential to their efforts. The circular announcing the formation of the association explained that existing horticultural societies were “too local” in orientation, whereas the new association embraced “the whole of the river counties of the Hudson.” Region trumped local community, as the broader geographical expanse provided a larger range of growing conditions and afforded opportunities for comparative study. The Horticultural Association failed to accomplish its ambitious goals because of Buel’s death and Downing’s emergence as a writer and landscape gardener, which consumed more and more of his energy, but it established at least a model for regional cooperation that was rooted in the valley. In later years other organizations, such as the American Scenic and Historic Preservation Society,

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A detail showing the geographical center of Sanctified Landscape. The map, extending from below Tarrytown at the south to Hudson at the north, identifies important homes and landscape features discussed in the text.

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I NTRODUCTION

promoted regional strategies for land preservation. At the end of the Hudson-Fulton Celebration in 1909, bonfires sequentially and simultaneously blazed from north of Albany to New York City, a symbolic statement to residents that the Hudson River, which on one level separated them, also united them, that what they had in common transcended local community. The result was a sense of place that embraced the region.3 The geographical expanse of the Hudson Valley that is at the heart of this book extends from Washington Irving’s Sunnyside, in Tarrytown, to Thomas Cole’s Cedar Grove, in Catskill. It embraces the Hudson Highlands and the Catskill Mountains, which were cherished in the first half of the nineteenth century as iconic landscapes that attracted artists, writers, and tourists in search of picturesque beauty. These reference points reflect the interdisciplinary nature of this study and also testify to the significance of the two men in shaping popular perceptions of place. In his Knickerbocker History of New York and in stories such as “Rip Van Winkle” and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” Irving invested the Hudson Valley with a folklore and history that still give meaning to everyday life. Many of Cole’s best-known paintings are of the Catskills, and he wrestled with the impact of economic development on his beloved mountains. The distance between Irving’s cottage and Cole’s Cedar Grove is approximately one hundred miles, and over the course of that expanse the landscape changes dramatically. From the veranda at Sunnyside you can look south to the Palisades, a visually stunning wall of rock on the Jersey shore, opposite Manhattan and the Bronx, that was the site of a major landscape preservation battle in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, while on a clear day from the belvedere atop landscape painter Frederic E. Church’s Olana, directly across the river from Cole’s Cedar Grove, you can see as far as Albany, roughly thirty miles to the north. Between these points the river expands to more than three miles in width at Tappan Zee and squeezes between mountains only a few hundred yards apart in the Highlands. The landscape of the valley changes from alluvial plain to rolling hills to Appalachian spine. Then, just north of Newburgh, the Shawangunk range comes into view to the west, and not many miles farther the southern Catskills loom. The Hudson flows, or rather courses back and forth, through some of the most majestic scenery in the world. As far north as Poughkeepsie, sometimes farther in severe droughts, the river is a tidal estuary, with salt water from the Atlantic mixing with freshwater flowing south, which led Native Americans to call the river “the water that flows two ways.”4 The ebb and flow of the river, the current beneath the surface, the geology through which it passes, all suggest a permanence about the Hudson. Yet the human presence is ubiquitous, and almost four centuries of settlement by European Americans has

I NTRODUCTION

altered much of the adjacent landscape even as it has polluted the river and fundamentally changed its ecosystem. This book sketches an important part of this history, from the tourist experience beginning in the 1820s through the creation of Palisades Interstate Park and the Hudson-Fulton Celebration in 1909. I narrate these developments through three thematic chapters as well as a series of biographical portraits of individuals who lived along the river and who wrote about or painted it. My intent is to explore a set of interrelated ideas: how nineteenthcentury Americans experienced the Hudson Valley, as residents, tourists, or creative artists; what meanings the river conveyed to those who lived along its banks or visited to explore its beauties; why residents and visitors considered the landscape and its history so special; and how, from Thomas Cole’s time through the end of the century, a small group of artists and writers struggled to reconcile economic development with stewardship of the landscape. Ultimately, the preservationist ethos Cole articulated in his “Essay on American Scenery” became the mission of the American Scenic and Historic Preservation Society and the Palisades Interstate Park Commission. Under the visionary leadership of George W. Perkins, the Palisades were saved, as was much of the land along the west bank of the river stretching north to Bear Mountain, some forty miles distant.5 But the preservation of historic sites and land adjacent to the river was, in important ways, a limited if visionary success. A person standing on the veranda at Irving’s Sunnyside in 1909 would see a spectacularly beautiful landscape, with the Palisades to the south and the Highlands to the north framing the Tappan Zee, but if that person walked across the railroad tracks and stood at the bank of the river, a different reality would make itself pungently known. By the dawn of the twentieth century the Hudson had become a tidal cesspool. Communities up and down the river were dumping human and industrial waste into its waters, and residents turned their backs on what should have been their most cherished resource. The Hudson River School of landscape painters was largely forgotten in the first half of the twentieth century, as was the career of Downing. Sales of Burroughs’s books declined toward the end of his life, and his style of writing was eclipsed by newer trends in literature, the same fate that befell Willis’s reputation a generation earlier. Even the accomplishments of Irving and Cooper were less appreciated in the new century. Nevertheless, those who wrestled with the meanings of the Hudson River valley in the nineteenth century, who appreciated what Irving called its “transcendent beauties,” established the foundation for the environmental ethos that would emerge in the twentieth century.6

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1 The Tourists’ River E XPERIENCING THE HUDSON VALLEY

I

n The Pioneers (1823), the first of James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking novels, Natty Bumppo tells his young friend Oliver Edwards that in all his travels he had found only one place more beautiful than the vicinity of Lake Otsego: the Catskill Mountains. These were the mountains Edwards had seen on his journey up the Hudson, which Natty described as “looking as blue as a piece of clear sky, and holding the clouds on their tops, as the smoke curls over the head of an Indian chief at the council fire.” Standing at the edge of the Catskill escarpment, a thousand feet above the valley floor, Natty looked out upon “all creation.” Leatherstocking explained that the river, eight miles to the east, was in sight from the Highlands at the south to Albany at the north, a distance of approximately ninety miles. From the height and distance of the escarpment, he added, the river seemed inconsequential. Natty also described a second site, which, he conceded, in later years he had come to appreciate even more than the sublime prospect from the escarpment: “There’s a fall in the hills, where the water of two little ponds that lie near each other breaks out of their bounds, and runs over the rocks into the valley.” Cooper was so taken with the scenery that he gave the unlettered Natty a vernacular aesthetic vocabulary: There the water comes crooking and winding among the rocks, first so slow that a trout could swim in it, and then starting and running like a creater [sic] that wanted to make a far spring, till it gets to where the mountain divides, like the cleft hoof of a deer, leaving a deep hollow for the brook to tumble into. The first pitch is nigh two hundred feet, and the water looks like flakes of driven snow, afore it touches the bottom; and there the stream gathers together again for a new start, and maybe flutters over fifty feet of flat rock, before it falls for another hundred, when it jumps about from shelf to shelf, first turning this-away and then turning that-away, striving to get out of the hollow, till it finally comes to the plain.

THE TOURISTS’ R IVER

Natty speculated that no more than a dozen white men had gazed upon Kaaterskill Falls, which he considered “the best piece of work that I’ve met with in the woods” and evidence of the “hand of God . . . in the wilderness.” 1 Although only a few white men had gazed upon Kaaterskill Falls at the time of Natty’s fictional visit, almost overnight the eastern part of the Catskills became one of the most explored and revered American landscapes. In 1823, the year Cooper published The Pioneers, a group of merchants from Catskill, New York, acquired a seven-acre tract of land known as Pine Orchard, obtained from the state legislature a charter of incorporation, and began erecting a “large and commodious hotel.” That frame building, known as the Catskill Mountain House, stood on table rock close to the edge of the escarpment, overlooking the Hudson. Historian John Sears has demonstrated that there were three prerequisites for the emergence of tourism in nineteenth-century America: the growth of an urban class that had the money and leisure to begin exploring the countryside; the construction of an adequate transportation system; and the development of an infrastructure to provide safe, comfortable accommodations for travelers. In the aftermath of the Supreme Court decision Gibbons v. Ogden (1824), which declared the Livingston monopoly on steamboat navigation on the river unconstitutional, several new lines were organized. According to The Tourist, by 1830 there were eight lines operating twenty-nine steamboats on the Hudson, which both increased the efficiency of travel and led to significant decreases in cost. Improvements in transportation made the Hudson Valley and the Catskills accessible and popular destinations for tourists. The emergence and public embrace of landscape painting as a particularly appropriate form of American expression in the arts were other important developments in promoting landscape tourism, as was the publication of books such as Timothy Dwight’s Travels in New England and New York (1822), the William Cullen Bryant-Asher B. Durand collaboration American Landscape (1830), and guidebooks such as The Tourist (1830), Sketches of the North River (1838), and The New York State Tourist (1842), all of which acquainted readers with the Hudson Highlands and the Catskill escarpment, which quickly became favorite haunts for painters, poets, and tourists seeking to experience the American landscape.2 In addition to these prerequisites for tourism, Kenneth Myers has pointed out the importance of the development of a way of seeing and thinking about scenery, which resulted both from the “importation of contemporary landscape art and literature from abroad” and from American artistic and literary efforts, which “represented landscape appreciation as a natural or intuitive ability.” Landscape tourism emerged in the early nineteenth century as a key to the development of an American national identity. To be sure, the United States lacked the monuments, ruins, and centuries of tradition that provided Europeans with a sense of identity in place and

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time, and Sidney Smith’s biting remark, in an 1820 essay in the Edinburgh Review, wondering if anyone ever read an American book or looked at an American painting, was a devastating blow to cultural nationalists. But if the United States could not compete with centuries of European achievement in the arts, it had Nature in abundance—Nature, always with a capital N and always in the feminine, Nature as the source of America’s distinctiveness as a culture. Moreover, the American landscape was older than all the institutions of European civilization. In Home as Found (1838), Cooper’s fictional Eve Effingham, who had spent virtually her entire early life in Europe, was amazed by the eloquent if misnamed Silent Pine that stood on the banks of Lake Otsego, and equated it with all the institutions of European civilization: “When [William] the Conqueror first landed in England this tree stood on the spot where it now stands! Here, then, is at last an American antiquity!”3 With the development of an infrastructure for tourism—the steamboat lines, carriage services, and hotels to accommodate visitors—as well as the publication of promotional pamphlets and other publicity heralding the attractions of mountain scenery, upper- and middle-class Americans, especially from large cities, began taking tours in search of the picturesque. Most tourists, whom Andrew Jackson Downing described as the “travelling class,” were not seeking a wilderness experience but one that provided reasonably comfortable accommodations and the opportunity to visit well-known places. They were first-generation consumers of the American landscape, both in the sense that building facilities for tourists transformed that landscape and because many tourists undoubtedly thought of scenery as a commodity to be experienced.4 Until the construction of railroads, river transportation provided the most comfortable access to the interior of the continent. As steamboats plied the Hudson, the first tourist destination was the Highlands, roughly forty miles north of Manhattan, where the river passes through a series of mountains. The distance from Dunderberg, at the southern gate to the Highlands, to Breakneck Ridge and Storm King Mountain, in the north, is approximately fifteen miles and features some of the most dramatic scenery in the eastern United States. Auguste Levasseur, secretary and companion to the Marquis de Lafayette during his 1824–25 visit to the United States, was especially struck by the Highlands, a place, he wrote, “where nature only shows herself under strange forms, and in sombre colours,” and which evoked “phantoms” and “sinister sighings.” Although someone who cherished the remnants of feudalism and the castles of the Middle Ages might favor the scenery of the Rhine, Levasseur wrote, “for one who prefers nature still virgin and wild, there is nothing so beautiful as the banks of the Hudson.” John Fowler, an Englishman who sailed north on the Hudson aboard the steamboat Albany in 1830, marveled at the varied landscapes he passed: “I was so hurried on from the sublime to the beautiful, that before the image of one

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had impressed itself upon the mind, the other appeared to take possession, and every successive change but deepened the thrill of admiration and rapture.”5 Washington Irving, whose fertile imagination invented much of the folklore of river and region, explained in Diedrich Knickerbocker’s History of New York (1809) that the Hudson was once an enormous lake extending from the Highlands some forty miles to the north. The mountains were “one vast prison, within whose rocky bosom the omnipotent Manetho confined the rebellious spirits who repined at his control.” There, “bound in adamantine chains, or jammed in rifted pines, or crushed by ponderous rocks, they groaned for many an age.” Eventually the waters of the lake broke through the mountains and flowed south toward the ocean, along the way freeing the spirits once imprisoned there and leaving the mountains behind as “stupendous ruins.” According to Knickerbocker, those spirits continue to inhabit the Highlands and cry out in haunting voices that reverberate throughout this stretch of the river.6 Sloops and steamboats sailing north on the river passed Dunderberg, or Thunder Hill, which the English traveler James Silk Buckingham described as “strikingly picturesque.” The entrance to the Highlands impressed him as romantic and wildly beautiful. Near Peekskill the river curves sharply to the northwest, a passage nineteenth-century navigators called the Horse Race, toward Bear Mountain and Anthony’s Nose. Gustave de Beaumont, Alexis de Tocqueville’s traveling companion, described Anthony’s Nose as epitomizing “all that is most picturesque.” Venerable Diedrich Knickerbocker attributed its name to Antony van Corlear, a trumpeter whose nose was “a very lusty size.” During Peter Stuyvesant’s journey up the Hudson, Antony, having finished his morning ablutions, was leaning over the quarter-railing, staring at his reflection in the water below. “Just at this moment the illustrious sun, breaking in all its splendor from behind a high bluff in the highlands, did dart one of his most potent beams full upon the refulgent nose of the sounder of brass—the reflection of which shot straightaway down, hissing-hot, into the water, and killed a mighty sturgeon that was sporting beside the vessel!” The crew cooked the sturgeon and found it to be excellent. Then, when Peter Stuyvesant tasted the fish and learned its history, he “marveled exceedingly; and as a monument thereof, he gave the name of Antony’s Nose to a stout promontory in the neighborhood.” 7 Together with the landscape painter Thomas Cole and the landscape gardener Andrew Jackson Downing, Washington Irving was central to the emergence of the belief that the Hudson River valley was a special place in the first half of the nineteenth century. In “Rip Van Winkle” and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” Irving adapted European folktales to the American scene, vividly portraying the people and the landscape in words that conveyed to readers an appreciation for the history and folklore of the Hudson Valley. In doing this he both captured contemporary attitudes

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H. Adlard, View near Anthony’s Nose (Hudson Highlands). Engraving after a drawing by William Henry Bartlett. Nathaniel Parker Willis, American Scenery; or, Land, Lake, and River Illustrations of Transatlantic Nature (London, 1840), 1: pl. 46. Archives and Special Collections, Dickinson College, Carlisle, Pa.

toward landscape and shaped how present and future generations would think about the Hudson Valley. Congregational minister and former Yale president Timothy Dwight, who was a keen observer of the American scene, repeated Irving’s account of the ill-fated Antony Van Corlear, and also the story that the river was once a lake dammed by the Highlands, when he visited the Hudson Valley two years after the publication of the Knickerbocker History. In the decades since the publication of the Knickerbocker History (1809) and the Sketch-Book (1819–20), which included “Rip Van Winkle” and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” and gained its author international acclaim, Irving’s tales have become inseparable from the popular perception of the Hudson Valley’s history and folklore and, as part of a vernacular tradition, have been transformed by other storytellers.8 From Anthony’s Nose the river changes direction again, toward the northeast and West Point, one of the first stops on the American Grand Tour. At the steamboat dock at Cozzens’ Landing, a mile south of the academy grounds, visitors could take

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a carriage up the steep hillside to Cozzens Hotel, a popular destination for tourists. The original hotel, which The Tourist praised as a “fine spacious House,” had been at West Point, but in the 1840s it was relocated to a bluff above the Hudson at Highland Falls. A large structure set near a precipice overlooking the Highlands, Cozzens could accommodate more than five hundred guests, who came to take advantage of the hotel’s extensive pleasure grounds, walk along paths to spectacular overlooks or streams cascading through ravines, or enjoy elite society. Downing attested to the popularity of the original hotel in 1835: “None of the fashionables” he wrote, “think their summer’s tour complete until they have loitered away a day or two at ‘Cozzens,’ falling in raptures with the captivating, though (at that place) stern and majestick beauty of the Highlands.” Willis Gaylord Clark advised travelers to spend a day at West Point, though, as his comments were limited to the quality of food and wines, he was apparently more interested in creature comforts than scenery. Artist and writer T. Addison Richards described the second Cozzens as “a spacious and elegant summer hotel.” Hudson chronicler Wallace Bruce considered it “one of the finest landmarks on the river” and praised the majestic view from the veranda. Other hotels and boardinghouses were constructed nearby to provide additional accommodations for the increasing number of tourists.9 Alternatively, passengers could steam to the dock at West Point and stay at a smaller hotel on the academy grounds that welcomed official visitors as well as prominent tourists. West Point was the American shrine, the sacred place where American independence hung in precarious balance during the dark days of the Revolution. Fowler, for example, was charmed by sites important in the “glorious struggle for independence” and took pleasure in “beholding the hallowed grounds where the great and the brave had fought and fallen.” The very topography that made the Highlands an advantageous location for the river’s defense also made it a spectacularly scenic landscape. Almost every author of travel accounts was effusive in describing the landscape of West Point and vicinity. Frances Trollope, for example, judged the scenery magnificent; Gustave de Beaumont found the Highlands to be “one of the most beautiful spectacles and one of the most imposing tableaus” along the length of the Hudson; and James Silk Buckingham reported that “few prospects can be imagined more romantic, more stirring, or more beautiful.” In the text accompanying twenty aquatints after paintings by William Guy Wall in Hudson River Port Folio (1821–25), John Agg similarly waxed poetic over the history as well as the setting of West Point: “Every spot is rendered sacred by association with times and circumstances which ‘tried men’s souls,’ and which now live only in memory, or rather, in history.”10 Agg was wrong: that history was not a dim memory but was alive to Americans in the first half of the nineteenth century. Echoing Thomas Cole’s assertion

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that the Revolutionary War had sanctified the Hudson Valley, Benson J. Lossing described the river as possessing “some of the finest scenery in the world,” which was “enhanced in interest to the student of history by the associations which hallow it.” O. L. Holley, author of The Picturesque Tourist (1844), a popular guidebook, described the Highlands as “classic ground, as many of the points or eminences in view from the river are celebrated in history for being the scene of stirring events during the struggle for American independence.” An advertisement in yet another guidebook noted that the “historic associations of these mountain summits with the early struggle of the Fathers of Liberty, combine, with the beauty of river and mountains, to render this vicinity peculiarly interesting and attractive.” All schoolchildren in New York learned the events of the Revolution, and particularly those that took place on the battlegrounds of their state. Hill’s Hudson River Port Folio, Nathaniel Parker Willis’s American Scenery (1840), Lossing’s Pictorial Field-Book of the Revolution (1850), and numerous guidebooks all described British general Henry Clinton’s foray into the Highlands in October 1777, when his troops captured forts Clinton and Montgomery. Part of Clinton’s army ventured as far north as Esopus (present-day Kingston), which the British burned, an event that was familiar enough to American readers that Cooper could assume they would understand Natty Bumppo’s account of watching the fire from the Catskill escarpment.11 When Clinton learned of the British defeat at Saratoga and decided to return to New York City, American revolutionaries, who knew the strategic importance of the Highlands, quickly rebuilt the fortifications in the mountains under the direction of the Polish volunteer Thaddeus Kosciusko and Colonel Rufus Putnam. Fort Putnam, which stood on a promontory northwest of the defenses Clinton’s troops had damaged, protected the rebuilt forts Clinton and Montgomery. In the early nineteenth century, nearby residents began removing stone from Fort Putnam to reuse in building. Although the government eventually acted to preserve the site, it was so compromised that it stood as a majestic ruin. As tourism became a national pastime, Fort Putnam became a favorite destination, cherished by nineteenthcentury Americans as a sacred place in the struggle for independence. The aspiring landscape painter Thomas Cole made several sketches of the ruins of Fort Putnam during his 1825 journey up the Hudson and painted A View of Fort Putnam shortly after he returned to New York City, and Willis published an engraving of the fort in American Scenery. From West Point, Washington’s engineers extended a great chain and boom across the river to Constitution Island, which throughout the remainder of the war prevented British ships from passing through the Highlands. As the war dragged on, a disgruntled Benedict Arnold conspired with Major John André to surrender the fortifications at West Point to the British, and only André’s capture by three militiamen in Westchester County prevented the British from regaining control of the Highlands and perhaps changing the outcome of the war.12

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Timothy Dwight, who as a chaplain during the Revolutionary War had been stationed at West Point, returned to the Hudson Highlands in the fall of 1811. From West Point he crossed to the east bank and hiked north to Sugarloaf Mountain. Dwight described the view in rhapsodic terms: at Newburgh Bay to the north, the river was almost two miles wide, but upon reaching the “magnificent cliffs” of Storm King and Breakneck mountains it narrows precipitously as it enters the Highlands. “The grandeur of this scene,” Dwight wrote, “defies description.” The Highlands simply captivated the Congregational divine, who struggled to find a vocabulary adequate to the landscape: “It is difficult to conceive of anything more solemn or more wild than the appearance of these mountains.” After describing the immense forest whose deep brown color he likened to universal death, and clouds at sunset that “imparted a kind of funereal aspect to every object within our horizon,” Dwight concluded by observing: There is a grandeur in the passage of this river through the Highlands, unrivaled by anything of the same nature within my knowledge. At its entrance particularly and its exit, the mountains ascend with stupendous precipices immediately from the margin of its waters, appearing as if the chasm between them had been produced by the irresistible force of this mighty current, and the intervening barrier at each place had been broken down and finally carried away to the ocean. These cliffs hang over the river, especially at its exit from the mountains, with a wild and awful sublimity, suited to the grandeur of the river itself.13

Dwight was an astute chronicler of the American landscape, but he was essentially seeking evidence of the progress of civilization in the United States. He measured the transition from barbarism to a higher form of life by the neatness and industry of residents and by the settling of Protestant churches in small towns and villages. In words that anticipated and undoubtedly influenced Downing’s writings a generation later, this conservative social critic judged the state of society by the streetscapes, buildings, and fields settlers had imposed on the landscape. Dwight was convinced that “uncouth, mean, ragged, dirty houses constituting the body of any town will regularly be accompanied by coarse, groveling manners. The dress, the furniture, the mode of living, and the manners will all correspond with the appearance of the building and will universally be in every such case of a vulgar and debased nature.” At stake in the physical transformation of the landscape was the fate of social order, of culture, in the new nation.14 Agg echoed Dwight in perceiving the landscape in terms of the progress of civilization. In the text of The Hudson River Port Folio Agg too sought evidence of neatness and cultivation, and expressed surprise that many parts of the Hudson Valley were still untamed. Describing the view from Fishkill Landing (present-day Beacon) south toward West Point, he found little evidence of the civilizing process.

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There were few dwellings of any sort throughout the Highlands, let alone ones that testified to the good taste of occupants. What buildings he observed were “thinly scattered over the landscape, and appear rather to add to the solitariness of the scene than to lend animation.” The Highlands represented, to Agg, “a wide field for the industry and enterprise of the pioneer.” He was certain that readers would be surprised to learn that “immediately on the verge of a noble stream, communicating with the most populous and commercial city of the Union, such extensive tracts of land should yet be found, which have never known the touch of the ploughshare, nor yielded any growth but the forest oak and mountain pine.”15 Neither Agg nor most other popular writers describing the Hudson Highlands in the 1820s and 1830s apparently realized the extent to which the mountains had been reforested in recent years—how much logging had occurred to provide fuel for the foundry at Cold Spring and the steamboats that traveled up and down the Hudson. Agg nevertheless expressed approbation for what he termed “a spirit of enterprise [that was] traversing this great State, out of which continual changes start forth to astonish and delight the traveler.” Only the poetic verse of the Old Testament prophet Isaiah seemed adequate to describe this transformation: “Here is a voice in the wilderness—here the crooked places have been made straight, and the rough places plain; the valleys exalted, and the mountains leveled; here, as with the rod of Moses, the rock which has been stricken has poured forth waters in the desert; and where loneliness and sterility reigned, are now to be found the blessings of a fertile soil and an opulent population.”16 This was a vision of prosperity that would result from the transformation of the landscape, from the labors of residents following the Old Testament injunction to take possession of and subdue the earth. A decade after the publication of Hudson River Port Folio, Downing published two essays in the New-York Mirror that likewise proclaimed the superiority of cultivated nature over the sublime, of pastoral landscape over wilderness. The first led visitors to the summit of Mount Beacon, on the east bank of the river just above the Highlands. Named for the signal fires that alerted Washington’s troops to the movements of the British army during the waning months of the American Revolution, Mount Beacon was, to Downing’s untraveled eye, one of nature’s “most majestick thrones.” Comparing the view favorably to better-known prospects in the Catskills, including Pine Orchard, the site of the Catskill Mountain House, he added that from Mount Beacon, “in every direction the country is full of beauty, and presents a luxuriant and cultivated appearance.” The second essay was a reverie at Dans Kamer, a flat rock that projected into the Hudson north of Newburgh. The northernmost point of Newburgh Bay, this was the place where Peter Stuyvesant and his crew were “most horribly frightened . . . by a gang of merry roistering devils,” which in his Knickerbocker History Irving immortalized

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as the Duyvel’s Dans-Kamer—the Devil’s Dance Chamber. Downing, who admired Irving greatly and praised Knickerbocker for preserving the “rich old legends and antiquarian scraps” of the river’s history, expressed sadness at the “extinction of the thousand tribes of our fellow-beings.” Nevertheless, he celebrated the progress, the improvement, that had taken place in recent years. The canoe had given way to the tall sloop and the steamboat, the “wild yell of the savage” had been replaced by the ringing of the church bell, and where wigwams once stood were “a thousand cheerful homes gleaming in the sunshine.” What best characterized the changes wrought by civilization, Downing implied, was the domestication of the landscape, the establishment of homes, farms, and villages: the “once dense wilderness,” he wrote approvingly, “has disappeared under the hands of civilized man.” The author of The Hudson Illustrated with Pen and Pencil (1852) similarly measured progress through economic development: “Instead of the wild desolation of the savage, the eye is now greeted on every side by the indications of happy industry and civilization.”17 N. P. Willis, who wrote the text to accompany William H. Bartlett’s illustrations for American Scenery, was similarly captivated by the Hudson Highlands. He described the landscape at West Point as the most strikingly beautiful river scenery in the United States and wrote evocatively of the mountains that rose so precipitously on the Hudson’s banks. Nevertheless, perhaps drawing on Cole’s assertion that American associations were those of the present and future, Willis contrasted European and American scenery in terms of what was and what would be. If what best characterized the Old World landscape was its history, the distinguishing feature of the New World was its potential for development, a transformation, ironically, antithetical to the very scenery he was describing in the text accompanying Bartlett’s handsome images. Gazing upon an “untrodden and luxuriant” valley, he wrote, the archetypal American would see not natural beauty but the “villages that will soon sparkle on the hill-sides, the axes that will ring from the woodlands, and the mills, bridges, canals, and railroads, that will span and border the stream that now runs through sedge and wild-flowers.”18 The writings of Dwight, Agg, Downing, and Willis reveal a crucial dichotomy that would remain central to the Hudson Valley throughout the nineteenth century. Dwight captured this best, celebrating the sublime scenery of the Highlands, yet also the material progress that was taming the land. Agg, whose text accompanied reproductions of Wall’s paintings, similarly framed progress as beneficently transforming the very landscape he celebrated, as did Downing and Willis. This tension between an appreciation of the natural landscape and improvement was perhaps the most difficult challenge facing residents of the Hudson Valley. Indeed, evidence of the civilizing process that these authors celebrated abounded as steamboats passed through the northern gate of the Highlands. The topography along the river became rolling

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countryside, a rich agricultural landscape dotted every few miles by a village or thriving town. Agg described Newburgh as “a very conspicuous figure in the scenery of this celebrated river,” a community of approximately five hundred houses that was a prosperous seat of commerce. “In point of scenery,” Willis added, “Newburgh is as felicitously placed, perhaps, as any other spot in the world.” Hudson chronicler Benson J. Lossing similarly appreciated the scenery at Newburgh and praised its “aspect of mingled grandeur and beauty.” A major tourist destination there, often described as a patriotic shrine, was the Hasbrouck house, a simple, vernacular fieldstone dwelling where George Washington had lived during the long months between military victory at Yorktown and the Treaty of Paris. Just to the west was Temple Hill, where the Continental army was quartered in 1782–83, an area, Lossing noted, that was “made memorable by events of the war for independence.” Travelers passed Fishkill Landing and the spine of the Appalachians on the east bank, opposite Newburgh, which was dominated by Mount Beacon. The anonymous author of an early guidebook celebrating the Hudson River and its new east bank railroad described the view from Mount Beacon, with the Highlands to the south, the Shawangunk range to the west, and the Catskills to the northwest: “Within this circle the materials of the beautiful and the picturesque are arranged with all the grandeur, the softness, the beauty of detail, that the most fastidious connoisseur of fine scenery can desire.” A dozen miles to the north the traveler reached Poughkeepsie, on the east bank, which was an important shipbuilding site for the Continental navy during the American Revolution, and shortly thereafter Hyde Park, the estate of New York City physician David Hosack, with its handsome grounds designed by Belgian émigré André Parmentier. Hyde Park was widely known for its famous view northwest across the “broad, tranquil, and noble river” toward the Catskill Mountains. With the mountains looming in the distance, the traveler approached Kingston, on the west bank, which was the capital of Revolutionary New York and where legislators drafted the state’s first constitution. Tourists steaming north on the river next encountered the east-bank estate Montgomery Place, a Federal-era house overlooking the Hudson, which was built in 1804 by Janet Livingston Montgomery, widow of Revolutionary War general Richard Montgomery, and was often described as a historic shrine. Also on the east bank was Robert Donaldson’s Blithewood, an image of which Downing chose as the frontispiece for his Treatise on the Theory and Practice of Landscape Gardening (1841).19 Many river travelers who first encountered the Catskills from a distance commented on the majesty of the range, the history of the region, and the qualities of light and shadow that created a mystique for the mountains. Washington Irving recalled that when he first sailed north on the Hudson, as a boy, he encountered an old Indian trader who stirred his imagination with tales and legends of the river valley.

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G. K. Richardson, View from Hyde Park (Hudson River). Engraving after a drawing by William Henry Bartlett. Nathaniel Parker Willis, American Scenery; or, Land, Lake, and River Illustrations of Transatlantic Nature (London, 1840), 1: pl. 23. Archives and Special Collections, Dickinson College, Carlisle, Pa.

The trader told Irving that an old squaw who lived on the highest mountain in the Catskills had charge of the “great treasury of storm and sunshine” that determined the weather in the Hudson Valley. The squaw sat in her wigwam, making a new moon each month and refashioning the old ones as stars, as well as manufacturing clouds. Other tales concerned “mischievous spirits” who took the shape of animals and played pranks on hunters, and the legend that Wilhelmus Kieft had discovered a lode of gold somewhere in the Catskills during the time of the Dutch dynasty. The young Irving also noted the “ever-changing shapes and hues” of the mountains, which, together with the “marvelous legends of the trader,” made a permanent impression on his mind. To Irving, the Catskills were the “fairy region of the Hudson.” Other writers concurred. The author of Sketches of the North River described the mountains’ “blue outlines boldly painted against the sky”; Willis Gaylord Clark observed that the Catskills appeared to be “heaving their broad shoulders against the blue horizon,” and noted that the clouds “sanctify their tops, as ‘sacristies of

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nature’ ”; Lossing characterized the mountains in terms of deep shadows and purple mists and found them to be “mysterious in their dim, incomprehensible, and everchanging aspect.” Downing, who considered the Catskills “more beautiful than any mountain scenery in the middle States,” described the distant view from Montgomery Place as the “crowning glory” of the estate. He particularly praised the everchanging pattern of color—the soft and deep blue hues that shrouded the mountains in the mornings, and the striking palette that they took on at sunset, ranging from azure to purple to a grayish lilac. Sunset was the “majical time for the fantasies of the colour-genii” of the mountains, the hour of the day when they were at their most dramatic.20 Only a few miles north on the west bank was Catskill, which Willis found to be a “thrifty little village, in which the most prosperous vocations are those of innkeeper and stage-proprietor.” Catskill, eight miles east of the Catskill Mountain House, was part of the tourist economy of the mountain region. As Willis noted, its residents provided goods and services to tourists who came to take in the delights of mountain scenery. Their starting point was the Mountain House.21 Timothy Dwight was one of the earliest writers to describe the site of the Mountain House. Visiting the escarpment in 1815, he first walked around the two lakes to Kaaterskill Clove, which he described as “a ravine, extending several miles in length, and in different places from a thousand to fifteen hundred feet in depth. The mountains on either side were steep, wild, and shaggy, covered almost everywhere with a dark forest.” Dwight characterized the precipice at the end of the clove in terms of “stupendous and awful grandeur.” Only later did he reach the escarpment, where he looked east toward western Massachusetts and Connecticut as well as the Hudson Valley and recorded in his journal: “[A] more distinct and perfect view of a landscape cannot be imagined.” The prolific writer Wallace Bruce, who characterized the Highlands in terms of sublimity, and the rolling countryside north of Newburgh as picturesque, chose the word “beautiful” to describe the Catskills.22 Construction of the Catskill Mountain House in 1823–24 commenced the resort era in the eastern Catskills. From the landing in the village of Catskill it was a four-hour carriage drive, on a bone-jarring road over precipitous hills, to the hotel. About halfway up the mountain the coaches passed a small dwelling reputed to be Rip Van Winkle’s shanty and the hollow where he imbibed the drink of the old Dutchmen playing ninepins. Just beyond the cabin, Lossing wrote, “the eye takes in a magnificent panorama of hill and valley, forest and river, . . . a beautifully coloured map rather than a picture.” Many travelers from abroad, including Harriet Martineau, John Fowler, and James Silk Buckingham, recounted the journey as well as the spectacular site that awaited them. Arriving by coach one July evening, Martineau described the Mountain House as “an illumined fairy palace perched among clouds

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R. Brandard, View from the Mountain House, Catskill. Engraving after a drawing by William Henry Bartlett. Nathaniel Parker Willis, American Scenery; or, Land, Lake, and River Illustrations of Transatlantic Nature (London, 1840), 2: pl. 52. Archives and Special Collections, Dickinson College, Carlisle, Pa.

in opera scenery,” and found the views from the escarpment more moving than Niagara Falls. Fowler found the view to be “altogether so beautiful, so boundless, so all-attractive,” that he experienced increasing rapture the longer he stood at the edge of the escarpment. Buckingham had an all-too-frequent experience. At the time he visited the Mountain House, clouds had drifted over the valley floor, completely obscuring the view from the escarpment. The Mountain House seemed, to him, an “aerial mansion suspended among the clouds,” which existed in “complete isolation from the world.” The following day the clouds started breaking up in midmorning, and by noon the view to the east was almost boundless, causing Buckingham to remark: “The prospect was enchanting, and worth going a hundred miles to see.” 23 N. P. Willis described the Mountain House as a “luxurious hotel,” with a broad, Greek Revival veranda affording spectacular views of the Hudson Valley. Willis Gaylord Clark found the Mountain House to be “earth’s one sanctuary,” and the view from the escarpment “a vast and changeful, a majestic, an interminable landscape.”

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Elizabeth Fries Ellett, the author of important early books on domestic economy, described the hotel’s drawing rooms as spacious and the dining room as “large enough for a feudal banqueting hall.” Guests slept in three rows of comfortably furnished rooms of substantial size. As was true of most commentators, Mrs. Ellett judged the food and drink to be excellent. T. Addison Richards commended the Mountain House for its “capacious and well-furnished parlors, halls, and chambers—a luxurious table, and attentive hosts and waiters—and bathing, billiard, and bowling appointments.”24 From the hotel, visitors could hike around South Mountain to an observation point looking southeast over the Hudson Valley; another path led north along the edge of the escarpment to destinations such as Artist’s Rock, Sunset Rock, and Newman’s Ledge; a third hiking trail and carriage drive led around North and South lakes to Kaaterskill Creek and followed the watercourse to the top of Kaaterskill Falls, where there was a refreshment pavilion and a wooden stairway that led visitors to the clove below. Local guides, still another part of the infrastructure of tourism, led visitors to these various destinations.25 The refreshment pavilion at the top of Kaaterskill Falls had been constructed as early as 1824. A sawmill that produced the lumber used in building the Catskill Mountain House impounded the once-free-flowing Kaaterskill Creek, and during dry summers no water cascaded over the falls. In a series of ten articles devoted to Catskill scenery published in the New York Commercial Advertiser in 1824, William Leete Stone reported that the operator of the sawmill would, for a fee, open the dam and allow the waters of Kaaterskill Creek to rush over the falls. When visitors arrived at the base of the falls the manager of the refreshment pavilion would lower a picnic basket and, if the tourists paid for it, a bottle of champagne. Willis Gaylord Clark expressed regret that the creek was dammed and the waters released for a fee of two shillings: “Scenery by the square foot!” he exclaimed. “Sublimity by the quintal!” Mrs. Ellett described how, when she walked down to the shelf where the upper falls reached a pool, the amount of water cascading over the falls was “suddenly increased by opening the dam above, so that its roar fills the gorge.” When she reached the base of the falls the dam once again opened, “and the clouds of sunny spray rise and fill the amphitheatre; then melt away as before, while the fall assumes its former thread-like appearance.” George William Curtis, who described a visit to the escarpment in 1852, was surprised to learn that the owners of the Mountain House had erected a pavilion near the top of the falls, and when visitors arrived the dam was opened and the water “turned on to accommodate poets and parties of pleasure.” Two years later, artist and writer T. Addison Richards described the operator of the refreshment pavilion as “our venerated friend Peter Schutt,” who charged twentyfive cents to unleash the water over the falls: “[The] once free torrent,” Richards

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observed, “is now chained by the cold shackles of the spirit of gain.” Stone, Curtis, and Richards were distressed that the human presence in the landscape had altered, and commercialized, what Natty Bumppo considered the best evidence of the divine in the wilderness. In providing amenities for visitors, the Catskill Mountain House brought the tension between scenic values and improvement into dramatic relief.26 Visitors to the Mountain House took in the sites the various published accounts recommended. Willis particularly favored the view from the escarpment trail at Sunset Rock, looking southwest toward the Mountain House and the two lakes, which numerous artists, including Thomas Cole, painted. In a drawing for the engraving The Two Lakes and the Mountain House, William H. Bartlett changed the outline of the mountains to make the setting more dramatic, but the rocky foreground, the shoreline of the lakes, and the site of the Mountain House all confirm that this was the vantage from which he sketched. “From the Mountain-House,” Willis wrote, “the busy and all-glorious Hudson is seen winding half its silver length—towns, villas, and white spires, sparkling on the shores, and snowy sails and gaily-painted steamers, specking its bosom. It is a constant diorama of the most lively beauty.”27 Given the large amount of favorable publicity the Mountain House received in gazettes, travel accounts, guidebooks, and periodicals, business must have been good. Certainly by 1830 the hotel had been enlarged—it was then four stories high and 140 feet in length—and would continue to be expanded in succeeding decades. But as Kenneth Myers has pointed out, most tourists stayed only for a short time and did not venture into the cloves or the distant parts of the Catskill range. They were, for the most part, consumers of scenery, who stayed at the Mountain House only long enough to see the falls, the view from the escarpment, and the much-talkedabout hotel itself.28 The Catskill Mountain House was an important early tourist resort in the United States, but even before the Civil War there were other popular destinations, including Ballston Spa and Saratoga to the north. Construction of the Erie Canal brought Niagara Falls within the tourists’ orbit only a year after the opening of the Mountain House, and within a generation railroads made once-remote parts of the Adirondacks and White Mountains accessible. After the Civil War, Newport became a popular seaside watering place for the well-to-do. Given this competition, as well as the fact that many consumers of scenery had already visited Pine Orchard and the escarpment, the Mountain House began to experience hard times by the end of the nineteenth century.29 The tourist experience in the Catskills continued well into the twentieth century. The New York State Conservation Department acquired much of the Mountain House association’s property on North and South mountains in 1930, but the oncegrand hotel continued operating until 1942. The state finally acquired the building

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J. C. Bentley, The Two Lakes and the Mountain House on the Catskills. Engraving after a drawing by William Henry Bartlett. Nathaniel Parker Willis, American Scenery; or, Land, Lake, and River Illustrations of Transatlantic Nature (London, 1840), 1: pl. 50. Archives and Special Collections, Dickinson College, Carlisle, Pa.

and the remaining property at Pine Orchard in 1962, and the following January it burned the hotel to the ground. Nevertheless, the era of Catskill tourism began its slow decline after the Civil War. To be sure, artists of the second generation of the Hudson River School of landscape painting, including Sanford R. Gifford, Worthington Whittredge, and Jervis McEntee, continued to find inspiration in the cloves to the southwest of Pine Orchard in the 1860s, but by then the nation’s attention— and that of artists such as Thomas Moran and Albert Bierstadt—had turned to the spectacular and more pristine scenery of the mountainous West. They were also, like some tourists, turning away from the familiar ground of the Catskills.30 Years earlier Washington Irving had described the Catskills in terms of “mighty forests that have never been invaded by the axe; deep umbrageous valleys where the virgin soil has never been outraged by the plough; [and] bright streams flowing in untasked idleness, unburdened by commerce, unchecked by the mill-dam.” But the

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impact of tourism and other forms of economic development on the Hudson Valley landscape became a source of great concern to a small group of artists and writers who cherished Catskill scenery. They recognized, as did James Fenimore Cooper and a number of their contemporaries, that the march of time and the march of progress made it imperative that antebellum Americans preserve the landscape that was so much a part of their collective heritage. In The Pioneers, Cooper’s fictional Elizabeth Temple expressed regret that her father’s enterprise was “taming the very forests,” and lamented: “How rapidly is civilization treading on the footsteps of nature!” In two of the most memorable chapters in the book, accounts of a pigeon shoot and fish seining on Lake Otsego, Natty Bumppo articulated a conservation ethic: “Put an ind, Judge, to your clearings. Ain’t the woods his work as well as the pigeons? Use, but don’t waste. Wasn’t the woods made for the beasts and birds to harbour in?”31 The same pattern of exploitation and development Leatherstocking decried on the banks of Lake Otsego was evident in the Hudson Valley. Stands of hemlock on hillsides near the Catskill Mountain House were cut to provide the bark essential to the tanning process. Indeed, the name of a nearby town, Tannersville, is a telling reminder that it was more economical to bring hides from distant places to tanneries in the forest than to bring the trees to urban centers. Equally harmful was the amount of pollution the tanning process dumped into the streams that were such an important part of clove scenery. Like the farmer whose dwelling Sanford R. Gifford depicted in Hunter Mountain, Twilight (1866), who had transformed a hemlock forest into a stump-strewn pasture, farmers and builders cut trees with the enthusiasm of Cooper’s fictional Billy Kirby, whose heroic efforts cleared forests with such efficiency that Natty Bumppo fled west to escape the settlers’ axe.32 Moreover, tourism was transforming the landscape experience in the Catskills. As early as 1835 Thomas Cole recorded in his journal his distaste for the visitors to the Mountain House, who were more interested in indoor games and dancing than in exploring the mountains and cloves that he cherished. The artist dismissed such behavior as a “desecration of the place where nature offers a feast of higher holier enjoyment!” Downing expressed regret that the “annual tourist by the railroad and steamboat, who moves through wood and meadow and river and hill, with the celerity of a rocket, and then fancies he knows the country, is in a state of total ignorance of their many attractions.” The dramatic enlargement of the Catskill Mountain House undertaken by Charles L. Beach in the mid-1840s, as well as the opening of a number of boardinghouses in and near Palenville and the construction of other hotels, including the Laurel House at the very top of Kaaterskill Falls, made a visit to the escarpment less a retreat from urban civilization than a social event. Wholesale deforestation had transformed the very scenery visitors to the Catskills encountered.

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The Clove Road was built not to give tourists yet another landscape experience but to provide access to a deposit of iron oxide essential in making the red paint used on barns and often on three sides of rural houses. The mountains, in short, were losing the very qualities that had made them appealing to artists, writers, and individuals making tours in search of the picturesque.33 Cole and Irving joined Cooper in lamenting the impact of civilization on the American landscape, and theirs were not the only voices speaking for nature. Just as ominous a warning was sounded by a critic in the Literary World. Reviewing the annual exhibition of the National Academy of Design in 1847, this anonymous author found special poignancy in a pair of Staten Island landscapes painted by Jasper Francis Cropsey. There was an essential lesson in Cropsey’s works: The axe of civilization is busy with our old forests, and artisan ingenuity is fast sweeping away the relics of our national infancy. What were once the wild and picturesque haunts of the Red Man, and where the wild deer roamed in freedom, are becoming the abodes of commerce and the seats of manufacture. Our inland lakes, once sheltered and secluded in the midst of noble forests, are now laid bare and covered with busy craft; and even the old primordial hills, once bristling with shaggy pine and hemlock, like old Titans as they were, are being shorn of their locks, and left to blister in cold nakedness in the sun.

This reviewer recognized that “Yankee enterprise has little sympathy with the picturesque,” and charged American artists with the responsibility to “rescue from its grasp the little that is left, before it is for ever too late.” The recording of the American landscape, this writer concluded, was the artist’s high and sacred calling. The advance of civilization was destroying nature, and it became the painter’s “mission”—a word replete with religious connotations—to capture and preserve the beauties of the New World before they were sacrificed to Mammon.34 Few people in the antebellum years heeded the warnings of the handful of artists and writers who articulated a preservationist ethic, or found in the pages of the Literary World a compelling reason to protect the landscape. Even the enduring popularity of George P. Morris’s poem “Woodman, Spare That Tree,” which had been set to music by Henry Russell in 1837 and which pledged that the woodman’s “axe shall harm it not,” did not foster a change in attitude that promoted a conservationist ethic. The pattern of development, of fundamental transformation of the landscape, continued.35 The tourist experience had, over time, a negative consequence on the landscape, but it had a positive impact as well. As individuals such as John Olmsted took their families on tours in search of the picturesque, they helped inspire the next generation to appreciate the beauties of natural scenery. Olmsted’s son Frederick, best

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known as the codesigner of Central Park in New York City, was one of a small group of individuals responsible for the preservation of the Yosemite Valley and the Mariposa Big Tree Grove in 1864. Olmsted and Hudson River School painter Frederic E. Church, whose majestic house Olana stands on a hillside just south of the present-day city of Hudson on the east bank of the river, were among the leaders of the crusade to free Niagara from commercial development and reserve it for public enjoyment forever. Although the vast majority of tourists were anonymous and left no written accounts of their impressions of the Hudson Highlands or the Catskills, surely many came to appreciate natural scenery and the beauties of the designed landscape as a result of their travels. Some of these individuals purchased landscape paintings or framed prints from Willis’s American Scenery and other publications or acquired English Staffordshire china that was made for the American market and illustrated with well-known scenes from the northeastern United States. Still others surely used Downing’s books and other publications to create modest domestic landscapes that were inspired by the great estates they had seen from the steamboat and read about in the Treatise on Landscape Gardening or the pages of the Horticulturist. The tourist experience in the mid-Hudson Valley, in short, not only established an important new industry in the United States; it also had a profound impact on the development of American culture in the nineteenth century.36

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2 The Artist’s River THOMAS C OLE

T

homas Cole is the artist most closely associated with the Hudson River. He was a devoted landscape tourist who traveled extensively throughout the valley and beyond in search of subjects for his pencil. Cole’s arrival in New York City in 1825 is generally considered the beginning of the Hudson River School of landscape painting—the first New York school, as John K. Howat once described it. Cole wasn’t the first to depict the American landscape, as Philadelphia artists Thomas Doughty and Thomas Birch were already accomplished painters, as was Washington Allston, who aspired to historical and allegorical painting as the highest expression of the art. Numerous other painters recorded views of the landscape, including Joshua Shaw and John Neagle, while Titian R. Peale accompanied the Lewis and Clark expedition and painted the first images of the new territory where so much of the nation’s destiny would be realized. John Hill published a massive illustrated book of hand-colored aquatints after paintings by William Guy Wall, The Hudson River Port Folio (1821–25), which remains an important resource for attitudes toward landscape at the time. The exhibition catalogue Views and Visions: American Landscape before 1830 (1986), edited by Edward J. Nygren with Bruce Robertson, is a wonderful reminder of the richness of the landscape tradition prior to 1825.1 Nevertheless, Cole’s arrival in New York that year remains a useful landmark because the exhibition of his first important paintings electrified the artistic community, and subsequent works would continue to do so for much of the twentythree years until his death in 1848. With the revival of interest in American art in the mid-twentieth century, Cole became the most recognizable figure in the history of American landscape painting. He is important because he is so closely associated with the Hudson River valley and because his paintings and writings, more than the work of any other contemporary artist, attempted to shape how Americans perceived the landscape. According to his first biographer, Louis Legrand Noble, “From

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Thomas Cole, ca. 1845. Daguerreotype, Studio of Matthew Brady. Prints & Photographs Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

the moment when his eye first caught the rural beauties clustering round the cliffs of Wehawken, and glanced up the distance of the Palisades, Cole’s heart had been wandering in the Highlands, and nestling in the bosom of the Catskills.” The “romantic scenery” of the Hudson Valley and the Catskills, Noble wrote in a flight of romantic imagery of his own, “charmed [Cole’s] eye, and took his soul captive.” Nature, to Cole and other cultural nationalists of the second quarter of the nineteenth

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century, would be the source of America’s distinctiveness as a culture. “The painter of American scenery,” Cole noted in his journal in 1835, “has, indeed, privileges superior to any other. All nature here is new to art.”2 Cole was born in Bolton-le-Moor, Lancashire, England, in 1801. His father was unsuccessful in several business ventures and migrated to the United States in 1818. The family settled first in Philadelphia, then moved to Steubenville, Ohio, and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, before relocating to New York. Thomas, the youngest of four children and the only male, followed his family and tried to help his father even as he pursued his own interest in painting. James Cole, his son recalled, was “an indulgent & affectionate husband and father” whose “life was spent in buffeting successive waves of adverse fortune.” Dutiful son Thomas studied briefly at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and developed his skill with pencil and brush by poring over the advice contained in numerous art instruction books, the most important of which was William Oram’s Precepts and Observations on the Art of Colouring in Landscape Painting (1810).3 Cole moved to New York City in the year marked by the opening of the Erie Canal. This massive and visionary infrastructure project, which linked the Hudson River with the Great Lakes and the American interior, was one key to New York’s emergence as the nation’s dominant commercial metropolis. Although Cole could not possibly have anticipated the degree to which the canal would affect his chosen profession in the years to come, the Erie Canal surely contributed to the emergence of a group of wealthy individuals who would patronize the arts. Cole had been painting in the garret of his father’s dwelling on Greenwich Street and exhibited several of his completed works in the shop of George Dixey, where they were seen by George W. Bruen a prosperous merchant. Bruen purchased two of Cole’s paintings, Storm Composition and Trees, and became Cole’s first patron: he subsidized the artist’s 1825 sketching trip up the Hudson. Surviving records do not indicate whether the artist traveled by sloop, steamboat, or on foot, but as Bruen provided only a “small sum for the purpose,” and Cole was an inveterate hiker, it seems likely that the impecunious but ambitious painter walked at least part of the way north through the valley. The first stage of Cole’s trip conformed to the emerging pattern of the tourist experience: he stopped at West Point, a popular destination with a steamboat landing, and from there he sketched a number of sites, including the ruins of Fort Putnam, already revered as a Revolutionary War shrine, and Buttermilk Falls, just south of the grounds of the United States Military Academy, as well as the village of Cold Spring on the east bank. Following his exploration of the Hudson Highlands, Cole headed north, perhaps by steamboat, to Albany, bypassing the Catskill Mountains. While in the vicinity of Albany he sketched a scene in Troy, on the east bank of the Hudson, and also Cohoes Falls on the Mohawk River. Only

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afterward did Cole reach the Catskills, on his journey back to New York City. On this first foray into the mountains he came to love, Cole sketched Kaaterskill Falls, South Lake, and the Catskill Mountain House. Perhaps surprisingly, his notebook contains descriptions of the landscape, time of day, and atmospheric effects, but not his aesthetic reaction to the scenery he was sketching, leaving his biographer Noble to wonder how the artist responded to the places he visited during the 1825 tour.4 Upon his return to New York, Cole transformed the sketches he had made during his travels into three important paintings: View of Fort Putnam, Lake with Dead Trees (Catskill), and a view of Kaaterskill Falls from below, the latter a setting Cole termed magnificent. What struck Cole about the falls, as it has subsequent visitors, was the way the water cascades sequentially over several levels of rock. The first drop of 180 feet reached a basin carved, over centuries, out of rock. The basin was almost fifty feet in diameter, behind which was a cavern. A second, lower falls dropped another 80 feet. The artist was enchanted by the site and described the water as “struggling and foaming through the shattered fragments of the mountains, and shadowed by fantastic trees, it plunges into the gloomy depths of the valley below.” The falls impressed Cole with its “savage and silent grandeur.” Kaaterskill Falls was, and remains, a place of striking beauty and surely is one of the most frequently painted and illustrated sites in nineteenth-century American art.5 These three paintings launched Cole’s career. At Bruen’s suggestion he placed the three paintings on exhibit at the shop of William A. Colman. There they were seen by John Trumbull, the longtime president of the American Academy of the Fine Arts and a well-connected patrician who was a powerful champion of the arts. Best remembered as the artist who painted four murals for the Rotunda of the U.S. Capitol, Trumbull immediately acquired one of Cole’s paintings, the view of Kaaterskill Falls, for $25. An article written by playwright and later historian of the arts in America William Dunlap and published in the New-York Evening Post reported that Trumbull remarked to Colman: “This youth has done at once, and without instruction, what I cannot do after fifty years’ practice.” According to accounts in a number of sources, which, as historian Alan Wallach has pointed out, became more embellished with each iteration, Trumbull told his friends Dunlap and engraver and later important landscape painter Asher B. Durand about the young artist whose work he had discovered. Dunlap promptly purchased Lake with Dead Trees (Catskill), and Durand the View of Fort Putnam. Just as his first sketching trip introduced the young artist to the landscapes of the Hudson Highlands and the Catskills, the paintings he produced upon his return introduced Cole to three of the most important figures in the New York art world and helped launch his career as an artist. The inclusion of the three paintings in the November exhibition of the American Academy of Fine Arts, and the generally favorable critical reviews they received, established Cole’s public

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reputation. William Cullen Bryant later recalled “what an enthusiasm was awakened by these early works of his,” and especially the “delight which was expressed at the opportunity of contemplating pictures which carried the eye over scenes of wild grandeur peculiar to our country, over our aerial mountain-tops with their mighty growth of forest never touched by the axe, along the banks of streams never deformed by culture, and into the depth of skies bright with the hues of our own climate.” 6 Cole’s approach to landscape painting is evident in these works, especially in the repainting of the lost 1825 view of Kaaterskill Falls, entitled, in its 1826 iteration, Falls of Kaaterskill (plate 1). He aspired to what he called a “higher style of landscape art”: he was interested in composition, and he often chose to idealize the landscape rather than record nature directly. When natural scenery had already been altered by human agency, he often chose to depict it as he imagined it must have been before what Bryant termed the “axe” or “culture” had intervened. In the transition from the sketch to finished painting of Falls of Kaaterskill, for example, Cole omitted the refreshment pavilion at the very top of the falls and the sawmill that loomed behind it to the north; he also added a rather awkwardly painted image of a Native American next to the great basin between the upper and lower falls. The artist presented a landscape as yet untouched by facilities for tourists, a landscape in which the human presence was in harmony with nature. In other paintings Cole chose to omit structures by slightly changing the angle to exclude human alterations to the landscape: his painting View from Mount Holyoke, Northampton, Massachusetts, after a Thunder Storm ( The Oxbow) (1836), for example, which portrays a carefully tended agricultural landscape adjacent to the Connecticut River below the promontory, is framed to omit the refreshment pavilion for tourists that had stood at the top of the mountain since 1821 and was recorded in the first of two engravings of the site published by William Henry Bartlett in American Scenery and the view that T. Addison Richards engraved for American Scenery Illustrated (1854). On other occasions Cole added to the landscape to create a visually more appealing scene than that which nature provided. In View of Schroon Mountain, Essex County, New York, after a Storm (1838), he chose to include a small pond in the middle distance that was not visible from the vantage where he and Asher Durand sketched the scene. “I have taken the liberty of elevating myself a little, as though on a treetop,” he wrote Durand, “to get a glimpse of the nearest pond by which we passed. How I have succeeded you shall judge.” Cole idealized the landscape as a source of intellectual and moral inspiration and politely but firmly rejected the advice of a patron, Baltimore collector Robert Gilmor, that his paintings record the landscape with fidelity. Great art, Cole replied, was a matter of composition: “If the imagination is shackled, and nothing is described but what we see, seldom will anything truly great be produced either in Painting or Poetry.” As Bryant observed, Cole’s

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paintings were vehicles for expressing “great truths and great lessons.” James Fenimore Cooper concurred. Cole’s paintings were not a “servile copy” of nature but works of a powerful imagination. “The poet and the painter are permitted to give the beau ideal of this nature,” wrote Cooper, “and he who makes it the most attractive, while he maintains the best likeness, is the highest artist.”7 The acclaim that accompanied the exhibition of Cole’s first paintings of the Catskills and the Hudson River valley resulted in numerous commissions, including a series of paintings for George W. Featherstonhaugh, several landscapes of the Catskill Mountains, a view of Kaaterskill Falls through the clove that hung in the parlor of the Hudson River steamboat Albany, several paintings of the White Mountains, and portraits of Monte Video, the estate of Daniel Wadsworth near Hartford, Connecticut. Cole also completed three paintings based on scenes in Cooper’s Last of the Mohicans and turned to historical or allegorical themes in other works, including Garden of Eden and Expulsion from the Garden of Eden.8 Cole loved the Catskill Mountains, and in 1827 he began summering in the village of Catskill, which he described as “my favourite haunt” and which, after his marriage to Maria Bartow in November 1836, became his permanent home. Just to the west of the village the mountains rise to majestic heights and present a spectacular view of the river. From Cedar Grove, his Catskill home and studio, Cole represented the annual prospect of returning to New York City for the winter season as wearisome. He professed to be happiest in the country and perceived the city with a “presentiment something like of evil.” Cole prescribed for Durand an existence similar to his own. “You must come & live in the country,” he advised, as “Nature is a sovereign remedy” and “in the country we labour under more healthy influences” than in the city. Upon returning to New York City for the winter of 1834–35 Cole wrote in his journal: “How I regret [having left] the country with its delightful tranquility. Here is nothing but turmoil: my mind is distracted with a thousand cares: and although I have commenced painting, it is not with love.” Bryant summarized Cole’s love of nature, and aversion to the city, in his “Funeral Oration”: “He could not endure a town life; he must live in the continual presence of rural scenes and objects.” Life in the country was, for Cole, “essential to the cheerfulness of the artist and to a healthful judgment of his own works.”9 From his Catskill home Cole made frequent sketching trips to the nearby mountains as well as extended tours in search of picturesque beauty, including visits to Niagara Falls, the White Mountains of New Hampshire, the Maine coast, the Connecticut River valley, and the Adirondacks. Cole returned to Europe in 1829, an event that inspired Bryant’s sonnet “To an American Painter, Departing for Europe.” Bryant warned the artist to avoid the temptations of Europe and to cherish his memories of the American landscape. The first eight lines describe unique attributes

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of American scenery and are followed by four lines that establish a stark contrast with the Old World: Fair scenes shall greet thee where thou goest—fair But different—everywhere the trace of men. Paths, homes, graves, ruins, from the lowest glen To where life shrinks from the fierce Alpine air.

The poet of American nature urged the painter of the American landscape to study European art and scenery but to “keep that earlier, wilder image bright.” Wherever Cole traveled, Noble wrote shortly after the painter’s death, Cole judged the scenery he encountered by comparison with that of the Hudson Valley, which Noble termed “this land of his heart.”10 Cole arrived in England in late June 1829. He hoped “to acquire information in my art,” as he later explained to Dunlap, through the study of Old Masters and contemporary landscape painting. He visited the studios of other artists, attended exhibitions frequently, toured the Lake District, and painted. His production included a series of ten paintings of American scenery that were engraved (along with two other views engraved from drawings) and published in John Howard Hinton’s History and Topography of the United States (2 vols., 1830–32). Nancy Siegel’s thoughtful study of the Hinton commission demonstrates that Cole undoubtedly painted the ten canvases, including A Distant View of the Falls of Niagara, which was the frontispiece of the second volume of History and Topography, from sketches he had made in recent years and brought with him to England. Unfortunately, only two of the paintings are known to survive, A Distant View of the Falls of Niagara and White Mountains, New Hampshire. Although Cole was deeply disappointed that the paintings did not sell, he nevertheless must have been pleased that his work, in engraved form, would reach a much larger and geographically diverse audience than did exhibitions of his paintings, which took place principally in New York City. Seven of the engravings were pirated by William Adams & Sons in their American Views series and transfer printed on Staffordshire china for export to the American market.11 Cole’s sojourn in England ultimately proved unsatisfying. He was frustrated not only by the lack of sales, which he counted on to finance his travels, but also by the way paintings he submitted to the Royal Academy were hung—“in the worst places”—while what he considered much inferior work received the most advantageous locations. “I did not find England so delightful as I anticipated,” he wrote Dunlap. “The gloom of the climate, the coldness of the artists, together with the kind of art in fashion, threw a tone of melancholy over my mind, that lasted for months, even after I had arrived in sunny Italy.” 12

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In May 1831 Cole traveled to France. Here again he was greatly disappointed, as the Old Masters he wanted to study in the Louvre had been replaced with an exhibition of modern French paintings, which, he reported, were even worse than contemporaneous English art. Only when he arrived in Florence did Cole find the artistic inspiration and the artistic community that he sought abroad. Although he expressed strong distaste for contemporary Italian art and found “no natural scenery yet which has affected me so powerfully as that which I have seen in the wilderness places of America,” Florence proved to be delightful, and he appreciated the city and its art galleries, which he described as “paradises to a painter,” as well as sketching trips to the nearby campagna. There too he enjoyed the friendship of Massachusetts-born sculptor Horatio Greenough, who introduced Cole to the expatriate community and who represented, in Joy Kasson’s words, “an important link to the poetic and ideal conception of art.” Cole also traveled to Rome and Naples and made several tours of the campagna before returning to Florence for a period of sustained work at the easel. “I painted more pictures in three months,” he informed Dunlap, “than I have ever done in twice the time before or since.” Bryant later observed that “Cole owed much to the study of nature in the Old World, but very little, I think, to its artists”—surely a reference to the artist’s contemporaries rather than to the Old Masters he studied to great benefit. Unfortunately, the illness of his parents, and the outbreak of Asiatic cholera in New York City, compelled Cole to return home, reluctantly, in October 1832.13 Upon his return from England and the Continent Cole became increasingly concerned over what he perceived as the negative impact of human agency on the American landscape. In 1834 he wrote a poem expressing his anger upon discovering that a favorite tree had been cut down: And is the glory of the forest dead? Struck down? Its beauteous foliage spread On the base earth? O! ruthless was the deed Destroying man! What demon urg’d the speed Of thine unpitying axe? Didst thou not know My heart was wounded by each savage blow?

Successive lines of the sonnet describe both the artist’s personal loss and a sense of finality, recognition that the destruction of a tree was in some ways more to be grieved than the loss of a friend, whom a Christian might look forward to meeting in the afterlife: But here no hope survives; again shall spread o’er me Never the gentle shade of my beloved tree.14

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This lament for the loss of a tree anticipates one of the most important themes of Cole’s “Essay on American Scenery,” which he presented as a lecture to the American Lyceum Society at Clinton Hall, at the southwest corner of Nassau and Beekman streets in New York City, on May 9, 1835. The lecture and “Essay” are Cole’s most sustained commentary on what he termed the senseless destruction of the American landscape. When Cole accepted the society’s invitation, he conceded that he was more comfortable expressing himself with an artist’s pencil than an author’s pen, but he recognized the importance of the audience and decided that the occasion would be worth the considerable time and effort he put into preparing his remarks. The organizers scheduled his lecture for the evening in conjunction with the annual exhibition of the National Academy of Design, also held in Clinton Hall, an indication that they expected a substantial turnout, but the size of the audience was disappointing. Before the event, Cole worried that his address would be too long, but when he expressed this concern to one of the event’s organizers, Theodore Dwight Jr., the corresponding secretary of the Lyceum Society, Dwight assured him: “Happy will it be for our countrymen, when they shall be persuaded to think and feel among the scenery of our fields & forests in which we have a portion of our American birthright.” Cole delivered the lengthy address as written. We don’t know how well it was received, but afterward he confessed in his journal that he had been embarrassed by this rare effort at public speaking: “I read badly.” However tentative his voice, Cole must have made an impression with his thoughts, as his remarks were published as part of the proceedings of the American Lyceum Society under the title “Essay on American Scenery” in the American Monthly Magazine the following January.15 The Lyceum Society had invited Cole to speak on a general topic “connected with Painting in the United States.” But between accepting the society’s invitation and writing his lecture Cole changed the subject and used the occasion to deliver a powerful message, not about painting but about the human relationship with the natural world. The “Essay on American Scenery” is a reflection of both the author’s appreciation for the American landscape and his sorrow at how his countrymen were abusing it. Most of the text is descriptive, a listing of the principal features of American scenery. Wildness of course was its most distinctive attribute, especially in comparison with Europe. Cole then addressed each of the components of scenery: the “gorgeous garb” of American mountains; water, which he termed the “most expressive feature” of the American landscape; waterfalls; river scenery, especially that of the Hudson, which he described as unsurpassed in its “natural magnificence”; forest scenery, which he judged to be unrivaled; and the sky, the “soul of all scenery.” In the second paragraph, however, Cole asserted that his topic was “a subject that to every American ought to be of surpassing interest.” “How undeserving of

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such a birthright,” Cole exclaimed, “if he can turn towards it an unobserving eye, an unaffected heart!” On one level Cole’s purpose was to acquaint listeners, and readers, with some of the most important landscape features of the Northeast.16 But Cole’s larger goal was didactic: he was speaking to leading educational reformers in the United States, and as the records of the Lyceum Society indicate, these were individuals deeply concerned not only about what children learned in the classroom but, through the lyceum program that quickly spread across the Northeast and Midwest, about adult education as well. The Lyceum Society described its lecture program as “a cheap and agreeable means of moral and intellectual improvement,” and Cole’s remarks were fully in keeping with that goal. He clearly wanted to impress upon members of the society the need to educate Americans about the importance of “cultivating a taste for scenery,” and he must have thought of his audience as allies in this mission. The development of an appreciation for landscape among his countrymen was desirable in its own right, he insisted, but perhaps more important it was also key to controlling the abuses of nature that Cole saw occurring all around him. Most Americans were indifferent to the importance of scenery; because a “meagre utilitarianism” dominated American culture, too few of Cole’s countrymen cherished the landscape as a font of intellectual and spiritual renewal. Cole characterized the majority of Americans as an “insensate multitude” who had little regard for the landscape. Two months after reading his “Essay” to members of the Lyceum Society, Cole hiked to the Catskill Mountain House. In his journal the artist recorded his distaste for typical visitors to the resort, who were more interested in indoor games and dancing than in hiking and experiencing the scenery of the Catskills and the Hudson River valley.17 What was so troubling to Cole was that indifference, the lack of attachment to place, had regrettable consequences: it was translated into tolerance of a gospel of progress that needlessly destroyed the landscape. Cole feared that “what is sometimes called improvement”—the word he and many contemporaries used to describe economic development—was crushing the “bright and tender flowers of the imagination.” In the “Essay” Cole was surely referring to places near the village of Catskill when he lamented that the “beauty of such landscapes are [sic] quickly passing away—the ravages of the axe are daily increasing—the most noble scenes are made desolate, and oftentimes with a wantonness and barbarism scarcely credible in a civilized nation.” Then Cole ominously added: “The way-side is becoming shadeless, and another generation will behold spots, now rife with beauty, desecrated by what is called improvement; which, as yet, generally destroys Nature’s beauty without substituting that of Art.” While working on The Course of Empire (1833–36) the following year, Cole wrote to New York City merchant Luman Reed and observed bitterly: “The copper-hearted barbarians are cutting all the trees down in the

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beautiful valley on which I have looked so often with a loving eye.” Two weeks later, Cole penned a second letter to Reed, on one level apologizing that “what I said about the tree-destroyers might be understood in a more serious light than I intended.” Nevertheless, he expressed contempt for “the miserable creatures who destroy the beautiful works of nature wantonly & for paltry gains,” and informed Reed that he had taken comfort in learning that “some of the trees will be saved yet.” With more than a touch of sarcasm he continued his condemnation of the improvers: “If I live to be old enough I may sit down under some bush[,] the last left in the utilitarian world[,] and feel thankful that Intellect in its march has spared one vestige of the Ancient Forest for me to die by.”18 Cole’s Course of Empire, which he was painting while writing the “Essay on American Scenery,” expresses on canvas the sentiments he articulated in the “Essay.” This series of five paintings was, to Cole, a powerful allegory for America. Cole, who conceptualized a series of paintings that would be “illustrative of the mutation of earthly things” as early as 1829, described his intent in a lengthy letter to Robert Gilmor in January 1832. There would be five canvases that traced the evolution of a landscape from wilderness to a pastoral state, to a great city, and then the destruction of that city and its fate as a “desolate ruin.” The series, he informed Gilmor, would illustrate “the natural changes of Landscape, and those effected by man.”19 Although Gilmor was not tempted by the series Cole proposed, the artist did find another, more sympathetic patron in Luman Reed, an important early nineteenthcentury collector who had transformed the third floor of his house into a picture gallery. Cole wrote a long description of The Course of Empire in a letter dated September 18, 1833. He was adopting a cyclical theory of history closely associated with Bishop Berkeley, whose poem “Verses on the Prospect of Planting Arts and Learning in America” was well known at the time. In it Berkeley wrote: Westward the course of empire takes its way; The first four Acts already past, A fifth shall close the Drama with the day; Time’s noblest offspring is the last.

But if Berkeley seemed optimistic that the new empire rising across the Atlantic would have a different fate than the Old World civilizations that had reached their apogee and then declined, Cole was not so certain. To Reed he explained that the series would “illustrate the history of a natural scene, as well as be an epitome of Man,—showing the natural changes of landscape, and those effected by man in his progress from barbarism to civilization—to luxury—to the vicious state, or state of destruction—and to the state of ruin and desolation.” To do so, Cole decided to

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paint the transformation of a single place, and to construct his allegory using the interplay of the natural world and the human impress on it over time. Although the perspective occasionally changed, the setting remained the same. What was different about each painting was threefold: the time of day, the season of the year, and the stage of civilization.20 Cole described each canvas meticulously. The first, The Course of Empire: The Savage State (see plate 2), is “a view of a wilderness” at daybreak. Clouds over the bay are lifting, a mountain stands in the distance, and humans are dressed pretty much as savages. This canvas represented what Cole described as “the first rudiments of society.” The second canvas, The Pastoral or Arcadian State (plate 3), depicts the same scene later in the morning, in early summer, and farther along in the continuum of civilization. Cole described how the “ ‘untracked and rude’ has been tamed and softened,” as a shepherd tends his flock, and a muse inspires a young boy drawing on stone. A Stonehenge-like structure appears in the middle distance, and at a small village by the bay shipbuilding and other economic activities are taking place. During the pastoral state the human presence is living in harmony with nature. The third canvas, The Consummation of Empire (plate 4), which is larger than the other four paintings in the series, represents the same scene at noon and in early autumn. The “rude village has become a magnificent city” characterized by large classical buildings, statues, fountains, and a triumphal arch. Slaves march behind the conquering army, and the wealth that, in classical republican thought, would surely result in corruption serves as a warning for America. Consummation of Empire represented the “summit of human glory,” in Cole’s words, but it also portended decline, a fate not unlike that experienced by the Greek and Roman civilizations whose buildings adorn the banks of the bay. As its title indicates, the fourth canvas, Destruction (plate 5), portrays a later stage of civilization in which the empire is vanquished. Together, an invading army and a fierce storm are reducing the once-glorious city to ruin: the handsome buildings are burning, statues have been toppled, the barbarians are raping women and sacking the city. “Description of this picture is perhaps needless,” Cole wrote; “carnage and destruction are its elements.” The fifth and final canvas, Desolation (plate 6), depicts the same scene at sunset. The shadows of evening “steal over the shattered and ivy-grown ruins of that once proud city.” A solitary column stands amid the ruins, on top of which a heron has made a nest. The human presence has been banished from the scene. Tellingly, in his published description of The Course of Empire Cole wrote that “though man and his works have perished, the steep promontory, with its insulated rock, still rears against the sky, unmoved.” This important series of paintings demonstrates how nature ultimately triumphs over an unsympathetic human presence.21

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On one level Cole’s allegory was obvious: drawing upon the rhetoric of the eighteenth-century commonwealth ideology in England and America, it was a throwback to the fear of luxury and centralized power so widely shared by members of the Revolutionary War generation, and a strident condemnation of Andrew Jackson’s America. Cole’s motto for The Course of Empire—from Lord Byron’s Childe Harold—went directly to the theme of decline that threatened the United States if it followed the path of republics of old: First, freedom, and then glory; when that fails, Wealth, vice, corruption.

But beyond the theme of the rise and fall of a civilization, Cole was revealing much about himself and his hopes for his adopted country. Bishop Berkeley’s “Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way,” and the cyclical theory of history upon which it was based, had a powerful meaning for Americans. As Alan Wallach has pointed out, “with all its allegorical discretion,” The Course of Empire insisted that “the United States was not exempt from the workings of cyclical history, that it, too, was subject to the unchanging law of rise and decline.” Art historian Angela Miller has argued that Cole’s contemporaries in the 1830s recognized The Course of Empire as a Whiggish political statement about America. President Jackson, she observed, was a latterday Caesar whose imperious actions threatened to subvert the nation’s republican political institutions. Yet Americans across the political spectrum united in praise for what Cole accomplished in this series of paintings. James Fenimore Cooper, one of the most elitist critics of the emerging democratic impulse in American politics and social life, described The Course of Empire as “the work of the highest genius this country has ever produced” and as “one of the noblest works of art that has ever been wrought.” Yet William Cullen Bryant, who had more democratic proclivities than Cooper, could also praise the series as being “among the most remarkable and characteristic of his [Cole’s] works.”22 The Course of Empire is so complex a series of paintings that historians have posited multiple levels of interpretation. Joy Kasson, for example, has argued that Cole’s message, in part, was that American society had “sinned by forsaking nature,” and has interpreted The Course of Empire as an expression of the artist’s fear that the United States was “on the verge of becoming the soulless society of the third canvas, alienated from nature.” She also points out that Cole was offering an extended commentary on the role of the arts in society—dance appears in the first and second canvases, drawing in the second, architecture dominates the third and fourth, and ruins of a former civilization the fifth—and argues that he was exploring “the way in which artistic expression embodied cultural values.”23

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Cole’s expressed intent in The Course of Empire was to portray the natural world as the human impress of civilization had affected it over time. The artist was living during a period of rapid urban and industrial growth, and he insisted that there was something unnatural about city life. The progression from The Pastoral or Arcadian State to Consummation of Empire was occurring even as he worked on The Course of Empire, and both the imagery of the paintings and the description he provided suggest that Cole was deeply concerned about how economic development was transforming the natural world, upsetting the delicate balance between nature and the human presence he depicted as Arcadia and believed to be the optimal state. As his letters to Reed and the “Essay on American Scenery” attest, Cole was deeply concerned that the emphasis on progress and improvement was resulting in the senseless destruction of the American landscape.24 The artist made this point explicitly in his journal: construction of the Canajoharie and Catskill Railroad along Catskill Creek was a vivid example of how “improvement” needlessly destroyed nature. On August 1, 1836, as he was working on Destruction and Desolation, Cole wrote: “Last evening I took a walk up the Catskill [Creek] above Austin’s Mill where the Rail Road is now making. This was once a favorite walk but now the charm of solitude and quietness is gone.” Because most men were “insensible to the beauty of nature,” he added, they “desecrate whatever they touch. They cut down the forests with a wantonness for which there is no excuse, even gain, & leave the herbless rocks to glimmer in the burning sun.” Near the end of his “Essay on American Scenery” Cole had restated the need for Americans to develop a greater appreciation for natural beauty, which, he implied, was the only sure way of preventing such desecration, of protecting the landscape: “We are still in Eden; the wall that shuts us out of the garden is our own ignorance and folly.” Urging Americans to experience the “pure enjoyment of rural nature” as a retreat from the demands of everyday life, Cole concluded his address with lines from the eighteenth-century Scots educator and poet John Wilson: Learn The laws by which the Eternal, doth sublime And sanctify his works, that we may see The hidden glory veiled from vulgar eyes.25

Two years after publication of his “Essay on American Scenery” Cole returned to the theme of the senseless destruction of nature. He did so not with brush and palette but with verse, a long (245-line) poem entitled “The Complaint of the Forest.” The narrator is enjoying a reverie sitting beside a serene lake (which seems, from internal evidence, to be one of the two lakes behind the Catskill escarpment), on a

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splendid early summer day. To his surprise he hears the “voice of the great Forest” lamenting the human impact on nature. Prior to the emergence of the human race, the voice declaimed, All then was harmony and peace—but man Arose—he who now vaunts antiquity— He the destroyer—amid the shades Of oriental realms, destruction’s work began—

The following lines recount the injury inflicted upon the forest: the axe—the unresting axe Incessant smote our venerable ranks, And crashing branches frequent lash’d the ground. Stupendous trunks the pride of many years, Roll’d on the groaning earth with all their umbrage.

Old World civilizations cut ancient forests until the earth Our ancient mother lay, blasted and bare Beneath the burning sun—

Initially the voice of the great Forest expressed some consolation that there remained “one bright virgin continent,” separated from the Old World by a vast sea, where the native peoples lived in harmony with nature. But alas, even that New World was subject to the same forces of destruction: O peace primeval! Would that thou hadst staid! What mov’d thee to unbar thine azure gates O mighty oceans when the destroyer came?

The voice of the Forest complained, but no one listened: Few were his number first; but soon The work of desolation was begun, Close by the heaving main; then on the banks Of rivers far inland our strength was shorn; And fire and steel did all their office well— No stay was there—no rest—

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The human presence was transforming the landscape, sacrificing scenes of ineffable natural beauty to commerce and development: And thus comes rushing on This human hurricane—which hath no bounds. E’en this secluded spot our sanctuary, . . . Our doom is near; behold from east to west The skies are darken’d by ascending smoke, For every valley is an altar made, Where unto Mammon and to all the gods Of man’s idolatry, the victims we are.

This is an apocalyptic vision, replete with the words “destruction” and “desolation,” which suggest that Cole was working out in words the sentiments he expressed visually in The Course of Empire.26 “The Complaint of the Forest” may not be Shakespearean verse, but it is nevertheless a powerful poem, one that brings together the sentiments Cole expressed in his paintings, his letters, and his published and unpublished writings. His friend Bryant noted that the artist was concerned that the human presence, through the very processes of settlement and economic development, was transforming the American landscape. As evidence of the wanton destruction of nature mounted, Cole used pencil and pen to warn his countrymen of the consequences of their actions.27 What is so striking about Cole’s “Essay on American Scenery,” several of his poems, and the letters to Reed is that the painter was reversing the usual progression from barbarism to civilization that an earlier generation, including Timothy Dwight and John Agg, who contributed the text to The Hudson River Port Folio, as well as contemporaries such as Andrew Jackson Downing, N. P. Willis, and a host of others, had celebrated. As economic development was transforming the landscape of the Hudson Valley, Cole realized that the civilizers were those who cut down the forests to bring fields into cultivation, who were destroying scenes of natural beauty out of greed or ignorance or philistinism. The civilizers, whom he characterized as “dollargodded utilitarians,” had become the modern barbarians.28 Alan Wallach has argued that Cole’s painting River in the Catskills (1843) is an antipastoral, “a deliberate attack on the conventions of pastoral landscape painting and consequently on a pervasive, if often contested, ideology that lauded improvement and material progress.” Specifically, the painting is an expression of Cole’s anger at the construction of the Canajoharie and Catskill Railroad alongside Catskill Creek, a scene he had sketched and painted frequently. In River in the Catskills, however, the lush canopy of trees evident in Cole’s earlier paintings of Catskill Creek is

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Thomas Cole, River in the Catskills, 1843. M. and M. Karolik Collection of American Paintings. Photograph © 2012 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

gone, tree stumps mar the foreground, and a railroad passes over a bridge in the middle distance. The serenity of the landscape had been ruined. Five years after he first expressed outrage at how the railroad had destroyed one of his favorite places, and two years before completing River in the Catskills, Cole presented his “Lecture on American Scenery” to the Catskill Lyceum. Most of the text repeated his earlier “Essay on American Scenery,” but Cole added a long passage that denounced the destruction of landscape near the village: “Within the last ten years, the beauty of its environs has been shorn away; year by year the groves that adorned the banks of the Catskill wasted away.” Cole heaped scorn on the railroad builders and profiteers who sacrificed natural beauty in the name of improvement: This is a spot that in Europe would be considered as one of the gems of the earth; it would be sought for by the lovers of the beautiful, and protected by law from desecration. But its beauty is gone, and that which a century cannot restore is cut down; what remains? Steep, arid banks, incapable of cultivation, and seamed by

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unsightly gullies, formed by the waters which find no resistance in the loamy soil. Where once was beauty, there is now barrenness.

If to many Americans the railroad represented progress, to Cole it was an unsettling, destabilizing force at odds with nature.29 Historian Perry Miller long ago argued that Cole was among a relatively small but influential number of American artists and writers who shared a deep anxiety about the direction their country was taking. In “Nature and the National Ego” he aggregated Cole with a group of individuals who feared that economic progress was taking a grievous toll on the American landscape, destroying the very birthright of the continent. While theirs was a minority view in “Young America,” the phrase made memorable in Ralph Waldo Emerson’s 1844 clarion call for the development of an American culture, Bryant, Cooper, Cole, Emerson, and like-minded individuals “denounced or lamented the march of civilization.” Their point of view sprang from an abiding and deeply felt concern: according to Miller, they “identified the health, the very personality, of America with Nature.”30 Perhaps because he never again had a patron as accommodating of his interests as Reed, Cole never returned to the important subject at the heart of The Course of Empire, River in the Catskills, and the “Essay on American Scenery” in its two versions. Nevertheless, his later paintings, especially The Voyage of Life and The Cross and the World, continued his attempt to merge history and allegory with the natural world and thereby elevate landscape painting to the highest tier of the artistic realm. Cole aspired to be much more than a “leaf painter,” as he wrote in his journal. Bryant observed that Cole “sought to exemplify his favorite position that landscape painting was capable of the deepest moral interest and deserved to stand second to no other department of the art.” The Voyage of Life is a powerful example of this. In four canvases, Cole portrayed the life cycle from childhood to old age, a passage that led from a tranquil stream to a turbulent sea. The landscape is not a backdrop for Cole’s allegory but an essential component of the human progression from childhood, a pastoral scene at dawn, to old age, a stormy scene at the end of the day. This enormously popular work captivated Cole’s contemporaries: the second painting in the series, Youth, was engraved by James Smillie for distribution to members of the American Art-Union. The Cross of the World, left unfinished at the artist’s death and surviving only in studies, similarly represents the theme of pilgrimage from youth to old age even as it attests to Cole’s deepening religious faith in the 1840s.31 Cole’s death in 1848 was a “national loss,” according to the New York Evening Mirror. Bryant, in his “Funeral Oration,” described how the artist’s death “affects us with a sense of violence and loss.” He referred to Cole’s beloved Catskills when he observed that “something of power and greatness is withdrawn from the sublime

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mountaintops and the broad forests and the rushing waterfalls.” Cole’s death left the American art community without its most famous and revered member. It also silenced the voice of one of the most important advocates for the natural world. Cole loved the Hudson River valley and turned the landscape of the river and its mountains into canvases that he hoped would inspire Americans to appreciate nature as the birthright of the continent. Although most of his expressions of outrage at the destruction of the natural world were private, included in letters to friends or in unpublished verse, or were subject to interpretation, as in River in the Catskills, in his paintings and published writings Cole raised a powerful voice in defense of nature, especially that of the Hudson River valley.32

3 The Writers’ River WASHINGTON I RVING AND N. P. WILLIS

J

ust as Thomas Cole’s paintings celebrated the landscape of the Hudson Valley, so did the writings of a number of authors who, over time, have been closely identified with the river and its environs. Asher B. Durand’s Kindred Spirits, which depicts Cole and the poet William Cullen Bryant on a rocky ledge overlooking a clove in the Catskills, captures the intimate relationship between literary and visual culture in the antebellum years. James T. Callow long ago borrowed the title of Durand’s painting for his thoughtful analysis of the interplay between Knickerbocker writers and artists. Bryant’s poem “Thanatopsis,” which electrified the American literary world upon its publication in 1817, urged readers to Go forth under the open sky, and list To Nature’s teachings . . .

Many American authors, like their artistic friends, heeded Bryant’s injunction and sought originality and inspiration in the natural world. Two of the most important writers in the first half on the nineteenth century whose works were closely associated with the Hudson River valley were Washington Irving and Nathaniel Parker Willis. Each lived in a house that overlooked the river and has become indelibly identified with its history. Each wrote extensively about creating a dwelling and landscape that domesticated the Hudson. The careers and dwellings of both became inseparable from the public perception of the river.1 “I THANK God that I was born on the banks of the Hudson!” These were the words Geoffrey Crayon chose to welcome readers of A Book of the Hudson, Collected from the Various Works of Diedrich Knickerbocker. Washington Irving, who created both Crayon and Knickerbocker as pseudonyms, attributed great importance to his childhood

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Detail of Washington Irving and His Literary Friends at Sunnyside, painting by Christian Schussele after an engraving by Felix O. C. Darley, 1863. Irving is seated at the center, facing forward, with Ralph Waldo Emerson at his right. SS.79.47, Historic Hudson Valley, Tarrytown, N.Y.

landscape in the development of his character and personality. The youthful Irving anthropomorphized the river, ascribing to it a soul and other human qualities, and found in its hollows and mountains and rolling countryside inspiration that fired his fertile imagination. A Book of the Hudson includes the famous stories “Rip Van Winkle” and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” from The Sketch-Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. (1819–20), the book that earned its author international acclaim, as well as a chapter from Knickerbocker’s History of New York (1809) and essays from other volumes of Irving’s prose.2 Irving’s writings proved to be enormously popular with the reading public, in England as well as the United States, and the pieces published in A Book of the Hudson shaped much of the folklore and history of the region. Although “Rip Van Winkle” and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” were surely derived from Germanic folklore, these tales gave a specificity of time and place to the Hudson River valley. The imagery of Ichabod Crane’s furious effort to outrace the Headless Horseman, and of Rip’s trip to the Catskills and his fateful encounter with the old Dutchmen playing ninepins, brought the valley’s landscape and its history to life. As was true of so many visitors to the Catskill Mountain House, Thomas Cole visited Rip’s “hollow” on one of his hikes through the mountains, though while there he enjoyed a drink of pure springwater rather than flagons of the heady brew that caused Irving’s most

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famous character to sleep for two decades. The Sketch-Book tales also became favorite subjects of artists and illustrators. John Quidor, for example, painted The Return of Rip Van Winkle (1849) and The Headless Horseman Pursuing Ichabod Crane (1858). Contributors to an 1864 edition of “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” included Daniel Huntington, John F. Kensett, Emanuel Leutze, T. Addison Richards, and William Hart, among others. John Rogers and Frederick MacMonnies sculpted images of Rip, and Felix O. C. Darley illustrated those two stories for members of the American Art-Union in 1848, as well as the Knickerbocker History for New York publisher George P. Putnam in 1850. Numerous artists in the years since have prepared illustrations for Irving’s works, including the English academician George H. Boughton (1893), Frank T. Merrill (1894), Will Bradley (1897), Maxfield Parrish (1900), Lolita Perine (1903), Arthur Rackham (1905), N. C. Wyeth (1921), Edna Cooke (1924), John Fitz Jr. (1928), and Barry Moser (1984). The Sketch-Book stories have been performed as plays, grand as well as comic opera, and of course fi lm. Equally important, the stories have been transformed in the telling and retelling and have become part of the vernacular tradition of the Hudson Valley.3 Irving was born in Manhattan in 1783 to parents who were of Scottish and English descent. As was true of many other male infants born that year, he was named in honor of George Washington. Irving studied law, occasionally helped with the family’s importing business, and dabbled in literary pursuits. Together with his brother Peter and James Kirke Paulding he wrote the irreverently satirical Salmagundi in 1807. Two years later he became engaged to Matilda Hoffman and began practicing law with her father, a noted judge. But Matilda’s death in March 1809 led Irving to turn his grief, and his energies, to literature, and the following December he published, under the pseudonym Diedrich Knickerbocker, the highly acclaimed History of New York.4 The subtitle of Knickerbocker’s History, which promises to tell the story of Dutch New York from the “beginning of the world” to the English conquest in 1664, is an indication of Irving’s playful intent. The book is filled with “many surprising and curious matters,” and the author’s declaration that it was the “only authentic history of the times that ever hath been or ever will be published” was an additional hint to readers that the following pages were less factual than authorial inventions. Indeed, for all its pretensions to history, Irving’s pen brought forth a marvelous satire. Although following its publication some commentators objected to Irving’s portrayal of stout old Dutch burghers and rulers he characterized as William the Testy and Peter the Headstrong, the History has itself become part of the history of the Hudson River valley. In succeeding decades what began as a pointedly irreverent depiction of New York’s old Dutch ways instead became a kind of “convivial currency” that, Irving wrote, “link[ed] our whole community together in good-humor and good

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S. Richardson, engraving of an old Dutch burgher. Diedrich Knickerbocker, A History of New York, from the Beginning of the World to the End of the Dutch Dynasty . . . (1809; New York, 1864), 169. Archives & Special Collections, Franklin & Marshall College.

fellowship.” The “quaint characteristics” he ascribed to New York’s Dutch forebears quickly became defining attributes of New York as city and state were experiencing tremendous social and cultural change. Almost a century later Irving’s pseudonymous Knickerbocker had become so revered that he was transformed into Father Knickerbocker, the personification and symbol of old New York. In his 1848 “Account of the Author” Irving described Knickerbocker as a throwback to an earlier time, “a small, brisk-looking old gentleman, dressed in a rusty black coat, a pair of olive velvet breeches, and a small cocked hat.” Fearing that the last vestiges of the Dutch era were “gradually slipping from our grasp,” Knickerbocker promised to rescue the events and persons of that earlier time from oblivion, “to render a just tribute of renown to the many great and wonderful transactions of our Dutch progenitors.” In the Knickerbocker History, Irving also described the scenery of the Hudson vividly. When Peter Stuyvesant and his crew sailed up the river toward the end of the Dutch dynasty, Irving wrote, “wildness and savage majesty reigned on the borders of this mighty river; the hand of cultivation had not as yet laid low the dark forest, and tamed the features of the landscape; nor had the frequent sail of commerce broken in upon the profound and awful solitude of ages.” In elegant prose the author invented many now-familiar place-names, such as Anthony’s Nose and Danskammer, and created a folklore for the Hudson—the legends and stories as well as the history that helped define the river’s meanings for nineteenth-century Americans.5

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Irving traveled to England to work in the family’s business in 1815, a trip that turned into a seventeen-year sojourn abroad. While he was in England the business failed, and as he had done at another critical point in his life, the months after Matilda Hoffman’s death, Irving again turned to writing. Over the next decade and a half he published the Sketch-Book, Bracebridge Hall (1822), Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus (1828), and The Conquest of Granada (1829), among other works, and received honorary degrees from Columbia College and Oxford University. He returned to New York in 1831, almost immediately traveled by horseback through the American West (an experience published as A Tour of the Prairies in 1835), and settled into life in his native city and in the lower Hudson Valley.6 Irving, who had never before owned his own house, acquired the former Van Tassel cottage in Tarrytown in 1835. He had frequently visited relatives in Tarrytown during his youth and clearly felt at home there. Shortly after purchasing the property, he described it as standing “in the midst of the ‘fairy haunts of long lost hours,’ in a neighbourhood endeared to me by boyish recollections, and command[ing] one of our magnificent river prospects.” Moreover, in “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” the narrator had described “a little valley or rather lap of land among high hills, which is one of the quietest places in the whole world,” and averred that if he were seeking a retreat from the cares of the world, he knew of no place “more promising than this little valley.” This was the spot Irving chose for his home. With the help of his neighbor, English-born landscape painter George Harvey, who was an amateur architect, Irving transformed the seventeenth-century two-room vernacular cottage into a “little nookery somewhat in the Dutch style, quaint, but unpretending.” The Van Tassel cottage became the two southern rooms of the enlarged house, the dining room and study, which are separated by a hall. Irving and Harvey added a parlor to the north of the dining room and a kitchen wing to the north of the study, as well as a piazza or veranda to the west. Perhaps most important, the house was as much a creation of Irving’s imagination as his writings: he added the stepped gables that became its signature and most visible link with New York’s Dutch colonial heritage, as well as weathervanes that, he claimed, were once used on prominent buildings in New Amsterdam (Manhattan) and Fort Orange (Albany). Irving was deeply involved in every step of the planning and construction of the house. He provided Harvey with specific instructions on the design of several rooms as well as the treatment of windows and of cast-iron benches for the entrance porch. Upon its completion Irving named the cottage Sunnyside and described it as “made up of gable-ends, and full of angles and corners as an old cocked hat.”7 Irving soon decided to write about the cottage and use his pen to help defray some of the cost of acquisition and development, which exceeded his expectations. In 1839 he published a three-part essay explaining—or rather, inventing—the history of the house in the March, April, and May issues of the Knickerbocker. Employing his

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well-known pseudonym Geoffrey Crayon, Irving wrote that he had found a manuscript in the cottage, in an old Dutch chest of drawers, “among pumpkin-seeds, bunches of thyme and pennyroyale, and crumbs of new-year cakes,” and “carefully wrapped up in the fragment of an old parchment deed.” Both the handwriting and the contents of the essay, Crayon explained, revealed it to have been written by Diedrich Knickerbocker. In the first of three pieces, which was not included in the collection of essays Irving published in 1855 as Wolfert’s Roost, Crayon detailed his relationship with venerable Knickerbocker and the history of the old dwelling. After years of wanderings that took him away from his Dutch heritage, Crayon returned to Sleepy Hollow and found the house, once occupied by Wolfert Acker and later by generations of the Van Tassel family, in deplorable condition. He decided to “arrest the mouldering hand of Time; to rescue the historic pile from utter ruin” and make it into a “quiet home, where I might enjoy ‘lust in rust’ ”—pleasure in repose—“for the remainder of my days.” Crayon acquired the dwelling and sought to return it to its former state: “I have repaired and renovated it with religious care, in the genuine Dutch style,” he informed readers in sometimes archaic prose, “and have adorned and illustrated it with sundry reliques of the glory days of New Netherlands,” including the weathercocks and Knickerbocker’s chair and writing desk.8 The publication of “A Chronicle of Wolfert’s Roost” brought Sunnyside to the attention of the reading public. So did the work of other writers. Andrew Jackson Downing, the most influential tastemaker in antebellum America, found Irving’s dwelling a valuable example of good architecture: there was “scarcely a building or place more replete with interest in America” than Sunnyside, he informed readers of his Treatise on the Theory and Practice of Landscape Gardening (1841). Downing apparently assumed that Irving and Harvey had retained rather than added the “strongly marked symptoms” of the house’s Dutch origins, and described the “quaint old weathercocks and finials, the crow-stepped gables, and the hall paved with Dutch tiles” as being “among the ancient and venerable ornaments of the houses of the original settlers of Manhattan, now almost extinct among us.” T. Addison Richards, who wrote and illustrated a lengthy essay on Sunnyside and its creator for Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, similarly lauded Irving’s cottage as “this sparkling little jewel of a home.” Between his accounts of the capture and trial of British spy Major John André, Benson J. Lossing took readers of his Pictorial Field-Book of the Revolution on a detour to Sunnyside, which he described as “beautiful and enriched by the hand of nature, hallowed by the voice of traditionary history speaking out from the old walls and umbrageous trees, and consecrated by the presence of true genius.” According to Lossing, “Sunnyside has a charm for the American mind as bewitching and classic as were the groves where Orpheus piped and Sappho sang to the Acadians of old.”9

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A decade later, in 1847, Irving built the Pagoda, designed together with Harvey in a vaguely Spanish style. The addition, surely named for its upwardly curving roofline, provided additional space for pantries and a laundry, a cold cellar, and living space for servants. “The additions and alterations have turned out beyond my hopes,” he wrote his niece Sarah Storrow, “both as to appearance and convenience, and meet with universal approbation.” Irving described the Pagoda as “one of the most useful additions that ever was made to a house; besides being so ornamental.” The result, he boasted to a friend, converted “what was once rather a make shift little Mansion into one of the most complete snuggeries in the country.” A weathervane from a windmill that formerly stood in Rotterdam brought by his friend Gilbert Davis topped the Pagoda and punctuated Sunnyside’s claim to Dutch ancestry.10 Irving also devoted significant expense and energy to the landscape. While the cottage was still under construction he was busy planting trees and boasted that he was becoming “a capital florist and horticulturist and agriculturist.” He planted the wisteria that climbed the south facade of the cottage as well as the English ivy that adorned the east wall and gables. Under Irving’s direction, workers dammed the brook flowing through the property and shaped it into a lake whose banks followed the outlines of the Mediterranean. Irving laid out the paths that meandered throughout the grounds, and placed seats at points with particularly interesting views. He also planted a number of trees and shrubs near the house. Irving took justifiable pride in the landscape he created. In 1841 he wrote his niece Sarah, describing recent improvements to the grounds: “I think the little domains about the cottage have been more beautiful than ever––The trees and shrubs and clambering vines that have been transplanted within the last year or two, have now taken good root and begin to grow luxuriantly. If vegetation goes on at this rate we shall before long be buried among roses and honeysuckles and ivy and sweet briar . . . every year the groves grow more dense and stately.” When Irving was absent for four years as U.S. minister to Spain beginning in 1842, the plantings matured and shrouded Sunnyside. “I understand my cottage is nearly buried among the trees I set out,” he wrote in 1846, “and over run with roses and honeysuckle and ivy from Melrose Abbey, and my nieces implore me to come back and save them from being buried alive in foliage.” Sunnyside was “so completely smothered in dense shrubbery,” the author of a guidebook to the Hudson River noted, “that it is hardly discernable from the decks of the passing steamers.”11 The addition of the Pagoda necessitated a new round of improvements to the landscape. In 1847 Irving informed Sarah Storrow that he had “cut down and transplanted enough trees to furnish two ordinary places.” Irving used the axe to create “several charming views of the Tappan Zee and the hills beyond; all set as if it were in verdant frames.” He planted annuals near the entrance as well as grapes and figs

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provided by his friend Gouverneur Kemble, designed and built a hothouse for tender plants and a board-and-batten cottage for his gardener, and even placed wren boxes “within piping distance of my house, so that I shall before long have a merry tenantry about me.” He frequently wrote his niece Sarah that his house and grounds never looked better. Irving described his “little nest on the banks of the Hudson” as “one of the pleasantest little nookeries in the world.”12 But Sunnyside was more than a house in an ornamental garden. An orchard stood on a hillside above the cottage, and fowl and other farm animals lived nearby in barns and stables. The combination of working farm and house with pleasure grounds was so successfully integrated that few visitors commented on the proximity of the agricultural buildings and crops. Downing, for example, who devoted a lengthy paragraph of the Treatise to Sunnyside, failed to mention the more utilitarian elements of the landscape: he described the grounds as being “threaded by foot-paths ingeniously contrived, so as sometimes to afford secluded walks, and at others to allow fine vistas of the broad expanse of river scenery.” Richards similarly wrote poetically about the beauties of the landscape and the wonderfully idiosyncratic cottage but failed to mention the proximity of the working farm. He described Sunnyside as covered with ivy and climbing roses and “embraced by its protecting trees and shrubbery.” The overall effect, Richards concluded, was “a sweet scene of rural simplicity.” If few of his contemporaries realized that Sunnyside was more the creation of its author’s mind than the preservation of an old Dutch building, almost immediately the house became iconic, a physical extension of the creator of Hudson Valley folklore and history. Richards, for example, found the house and grounds to be “a striking reflex” of Irving’s character and personality. The cottage was illustrated in Downing’s Treatise on Landscape Gardening, issued as a lithograph by Nathaniel Currier and James Ives, and captured on canvas by a number of artists.13 Irving’s writings and his residence at Sunnyside created a new image for Tarrytown and the surrounding area, and as steamboat service brought the river towns of Westchester County within commuting distance of New York, it experienced a period of impressive growth. When his sister Sarah had visited Tarrytown a few years earlier, it had been “little better than a mere hamlet” at the foot of the hill, with one small tavern that gave the village its name, which derived, Crayon explained in “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” from the “inveterate propensity” of farmers to “linger about the village tavern on market days.” Since Irving had settled in Tarrytown, however, the “spirit of speculation and improvement had seized even upon that once quiet and unambitious little dorp.” As a result, Irving wrote his sister in 1841, the village was barely recognizable: “It has undergone such change . . . cottages and country seats have sprung up along the banks of the Tappan Sea, and Tarrytown has become the metropolis [of quite] a fashionable vicinity.” New houses dotted the

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Sunnyside—On the Hudson, ca. 1850. Hand-colored lithograph published by Currier and Ives. Private collection.

hillsides above Sunnyside, there were new hotels and churches, including a “little Gothic Episcopalian church with an organ,” and storekeepers catered to the wants of increasingly prosperous residents. Tarrytown, the well-traveled Irving concluded, had become “one of the most agreeable neighborhoods” he had ever lived in. Six years later Irving again wrote his sister Sarah and described Tarrytown as being “as much changed as the metropolis. It is now quite an extensive village with several churches; fine buildings; two hotels; and the country around beautified by tasteful cultivation and dotted with country seats.” These changes pleased Irving: at times during the 1830s he feared that Sunnyside might be too isolated, especially in the winter, for his young and sociable nieces. As Tarrytown became more cosmopolitan he found its society very satisfying, both for himself and for the younger residents of Sunnyside.14 Much as Irving appreciated the new development occurring nearby, he had acquired the Van Tassel cottage because of its location adjacent to the river. The veranda of his home faces west, toward the Tappan Zee, where the Hudson River is approximately three miles wide and where, according to Diedrich Knickerbocker,

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Dutch sailors “prudently shortened sail and implored the protection of St. Nicholas when they crossed.” From the veranda the Palisades, a vertical wall of rock opposite Manhattan and the Bronx, is visible on the west bank to the south. Hook Mountain stands directly opposite Sunnyside on the west bank, and High Tor and the Hudson Highlands loom over the river to the north. Amid the grandeur of the river and adjacent landscape, Sunnyside nestled within a secluded valley, and Irving took great pleasure in the domestic world he had created.15 But one change distressed Irving: the coming of the railroad along the east bank of the Hudson. Sunnyside stands approximately twenty feet from an embankment. Today, and for more than a century and a half, railroad tracks have separated Irving’s cottage from his beloved Hudson River. To the south of the house the original shoreline curves to the east, and rushes wave in a gentle breeze where once there was a cove in the river (plate 7). The landscape is a reminder that Sunnyside once stood on a point with water to the south and west, a stepped-gabled sentinel keeping watch over the river. Irving had been “much disturbed” at the prospect of a railroad on the east bank of the Hudson, which, according to his nephew, would “bring the nuisance, with all its noise and unsightliness, to his very door, and mar forever, as he feared, the peculiar charms for which he had chosen the spot—its quiet and retirement.” Irving was right in being concerned: the railroad literally invaded the authorial garden. On August 7, 1850, he wrote an aggrieved letter to Gouverneur Kemble protesting the “infernal alarum of your railroad steam trumpet,” which awakened him at midnight and left him in a “deplorable state of nervous agitation.” Irving once commented tellingly on the spirit of improvement abroad in the land: “If the garden of Eden were now on Earth,” he wrote, “they would not hesitate to run a railroad through it.” Richards, who visited Sunnyside with George P. Morris in 1855, surely reflected Irving’s sentiment in observing that the “intrusion of the railroad” had “profaned so much of the river shore” and destroyed some of the “sweetest features” of the author’s landscape. If Sunnyside was the “supreme artistic achievement” of Irving’s later years, as historian Adam Sweeting has claimed, the railroad marred a landscape of great beauty and significance.16 Washington Irving invented himself as the quintessential New Yorker and American man of letters. Christian Schussele’s painting Washington Irving and His Literary Friends at Sunnyside (1863), which is based on an engraving by Darley, depicts the author in his study. The artist portrays Irving surrounded by fourteen fellow authors, including Knickerbocker writers James Kirke Paulding, Fitz-Greene Halleck, William Cullen Bryant, James Fenimore Cooper, and Nathaniel Parker Willis, all of whom were friends, as well as such other writers as Henry T. Tuckerman, George Bancroft, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Ralph Waldo Emerson. Although the painting is a charming fiction—the gathering never took place, and a number of

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the writers depicted had died years earlier—it testifies to Irving’s importance to the development of American literature. Lionized at home and abroad for his writings and honored for his commitment to public service, Irving was in some respects the human embodiment of the Hudson River valley during his lifetime. In his prose he celebrated its hollows and mountains, invented its history and folklore, and created a house and landscape than took on iconic importance as the physical extension of the man and of the region. As Edgar Mayhew Bacon long ago observed, “Irving may almost be said to have discovered the Hudson. He found a stream that was wonderful in beauty and already rich in material for history, but the beauty was uncelebrated and the history unrecorded.” Irving’s death in 1859 marked the passing not only of the first commercially successful American writer, but also of an individual whose imagination created the public image of the Hudson Valley.17 NATHANIEL PARKER WILLIS was a generation younger than Irving and, though he lived in various places, sixteen years after Irving acquired Sunnyside he built a house on a large tract of land some thirty-five miles north of Sunnyside, on the west bank of the river, at Cornwall. Although largely forgotten today, Willis, who was born in Portland, Maine, in 1806, was one of the most prolific and successful authors of his time. The son of a minister who had launched the first religious weekly in the United States and later the very popular Youth’s Companion, Willis started publishing verse that the New York Times described as “of more than ordinary excellence” while a schoolboy, continued his literary endeavors throughout collegiate days at Yale, and then established the American Monthly Magazine, which was published in Boston. The failure of that journal, and Willis’s craving for a larger stage, led him to accept George P. Morris’s offer to become copublisher of the New-York Mirror, an influential journal that promoted American art and literature, in 1831. This was the beginning of a long partnership that culminated in the establishment of the Home Journal, one of the most successful magazines of the antebellum years. Willis’s prodigious writings ranged from poetry to two plays to sixteen volumes of prose and the editing of several gift books or annuals. He also contributed the text that accompanied the engravings, prepared after sketches by the well-traveled English artist William H. Bartlett, in their 1840 collaboration American Scenery. Willis was sometimes criticized as a social dandy or a writer who preferred a light approach over serious prose and analysis, yet he was also an integral part of the New York literary scene and a writer who made the Hudson River and its environs come alive for readers.18 Willis’s prose style and much of the subject matter he took on were obviously influenced by Washington Irving. He chose Irving’s fictional Phil Slingsby as the narrator of his “Inklings” sketches: what better way to honor an author you admire and emulate, Willis must have thought, than to borrow a minor character and transform

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Nathaniel Parker Willis, n.d. Engraving by Henry Wright Smith. Prints & Photographs Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

him into your voice. Willis’s first significant assignment after joining Morris at the Mirror was to travel to Europe and submit weekly letters about the places and people he encountered. Later assembled as Pencillings by the Way (1835), the stories in many respects drew upon the success Irving had in portraying English society and culture through words that evoked the history of place or that presented shrewd observations of the ordinary drama of daily life.19

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Willis returned to the United States in 1835 and immediately plunged into metropolitan life. In December 1838 he severed his ties with Morris, a move that historian Thomas H. Baker attributes to “lingering troubles” over the publication of Pencillings by the Way, which had been criticized for Willis’s description of events and conversations that his British hosts considered confidential. He then edited the Corsair, which the Times judged to be a “brilliantly written weekly paper,” and shortly after its demise Willis and Morris renewed their longtime partnership and friendship. Poor health forced Willis to seek an alternative to the city, which he found at Glenmary, a home near Owego, New York, on the banks of the Susquehanna. Willis wrote a series of delightful letters to the New-York Mirror chronicling his experiences there, which were collected and published as Letters from under a Bridge (1840).20 In 1836 Willis was commissioned by the English publisher George Virtue to write the text to accompany the 121 engravings after drawings by William H. Bartlett for American Scenery. Its publication was, according to James T. Callow, “the most ambitious [literary and artistic] undertaking of the entire Knickerbocker period.” Willis’s well-known account of his European travels surely suggested him to the publisher, and his prose style, which emphasized brevity as well as flair, was ideal for the project. Although to modern readers and print collectors Bartlett’s engravings are usually the most appealing part of the book, Willis’s introductory material and the mini-essays accompanying each image are also important. In the introduction Willis outlined the themes that pervade the book. One was the essential newness of the New World. “In comparison with the old countries of Europe,” he wrote, “the vegetation is so wondrously lavish, the outlines and minor features struck out with so bold a freshness, and the lakes and rivers so even in their fullness and flow, yet so vast and powerful,” that a visitor from the Old World might well conclude that the American continent was “an Eden newly sprung from the ocean.” A second theme was the contrast between Old World and New. In Europe “the soul and centre of attraction in every picture is some ruin of the past.” In America, by contrast, everyone looked toward the future, anticipating continued economic and demographic growth as well as progress in the arts. A third theme, introduced in the preface to readers, was the importance of history even in such a young country. Willis expressed his intent to “assemble as much as possible of that part of [the] American story which history has not yet found leisure to put into form, and which romance and poetry have not yet appropriated—the legendary traditions and anecdotes, events of the trying times of the Revolution, Indian history, &c. &c.”21 Willis accompanied Bartlett on at least part of the artist’s sketching tour during 1836 and 1837, taking notes while Bartlett recorded his views. Willis also surely spoke with residents or other tourists about the history of each of the sites the two men visited, and undertook additional research as he was preparing the text: his

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account of the Seven Years’ War battle for Fort Niagara, for example, includes a published letter from Sir William Johnson describing the British victory, while the text accompanying the View of Faneuil Hall quotes from the seventeenth-century writings of John Josselyn and John Dunton. Willis clearly was writing for a literate audience, as he assumed that the Congregational minister and educator Timothy Dwight was so well-known that he referred to him not by name but as “a grave and eminent divine” when quoting the description of Lake George published in Travels in New England and New York (1822). Just as Willis neglected to include the author and title of Dwight’s Travels, so did he quote “from the history of these middle regions of our territory” an extensive account of the massacre of fourteen Conestoga Indians by the Paxton Boys in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, in 1763. He also referred to Thomas Jefferson’s description of Natural Bridge, in Virginia, and quoted approvingly Harriet Martineau’s account of visiting the site. There are numerous other examples of the extent to which Willis supplemented his observations and what he learned from others on his journey with Bartlett by conducting research in the bestknown histories and travel accounts then available in the United States. Clearly, the research he undertook for American Scenery demonstrates that he worked hard to do justice to the opportunity presented by George Virtue.22 Bartlett’s images were not limited to natural scenery but included urban views of Boston, New Haven, Albany, New York City, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Washington, D.C., as well as a number of small towns located near picturesque sites. Nevertheless, as the book’s title indicates, Willis and Bartlett devoted most of the text and illustrations to places of natural beauty. Today, and as some critics charged during his lifetime, Willis is generally regarded as a breezy writer of inconsequential essays, but in his contribution to American Scenery he demonstrated that he had a keen eye for the significance of the American landscape. For example, he described the prospect from Mount Holyoke as “probably the richest view in America, in point of cultivation and fertile beauty,” and Horseshoe Falls (the Canadian part of Niagara Falls) as “unquestionably the sublimest thing in nature.” He characterized the Shenandoah Valley as “one of the most harmonious combinations of mountain, vale, and river, to be found in America,” and the scenery near Harpers Ferry as “the most singularly picturesque in America.” Willis described the valley northeast of the White Mountains, near the towns of Lancaster and Jefferson, as “a little Arcadia.” These and numerous other passages acquainted readers with the beauties of the American landscape.23 In addition to observations on American scenery, Willis was true to his word in incorporating history and folklore. The American Revolution figured prominently as a theme, especially in the Hudson River valley scenes Bartlett recorded. In the text accompanying Bartlett’s view of the Kosciuszko Monument at West Point, which

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had been erected to the general’s memory by cadets, Willis informed American readers of the Polish general’s achievements in service to his homeland in the years after the American Revolution. For View of the Ruins of Ticonderoga he wrote an account of how Ethan Allen and the Green Mountain Boys had captured the fort. Willis’s text for Lighthouse near Caldwell’s Landing drew upon Samuel L. Knapp’s recently published Life of Aaron Burr (1835) to tell the story of Burr’s treachery. To accompany the engraving Boston, from Dorchester Heights Willis described George Washington’s decision to build fortifications on the high ground overlooking the town, which forced British general Howe and his troops to evacuate Boston. Other historical events that Willis incorporated in his text include Henry Hudson’s account of entering the Narrows at Staten Island, Robert Juet’s journal entry on the Half Moon entering New York Harbor, Giovanni da Verrazano’s letter describing New York Bay, Robert Fulton’s recollections of the doubts and trials he encountered when building the first steamboat, and the defense of Baltimore against the British invasion during the War of 1812.24 Willis expressed surprise at “how few details connected with the races that inhabited the older settlements of our country are reached even by the researches of Historical Societies.” He regretted that Native Americans “had not a poet and a partial chronicler,” and throughout the text of American Scenery he provided readers with parts of their history and folk beliefs. Willis recounted the Puritans’ acquisition of the fertile land of the Connecticut River valley from the native peoples for a pittance; he printed Peter Kalm’s description of a Native American making a canoe; he related the history of King Philip’s War to accompany Connecticut Valley, from Mount Holyoke; and he described Henry Hudson’s encounter with Native Americans when the mariner shared an alcoholic drink with the chiefs, who promptly became intoxicated. Willis also related the Native American superstition about the stillness of Saratoga Lake as evidence that it was sacred to the Great Spirit, as well as John Bartram’s account, in Travels through Pennsylvania, of two Indian superstitions, and he included an appreciative biographical sketch of the great Mohegan chief Uncas.25 More than a quarter of the engravings in American Scenery (33 of 121) are of the Hudson River valley and the Catskills. A measure of the significance of the Hudson Valley to the American landscape was the choice of the view south toward Bannerman’s Island and the northern gate of the Hudson Highlands as the frontispiece of the second volume of American Scenery (plate 8). Indeed, Willis described the Hudson as “this finest of our rivers.” Collectively, the engravings and text devoted to the Hudson Valley contributed to its emergence as the national landscape. Willis described the View from West Point as “the boldest and most beautiful” river scenery in the United States and asserted that “there are few more fairy spots in this working-day world.” In the text accompanying Crow Nest, from Bull Hill, West Point, he described

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this peak in the midst of the Hudson Highlands as “one of the most beautiful mountains of America for shape, verdure, and position,” and he included excerpts from Joseph Rodman Drake’s “The Culprit Fay,” a lengthy poem about a fairy whose love for a mortal woman caused him to lose his magical powers. West Point overlooked “the most beautiful scene on the most beautiful river of our country.” Indian Falls, on the east bank opposite West Point, was “a secluded and delicious bit of nature, hidden amid rocks and woods” and “possessing a refinement and an elegance in its wildness that would almost give one the idea that it was an object of beauty in some royal park,” while the view of the Hudson Highlands from Bull Hill embraced “some very romantic scenery.” Peekskill Landing was “interesting from its association with the history of the Revolution,” and the famous view from Hyde Park, looking north and west toward the Catskills, where the broad river is flanked by rolling countryside, presented a very different aesthetic from the sublimity and grandeur of the Highlands. Together, Bartlett’s images and Willis’s text brought the landscape of the Hudson Valley alive to readers—the scenery, and the history, of a place that shaped the nation’s destiny during the American Revolution.26 American Scenery also presented five engravings of the Catskills, including The Two Lakes and the Mountain House, which Bartlett sketched from Sunset Rock on the escarpment trail; a view from the Mountain House overlooking the expanse of Hudson River scenery, for which Willis quoted extensively from Harriet Martineau’s account of a visit; and a winter scene that appears to be of North or South Lake. For the two views of Kaaterskill Falls (from below and above), Willis briefly described the water’s dance from ledge to ledge as it cascaded from the escarpment to the ravine at the base of the falls, and reprinted William Cullen Bryant’s poem “The Catterskill Falls.”27 According to James T. Callow, American Scenery contains “some of Willis’s best writing.” The combination of Bartlett’s engravings and Willis’s prose resulted in “a vast storehouse of association-enhanced landscape, and an authentic, colorful record of America’s folklore, legend, and history.” Nevertheless, there is a disjointed quality to the book’s organization. Whether the result of Bartlett’s or Willis’s wishes, or publisher George Virtue’s decisions, the words and images follow no temporal or geographical logic. Perhaps Virtue was attempting to create an alternative to the familiar travel narrative, which progressed from place to place as writers made their way along the American Grand Tour; or perhaps the organization of the book reflected a privileging of engravings over narrative, as each work of art can be appreciated on its own terms rather than as part of an unfolding text. In any case, reading Willis’s prose and viewing Bartlett’s images of the Hudson Valley, or other places that they visited, requires diligence and patience, but the ultimate result was still a major contribution to the evolving appreciation of the American landscape.28

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Following the publication of American Scenery Willis continued to edit and write for his and Morris’s weekly. In 1846 the partners launched the Home Journal, which quickly became one of the most popular and influential weeklies of the time. Willis collected his essays and published People I Have Met (1850), Life Here and There (1850), Hurrygraphs (1851), Fun Jottings (1853), Health Trip to the Tropics (1853), and Famous Persons and Places (1854) before turning to his second important work devoted to the Hudson Valley, essays that originally appeared in The Home Book of the Picturesque and the Home Journal and were brought together as Out-doors at Idlewild.29 In 1850 Willis moved to Cornwall, fifty-five miles north of Manhattan. Suffering from tuberculosis and seeking a more salubrious climate than that of the city, he and his family boarded at a farmhouse before acquiring, in 1851, a fifty-two-acre tract overlooking the Hudson. Before commencing construction of a house, the following year Willis published the essay “Highland Terrace,” which explored the developmental potential of the vicinity. He described the Hudson Highlands as “a complex wilderness, of romantic picturesqueness and beauty, which will yet be the teeming Switzerland of our country’s Poetry pencil.” At the northern end of the Highlands, on the west bank, was a ten-square-mile area of relatively flat ground, between the river and the mountains, that Willis judged remarkable for its picturesque beauty. Extending approximately five miles from Cornwall north to Newburgh, Highland Terrace embraced a multiplicity of glens, extensive views of the Appalachian spine as it crossed the Hudson, and of course the river itself. Here was a place, soon to be brought within easy and rapid access to New York City as railroad service improved, that would appeal to those “who have rural tastes and metropolitan refinements rationally blended—who have families which they wish to surround with the healthful and elegant belongings of a home, while, at the same time they wish to keep pace with the world.” Highland Terrace was, to Willis, “a mixture of city and country, with the home in the country.”30 Willis differed from Irving in his embrace of the railroad. Of course he experienced the railroad differently than did Irving, observing the trailing smoke and occasionally hearing the muted sound of an engine, as his house stood on an elevated perch above and some distance from the river, whereas Sunnyside was very close to the railroad tracks, and noise from passing trains disturbed the tranquillity of the author’s retreat. Willis recognized that the railroad was contributing to the rapid development of the east bank of the Hudson, whereas the west bank seemed to be frozen in time: “For the first fifty miles from New York,” he wrote, the west shore “is as much a wilderness at the present moment, as many a river-bank of equal length in the far west. While the Eastern shore is a close-linked chain of villages which makes it an extension of the suburbs of the city for fifty miles, . . . the opposite river-bank from Hoboken to West Point is mostly a vague desert.” A railroad on the west bank

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would bring Highland Terrace within an hour of Manhattan, he predicted, and make it a destination of choice for fashionable society.31 Upon acquiring the property at Cornwall, Willis engaged Calvert Vaux, Andrew Jackson Downing’s partner, to design what the architect described as “a plain, roomy cottage residence, comfortably sheltered among the trees.” A two-story brick house covered with what Vaux termed a limewash, with projecting bracketed gables topped by a turret, it stood on a promontory facing north, toward Newburgh Bay and the mountains on the east bank of the river. Situated in a lovely meadow interspersed with mature hemlock trees, on level ground two hundred feet above the river, the house commanded views from the southeast, toward the Highlands, as well as toward Newburgh Bay, a testament to Vaux’s statement that Willis “seemed to take more interest in accommodating the house to the fancies of the genius of the place than in any other part of the arrangement.” Idlewild, as Willis named the property, seemed to “peer over the topmost branches of the dark pines,” Vaux wrote, “and to command the whole valley below.”32 Although Idlewild presented spectacular views of the Hudson, what Willis and his visitors found so striking about the setting was the brook that cascaded toward the river. The glen formed by the brook, just to the north of the house, was the signature piece of the landscape. Willis described this “craggy ravine” as a “kind of Trenton Falls for one”—a reference to a popular scenic destination near Utica, New York, that he had described in American Scenery—and attributed to it “varieties of charm that will at least occupy what loving I have time for.” T. Addison Richards, who wrote and illustrated an account of a visit to Idlewild for Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, described the brook as “twisting and twirling, in foam and fall, over a varied rocky descent of between one and two hundred feet, to the quiet meadow below the cottage.” The overall effect, Richards observed, was a “sweet idyl [sic] of Art-embellished and Fancy-veiled landscape.” “With the potent spells of Art and Taste,” the artist continued, Willis had “summoned there the hidden spirit of Beauty” as he transformed what once had been a straggling farm into a scene of remarkable beauty. Paths led residents and visitors from the house to the banks of the brook, which was crossed by rustic bridges, to where it emptied into Moodna Creek and continued its course to the river below.33 Washington Irving visited Willis’s “poetical retreat” at Idlewild in 1854, a year after completion of construction of the house Vaux designed. Irving described Idlewild as “really a beautiful place. The site well chosen, commanding noble and romantic Scenery; the house commodious and picturesque, and furnished with much taste.” The overall effect, he concluded, was “just such a retreat as a poet would desire.” Other visitors were equally appreciative of what Willis had accomplished in transforming the site into an extended landscape garden. Richards, for example,

Calvert Vaux, “North-East View [of Idlewild].” Calvert Vaux, Villas and Cottages: A Series of Designs Prepared for Execution in the United States (1857; New York, 1864), facing p. 267.

T. Addison Richards, “Up the Glen, from the Foot-Bridge.” “Idlewild: The Home of N. P. Willis,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine 16 (January 1858): 160. Archives & Special Collections, Franklin & Marshall College.

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was effusive in praising what Willis had created at Idlewild, both in erecting a snug house and in siting it to take advantage of the genius of the place.34 Out-doors at Idlewild, the book Willis compiled about his experiences while living on the banks of the Hudson, is one of his most engaging works. It presents some of his most charming essays, written between April 16, 1853, and July 24, 1854, which recount his experiences creating a home and its landscape. Many of the essays address the physical transformation he directed—constructing the house and terraces to create level ground, erecting dams to create a series of cascades, building rustic bridges over the brook, and laying out drives and footpaths. Other essays in the collection poetically describe the scenery of the river and the Highlands or the changing of the seasons. Still others deal with more prosaic subjects, such as highway pigs (and the need to build a “pig tight gate”) as well as other animals, both domesticated and wild, that abounded near Idlewild. Willis is perhaps at his best in describing the routines of everyday life—visits to friends, conversations with longtime residents, wagon rides to nearby Newburgh to shop.35 Willis never again experienced the level of literary productivity he enjoyed during his initial years at Idlewild. He wrote a semiautobiographical novel, Paul Fane (1857), his only full-length work of fiction, and collected a series of essays as The Convalescent (1859), while continuing to edit the Home Journal. But years of poor health had taken their toll on Willis, and he died on his birthday, January 20, 1867. The New York Times obituary remarked that his verse was “as popular with the mass of American readers as BYRON was in England,” and stated that Willis’s books were invariably found on the center table in parlors across the nation. 36 Willis’s reputation has not fared as well as Irving’s. By the time of Willis’s death his style of writing, and the subjects he addressed, made him a peripheral figure as the novel supplanted the essay as the preferred medium in literature, and realism sounded the death knell of romanticism. The titles of his popular books, Hurrygraphs and Pencillings by the Way, suggest that he was writing quickly, almost unreflectively, about what he encountered both abroad and at home. And yet, as the text to American Scenery and Out-doors at Idlewild demonstrate, Willis was a skilled writer who captured the history and significance of the Hudson Valley. His complete works, then still in progress, were published in 1848, and his verse, illustrated by the painter Emanuel Leutze, continued to be popular and remained in print throughout the nineteenth century. The New York Times noted that while changing public taste in literature after the Civil War made Willis’s writings seem to belong to an earlier era, “the American people will ever remember and cherish NATHANIEL P. WILLIS as one worthy to stand with FENIMORE COOPER and WASHINGTON IRVING, with whom he was co-laborer in the literary field.” But in the seventeen years following his death Willis’s reputation had faded into near obscurity. In 1884 Edward F.

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Hayward published in the Atlantic Monthly an appraisal of Willis’s literary accomplishments that was both appreciative and critical. Willis “did so much to influence our unformed social and literary tastes,” Hayward wrote, and then predicted that Willis would “long remain the most picturesque figure in our literature, with a gift second to none in the arts which gently stimulate, adorn, and please.” Nevertheless, Hayward conceded that Willis’s lack of attention to workmanship and “want of painstaking toil” prevented him from achieving a place in the pantheon of American letters. Henry E. Beers published a full-length biography of Willis the following year as well as a collection of Willis’s favorite poems. Perhaps the greatest praise came from Van Wyck Brooks, one of the most important historians of American literature of the twentieth century, who alluded to changing tastes yet also to Willis’s accomplishments when he described him as “a writer born and one that a careless country should not have forgotten.”37 WASHINGTON IRVING and Nathaniel Parker Willis were two of the most important writers of the antebellum years. They were probably the first two American authors to support themselves financially through their writings, though Willis turned to his wife’s family for help when undertaking construction and improvements to Idlewild. Each contributed to the professionalization of literature, both through their popularity with readers and through their efforts to establish an international copyright law. Irving was clearly the more accomplished of the two, as he wrote not only the Sketch-Book and the Knickerbocker History but multivolume biographies of George Washington, Christopher Columbus, and John Jacob Astor, as well as travel accounts of tours in the American West. At the time of his death Irving was widely acknowledged as the most important writer the United States had yet produced. Willis never enjoyed the universal admiration accorded Irving, but he did happily bask in Irving’s shadow and create a new style of journalistic writing that appealed to the emerging middle class. Willis’s verse and his essays, whether published in journals or collected in books, were enormously popular in the antebellum years and gently instructed readers in the cultures of foreign places, trends and standards in American art and literature, and gossip about the social life of the metropolis. What is perhaps most important is that in several of their major works—Irving in his Knickerbocker History, Sketch-Book, Book of the Hudson, and Wolfert’s Roost, Willis in the text of American Scenery and Out-doors at Idlewild as well as essays he wrote for the Home Journal—brought the Hudson River valley, its scenery, its people, and its history, to the American public. Their writing helped create a sense of place in the valley and contributed to the recognition that the Hudson River was an indelible and central part of the American landscape.

4 The River in a Garden A. J. D OWNING

O

ne of the Native American names for the Hudson identified it as the Great River of the Mountains. From its origins at Lake Tear of the Clouds on Mount Marcy, the highest peak in the Adirondacks, the Hudson passes near the Catskills, through the Highlands, and along the Palisades opposite southern Westchester County and northern New York City. In the eyes of many artists, writers, tourists, and other commentators, the river is defined by some of the most beautiful mountain scenery in the eastern United States. But along other parts of its long journey to the sea, the Hudson also passes rolling countryside devoted to agricultural use or, especially on the east bank, to great estates. The Hudson literally courses through an extended landscape garden, and as a result of the efforts of landscape gardener and tastemaker Andrew Jackson Downing, the Hudson River aesthetic became an indelible part of the national landscape. Downing was born in 1815 in Newburgh, New York, a village on the west bank of the Hudson River just north of the Highlands, which Washington Irving had described as “abounding with transcendent beauties.” The popular writer George William Curtis described Downing’s childhood as being “cast among all the charms of a landscape which the Fishkill hills lifted from littleness, and the broad river inspired with a kind of grandeur.” The river and the mountains, Curtis wrote, were the “silent companions of his [Downing’s] childhood.” Shortly after Downing’s death, when the American Pomological Society erected a monument to his memory on the grounds of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, one face of the plinth was inscribed with the following lines: He was born, and lived, And died upon the Hudson River. His life was devoted to the improvement of the national

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Andrew Jackson Downing, ca. 1852. Daguerreotype. The Athenaeum of Philadelphia.

taste in rural art. An office for which his genius and the natural beauty amidst which he lived had fully endowed him.

This linking of native genius and beautiful surroundings was a hallmark of an age that believed in a kind of environmental determinism. Indeed, just as Washington

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Irving attributed much of what was good in his character and personality to having grown up on the banks of the Hudson, in his writings Downing attributed great importance to a well-designed house and garden as having a moral influence on its residents.1 After completing schooling at age sixteen, Downing joined his brother Charles in managing the family’s nursery business. In succeeding years he published a number of articles on horticultural topics as well as taste in landscape and architectural design. Downing’s first book, A Treatise on the Theory and Practice of Landscape Gardening, Adapted to North America (1841), was a prodigious achievement. It quickly became the best-selling and most widely influential book of its type published in nineteenth-century America and remained in print well into the twentieth century. Downing’s purpose in writing the Treatise and subsequent books was to educate the public taste. As he was completing the text of the Treatise he wrote to his friend Robert Donaldson and explained his strategy for reaching his intended audience. Some potential readers wanted him to elucidate complex aesthetic theory while others craved “practical observations”; some were seeking advice on how to landscape large properties, and still others places of moderate extent. Perhaps the largest group of readers wanted “exact plans for small places to be carried into execution in an easy and economical manner.” Downing concluded that his role was that of an educator— to provide Americans with the “leading principles of the art” of landscape gardening. He wrote the Treatise, he informed Donaldson, “to raise the standard rather than come down entirely to the practical view and wants of many of our countrymen.” This same principle determined how he wrote three subsequent books, Cottage Residences (1842), Fruits and Fruit Trees of America (1845), and The Architecture of Country Houses (1850), and also shaped the content of the monthly magazine he edited, The Horticulturist, and Journal of Rural Art and Rural Taste (1846–52).2 The Treatise drew heavily on eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century English writings devoted to landscape design, especially the works of Humphry Repton and John Claudius Loudon, but as its subtitle, “Adapted to North America,” indicates, Downing was consciously attempting to make Old World ideas about the proper design of gardens and homes appropriate to the climate and republican social structure of the New. In architecture this most often meant a smaller dwelling than those of England, because of the transience of fortunes in the United States and the emergence of a large middle class, as well as specific features of houses, such as type of materials used (especially wood), roof pitch, and porches.3 As was true of the English authors who were his guides, Downing divided styles of landscape gardening into two principal categories, ancient and modern. He characterized the ancient style in terms of geometric designs and classical enhancements— allées, parterres, fountains, and architectural elements—that were prized for their attributes of “regularity, symmetry, and the display of laboured art.” The modern

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style, by contrast, attempted to “exhibit a highly graceful or picturesque epitome of natural beauty,” which Downing believed would be achieved by gently curving lines and the naturalistic disposition of plants in the landscape. Downing clearly preferred the modern or natural style over the older way of laying out grounds and posited a progression from a formal, ordered garden to a naturalistic landscape. Whereas geometric order in the garden might have been a reasonable choice when the United States was still dominated by wilderness, he considered it inappropriate in long-settled parts of the country, where human effort had domesticated the landscape. Downing believed that in these areas the “present more advanced state” of landscape gardening was the proper choice. His analysis of history, then, was more than an overview of changing tastes: it was a justification for the modern style of landscape gardening he championed.4 Following the lead of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century English aesthetic theorists, Downing divided the modern or natural style of landscape gardening into two distinct categories, the Beautiful and the Picturesque. The Graceful style, as Downing termed the Beautiful in the first two editions of the Treatise, was “expressive of grace, surfaces of softness, and growth of richness and luxuriance.” His illustration of the Graceful captures these qualities precisely: the house is vaguely classical, with a balustraded stairway and urns serving as a transition from building to landscape. The trees are round-headed, the lawn smooth and closely cropped, the drive and path follow a sweeping S-curve, which William Hogarth considered the line of universal beauty. This was a serene, harmonious landscape, which Downing emphasized by placing a woman and a child walking along the drive toward the house. The Picturesque, by contrast, was characterized by “irregular and spirited forms” that conveyed a sense of the raw power of the natural world, with trees and shrubs arrayed to resemble the caprices of “wild nature.” As a style of landscape gardening it sought to achieve “the production of outlines of a certain spirited irregularity; surfaces, comparatively abrupt and broken; and growth, of a somewhat wild and bold character.” Downing’s illustration of the Picturesque demonstrated the principles of the style: the dwelling is a rural Gothic cottage, the trees bear evidence of Nature’s raw power, the lawn is irregular in surface and not as neatly cropped as in the vignette of the Graceful, the foreground is rocky and overgrown, and a rustic shelter stands on a hillock to the right. Walking toward the house are a man and a dog, a reminder of how gender was deeply enmeshed with aesthetics at the time. If smoothness, regularity, and gradual variation were the attributes of the Beautiful/Graceful and femininity, roughness, irregularity, and sudden variation defined the Picturesque and masculinity.5 Downing advised readers to choose the Beautiful or the Picturesque depending on topography. A relatively flat site was more suited for the Beautiful, while a rugged,

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Andrew Jackson Downing, “Landscape Gardening, in the Graceful School.” Downing, A Treatise on the Theory and Practice of Landscape Gardening, 2nd ed. (1841; New York, 1844), facing p. 55.

hilly site was more appropriate for the Picturesque. Whatever style the reader chose, however, Downing cautioned that landscape gardening was not the replication of nature but nature improved by art, and so a skilled designer could create, “in the same scene, a richness and a variety never to be found in any one portion of nature.”6 As the title of the Treatise demonstrates, Downing gave readers information on the practical considerations of landscape gardening as well as its history and theory. Subsequent chapters were devoted to trees and plants suitable for use in the landscape, the treatment of water, rural architecture, and embellishments and structures in the garden. The result was a surprisingly popular book, for despite its length and cost ($4 in 1841), readers on both sides of the Atlantic were captivated by Downing’s elegant prose and commonsense approach to the landscape. Reviews in the United

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Andrew Jackson Downing, “Landscape Gardening, in the Picturesque School.” Downing, A Treatise on the Theory and Practice of Landscape Gardening, 2nd ed. (1841; New York, 1844), facing p. 55.

States and in England expressed admiration for the Treatise, praising it as a major landmark in aesthetic taste. The English author and plantsman John Lindley stated that he knew of no other book that better explained the principles of landscape gardening: “No English landscape gardener has written so clearly, and with so much real intensity.” For a twenty-five-year-old author, this was extravagant praise, as were the favorable comments of other reviewers.7 One of the ways Downing attempted to influence Americans in the proper taste in landscape and architectural design was by providing readers with examples they could study and emulate. The Treatise included text and wood engravings, prepared by the innovative architect Alexander Jackson Davis, that together conveyed the author’s sense of the beauty of notable examples of landscape and architectural design. Downing also included practical advice to homeowners on how to improve existing dwellings. A pair of vignettes illustrates a country property: the first

presents a house and its grounds “as frequently seen,” a rectangular block with a

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Andrew Jackson Downing, “View of a Country Residence, as Frequently Seen.” Downing, A Treatise on the Theory and Practice of Landscape Gardening, 2nd ed. (1841; New York, 1844), 80.

Andrew Jackson Downing, “View of the Same Residence, Improved.” Downing, A Treatise on the Theory and Practice of Landscape Gardening (1841; New York, 1844), 80.

projecting central bay and small porch, a barren landscape in the foreground, and a straight drive toward the house to the left; the second demonstrates how the dwelling could be improved in the modern style. A central gable, clustered chimneys, and a veranda that extends across the facade have transformed a vernacular house into one that exemplifies Downing’s taste, while the straight drive has been replaced with

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a gently curving one, and new plantings near the house and in the foreground landscape illustrate what he considered the superior attractions of the modern style of landscape design. “Effects like these,” he wrote, “are within the reach of very moderate means, and are peculiarly worth attention in this country, where so much has already been partially, and often badly executed.”8 Perhaps the best example of the aesthetic Downing promoted as worthy of emulation by his countrymen was his own house and garden. Shortly after his marriage to Caroline DeWint in 1838, Downing began erecting a large dwelling on the property where he grew up. For this, his first architectural design, he turned to published English books, especially Francis Goodwin’s Rural Architecture (1835) and Loudon’s Encyclopaedia of Cottage, Farm, and Villa Architecture (1832). While the overall massing of the house and the projecting central pavilion clearly owed much to Goodwin’s design for an Elizabethan villa, and other details to a Gothic villa included in Loudon’s Encyclopaedia, Downing’s house is clearly more than the sum of borrowed ideas: it has a stronger sense of scale in its balanced proportions, and greater simplicity. Moreover, it represents his attempt to adapt imported forms to the climate and social structure of the United States. The best illustration of this is the veranda, or porch, which extends across the facade to the south and north of the entrance pavilion. Downing emphasized the importance of the porch in serving practical and symbolic functions: it was both a shelter in front of the entrance and an indication of domestic life within the dwelling. An American analogue of the English paved terrace, the porch was an essential accommodation to climate because it shaded the principal rooms of the first floor and also provided an outdoor seating area for the family, all the while bringing house and garden closer together. “A fine country house, without a porch or covered shelter to the doorway,” he wrote, was “as incomplete, to the correct eye, as a wellprinted book without a title page.” Downing also sited the house to take optimal advantage of views of river and mountain scenery to the east and southeast.9 As the house was being constructed Downing also transformed the adjacent landscape, which had been a working nursery. Following the removal of much of the nursery stock Downing planted a sweeping lawn interspersed with flower beds, tropical plants in pots, and a sundial. A gently curving drive and walks led visitors to the house and into the surrounding gardens. Downing was still a nurseryman, and so a carefully planted screen of arborvitae blocked the view of utilitarian buildings (greenhouses, a packing shed, and a gardener’s cottage) south of the house, while other plantings and the falling off of the ground to the east blocked the view of the remaining nursery stock. Downing’s property was at the northern edge of the village, but it was subdivided by streets, and there were nearby residential and institutional buildings. While Downing’s property was part of the village, it was so carefully designed and planted that to visitors it seemed a world apart. Curtis, for example,

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Andrew Jackson Downing, “Residence of the Author, near Newburgh, N.Y.” Downing, A Treatise on the Theory and Practice of Landscape Gardening, 2nd ed. (1841; New York, 1844), facing p. 371.

delighted in the solitude of the garden and, despite its small size, found it visually almost limitless. From the paths, he wrote, “the enchanted visitor saw only the garden ending in the thicket, which was so dexterously trimmed as to reveal the loveliest glimpses of the river, each a picture in its frame of foliage, but which was not cut low enough to betray the presence of road or town. You fancied the estate extended to the river; yes, and probably owned the river as an ornament, and included the mountains beyond.”10 Downing’s Gothic Revival house and its gardens marked a new direction in American taste. Only a small number of contemporary buildings so emphatically broke away from the classical revival and vernacular forms that dominated the American landscape, and Davis’s Rural Residences (1838), a pioneering attempt to influence American architectural taste, apparently had a very limited circulation. Downing surely considered his house an example of the taste he believed his countrymen should embrace: he illustrated the building in the chapter of the Treatise devoted to rural architecture, and allowed C. M. Hovey to publish a view of the

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Plan of Downing’s property, drawn by Frederick C. Withers and engraved by Alexander Anderson. “A Visit to the House and Garden of the Late A. J. Downing,” Horticulturist, n.s., 3 ( January 1853), facing p. 1. Archives & Special Collections, Franklin & Marshall College.

house and a plan of the grounds in his Magazine of Horticulture, a widely circulated periodical. The house quickly became a prominent landmark visible from the sloops and steamboats traveling the Hudson. One writer glowingly described Downing’s house and grounds, when seen from the river, as a “fine practical illustration, as well as an acceptable theory, of both Architecture and Gardening.”11 Downing considered the home the bedrock of the American republic. Yet at a time when the culture of domesticity celebrated the home as a haven from the pressures of work and society his house was also his place of work. From there he continued to manage the nursery business for close to a decade and wrote the books and journal articles that were central to his efforts to improve American taste. There he also corresponded with clients of his practice as a landscape gardener. In 1850, three years after selling the nursery stock and enlarging the pleasure grounds, he added an architectural wing to provide space for what would quickly become a thriving practice.12

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Most visitors appear to have been unaware of how diligently Downing labored to advance his crusade to improve American taste. Curtis, for example, found Downing to have been hours at work long before he arrived for breakfast, and one evening, while reading in the library long after, he assumed, everyone else had gone to bed, was surprised when Downing emerged from his office. Curtis’s intent was to describe Downing’s ingenious solution to the problem of joining the office addition to the main house—through a door cut within the frame of one of the library bookcases, so that the room’s appearance remained unchanged—but his words testify to the habits of a highly disciplined writer and an individual who worked hard to support his way of life.13 Understandably, the accounts of visitors focused on the social life they experienced with their hosts. Visitors were impressed by the graceful hospitality of the Downings, by the domestic world they had created in their home, and by the whirl of activities that took place there and throughout the Hudson Valley. Curtis, for example, once expressed delight in a magnolia blossom while strolling through the gardens, and every morning thereafter found that Downing had placed one at his seat in the dining room. Fredrika Bremer remarked at length about the tastefulness of the interiors, which were always filled with flowers and in every way expressed the refinement of the owners. Caroline Downing’s niece, Lenora Cranch Scott, recalled that to her mother the Downings’ home was “a paradise where friends met congenial friends, and where the feast of reason and the flow of soul mingled with delicately seasoned meats, fruits and wine.” Although Bremer especially cherished the quiet evenings when she and the Downings would read their favorite authors— William Cullen Bryant, James Russell Lowell, and Ralph Waldo Emerson—or discuss important political and social questions of the day, most visitors remarked on the whirl of social activity. Curtis, for example, described evenings filled with games, including charades, music and dancing in the hall, and “some slight violation of the Maine Law,” wines, often provided by Downing’s friend Nicholas Longworth, who had an extensive vineyard near Cincinnati. Days were also filled with activities. Curtis provided a list that included “books, conversation, driving, working, lying on the lawn, excursions into the mountains across the river, visits to beautiful neighboring places, boating, botanizing, painting,—or whatever else could be done in the country, and done in the pleasantest way.” Downing would usually be engaged with work or writing at least part of each day, though his labors were not visible to his guests, yet would drop whatever was at hand to join in the activities.14 Visitors’ accounts of excursions to points of scenic or historical interest or to the homes of friends, together with Downing’s writings, provide entry into his social world and the landscape of the Hudson Valley. Mount Beacon, which Downing had described in one of his first published essays, was both scenic and historic. The highest

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peak in the Fishkill hills, the part of the Appalachian spine opposite Newburgh, it was named for the signal fires that had alerted George Washington, headquartered in Newburgh during the final months of the Revolutionary War, to the movement of British troops and ships. Downing considered the view, overlooking the northern gateway to the Hudson Highlands as well as the cultivated landscape to the north and west, superior to that from the Catskill Mountain House. In 1835 Downing had reported that investors were interested in building a hotel there, but almost fifteen years later the route to the summit, as Bremer described it, was still “rather an apology for a road than anything else.” As uncomfortable as the drive up the mountain proved to be, upon reaching the top Bremer was enthralled: from there she wrote that she “looked down upon half the world, as it seemed to me, but which presented the appearance of a billowy chaos of wooded heights and valleys, in which human dwellings were visible merely as specks of light, scarcely discernible to the naked eye.” What she found most memorable was not the large party of fellow ramblers or their ample picnic but the “view of the Hudson, which,” she wrote, “like a clear thought bursting from chaos, makes for itself a path through the woods, and flows brilliantly forth into the infinite.”15 In these early days of landscape tourism Downing’s guests also visited many of the great estates along the river, and their accounts provide a glimpse into a society that embraced calling upon neighbors and touring their gardens as a principal form of entertainment. They also highlight the degree to which residents, especially the wealthy, domesticated and civilized the landscape. As the son of a wheelwrightturned-nurseryman, Downing would not ordinarily have enjoyed entry into the great homes and estates of the valley. Indeed, it seems likely that as he was preparing the “Historical Notices” chapter of the Treatise he was writing about places that, save for Robert Donaldson’s Blithewood and perhaps a few others, he had glimpsed only from the outside—as a young student examining models of landscape and architectural design and as a nurseryman providing plant materials for gardens and orchards. At about the time of the publication of the Treatise, however, Downing launched his career as a landscape gardener, and he was soon providing not only nursery stock but also professional advice to wealthy clients. And, as his national and international reputation soared as a result of his writings, Downing visited many of the principal seats along the Hudson as a celebrity and friend.16 Bremer described the Downings’ social life as revolving around a “select circle of friends and neighbors, who for the most part reside on the lovely banks of the Hudson,” and she took delight in the “unembarrassed social intercourse” that characterized the group. While she was staying at the Downings, numerous friends and acquaintances of her hosts visited, including the writer Catharine Sedgwick, whose novel Redwood Downing particularly admired, and Marcus Spring, the New York

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businessman who was one of the major contributors to the North American Phalanx, a socialist community in Raritan, New Jersey. During Bremer’s extended stay the Downings took her to Donaldson’s Blithewood, an extensive property overlooking the Hudson at Annandale-on-Hudson. During the sail north from Newburgh, Bremer found the scenery delightful. The river was not dominated by castles and ruins, like the Rhine, but was nevertheless “rich and well cultivated” and lined with “very tasteful houses.” Upon arriving at Blithewood she met Donaldson, a wealthy North Carolinian who lived in New York City and who had hired Alexander Jackson Davis to modernize his Federal-era country house overlooking the river. Davis altered the roofline, giving the house the projecting eaves characteristic of the bracketed style, designed an addition to the east facade, and surrounded the house with a veranda that became its signature feature. He also designed a pair of gatehouses, a utilitarian shed, and other ornamental structures. Downing, who probably became acquainted with Donaldson through Davis in the late 1830s, praised Blithewood as “one of the most charming villa residences in the Union” and used a view of the veranda and grounds looking northwest toward the Hudson and the Catskill Mountains as the frontispiece of the Treatise.17 During her 1849 visit to Blithewood Bremer found the interior of the dwelling too dark, a common assessment of many of the houses she visited, but was enthralled with the sumptuous breakfast that greeted the guests and the dance that followed. In the evening, Susan Gaston Donaldson delighted the revelers by playing the harp and piano and singing in a voice Bremer praised as extraordinary. The most memorable part of her visit, though, was the opportunity to stroll through the landscape, which Downing had praised for its fine lawn, decorated with classical vases, and paths that led to rustic seats or summerhouses nestled amid the trees or located at points that offered particularly fine views of the river. As evening settled over the Catskills on the west bank, Bremer “wandered quietly beside the glorious, calm river, and contemplated the masses of light and soft, velvet-like shadows.”18 Just to the south of Blithewood, across Sawkill Creek and a heavily wooded ravine, stood Montgomery Place (1804), another famous Hudson River estate. This too was a Federal-era house overlooking the river, though on a much larger scale than Blithewood. Little is known about the house erected by Janet Livingston Montgomery, widow of the hero who led the American assault on Quebec in December 1775 and died on the Plains of Abraham: the only surviving image of it prior to extensive changes undertaken in the early 1840s is a pencil sketch by Davis. Davis’s drawing illustrates the east facade and the north side of a two-story, six-bay house built of local fieldstone covered with stucco. An uncovered wood porch with a wide stairway faced west. The distinguishing architectural feature of the house was a classical entablature topped by a balustrade. Fields and orchards dominated the eastern lands,

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a hemlock forest stood to the north, and a hardwood forest, dominated by oaks, to the south of the dwelling, while the area immediately surrounding the house, as well as the expanse to the west facing the river, was pleasure grounds. As a number of travel accounts and guidebooks indicate, even before Davis’s alterations the house was an impressive site when seen from the river.19 Following Janet Montgomery’s death in 1828, the estate passed to her brother, Edward Livingston, and his wife, Louise, who commenced significant improvements to the estate. Following Edward’s death soon after inheriting the property, his widow, along with her daughter, Cora, and her son-in-law, Thomas P. Barton, continued the work of modernizing the house and redesigning the grounds. They did so in a pair of creative partnerships with two of the most talented designers then

North Pavilion, Montgomery Place. “A Visit to Montgomery Place,” Horticulturist 2 (October 1847): facing p. 153.

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working in the United States, Davis and Downing. At Montgomery Place, Davis designed a south wing, new porches for the east and west facades, and the north pavilion. A handsome semicircular entrance porch at the center of the east facade welcomed residents and visitors to the home. The porch at Montgomery Place that Downing found most noteworthy, though, was the north pavilion. In The Architecture of Country Houses (1850), he described a pavilion as the most agreeable part of a house, especially in warm climates. It was a gathering place for the family and served both as an outdoor parlor and as a dining area. The north pavilion at Montgomery Place impressed visitors in its combination of “beauty, dignity, and utility.” It was “something more than a veranda viz. a room in the open air,” which Downing considered essential in a well-designed house. The Livingston-Barton family moved furniture to the pavilion and used the space as an outdoor parlor, one of the functions the tastemaker had suggested for the sheltered porch. From the shaded comfort of the north pavilion, residents and their guests could look east, over a sweeping greensward, north toward the hemlock forest, or west across the river toward Roundtop and the Catskill high peaks.20 Downing probably first met the residents of Montgomery Place in his capacity as a nurseryman providing plant materials for the extensive improvements they were undertaking: the text devoted to Montgomery Place in the first edition of the Treatise is only a paragraph long, much shorter than the extensive treatment he would later devote to it in an essay for the Horticulturist. His time on the property and contact with its owners were surely limited. But by the mid-1840s he was welcomed on a different, more professional footing. Under the new generation of owners the landscape at Montgomery Place changed from working farm to ornamental pleasure grounds. Indicative of this was the relocation of the orchards to the east. The area where the orchards once stood was transformed into a sweeping lawn that conformed to Downing’s Beautiful in landscape gardening and extended from the entrance drive north to a heavily forested area the owners called the Wilderness. One of the most significant changes to the landscape was the drive, which originally must have approached the house on a straight line but now took on a gently curving aspect: whether Edward or his widow and children changed the course of the drive, by the mid-1840s it had been accomplished. Downing had indicated ways of bringing an older, formal landscape into congruence with modern taste by regrading the drive to introduce gentle curves and adding strategically placed plantings that would structure the visitor’s view of the gardens and house. At Montgomery Place the entrance drive continues on a straight course through the orchards. Halfway to the house—the point where the agricultural landscape ended and pleasure grounds began—the drive was changed to follow the gentle curves Downing favored, while irregularly placed locust trees opened vistas across

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the lawn but hid the house from view until the drive turned to the right (north), at which point Davis’s majestic entrance porch and the Federal-era dwelling appeared as if by magic in the course of a carriage drive through a park. Downing likened the altered entrance drive at Montgomery Place to the “approach to an old French chateau.”21 Other changes to the landscape at Montgomery Place included construction of a conservatory for plants, an ornamental flower garden, and an arboretum. The conservatory, which stood west of the orchards, near the eastern terminus of the lawn, was designed by English-born architect Frederick Catherwood and was fi lled with citrus and other tropical plants as well as large jasmines and eugenias. Adjacent to the

The Conservatory, Montgomery Place. “A Visit to Montgomery Place,” Horticulturist 2 (October 1847): 159.

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conservatory was a geometric flower garden designed by Downing or at least based on advice from him. As work on the flower garden was progressing in the fall of 1845, Downing wrote to Louise Livingston and expressed dismay that the dimensions of the garden had been reduced and concern that its smaller size might diminish the overall effect. Whether Downing was acting as a professional or a friend, his nursery provided many of the plants used in the garden, which were arranged in parterres edged with turf or boxwood. The result, he wrote in 1847, “looks like some rich oriental pattern or carpet of embroidery.” The arboretum took shape east of the conservatory. Other principal features of Montgomery Place included the heavily wooded ravine adjacent to the Sawkill River, which Downing described as a “dusky wood,” and the cataract, which was “beautiful at all seasons,” filled, as it was, “with the music of falling water.” The cascading Sawkill induced in Downing a reverie he characterized in terms of “quiet harmony and joy.” The estate also featured a lake, northwest of the conservatory and garden, and walks that extended from the house to the river below.22 As was true of other estates and gardens along the Hudson, Montgomery Place was an example of the taste in landscape design Downing considered appropriate for his countrymen. “There are numberless lessons here for the landscape gardener,” he wrote; “there are a hundred points that will delight the artist; there are meditative walks and a thousand suggestive aspects of nature for the poet.” While few Americans could afford the extensive grounds and expensive improvements undertaken by the Livingstons and Bartons, Downing nevertheless considered Montgomery Place a model of a dwelling existing in harmony with nature and its owners as individuals committed to the landscape as an evolving work of art.23 Downing also took guests to Locust Grove, the DeWint family homestead in Fishkill. Curtis described Locust Grove as an “estate and old family mansion” that was “indolently lying in luxuriant decay.” The crowning features of the property were its spacious porches and gardens, especially the sloping lawn that afforded lovely views of the Hudson. As wealthy parents of several daughters, the DeWints had, over the years, hosted many social events that attracted young men from the valley as well as cadets from the United States Military Academy at West Point. It was at Locust Grove that Downing courted his future wife, Caroline, and there the two were married and lived while their house was being constructed. While Bremer was visiting the Downings they returned to Locust Grove for a party celebrating the ninetieth birthday of Caroline’s grandmother. After dining, the fifty or so guests turned to music: Bremer played a number of Swedish polkas, and Christopher Pearse Cranch, a minister, transcendentalist, and aspiring landscape painter who had married one of Caroline’s sisters, sang Italian arias in what Bremer described as an exquisite voice.24

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Downing took Bremer to visit other friends who lived along the river south of Newburgh, including the family of James Alexander Hamilton, son of the Revolutionary War general and, as first secretary of the Treasury, architect of the new nation’s financial policies. The Hamiltons, whom Bremer described as being among the Downings’ best friends, lived in a house overlooking the river not far from Washington Irving’s Sunnyside. Travel south involved taking a steamboat part of the way, then transferring to the east bank railroad, which was partly open but still under construction in the fall of 1849. Bremer was welcomed into the Hamiltons’ “beautiful home and domestic circle,” which included adult children as well as friends and neighbors, was feted at a large dinner where she was seated with Irving, and visited a number of nearby farmhouses with Hamilton as her guide. Understandably, given her own literary accomplishments, Bremer was much more interested in describing the acclaimed American author than the landscape and the following morning accepted his invitation to visit Sunnyside, which she described as a “peaceful idyll.” The bright interior, one of the few in which she felt completely comfortable, was “full of summer warmth, and had a peaceful and cheerful aspect.” 25 These houses and gardens represent only a small portion of the impressive landscapes of the Hudson Valley in the middle of the nineteenth century. In the Treatise, Downing described a number of equally important places, including Hyde Park, north of Poughkeepsie, the former country estate of David Hosack, a physician and professor at Columbia College and the individual who developed the Elgin Botanic Garden in Manhattan, which was famous for its conservatory and exotic plants. As committed as he was to life in New York City, Hosack was also deeply attracted to the Hudson Valley, and in 1828 he acquired a heavily wooded property on a bluff overlooking the river and developed it into what Downing described as “one of the finest specimens of the modern style of Landscape Gardening in America.” Hosack erected a dwelling with a splendid view of the Hudson and hired the Belgian-born nurseryman André Parmentier to landscape the grounds. Parmentier, whom Downing judged “the only practitioner of the art, of any note” prior to his death in 1830, had established a nursery in Brooklyn (the site of the present-day Brooklyn Botanic Garden) and had designed several properties on Long Island and in the Hudson Valley. At Hyde Park he respected the natural landscape but added a gently undulating lawn, walks, drives, greenhouses, and rustic seats to create an appropriate setting for the house and its spectacular views.26 Downing also pointed to other houses and gardens in the Hudson Valley, including Livingston Manor and William P. van Rensselaer’s Beaverwyck, which he praised for its handsome mansion, its extensive drives and walks, and its “large level lawn, bordered by highly varied surface of hill and dale,” as tasteful examples for the nation to follow. In the Treatise and the Horticulturist Downing described several properties

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near Philadelphia, Boston, and Staten Island, but he paid particular attention to the Hudson Valley. Indeed, he wrote, “there is no part of the Union where the taste in Landscape Gardening is so far advanced, as on the middle portion of the Hudson.” What made the Hudson Valley so special was the river and its varied scenery, from rolling countryside to distant mountains, as well as the care with which owners shaped lawns and plantings.27 Most of the houses and gardens Downing visited and described in the “Historical Notices” chapter of the Treatise were older estates owned by wealthy families. The dominant style was classical, the buildings notable not for their size or opulence but the relationship of house, gardens, and the landscape of the Hudson Valley: in each case the house was sited to take advantage of extensive views of the river, and the landscape was designed to serve as an exterior room of the house, a place for walking and sitting, for dances and other activities. In the “Rural Architecture” chapter, however, Downing introduced readers to a strikingly modern aesthetic: the rural Gothic, Italianate, and bracketed designs that would come to dominate American architecture in the middle decades of the nineteenth century. Downing praised the “highly romantic and poetical nature” of the Gothic style, which was particularly appropriate for the hilly banks of the Hudson and also tolerated additions without destroying the symmetry that was the hallmark of classical revival buildings that were so ubiquitous in the American landscape.28 Taken together, Downing’s writings represent an assault on the classical revival in architecture and the formal or geometric style of landscape design. In their place he championed various revival styles in building—especially Gothic, Italianate, and bracketed—and landscapes in the modern or natural style. In one respect it is surprising that Downing devoted the longest chapter of the Treatise to architecture, as his original intent was to produce a book on trees in landscape gardening. But as the book evolved, Downing recognized that rural architecture was inseparable from the landscape. Indeed, he wrote, “architectural beauty must be considered conjointly with the beauty of the landscape or situation.” Proper taste in rural building could be achieved only if a dwelling were designed in “harmonious union” with nearby scenery. In much the way the Downing used earlier portions of the Treatise to educate the public taste in landscape design, so the chapter on rural architecture attempted to provide readers with the leading principles of architectural beauty, which, borrowing from English precedent, he defined in terms of fitness (or utility), expression of purpose (or propriety), and expression of style, which he termed the “beauty of form” and sentiment. Fitness, the most important of the three, meant to Downing a building that met the needs of residents in terms of comfort, affordability, and the appropriateness of design to the landscape setting. Expression of purpose meant that a home ought to look like a home, not an ersatz temple, with chimneys, porches, and

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other indications of domestic comfort frankly expressed. Only after meeting the criteria of fitness and expression of purpose did Downing advise readers to consider style. While conceding that architecture was “an art of taste” and that beauty was the highest expression in architecture, Downing nevertheless warned that style had to be subordinate to the two primary criteria.29 The dwellings Downing chose to illustrate his theory of architectural design were, for the most part, recently constructed or renovated and stood on the banks of the Hudson. Most of the plates in the “Rural Architecture” chapter of the Treatise depicted new buildings in variations of the Gothic Revival style: in the 1844 edition, more richly illustrated than the first, eight were in some form of the Gothic, two were Italianate, and one was Washington Irving’s Dutch colonial Sunnyside. The illustrations confirm Downing’s belief, most clearly expressed in Cottage Residences, that the Rural Gothic and Italianate styles were “much the most beautiful modes for our country residences.” Moreover, of the identifiable dwellings, nine were located in the Hudson Valley, one in the environs of Boston, and one in New Jersey. The illustrations inserted in the text depicted the various architectural styles Downing described; of the identifiable buildings, most represented were those Davis had designed for Donaldson’s Blithewood. For readers the lessons were obvious: variations of the Gothic and Italianate were the styles of choice, and the Hudson Valley was the place where the new direction in American residential architecture and landscape gardening had achieved its fullest expression by the early 1840s.30 Although the dwellings chosen to illustrate the Treatise were beyond the means of the majority of Americans, and although his profession restricted his clientele largely to the wealthy, Downing was dedicated to improving the designs of houses and gardens for all Americans. Only months after publication of the Treatise, Downing was working on Cottage Residences, a book he was writing, he informed Donaldson, “partly con amore and partly at the solicitation of a great many persons who want plans having some degree of adaptation to our country; & which also come within the means of the middle class.” Arguably the first house pattern book published in the United States, Cottage Residences was part of Downing’s crusade to reform domestic architecture and improve the taste of his countrymen. “I wish to inspire all persons with a love of beautiful forms,” he wrote in the preface, “and a desire to assemble them around their daily walks of life.” Following a twenty-six-page discussion of taste in architecture, Downing devoted each of the remaining chapters to a single house design. Davis prepared the illustrations, as he had for the Treatise, which included a view of each house in its landscaped setting, floor plans, construction details, and advice on laying out the grounds, along with a text that attempted to instruct readers in the principles of taste. Cottage Residences presented house designs in “avant-garde styles,” according to Davis biographer Jane B. Davies, “styles that

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only the most adventurous architects and clients were yet undertaking in America.” And yet the book enjoyed impressive sales and the designs proved very popular: an adaptation of Design II for use as a farmhouse appeared as the masthead of the American Agriculturist, while Design IV, complete with Downing’s text and illustrations, was reprinted in the Cultivator. Shortly after the publication of Cottage Residences, Downing could write: “Some of my ‘castles in the air’ I have the satisfaction of knowing will be soon brought into palpable form by amateurs in different parts of the country.” Design II, a cottage in the English or Rural Gothic style, was “an especial favorite,” he noted in the fourth (1852) edition, and “has been executed in various parts of the country.” Bremer explained how readers pored over Downing’s writings and weighed the appropriateness of his suggestions to their own circumstances. During her travels she met a young couple in Uxbridge, Massachusetts, who, after months of careful study, “had built their house according to one of Mr. Downing’s designs” and had “laid out their garden also after his plan.” Through Downing’s writings the Hudson River aesthetic was becoming national.31 Of the ten designs presented in Cottage Residences, five were in variations of the Gothic, three were Italianate, and two were bracketed. The cost ranged from a simple Gothic cottage or gate lodge ($830), a bracketed cottage for “a family of small means” ($1,800), and an ornamental farm house in a vaguely Rural Gothic mode ($1,700) to an elaborate Gothic villa, designed by Davis, that would cost $12,000 to $15,000 depending on materials and interior finish. Several critics pointed out that the designs in Cottage Residences were too expensive for most Americans, and in the pages of the Horticulturist and The Architecture of Country Houses Downing provided plans for tasteful yet less expensive homes. In the inaugural (July 1846) issue of the Horticulturist, he demonstrated how a small vernacular dwelling could be transformed into a comfortable, attractively designed cottage at small expense, and in the third issue provided plans and descriptions for simple cottages appropriate for industrious workingmen and their families. These were wood, of board-and-batten construction, with overhanging eaves and hoods over the doorway and windows. The two examples he provided avoided the mania for gingerbread he decried, and instead achieved good taste through simplicity and fitness. They could be built at an estimated cost of $200 to $500.32 Downing took particular pride in the small but tasteful dwellings of working Americans. In the midst of the social whirl of Bremer’s visit he took her to several houses that illustrated his hopes for American society. One was a “lovely villa” owned by a modest brick-maker, another a “beautiful little house, a frame house, with green veranda and garden,” owned by a cart driver. Downing pointed to these dwellings and their occupants as a demonstration of the possibilities of the New World. Bremer too was captivated by these simple yet tasteful homes and what they represented. The

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American worker, she wrote, could, “by the hard labor of his hands, obtain the more refined pleasures of life, a beautiful home, and the advantages of education for his family” much more readily than could a worker in Europe. In the Treatise, Downing had argued that even the smallest cottage, affordable by an individual of “very modest means,” could be tastefully designed, and in his writings he provided plans that, he hoped, would raise the quality of domestic life throughout the nation.33 Downing attempted to reform American domestic architecture largely through his writings, and to ensure that the cost of his books was not an obstacle, in 1851 his publisher, D. Appleton and Company, issued a separate edition of part 1 of The Architecture of Country Houses, entitled Downing’s Cheap Cottages and Farm Houses, which sold at half the price of the original volume. Appleton advertised the book as “especially adapted to the wants of the American people, who wish to build convenient, comfortable, and tasteful homes, at very moderate expense.” This inexpensive edition, the Ohio Cultivator concluded, was “emphatically a BOOK FOR THE MILLION.” Downing’s neighbor, N. P. Willis, suggested that Downing’s designs for smaller homes and gardens were evidence of his passion for improving the “homes of The Many,” and found praiseworthy his efforts to bring “taste and refined comfort within reach of moderate means.”34 Downing seemingly went from triumph to triumph as the decade of the 1840s progressed. A popular author and editor, he received so many inquiries about his professional services or invitations to design houses that he invited the young English architect Calvert Vaux to join in him in establishing a practice in Newburgh. A year after Vaux joined him in Newburgh, Downing wrote to his friend John J. Smith: “I am deeply immersed in practical works—architectural and rural—turning my theories into practice all over the country.” In March 1852, a month after Frederick C. Withers joined the growing firm, Downing informed Smith: “I am really a man of no leisure—except after dinner, at home. I wish I could show you my ‘Bureau of Architecture,’ in the new wing of my residence—full of commissions, and young architects, and planning for all parts of the country.” He also raised a powerful voice in support of establishing large public parks for the nation’s cities and had the opportunity to design the public grounds in Washington, the National Mall, which he attempted to transform into the first great urban park in the United States. Downing also offered a compelling rationale, in the Horticulturist, for the proper design of the suburban communities that were becoming a distinctive feature of the American metropolitan landscape. He hoped that parks, public libraries, galleries of art, and other cultural institutions would promote what he termed “popular refinement.” By making accessible “common enjoyments for all classes, in the higher realms of art, letters, science, social recreations and enjoyments,” Downing hoped to raise the level of social civilization in the United States for all its citizens.35

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Downing died in the tragic burning of the Hudson River steamboat Henry Clay on July 28, 1852, when he was only thirty-six. Ironically, the river that helped shape his ideas of landscape and architecture cruelly took his life. Although his early death precluded his realization of the ambitious reformist agenda he articulated, through his writings and designs Downing left an indelible imprint on American society and culture in the middle decades of the nineteenth century. Downing did not invent a Hudson Valley aesthetic: residents had for a generation sited houses and shaped landscapes to take advantage of river views, many of which conformed to his ideas of the Beautiful and the Picturesque. Nevertheless, he was the key figure in articulating and popularizing this aesthetic and the idea that the Hudson Valley landscape was the example the rest of the nation should follow. In so doing, he contributed to the recognition that the Hudson was America’s river and the incubator of a national taste in landscape and architectural design.

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t midcentury many of the individuals who had helped define the Hudson Valley as a special place were passing from the scene. Thomas Cole died in 1848, and Andrew Jackson Downing four years later, both while still in the prime of their creative lives. Of the older generation, James Fenimore Cooper died in 1851, while Washington Irving was nearing seventy and would not survive the decade. N. P. Willis’s literary productivity was declining as tuberculosis eroded his health. The last of the veterans of the Revolutionary War also neared the end of their natural lives: Uzal Knapp, of Orange County, long if erroneously thought to be the last surviving member of George Washington’s Life Guard, died in 1856 and was buried on the grounds of the Hasbrouck house in Newburgh, which had served as the general’s headquarters during the tense period between the Battle of Yorktown and the signing of the Treaty of Paris, which secured American independence. In 1850, Asher B. Durand completed the painting Landscape—Scene from “Thanatopsis” (plate 9), a large canvas inspired by William Cullen Bryant’s poem. As was the case in Bryant’s verse, the painting is a meditation on death and nature. In “Thanatopsis” (1817) Bryant had urged those whose thoughts had turned to “darker musings” to seek communion in Nature, which promised a “healing sympathy.” Much as the artfully designed landscapes of rural cemeteries of the 1830s attempted to soothe the troubled heart, so Bryant’s words evoked the restorative powers of Nature. Durand’s painting is an allegory that pays obvious homage to Cole in its composition, the juxtaposition of atmospheric effects and coloration on the two sides of the picture, and its effort to elevate landscape painting to the highest expression of the art. In Thanatopsis a small group of people gathers at a gravesite in the middle distance; directly above and behind them is a castle-like Gothic structure, behind which rises a steep promontory. The tiered effect at once draws the viewer’s attention to the center of the canvas, where the burial ceremony takes place shrouded in

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shadow near a strikingly lighted dead tree, yet also away from it, to the mountain, the sky, and the broader landscape, providing precisely the comfort in grief Bryant’s verse promised. A Gothic chapel stands to the right in the middle distance, while to the left a meandering river finds it way to the horizon and the setting sun. Goats and sheep lend a pastoral calm to the scene. The tree in the right foreground resembles the natural forms common in Cole’s painting, and its roots have disturbed several graves, uncovering a human skull, a memento mori that was a familiar motif in the elegiac tradition and perhaps an allusion to Cole’s death two years earlier. When Durand exhibited the painting at the National Academy he included in the catalogue lines from Bryant’s poem: The hills, Rock-ribbed and ancient as the sun; the vales Stretching in pensive quietness between; The venerable woods; rivers that move In majesty, and the complaining brooks That make the meadows green; and, poured round all, Old Ocean’s gray and melancholy waste,— Are but the solemn decorations all Of the great tomb of Man.

Completed at midcentury, Landscape—Scene from “ Thanatopsis” was acquired by the American Art-Union, a testament both to Durand’s stature as the most important American landscape painter in the years immediately following Cole’s death and to the Art-Union’s belief that the painting captured the sentiments of its audience and its time.1 Durand’s Thanatopsis depicts change at its most immediate, death and the efforts of family and friends to memorialize an individual. Yet it also attests to the continuity of the human spirit, which builds houses and churches and remembers. In suggestive ways the painting captures a dynamic of the middle of the nineteenth century, which was a time of tremendous change, of great uncertainty, in the Hudson Valley and throughout the United States. National politics, and the question of slavery in the territories, were staples of conversation, as was the future of the new territories acquired as a result of the war with Mexico. Some contemporaries wondered whether the United States could survive in the face of sectional tendencies that threatened to divide it. Others doubted whether a nation founded as an agrarian republic could adapt to the new realities of industrialization, record-high immigration from abroad, and the rapid growth of cities. Like Washington Irving’s character Rip Van Winkle, who fell asleep in the Catskills for twenty years and, upon

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awakening and wandering back to his village, was astonished by changes he could simply not comprehend—the sign over the tavern bore the likeness of George Washington rather than George III—residents of the Hudson Valley at midcentury confronted a new world that was changing rapidly and in unsettling ways. Death and the passing of time are the human condition. They represented one dimension of change that was immediate to residents of the mid-Hudson Valley in the middle of the nineteenth century. And yet change was accelerating, spiraling beyond most residents’ ability to comprehend: people in Newbugh, Kingston, and Poughkeepsie experienced three principal developments that fundamentally reordered their communities and livelihoods. The transportation revolution, the development of steam-powered industry, and immigration from abroad indelibly impacted the river towns of the valley and affected the everyday lives of residents of the countryside as well, as the railroad introduced competition from distant markets and contributed to the transformation of agriculture in the Northeast. A fourth development was the incredible growth of New York City, whose population increased from 60,000 in 1800 to more than 800,000 in 1860 and which was the major market for the agricultural bounty of the valley. The first major agent of change was the transportation revolution, and it was inextricably linked to the emergence of industrialism and large-scale immigration, though in somewhat different ways in each of the river villages. Steamboats made the transport of goods and people much easier, and in a place such as Newburgh, businessmen invested their wealth, and their community’s future, in transshipping the agricultural resources of the countryside. First settled in 1709, Newburgh is located sixty miles north of New York City on the west bank of the river. By the early nineteenth century the small village hugged the shoreline. In 1822 its population was 2,370, and the building stock consisted of 372 frame dwellings and stores and 85 brick or stone structures, most of which must have been of Germanic or Anglo-American vernacular design. But as river commerce increased, Newburgh’s businessmen aggressively built turnpikes to the southern tier of the state to secure trade from farmers in that region, even opening a branch of the Bank of Newburgh in Ithaca in 1820. Completion of the Erie Canal in 1825 soon tempered the merchant freighters’ vision that Newburgh would become a major commercial center: the cost of shipping goods by water was significantly less than the arduous journey over dirt roads, and farmers in the Finger Lakes region instead sent their goods north to the canal, sharply reducing what the turnpike builders hoped would be a vastly enlarged hinterland. Most of the barges, sloops, and steamboats laden with cargo destined for New York City bypassed Newburgh, forcing the village to look for alternatives to its dream of becoming the dominant trading emporium of the midHudson Valley.2

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Despite its reduced trading area, Newburgh’s merchants prospered throughout the 1830s because of the productivity of agriculture in Orange County, and they invested heavily in a rapidly growing community. In the middle of the decade a local newspaper, the Telegraph, surveyed the physical changes these merchants had wrought. By 1835 approximately six hundred buildings stood closely together in a dozen or so blocks adjacent to the waterfront, the village’s population had swelled to 5,118 persons, and shopkeepers and tradesmen provided for residents’ needs as well as those of farmers who came to Newburgh to do business. New buildings signified this prosperity: recently constructed dwellings that ornamented “many of the beautiful points in our landscape which render it the admiration of the traveler”; new houses for the rapidly growing population in the blocks close to the river; a new bank and an impressive number of commercial buildings; and a new dock to expand the community’s potential as a trading center. New churches catered to the spiritual needs of residents, including Alexander Jackson Davis’s majestic Dutch Reformed Church, and the theological seminary of the Associate Reformed Synod began training the next generation of ministers for that denomination. The United States Hotel, a five-story brick structure with three large porches and an observation deck, rose near the ferry dock. So great was the material progress of the community, the Telegraph reported, that “upwards of 60 buildings have been erected here within the past year, upwards of 1500 feet of dock built, and something like a million of dollars in stocks taken up by our citizens.”3 Even as merchants built a new community, another threat to their prosperity loomed, construction of a railroad from Piermont, in southern Rockland County, the point of transshipment to New York City, through the center of Orange County and ultimately onward to Buffalo—the Erie Railroad. The Buffalo and New York City Railroad, as the Erie was first called, was incorporated by the state legislature in 1832, but it experienced difficulty raising capital for construction of the line. Heeding arguments from legislators and farmers in the southern tier that the region was poorly served by transportation, the state acquired $3 million in stock in 1836, and the railroad began laying track two years later. In 1841 the Erie reached Goshen, in central Orange County, and when operations commenced, farmers from the central and western areas of the county began shipping their produce to New York City via train rather than overland to Newburgh. During the first three months the Erie linked Goshen to the metropolis, almost 6 million pounds of agricultural produce, most of which would formerly have passed through Newburgh, traveled by rail instead. In the first six months of 1852, the Erie carried 35,177 quarts of milk alone to New York City, most if not all of it from Orange County. Newburgh was at a critical juncture as its trading area shrank dramatically. In the early 1840s its population declined as workers sought better opportunities elsewhere, businesses closed or carried on reduced and less profitable operations, and property values collapsed.4

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Newburgh’s merchants responded to the crisis of the early 1840s by developing the first large factory in the mid-Hudson Valley, the Newburgh Steam Mill. Until the introduction of steam-powered industrial technology, most industries were located not along the slow-moving Hudson itself but on tributary streams and creeks, at places where waterfalls and cataracts could power the operations. But with the feasibility of steam power, location along the river provided new advantages: sloops, steamboats, and barges could bring in raw materials and coal inexpensively and carry finished goods to market. For Newburgh’s merchants—the very people who had invested so heavily in building their community in the 1830s—steam was the opportunity to reestablish the economic basis of the village.5 The new five-and-a-half-story Newburgh Steam Mill, a brick structure that loomed over the waterfront, began operating in 1845. It employed more than three hundred workers, most of them unskilled women, but equally important the new mill attracted other industries, including several foundries and the Washington Iron Works, which located nearby. The village’s major merchants also invested in a railroad spur connecting to the Erie, which provided access to Pennsylvania’s coalfields. As new industries located in Newburgh, prosperity returned, and the village’s population soared from 5,784 in 1845 to 11,415 fifteen years later. As was true in other communities in the mid-Hudson Valley, many of these newcomers were immigrants, principally from Ireland and Germany, who were attracted by jobs in the new factories and whose increasing presence gave rise to the stridently anti-immigrant Know Nothing (or American) Party, which swept the municipal election of 1855. Population growth, and the development of industrial capitalism adjacent to the river, resulted in the development of new blocks to the west of the 1830s village. A number of the wealthier merchants built impressive houses, many designed by Downing and his talented associates Calvert Vaux and Frederick C. Withers, on newly opened streets to the north or on the hills overlooking the village to the west. Vaux described Grand Street as Newburgh’s “handsomest thoroughfare” and “principal promenade.” As elms and maples grew to shade the many dwellings the three men designed, he predicted that the street would “equal the far-famed Hill-house Avenue in New Haven” as an icon of urban living. Even as those who could afford to do so moved away from the noise, smoke, and congestion of the riverfront, immigrants lived in much smaller houses near their places of work, in the east end. A new cultural and social geography was emerging, along with new, more complicated social relationships in an increasingly diverse community, as the village experienced its transformation into a city.6 Thirty miles north on the west bank, near the point where Rondout Creek meets the Hudson, another community also experienced the effects of the transportation revolution, though in a very different way than Newburgh. Kingston, originally named Esopus, was established in the middle of the seventeenth century. It was not

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located on the banks of the river but inland, on an elevated plain three miles west of the Hudson. The stockaded village, where New York’s colonial assembly had voted to support independence, had been burned (apparently in spite, as it held no strategic importance) by the British during Sir Henry Clinton’s foray up the river in 1777, and following the fire, rebuilding progressed slowly: in the 1820s its population was 3,000, and farmers outnumbered villagers by a two-to-one ratio. But during the decade the plain below Kingston became the Hudson River terminus of the Delaware and Hudson Canal, which extended from Rondout Creek 108 miles south and west to Port Jervis, New York, and then north and west to Honesdale, Pennsylvania, in the heart of the anthracite region. Coal boats carried 7,000 tons in 1828, the first year of operations, and more than a million tons of anthracite annually in the 1850s. Other goods carried by the canal, largely lumber and agricultural produce, totaled roughly 33,000 tons in 1831 and 83,000 tons in 1850. The canal brought not just coal but prosperity: a number of Kingston merchants became wealthy through the ownerships of steamboats and sloops that carried goods and people to other destinations in the Hudson Valley. Shortly after the canal opened, Kingston investors began construction of a turnpike extending west to Delaware County, which brought even more commerce into their community.7 In addition to the profits from shipping, the economic activity the canal generated benefited the village of Kingston through the goods and services an increased number of shopkeepers and other businessmen provided for the canal workers. The canal company built a large dock where Rondout Creek meets the river, and a new community quickly took shape. As historian Stuart Blumin has demonstrated, as economic development took place the two villages gradually migrated toward each other and were consolidated (along with Wiltwick and surrounding areas) in 1872. The two villages were remarkably different in their physical geography. Kingston’s town center—the old stockade area—was where commerce concentrated and wealthy and professional residents lived. But the town that grew up at Kingston Landing was different from the older village: Rondout’s design and the location of shops and neighborhoods were defined by its port activity, warehouses, and quarrying operations. Moreover, the two villages differed demographically. Blumin characterizes Kingston Village in terms of its homogeneity, as most residents were descended from the original Dutch settlers. By contrast, Rondout was a workingclass village dominated by immigrants: its people were newcomers, largely Irish and German, who were attracted by opportunity. Especially for the Irish, jobs at the canal and at the quarries were unskilled and poorly paid in the mid-nineteenth century. As was true of canal villages in general, Rondout had a reputation for roustabouts and other unsavory characters. But it managed to survive, in large part because the canal and other new industries, especially cement manufacturing and bluestone quarries, supported the local economy.8

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As Rondout developed and surpassed Kingston village in population, the community experienced significant change. Most obviously, half of the population of greater Kingston was immigrant. New churches and religious denominations symbolized this change, as did new social organizations and tensions between nativeborn Americans and the newcomers. Life was hard for the immigrants: many canal workers left during the winter, when the canal froze, and Blumin speculates that at least some of the temporarily unemployed men took jobs during those months in the Catskills felling trees, which constituted the largest tonnage on the canal after coal. As the population grew rapidly Rondout investors erected hotels, taverns, and other businesses, while working people huddled in densely populated neighborhoods: the Irish neighborhood along the hillsides to the west of the village, described as “New Dublin,” consisted of rude houses, while other laborers lived near the canal or adjacent to the quarry north of the creek. Most of Rondout’s workers and their families lived surrounded by the noise of blasting and the pollution generated by the quarry and other economic activity along the waterfront.9 The presence of so many immigrants, and evidence of cultural and social as well as ethnic diversity, fundamentally changed an old farming village once dominated by descendants of the early Dutch settlers, and set the course for greater Kingston to emerge as a small city. The anti-immigrant Know Nothings dominated politics in the early 1850s, and violent clashes between native-born and immigrant men occurred frequently enough to cause residents to worry about the social order. Kingston and Rondout had grown dramatically in a very short time, in terms of their urban landscapes, the number and diversity of residents, and their economy. But the sheer impact of these changes must have been unsettling for residents, even for those who prospered as a result.10 Poughkeepsie is located approximately midway between Newburgh and Kingston on the east bank of the Hudson River. As was true of Kingston, at first Poughkeepsie didn’t hug the river shore: the earliest settlers, in the 1680s, located their homes on a plateau above and separated from the Hudson by a steep hillside. As Harvey Flad and Clyde Griffen have pointed out, in its early years Poughkeepsie had “no initial orientation to the river.” Instead, the community organized around the Post Road, which connected New York and Albany early in the eighteenth century, and because of topography the streets were an irregular grid. But as was true of Newburgh and Kingston, what drove Poughkeepsie’s economy was its role as a transshipment center for the hinterland: early industry was largely limited to the banks of Fall Kill, a creek at the northern edge of the settlement that was dammed to power mills that processed the grains and lumber from the surrounding farms and forests, as well as a tannery, and from there the surplus was shipped elsewhere in the valley and beyond.11

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The economic and social geography of Poughkeepsie began to change when Matthew Vassar moved his brewery from the village to the riverfront to take advantage of opportunities for expanding the market for his products. Other industries soon followed, and construction of the Harlem Railroad, which reached eastern Dutchess County in 1847, and the Hudson River Railroad, which began operating in 1849 and extended to Albany two years later, accelerated this transformation. The railroad made the riverfront attractive to other industries that could use steampowered technology and take advantage of transportation by water and rail to bring in raw materials and carry away finished products. Poughkeepsie’s population grew from less than 8,000 in 1840 to 12,763 in 1855, an increase of more than 50 percent. Nevertheless, Poughkeepsie largely remained a market town, albeit a growing one.12 Construction of the Hudson River Railroad brought immigrants from Ireland, and the failed European revolutions of 1848 led many Germans to settle in Poughkeepsie. Predictably, a nativist reaction ensued. Painter and inventor Samuel F. B. Morse, who lived in Locust Grove, feared that a Papist conspiracy would undermine America’s republican institutions. The Know Nothings organized, though with less electoral success than in Kingston or Newburgh. But hostilities between native and newcomer persisted. In 1857 the New York Times reported a vicious brawl between a predominantly Irish volunteer fire company and another whose members apparently were native born. The Irish firemen of company Number 3 had congregated at the Glen Cove saloon when men from another company, Number 4, entered. Animosities must have been deep, for instead of sharing in their common avocation the firemen engaged in a fight. Most of the brawlers brandished glasses and bottles, while one man wielded a pistol and another an axe. A third company, Number 6, soon arrived to support the nativist cause, and “by the free use of clubs, staves, &c., they compelled the firemen of No. 3 to leave the saloon and escape in the best manner they could.” Several men were seriously injured, and resentment smoldered. As the village became a city, the fault lines of wealth and ethnicity were clearly drawn, leaving residents to worry about the future of what they once considered a harmonious community.13 Just as new technologies had an impact on communities and those who lived along the river, they also changed the lives and livelihoods of farmers throughout the valley. In the first third of the nineteenth century the mid-Hudson Valley was the breadbasket of the United States. Wheat from Ulster County was widely regarded as the finest in the United States. But two factors transformed traditional agricultural practices in the valley: declining productivity and the transportation revolution. Downing reported that farms that had once produced thirty to forty bushels of wheat per acre were yielding only twelve to fourteen: the “productive power of nearly all the land in the United States which has been ten years in cultivation, is

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fearfully lessening every season,” he wrote, “from the desolating effects of a ruinous system of husbandry” that was extracting essential nutrients from the soil. Downing thus became a powerful advocate for establishing a state-supported agricultural college that would teach the best farming techniques and thereby solidify the rural economy of the Hudson Valley and the state as a whole. Agricultural reformer Solon Robinson was surprised by the backward condition of long-settled areas in the east at midcentury: following a tour of Westchester County, New York, and Fairfield County, Connecticut, he described the Connecticut countryside as “covered with bushes, or miserable little half-starved patches of cultivation, or with shanties that are a degree, at least, below the western log cabin.” Robinson saw farms whose productivity had been devastated by the “ ‘American system’ of skin, shave, and waste the soil.” The places he visited in Westchester County had a “behind-the-age appearance”—ancient houses, “old barns and outbuildings, covered with an old mossy coat,” fields and stone walls in disrepair—everything he saw testified to age and decline. “Close as this country is to the city,” Robinson wrote, “the majority of the inhabitants have not yet caught the infecting spirit of improvement.”14 Conditions for wheat farmers in the Hudson Valley worsened with the mechanization of agriculture and the opening of much larger, more productive tracts in the upper Midwest. Many Hudson Valley agriculturists responded to this crisis by shifting production from wheat, rye, and other staples to fruit and dairy, the latter of which became especially important following Gail Borden’s invention of condensed milk. The amount of milk and butter produced in Dutchess, Orange, and Ulster counties increased significantly at midcentury. And following Downing’s advice on the importance of fruits, and the salubrious conditions in the Hudson Valley for their cultivation, farmers saw the value of orchard products soar between 1850 and 1860, from $16,000 to $92,000 in Dutchess, $16,000 to $41,000 in Orange, and $8,700 to $34,499 in Ulster. Clearly, farmers were responding to a changing economy by increasing the output of dairy products, fruits, and other crops they could ship to the rapidly growing metropolis to the south. They were also being drawn fully into a market economy that extended far beyond the Hudson Valley.15 WHETHER they lived in villages evolving into small cities or in the countryside, residents of the mid-Hudson Valley were buffeted by change in the middle decades of the nineteenth century. Yet many people also proudly realized that they were living in a special place that, as Thomas Cole noted in 1836, was sanctified by history and an incredibly beautiful landscape. Around the time Cole was first receiving recognition for his accomplishments as a landscape painter, that history was very much a part of everyday experience. Cooper had published The Spy in 1821, and during the 1820s virtually every town and village in the valley boasted at least one resident who

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was a veteran of the nation’s struggle for independence, and these men, who so often were called on to deliver the traditional Fourth of July oration, provided physical and psychological continuity with the past. An event such as Lafayette’s visit to cities and towns in the Hudson Valley in 1824 was a stirring reminder of the sacrifices of the Revolutionary War generation, while the simultaneous deaths of Thomas Jefferson and John Adams on July 4, 1826, fifty years to the day of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, were a symbolic reminder that Providence was indeed guiding the new nation.16 Nevertheless, with the passing of years the last of the veterans died—in 1825 John Quincy Adams praised the surviving soldiers of the Revolution as “these venerable relics of an age gone by”—and any number of plans to sanctify the sites and events of the war for independence went uncompleted. Long before Lafayette’s visit the steeple of Independence Hall had been damaged and removed, but it would not be replaced until 1828. Residents in Newburgh intended to erect a monument “commemorative of that glorious termination of our revolutionary struggles” at Temple Hill, in nearby New Windsor, where the Continental army had camped in the long months between Yorktown and the treaty of peace. The best of intentions did not, however, protect significant structures or sites associated with the nation’s past, and buildings associated with the Revolution were torn down and sacred ground turned to more prosaic use. In the seemingly relentless march of progress, the present was sweeping away the past.17 Perhaps no individual did more to impress upon the broader public the historical significance of the Hudson River valley than the Poughkeepsie historian Benson John Lossing. Lossing was one of many historians writing in the antebellum years. There were numerous biographies of Washington, the best-known of which was by Jared Sparks, as well as volumes devoted to the signers of the Declaration of Independence. The first three (of ten) volumes of George Bancroft’s History of the United States had been published by 1840; John Romeyn Brodhead spent more than three years in the early 1840s traveling throughout western Europe assembling a documentary history of New Netherlands and early New York, which would be edited as the first ten volumes of Edmund B. O’Callaghan’s Documents relative to the Colonial History of the State of New York (15 vols., 1853–87); and the romantic historians— Francis Parkman, William H. Prescott, and John L. Motley—had already begun their researches.18 But Lossing was different in a way: he was a skilled writer and talented artist who took advantage of the revolution in book publishing to produce handsomely illustrated, readable histories that reached a broad audience. A native of Dutchess County who apprenticed as a watchmaker, Lossing migrated to journalism in Poughkeepsie and then studied wood engraving. He moved to New York City in 1838 and launched

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a successful career as a writer. Nine years later, while traveling through southern Connecticut, he chanced on the spot where, in 1779, General Israel Putnam narrowly escaped from British troops then trying to divert Washington’s forces from the defense of the Hudson Highlands by raiding the coastal countryside. The rude stairway that Lossing sketched that day inspired him to write an illustrated history of the American Revolution. Soon thereafter he was traveling with pen and sketchbook in hand, conducting research in documentary collections, interviewing surviving eyewitnesses to the events of the Revolution, and sketching the important sites associated with the war. The result was his two-volume Pictorial Field-Book of the Revolution, a lengthy text illustrated with more than 1,300 wood engravings. In the subtitle of that magisterial work Lossing listed “scenery” with “relics” in the topics covered, an assertion of the interdependence of landscape and history. He described the midHudson Valley as possessing “some of the finest scenery in the world,” which was “enhanced in interest to the student of history by the associations which hallow it.” Lossing’s highly popular book familiarized readers with the American landscape and scenes of the Revolutionary past at the very time residents of the Hudson Valley acted

“Washington’s Head-Quarters at Newburgh.” Benson J. Lossing, Pictorial Field-Book of the Revolution (1850; New York, 1852), 2: 99. Archives & Special Collections, Franklin & Marshall College.

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to preserve a modest fieldstone farmhouse Lossing praised for its historical significance, Washington’s Headquarters at Newburgh.19 Washington’s Headquarters is an eighteenth-century vernacular stone building. As simple as the one-story dwelling appears from the exterior, it was a place of transcendent importance in the establishment of an independent American republic. Washington lived there for more than a year between the victory at Yorktown and the disbanding of the Continental army following the signing of the Treaty of Paris. This was a period of anxious waiting, to be sure, but also a perilous time. General Howe’s British troops still occupied New York City and much of the lower Hudson Valley. Moreover, a parsimonious Congress in Philadelphia, as well as state governments, refused to support the army adequately, and there was mounting dissatisfaction among officers and troops. It was while living in the house of Jonathan Hasbrouck that Washington read Louis Nicola’s proposal that the new nation be established as a constitutional monarchy. And it was there that he learned, to his utter despair, that many of his officers had concluded that the army should take action against the ineffective Congress. The Newburgh Conspiracy, as historians have characterized it, was an attempt to use the threat of a military coup to force Congress to raise the revenue needed to pay the troops. Washington considered the possible consequences of the statements of grievances against Congress that had circulated through the campground the greatest crisis of the long and difficult war, and was shaken upon learning that his officers had called a meeting at Temple Hill for March 11, 1783. Realizing that he had to act swiftly and resolutely, Washington informed the officers that only he had the right to convene the group and rescheduled a meeting for five days later. When the officers had congregated at the Temple, Washington entered, stoically and without ceremony, calmly put on a new pair of eyeglasses—remarking that not only had he grown old in service to his country but almost blind as well—and delivered what historian Joseph Ellis believes was “the most impressive speech he ever wrote.” Washington described the Newburgh letters as having “the most insidious purposes” and predicted that if the officers followed the actions the petitions outlined they would dishonor all that the army had achieved over seven years of war. He called instead for the officers to reaffirm their commitment to a republican system of government and assured them that their collective honor required them to give “one more distinguished proof of unexampled patriotism and patient virtue, rising superior to the pressure of the most complicated sufferings.” When Washington completed his remarks and left the room, he had secured the goals of the Revolution: there would be no monarchy in the new nation, and the military would continue to be subservient to civilian authority, a cardinal tenet of republican ideology. Three months later Washington wrote a “Circular Letter to the States” that congratulated citizens on their “absolute freedom and Independency”

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and described the nation as “peculiarly designed by Providence for the display of human greatness and felicity.” Finally, in November 1783, Washington bade farewell to his army at Temple Hill.20 This was real drama. The actions Washington took while living in the Hasbrouck house determined the future course of the nation. As historian and public official Joel T. Headley noted at the Hasbrouck house during Newburgh’s celebration of the centennial of the Declaration of Independence, “In Independence Hall, Philadelphia, was settled the question of national independence; in these old headquarters, whether we should be a republic or not.” This was a sentiment Lossing had conveyed to readers in prose that captured the immediacy of these events and their significance for the nation. He also provided two illustrations of the building in his Pictorial Field-Book, one of the exterior, the other of the interior great room, which was often described as the room with seven doors and one window, as well as two views of the cantonment at Temple Hill. To nineteenth-century Americans who read about or visited the old stone house, Washington’s Headquarters became a symbol, a shrine to American republicanism, the place where Washington had once again saved the nation, this time from itself.21 Washington’s Newburgh headquarters became, in 1850, the first building in the United States preserved for its historical significance, but it was not always so cherished. In 1813 the owners, the Hasbrouck family, fought attempts by the village to run a street through the property. The effort to preserve this simple fieldstone structure, while the result of unusual circumstances and the work of a few determined individuals, reveals how nineteenth-century residents of the Hudson Valley turned to history as a familiar ground at a time of incessant change. The effort succeeded in large part because artists, writers, publishers, and citizens sanctified the Hudson Valley, merging history with the landscape, which functioned both as the physical setting in which so many of the stirring events of the Revolutionary War had taken place and as a sacred place in its own right. The preservationist impulse, which was nurtured and promoted by artists and writers, was an important element of what historian Daniel Walker Howe has called Whig political culture. It was a manifestation of a “proper sense of responsibility, both toward previous generations, whose sacrifices had made freedom possible, and toward subsequent generations, who depended on present exertions” to maintain continuity with the past. Thus in 1834 Knickerbocker author Gulian C. Verplanck described Washington’s Newburgh headquarters as “one of the most interesting relics of the first and heroic age of our republic.” The significance of the building was not local but national and international: Verplanck recounted how, at a dinner honoring Lafayette, a French host replicated the principal room of the Hasbrouck house. A surprised Lafayette immediately recognized the room with seven doors and one window and exclaimed: “We

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are at Washington’s Head-Quarters on the Hudson, fifty years ago!” Verplanck asserted that this simple vernacular dwelling was not just a monument to the past but had didactic importance for present and future generations: “What shall we say of the American who feels no glow of patriotism,” he inquired, “who kindles not into warmer love for his country, and her glorious institutions, who rises into no grand and fervent aspiration for the virtue and the happiness of this people, when he enters the humble, but venerable walls of the HEAD-QUARTERS AT NEWBURGH.”22 For Verplanck what made this structure especially important as a shrine was the interdependence of a landscape aesthetic and the historical consciousness it embodied. “The view from the house and grounds, as well as the whole neighbourhood around it,” he wrote, “are rich alike in natural beauty and in historical remembrances.” In 1839 Verplanck’s friend and fellow writer Washington Irving joined a group of citizens from throughout the Hudson Valley in petitioning the state legislature to preserve Washington’s Headquarters as a historic site. “If our love of country is excited when we read the biography of our revolutionary heroes, or the history of revolutionary events,” the legislative report on the petition read in part, “how much more will the flame of patriotism burn in our bosoms when we tread the ground where was shed the blood of our fathers, or when we move among the scenes where were conceived and consummated their noblest achievements.” As Verplanck had done, the petition linked the Hasbrouck house’s historical and scenic significance, noting that it overlooks “the beautiful bay of Newburgh, and the military station at West-Point” and had within its viewshed “all the splendid water and mountain scenery for which that region is remarkable.” Irving and other signatories of the petition hoped to incorporate as a joint stock company to purchase and preserve the building, and based on the favorable report of a select committee the state assembly unanimously approved an act to create that organization. Charles B. Hosmer Jr., the foremost historian of preservation in the United States, has pointed out that Jonathan Hasbrouck, the owner of the house, considered the possible sale of the property to Irving’s group, but that nothing came of the discussions.23 To residents of the mid-Hudson Valley the preservation of the Hasbrouck house was a noble cause. This first successful preservationist effort moved closer to fruition when, in 1848, Hasbrouck defaulted on a government loan. When the building was scheduled to be put up at auction, Andrew J. Caldwell, the loan commissioner of the U.S. Deposit Fund, who was overseeing the disposition of the default, took steps to protect this historically significant dwelling. He corresponded with Governor Hamilton Fish and won the governor’s support for its preservation as a historic site. Following Caldwell’s initiative, in November 1849 the Orange County supervisors

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petitioned that the state purchase and maintain the house and grounds for the public. A legislative committee studying the question endorsed the petition the following year, predicting: No traveler who touches upon the shores of Orange county will hesitate to make a pilgrimage to this beautiful spot, associated as it is with so many delightful reminiscences in our early history, and if he have an American heart in his bosom, he will feel himself a better man; his patriotism will kindle with deeper emotion; his aspirations for his country’s good will ascend from a more devout mind for having visited the “HEAD-QUARTERS OF WASHINGTON.”

The language of this report included the words “pilgrimage” and “devout,” each conveying a religiosity that equated the saving of the Hasbrouck house with the sacred “mission” the reviewer for the Literary World in 1847 had ascribed to the landscape painter—to preserve the landscape before it fell to commercial uses. That language must have been persuasive, because until this time the national and state governments had not yet assumed responsibility for constructing monuments or preserving historic sites. The great memorial at Bunker Hill and the Washington Monument in Baltimore, as well as the uncompleted obelisk in the District of Columbia, had been erected through private funding. In the middle of the nineteenth century, however, residents of the Hudson Valley requested that the state not only purchase but restore and maintain as a historic site what had been a private residence.24 The committee’s report, together with mounting evidence of the progress that threatened to destroy the surviving relics of the Revolutionary era, led the state legislature to approve “an Act for the preservation of ‘Washington’s Head-Quarters’ ” on April 10, 1850. On July 4, 1850, citizens from throughout the Hudson Valley gathered at Washington’s former residence to dedicate it as a historic shrine. A large military procession paraded through the town to the grounds, where General Winfield Scott, hero of the Mexican War, presided over the ceremonies. While a group of singers gave a spirited rendering of a celebratory ode, Scott raised the flag on what a newspaper described as a 135-foot liberty pole. Mrs. John J. Monell’s thirty-line poem described the ground as holy and the building as sacred while charging listeners with the responsibility of cherishing the monument: Brothers! to your care is given, Safe to keep this hallowed spot; Though our warriors rest in heaven, And these places see them not, see ye to it, That their deeds be ne’er forgot.

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Appropriately, an amateur poet’s verse captured the religious connotations of the sanctified landscape, as well as of patriotism, at the very moment when “this venerated relic” of the past was preserved for the future.25 The preservationist impulse that culminated in the dedication of Washington’s Newburgh headquarters as a historic shrine was the product of a broader cultural movement through which nineteenth-century Americans responded to change and sanctified the landscape of the Hudson River valley. This new landscape aesthetic combined with the historical consciousness that was becoming more compelling as time and economic development swept away the relics of the Revolutionary War era. Nurtured by Knickerbocker writers and landscape painters who first explored the aesthetic potential of the Hudson Valley, the sanctification of landscape united attitudes toward scenery, history, political culture, and change into a conservative worldview that helped contemporaries adapt to the social and economic forces that were transforming their lives. Residents of the Hudson Valley recoiled from at least some of the implications of change and turned to the sanctified landscape as an alternative to urban and industrial growth, to the more secure ground of the past to find their identity as a nation.26 In subsequent years Washington’s Headquarters became a repository of regional and national memory. As early as 1855 it received a collection of curiosities from Enock Carter that had been on display in a Poughkeepsie museum. Other citizens donated relics, including Benedict Arnold’s saber, lockets of Washington’s and Lafayette’s hair, Martha Washington’s watch, equipment used by common soldiers and other items found at the army’s final encampment at Temple Hill, a piece of the chain and boom that extended across the river at West Point to prevent British ships from passing through the Highlands, and one of the chairs Washington used while living in his Newburgh headquarters. Among the manuscripts stored at the house were letters from Washington, General Anthony Wayne, John Hancock, John Jay, and others, as well as numerous documents related to the construction of forts and the defense of the Hudson Highlands. The historic site clearly appealed to many residents of the Hudson Valley as a shrine, and writers of history as well as tourist guides to the Hudson Valley extolled its significance. Landscape painter Jervis McEntee visited Washington’s Headquarters in 1878 and described the parlor, with its “broad fire place surrounded with tiles.” He was humbled to walk across the same floorboards as Washington and described his experience as “a most interesting one as it was a spot I had always wanted to visit.”27 As the centennial of national independence neared, citizens saw an opportunity to organize an event that would convey the historical significance of Washington’s Headquarters to a broader audience. Newburgh itself organized several events, beginning on December 31, 1875, and including celebrations of the centennials of the

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Fourth of July and the announcement of the Treaty of Paris on April 19, 1883. But the major event took place on October 18, 1883, the centennial of the Continental Congress’s directive to Washington ordering the disbanding of his army. That this occasion was of more than local importance was indicated by appointment of a joint committee of Congress to work with local organizers in planning the celebration, appropriations from Congress and the state legislature to support it, and the presence of the Grand Army of the Republic and other veterans from every mid-Hudson community as well as from New York City, Brooklyn, Hartford, Connecticut, and Elizabeth, New Jersey, who participated in what local historian John J. Nutt described as “a magnificent pageant.” The town was bedecked in bunting, and as cannons boomed from naval vessels in the river to start the celebration thousands lined

Tower of Victory at Washington’s Headquarters State Historic Site, Newburgh, N.Y. Photo by author.

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the streets to witness a parade that extended three miles in length. Exercises at Washington’s Headquarters included addresses by Senator Thomas F. Bayard of Delaware, a member of the joint committee of Congress, and former Secretary of State William M. Evarts. The New York Mail and Express described Evarts’s speech, which recounted the events of the closing days of the Revolution, as “a historical review of a most interesting and touching episode of Washington and of the country.” Fireworks, which the New York Times reported would be more spectacular than those at the recent dedication of the Brooklyn Bridge, ended the day. Organizers hoped to lay the cornerstone of a commemorative Tower of Victory, designed by architect John H. Duncan, on the grounds of Washington’s Headquarters, but disagreement over its design and cost delayed the project. Duncan’s tower would not be completed until 1887. The large stone structure has an atrium where a statue of Washington by William Rudolph O’Donovan stands, other sculptures by O’Donovan representing the four branches of the military during the war, and a belvedere (which has been lost and not replaced) overlooking the river and the Hudson Highlands, where so much of the nation’s history took shape. On an interior wall is a plaque commemorating the disbanding of the “armies by whose patriotic and military virtue our National Independence and sovereignty were established.”28 As the years passed, other places in the mid-Hudson Valley were preserved for their historical significance, including the eighteenth-century stone house built in Kingston by Abraham Van Gaasbeek, where New York’s first state senate met and ratified the Declaration of Independence, which became a state historic site in 1887. Other landmarks would also be preserved, many as a result of efforts by the American Scenic and Historic Preservation Society around the turn of the twentieth century. But none was as important as Washington’s Headquarters at Newburgh. There Washington witnessed the suffering of his officers and men but heroically reaffirmed the new nation’s commitment to a republican system of government. Nineteenthcentury residents of the Hudson Valley, as well as state and national leaders, cherished the stone building for its historical significance, which many, like Verplanck and Lossing, inextricably linked to its setting overlooking the northern entrance to the Highlands. As Joel T. Headley pointed out, this was a sacred place where the nation’s future as a constitutional republic had been secured.

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6 Elegy for the Hudson River School JERVIS M C E NTEE

J

ervis McEntee was a second-generation Hudson River School landscape painter whose working career spanned the years from 1850 to 1890. He was one of a large group of artists who worked principally in New York City and gained national acclaim for their portrayal of the Hudson River valley, the Catskills and Adirondacks, the White Mountains, and the coast and interior of Maine. Collectively, these artists helped define the nation’s cultural identity in terms of Nature, which they considered the birthright of the New World. Better remembered as a diarist than as a painter, McEntee wrote eloquently about his ideals of art yet also expressed frustration at the difficulties of forging a successful career in his chosen profession. McEntee shared with Frederic E. Church, John F. Kensett, and Sanford R. Gifford a love of the American landscape, though his approach to his art differed from that of his more famous friends. Perhaps because of the subjects he chose to depict and changing tastes in the market for paintings, which shifted away from the native landscape tradition and toward European directions in art, McEntee encountered frequent, almost chronic financial difficulties that worsened in the changing economy and culture of the post–Civil War years. But even as his bank account suffered, McEntee persevered and established a place for himself in the New York art world: a number of his contemporaries—critics, patrons, and fellow artists alike—considered the small, intimate landscapes for which he is best known, and the muted palette of late autumn and winter colors associated with his work, as original and important contributions to the American landscape tradition. McEntee’s paintings, his poetry, his deep friendships with other painters and writers, and his invaluable diary attest to the efforts of an individual struggling to pursue his ideal of art. Although he never achieved the sale prices or critical acclaim of the most celebrated painters of his time, McEntee nevertheless was an important and beloved artist. Yet he was also a troubled individual: his diary entries reveal self-doubt and chronic frustration,

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loneliness, and a personality his best friends considered melancholic. McEntee’s psychological struggles undoubtedly shaped many of the paintings he created. McEntee was born in Rondout, New York, in 1828, the son of James and Sarah McEntee. The senior McEntee was an engineer involved in the construction of the Delaware and Hudson Canal, which brought coal from Pennsylvania to the Hudson River at Rondout and contributed to Kingston’s rapid transition from village into city. Educated at the Clinton Institute, a Universalist school in Clinton, New York, the younger McEntee had a poetic and artistic sensibility nurtured by Henry

Jervis McEntee, ca. 1867. Photograph by Napoleon Saroney. The Century Association, New York City.

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Pickering, a patrician New Englander and poet who boarded with the McEntee family for a time and who exemplified for Jervis the possibilities of a life devoted to intellect and culture. Henry T. Tuckerman’s biographical sketch of McEntee in his Book of the Artists mentions Pickering prominently and was surely derived from conversations with McEntee, as Tuckerman had a room in the Tenth Street Studio Building while he was working on his history and thus had the opportunity to speak frequently with the artist, who also had a studio and living quarters there. According to Tuckerman, Pickering made the young Jervis his companion on frequent excursions to the countryside beyond Rondout and “naturally awakened in his mind an appreciation of the beautiful, and of artist life as a resource and a pursuit.” Although surviving documents do not reveal any professional study in his early years, McEntee sold four paintings to the American Art-Union in 1850 (and a fifth in 1852), which may have persuaded Frederic Church to accept him as a student during the winter of 1850–51. The two men formed a deep friendship that, while not without its tensions, especially as Church’s work commanded unimaginably high prices while McEntee struggled to make ends meet, lasted until McEntee’s death in 1891.1 Following his studies with Church, McEntee returned to Rondout where, undoubtedly at the behest of his parents, he took a job in a flour and feed business. Given his poetic and artistic temperament, McEntee must have found the job tedious and longed for other outlets for his talents. Following the example of Pickering, who was a published poet, McEntee began writing verse. One of his early surviving efforts, “The Ruin” (1855), a forty-eight-line poem, evokes the familiar landscape of the Catskills: Afar the soft, blue mountains stand, With sloping vales and woods between, And many a stretch of pleasant land, And many a shaded, babbling stream.

The poem describes a once-vibrant building that had decayed to the point where tendrils of sweetbriar covered the walls, and swallows darted through window openings and made the hallway their own. The “voiceless home” was filled not with human life but a “sweet suggestion of the dead.” In another, “The Trailing Arbutus” (undated), McEntee celebrates the beloved woodland wildflower that is a harbinger of spring in the Northeast: Pale, timorous flower, thy faint perfume That freights the fragrant breeze

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Reveals to me thy hidden bloom Among the withered leaves.

However timid the arbutus, it weathered the blasts of winter that returned after a succession of warm days and, in a metaphor for rebirth, once again opened its “tender, hopeful eyes” when the temperature moderated. Both poems make pointed allusion to isolation and the cycles of nature and human life, themes that would preoccupy McEntee later in life. “The Ruin” ends with the lines Dim, dying eyes turn longing back, With wishes of the banished heart.

“Arbutus” closes with the poet promising to weave a wreath of arbutus vine each year in memory of departed friends. These early poems suggest a melancholy that contemporaries would later attribute both to McEntee and to his paintings.2 While in Rondout, McEntee also began submitting his work to the annual exhibitions of the National Academy of Design. A review of the 1855 exhibition published in The Crayon, for example, noted that it included several of his paintings. In his painting and poetry McEntee clearly was pursuing the possibilities of an artistic life that Pickering held up to him as an ideal. The affirmation of having verse published in Putnam’s Monthly Magazine and paintings hung at the National Academy surely gave him the confidence to follow that dream. Perhaps the best demonstration of his determination to cast business aside and pursue painting as a career was his decision, probably before 1854, to have architect Calvert Vaux—who would soon become his brother-in-law—design a small board-and-batten studio on the family property in Rondout.3 In 1854 McEntee married Gertrude Sawyer, the daughter of the principal of the Clinton Institute. Prior to McEntee’s wedding Vaux designed an addition to the studio to provide living quarters. The home and studio stood on an elevated site on Weinbergh Hill and afforded what Vaux described as “an extended view of the Kaatskills and the Hudson,” a prospect that embraced a range of beautiful scenery— Mount Beacon to the south, the Catskill high peaks to the west, and the rolling countryside adjacent to the river in between. McEntee spent part of his wedding day preparing the new house for Gertrude’s arrival before traveling to New York City for the ceremony. But even as the young couple settled into happy companionship in their new dwelling, McEntee’s ambition called him to the metropolis, and in 1858 he took a studio with adjacent living quarters in the recently completed Tenth Street Studio Building. For the next twenty years, until Gertrude’s death in October 1878,

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Calvert Vaux, Design for the Studio and Residence of Jervis McEntee, ca. 1854. Calvert Vaux, Villas and Cottages: A Series of Designs Prepared for Execution in the United States (1857; New York, 1864), 168.

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they would leave Rondout for New York City in October or early November, stay in the city through the winter and early spring as McEntee worked at his profession, and then return to their home in the Hudson Valley.4 At the Studio Building, McEntee forged enduring friendships with Gifford, Kensett, John F. Weir, Worthington Whittredge, and Eastman Johnson. The friends would visit each others’ studios for social events as well as conversation and criticism of their work, and attend lectures, plays, and exhibitions together. One frequent topic of conversation was their abiding concern about the state of the National Academy and their profession, especially in the 1870s, as the effects of the long depression following the Panic of 1873 adversely affected the art market, and as American paintings faced increasing competition from European works as tastes began to change. Although the artists scattered to different locations during the warmest months—a phenomenon Thomas S. Cummings described as the “Summer stampede of artists”— in the autumn they would head off on sketching expeditions with friends. In 1861, for example, McEntee, Gifford, and Whittredge embarked on one of their many sketching tours together, to the Shawangunk and Catskill mountains. Whittredge later recalled his delight in accompanying McEntee on outings to the Catskills, as he “knew every nook and corner” of the mountains and “every stepping-stone across their brooks.” McEntee and Gifford traveled to Europe for three months in 1863 and for a more extended stay in 1868–69. During these travels McEntee undoubtedly had the opportunity to study recent developments in European landscape painting as well as the works of the Old Masters, though surviving documents do not reveal what contemporary paintings he studied or what he thought of them. On the second trip McEntee and Gifford met Church and Weir in Rome and sketched the Italian campagna. One result of their time in Rome was a remarkable collaboration: McEntee, Church, and George Healy painted The Arch of Titus, completed in 1871, which incorporates the three men in the foreground, Church sketching as Healy and McEntee look over his shoulder, the arch just behind and above them, and the Colosseum in the distance. Healy painted the figures, Church the arch, and McEntee the Colosseum. The man and child strolling under the arch are thought to be poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and his young daughter.5 In subsequent years, McEntee would travel to Mount Desert Island, on the Maine coast, with Gifford; to Cape Ann, Massachusetts, with Gifford and Whittredge; to Mount Katahdin on several occasions with Church, Gifford, and Johnson; to Vermont with Church; to eastern Long Island with Weir; and to Nantucket with Johnson. When Church was planning a trip to Mexico in the winter of 1889 and his wife Isabel was unable to make the journey because of eye trouble, he invited McEntee to accompany him and promised to pay all his expenses as well as buy a small picture. McEntee asked Church “if he thought my companionship would be worth what it

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would cost him and he said ‘ten times more.’ ” Such was the camaraderie of these artists. Upon their return to New York from these various sketching expeditions they would begin translating drawings and plein-air studies into larger canvases for the annual Academy exhibition and potential sale.6 McEntee’s first acclaimed painting was Melancholy Days (unlocated), which earned him election as an associate member of the National Academy in 1860. In his “Memorial Address” at McEntee’s funeral, Weir noted that the painting had been inspired by William Cullen Bryant’s verse The melancholy days have come, the saddest of the year, Of wailing winds and naked woods and meadows brown and sere, Heaped in the hollows of the groves the withered leaves lie dead, They rustle to the eddying gust and to the rabbits tread.

McEntee’s Melancholy Days, Weir asserted, “made his reputation and gave him a permanent place in art.” He was elected to full membership in the Academy the following year. According to Tuckerman, the painting was acquired by fellow artist James A. Suydam and later bequeathed to the National Academy. Perhaps the title of the painting, along with McEntee’s penchant for depicting the waning days of autumn, as the brilliant foliage was fading, led many of his contemporaries to describe him as melancholic. There were, however, aspects of the artist’s appearance and personality that contributed to this characterization. When inviting McEntee to visit him at his summer retreat in Milford, Pennsylvania, in 1867, for example, Weir wrote: “I long to see your pale and melancholy phiz.” Whittredge described the “somber mood” of McEntee’s paintings and found in them “a tenderness and loneliness, born of his peculiar disposition, which was not gloomy, but tinged with a gentle melancholy.” Grey Day in Hill Country (1874) (plate 10) exemplifies the mood of much of McEntee’s art. Birch trees in the left foreground and in the right middle distance frame the composition. Some leaves remain on the branches, and small flecks of paint give evidence of others that have already fallen. A farm building stands in the distance, and behind it a small spot bathed in light. The dark gray sky that gives the painting its title is broken only at the horizon, where the last rays of the setting sun illuminate the lowest clouds.7 McEntee came of age at a time when landscape painting was challenging portraiture as the dominant mode of artistic expression in the United States. Although there was a landscape tradition in American painting before Thomas Cole electrified the New York art world in 1825, it was that artist’s success that inspired Asher B. Durand, a talented engraver, to take up the brush and begin painting American nature, and his student John W. Casilear and other artists followed suit. During the

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1840s and early 1850s the American Art-Union, a membership organization that purchased works of art and distributed them through an annual lottery, promoted landscape over other forms of painting. Part of this was practical: as John K. Howat has pointed out, members of the Art-Union would not be very interested in winning a portrait of someone else’s grandfather in the annual lottery. But the increasing popularity of landscape was also a response to an important current in American thought and culture at the time, a generational search for an American national identity. As a new nation the United States lacked the centuries of tradition—of history in buildings, the arts, folklore, and culture—that characterized Europe. Sidney Smith’s infamous remark denigrating American culture was a challenge that resonated in the new nation: the United States needed to produce a culture worthy of respect or cede its claim to a place among enlightened nations. An American culture distinct from that of the Old World would necessarily have to rise out of the unique qualities of the New, a landscape largely untouched by the human presence. Perhaps Nathaniel Hawthorne captured this best when he wrote about the difficulties of an author trying to write about a new country, a place “where there is no shadow, no antiquity, no mystery, no picturesque and gloomy wrong.” Although Cole believed that the United States did indeed have a history sanctified by the Revolutionary War, most American artists and writers, bereft of tradition, turned to what they believed was distinctive about the United States, its landscape. Bryant’s advice to Cole, to “keep that earlier, wilder vision bright,” was widely shared by fellow artists. Durand’s “Letters on Landscape Painting,” published in the influential Crayon, which became obligatory reading for aspiring artists, advised Americans to stay at home and study nature rather than travel abroad (though Durand and virtually every other significant painter associated with the Hudson River School journeyed to Europe to study). Many artists also embraced the influential English critic John Ruskin’s dictum of “truth to nature.” Studying nature close at hand would ensure a distinctiveness and originality that artists would never attain in the museums and palaces or amid the ruins of the Old World.8 But if American national identity was a critical component in the celebration of the landscape, so was the ideology of Manifest Destiny. This was the belief that the United States should extend beyond the Louisiana Purchase territory across the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific Ocean. If the search for an American cultural identity through art and literature was one side of “Young America,” as numerous commentators described the time, Manifest Destiny was its more aggressive side. William Truettner and his collaborators have demonstrated that landscape painting was at least a complicit component of the ideology of Manifest Destiny, reinforcing a sense that the land was largely unoccupied, or at least underutilized, and that the nation must fulfill its mission in settling the West. Albert Bierstadt’s paintings

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of the Yosemite Valley and Thomas Moran’s of Yellowstone and the Grand Canyon acquainted Americans with the wonders of the region and, in a way, asserted that the majesty of the American landscape was comparable to the ruins and centuries of artistic achievement European nations could claim.9 McEntee does not fit comfortably into this ideological mix. He lived in a longsettled place and save for his sketching tours and seasonal residence in New York City seemed quite content there. He was born in the Hudson Valley, lived his entire life in Rondout, and was devoted to the river and his home overlooking it. Grounded in the local, he considered the Catskills his spiritual home. He was inspired there much more so than in other places he visited, and he painted the mountains with deep affection. This attachment to place, together with his melancholic personality, defined McEntee’s career as a landscape painter. Many artists of the Hudson River School chose panoramic subjects of spectacular scenery and layered paint on enormous canvases that depicted distant places. McEntee, by contrast, was most comfortable creating smaller pictures of scenes close at hand. To be sure, he normally painted at least one large canvas for the annual exhibition at the National Academy of Design, and some of these paintings were distant views in the Catskills, but even in his Academy paintings McEntee chose a different path than Church, Bierstadt, or Moran. He preferred to portray intimate glimpses of the landscape, especially of the area around Rondout and the nearby mountains. “I don’t care for mere scenery or ‘views,’ ” he explained to George W. Sheldon, “unless they have some peculiar or distinctive character, which makes places that at first are not picturesque really picturesque.” To demonstrate this point McEntee added: “From my home in the Catskills I can look down a vista of forty miles, a magnificent and commanding sight. But I have not painted it; nor should I care to paint it. What I do like to paint is my impression of a simple scene in nature.” He wanted to capture the thoughts and moods of a landscape, its human and humanized elements, not its more spectacular features. Rather than paint the brilliant colors of autumn, as did so many of his fellow artists, McEntee chose the more muted palette of the late fall and winter. To critics who stated that McEntee’s landscapes were “gloomy and disagreeable” because of the seasons he preferred to paint, the artist responded: “I would not reproduce a late November scene if it saddened me or seemed sad to me. In that season of the year Nature is not sad to me, but quiet, pensive, restful.”10 A number of the paintings that McEntee submitted to the National Academy of Design in the early 1860s attracted generous praise, though, like Melancholy Days, few of them survive in public or identifiable private collections. One, The Fire of Leaves (1862) (plate 11), demonstrates how quickly McEntee adopted a pictorial strategy more akin to Durand’s than to that of Church, whose canvases, such as Heart

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of the Andes and Cotopaxi, recorded the landscape in fine-grained detail. When he learned of Durand’s death in 1886 McEntee described the older artist and mentor as a “sincere and simple lover of the quieter aspects of nature,” whose paintings were “the reflex of a serene and simple nature.” Those words could have described McEntee’s art as well. In The Fire of Leaves the viewer’s eye passes between rock outcrops and two children playing in the foreground, following a path that leads between the trees. The birches and other trees in the middle distance have dropped their leaves, and the colors of distant trees as well as the sky are muted. The path and building to the right give evidence of a human presence in the landscape, but it is a quiet one. There is nothing panoramic or spectacular about The Fire of Leaves, nor anything like the vibrant autumnal colors many Hudson River School artists employed and contemporaries often likened to fire. Instead, the painting evokes contemplation, repose. As the Evening Post observed, “There is yet that dreamy solitude about the scene.” The reviewer concluded by describing McEntee’s approach to painting as “peculiar and original, but always truthful, and often very impressive.” The Continental Monthly praised another early McEntee painting of Mount Marcy, Mt. Tahawas, Adirondacks (1863), as a work of “great simplicity and grandeur” and noted that it “bears the impress of a poet-soul.” For this reviewer the painting evoked a “vague stretching forth toward the regions of the infinite, a melancholy remembrance of some enduring sorrow, a tender reminiscence of scenes peculiar to certain heartfelt seasons of the year.” As a group, McEntee’s four submissions to the 1863 annual exhibition (which included Twilight, October on the Hudson, and Late Autumn) were “excellent specimens of his tender and poetical mode of handling a subject.” The Woods and Fields in Autumn, exhibited at the National Academy in 1864 and purchased by McEntee’s friend Edwin T. Booth, the celebrated actor, also received favorable reviews. The Continental Monthly described McEntee’s rendering of the trees and the “exquisite harmony of color in his poetic representation of autumn scenery” as deserving “all praise.”11 On November 5, 1864, McEntee joined with fellow artist members in a celebration at the Century Association to mark the seventieth birthday of William Cullen Bryant. As the beloved poet and editor entered the exhibition hall he found a display of twenty-five paintings and one sculpture, gifts from the artists. According to Bryant’s biographer John Bigelow, “the most esteemed artists of the country, among them Durand, Huntington, Kensett, Eastman Johnson, Church, Gifford, Gray, Colman, Lafarge, Leutze, Hennessey, J. G. Brown, Bierstadt, McEntee, and Hicks, united in presenting Bryant with a portfolio of pictures from their respective easels.” Collectively, the artists were expressing their esteem for Bryant and gratitude for his longtime support of their endeavors. McEntee must have been delighted to participate, as Bryant’s poetry had inspired Melancholy Days. The small sketch he

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prepared for the event, Early Spring (plate 12), was also inspired by one of Bryant’s poems, “The Return of the Birds”: Brown meadows and the russet hill Not yet the haunt of grazing herds, And thickets by the glimmering rill, Are alive with birds.

The painting, unusual for McEntee in its depiction of spring, has a characteristic white birch tree in the left foreground, just beginning to leaf, with a number of birds on its branches and several feeding on the ground nearby, just as Bryant’s verse described. A barn stands in the middle distance. Perhaps most unusual for McEntee is the sky, which is muted, to be sure, but with a coloration almost pastel-like in effect.12 Another painting that earned praise from a discerning critic was Autumn, one of four works McEntee exhibited at the National Academy in 1875. In reviewing that exhibition the novelist Henry James criticized Moran’s painting of rocks in Utah and expressed the wish that the artist would choose subjects closer to home. James then praised McEntee as “the author of the landscape which most took our own individual fancy—a pond in a little scrubby, all but leafless wood, on a gray autumn afternoon.” Autumn, James wrote, was “excellent in tone” and “a genuine piece of melancholy autumn,” which gave the reviewer a sense of identification with the children playing next to the pond.13 If painting simple autumnal scenes from nature was McEntee’s professional calling card, he came of age when tastes were changing. McEntee served the Union cause and was a devout nationalist who erected a flagpole on the family property in Rondout and almost invariably voted the Republican ticket in elections. But even his steadfast allegiance to the nation could not insulate him from forces far beyond his control. The Civil War chastened the American cultural and intellectual elite, many of whom had assumed an inexorable march of national progress. The sheer carnage of battle, the everyday reality of maimed veterans in every small village and town, was a constant reminder of a war that shattered American ideals. The aftermath of the Civil War was a time of questioning, of doubts about the nation’s direction, especially as Reconstruction ended and immigration from abroad increased, swelling the population of already-overcrowded cities. Factory output soared, and as railroads extended across the trans-Mississippi West, settlers established farmsteads and communities there, but the national economy suffered a severe setback following the Panic of 1873.14 The years from the 1860s to the mid-1870s were the first, most successful phase of McEntee’s artistic career. His large paintings apparently sold reasonably well. Of

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the thirty-eight works he included in the annual National Academy of Design exhibitions between 1861 and 1875, fifteen were sold either prior to or during the exhibitions. Moreover, his smaller pictures regularly attracted buyers. Although few surviving letters from the 1860s provide information on sales, on March 5, 1873, McEntee reported selling five of his smaller works to visitors to his studio. At the invitation of Haven Putnam and undoubtedly with the assent of Bryant, he also prepared nineteen drawings to illustrate an edition of Bryant’s poem Among the Trees, which was published in 1874.15 Clearly, during the first half of his career McEntee was generally pleased with his work and its reception, both in the press and among the picture-buying public. As he was preparing to return to Rondout for the summer in May 1873 he reviewed his finances and concluded: “I find my receipts have been larger than last year. I have paid off some debts, and looking over the whole field I find after all I have reason to be encouraged.” McEntee was especially gratified that he had “gained in reputation” as a result of his recent work. He also took pride in appraisals of his paintings by knowledgeable individuals. He was delighted, for example, when in 1873 Edmund Clarence Stedman described him as the most “characteristic American artist”; later that year the visiting English artist Henry Blackburn told Richard Henry Stoddard and Calvert Vaux that he considered McEntee “the best and most original landscape painter in America.”16 Three years later, at roughly the midpoint in McEntee’s career, the Art Journal published an admiring account of his work: “Very few American painters have acquired in the broad field of landscape Art, particularly in the illustration of autumn and winter scenes, so prominent a position as JERVIS MCENTEE.” The author described McEntee’s “tender-toned brown landscapes” as “true impressions of the solemn phases of the season he loves so sincerely to paint,” and praised “the purity and originality of his style and the poetical sentiment expressed in his work.” That same year, 1876, the Spanish painter Ignacio de Leon y Escosura, when visiting New York galleries, stopped to admire one of McEntee’s paintings. According to the New York Tribune, Escosura remarked: “I don’t know this artist; I never saw any of his work before; but I know no one in Europe who could do better.” Weir wrote McEntee that a number of newspapers around the country had reprinted Escosura’s remark, and assured his friend: “Your stock is up.”17 Although he sometimes complained that his work was underappreciated by the buying public, and expressed concern about the increasing popularity of European art, McEntee was optimistic in the mid-1870s. But McEntee’s stock was not going up, as Weir had predicted, and the second phase of his career was much less successful, at least in terms of recognition and reception by the picture-buying public. If the search for an American cultural identity had defined the decades prior to the Civil

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Joseph S. Harley, engraving after drawing by Jervis McEntee for William Cullen Bryant’s Among the Trees (New York, 1874).

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War, in the years that followed, nationalism gave way to cosmopolitanism, what historian Daniel Walker Howe has termed the “international quality of Victorian culture.” Howe argues that the nation’s cultural proclivities shifted toward European tastes in the postwar era, and nowhere was this more immediate than in painting. In one of the earliest entries in his diary, in November 1872, McEntee noted that “foreign pictures are pouring in in a perfect deluge.” He feared that the market for foreign paintings would leave no place for American artists, especially those who devoted their energies to the landscape.18 The influx of foreign paintings, along with a cataclysmic shift in the art world from the ascendancy of the Hudson River School to a preference for new, Europeaninfluenced styles, took place even as McEntee was trying to eke out a living painting landscapes. The post–Civil War years presented a complex set of challenges that McEntee could not have anticipated in 1861, when he was elected to the National Academy. In 1873 he confided in his diary his frustration over his inability to sell paintings: “I fail to address in my pictures the great mass of picture buyers. I can’t get used to it and feel every time the wound afresh.” This complaint became a leitmotif in the second half of McEntee’s career—that the style of painting he practiced was being supplanted by newer trends and as a result that the public was becoming increasingly indifferent to his work. Over the remainder of his career, as the New York art market proved less and less hospitable to his style of painting, McEntee shipped numerous works elsewhere—to exhibitions in Chicago, Louisville, New Orleans, Buffalo, and Boston, among other places—but these attempts to reach potential collectors also resulted in disappointing sales.19 The fashion for French and German painting, as well as Old Masters, accelerated during the 1870s and pushed many Hudson River School artists to the side. “All I hear about the condition of American art is discouraging,” McEntee wrote in 1880. There simply weren’t enough people buying paintings. A year later he decried the “neglect of the American Artists” and expressed exasperation over the public’s lack of appreciation of his art. McEntee was right to feel so discouraged. Between 1876 and 1890 he exhibited forty-one paintings at the National Academy but sold only four. Perhaps nothing demonstrates this change in taste more clearly than events surrounding the death of Sanford Gifford. In the summer of 1880 an ailing Gifford traveled to the Midwest in the hope that a more salubrious climate would be curative, but to no avail. He returned to New York, where his condition fluctuated, then worsened. Mary Gifford, the artist’s sister, telegraphed McEntee that he was living hour to hour, and his steadfast friend wrote in his diary that “one by one break the links that hold us to this changeful life.” McEntee went to Hudson for the funeral and comforted the grieving family. Along with his fellow artists Weir, Whittredge, and Richard William Hubbard, McEntee carried the casket to the cemetery, where

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he parted with his sketching companion, genial but constructive critic, and surely his best friend. “As I came home in the twilight,” he wrote, “I looked at the beautiful mountains where we had been so much together and which glorify so many of his canvases.” Thereafter, for McEntee the Catskills would be sacred to the memory of Gifford.20 Gifford’s death on August 29, 1880, was a signal moment. He was an important figure in American painting and a beloved denizen of the Studio Building who would go anywhere with friends to sketch the American landscape. The Metropolitan Museum of Art recognized Gifford’s significance with a major retrospective exhibition soon after his death, the first such exhibition the museum undertook. McEntee, Hubbard, and Richard Butler were appointed to “collect and arrange Gifford’s pictures for exhibition at the Art Museum.” As Gifford’s closest friend and sketching companion McEntee was the person best able to conceptualize the exhibition and ensure that it represented the artist’s accomplishments. He grieved as he pored over sketches and studies and helped organize the museum’s acknowledgment of Gifford’s career.21 But the reaction was nothing that McEntee, Gifford’s family, or the museum could have anticipated. The exhibition consisted of 160 of Gifford’s sketches, paintings, and drawings, with additional works that spanned the American art world since the days of John Singleton Copley. The New York Times praised the exhibition: it was a “highly commendable thing to bring together the works of an artist who has passed away, and thus to pay a tribute of respect to his memory”; but other critics were not as positive. Surely the worst review was a scathing piece in the New York World that Eastman Johnson forwarded to McEntee. In the review, entitled “The New Loan Exhibition,” the World’s critic derided the exhibition as consisting of “frightful examples of what should be avoided in art.” Gifford, this critic wrote, “belonged to that class of artists who set themselves down deliberately to copy nature, rigidly stifling every attempt at utterance which the poetry and melody of their own souls might make. They were photographic, they were topographic, but they never succeeded in being artistic.” The critic dismissed much-beloved fellow Hudson River School artist Kensett along with Gifford and characterized the exhibition as the “Gifford Chamber of Horrors.” Equally upsetting to McEntee was the characterization of a companion exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum devoted to foreign artists. Paintings by Camille Corot, Theodore Rousseau, and others earned the praise not afforded to Gifford or his peers. Worse, in McEntee’s eyes, the critic noted that a rising group of American painters “have been deeply influenced by foreign art of a true and noble kind.”22 McEntee was also a member of the committee that organized the Century Association’s memorial to Gifford and helped organize the collection of Gifford’s

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paintings that hung there for the event. At its November 19 meeting, Weir, Whittredge, and McEntee delivered orations at the Century that gave the full measure of their friend, while Stoddard and Stedman wrote poems for the occasion. Gifford and he had become “intimate friends,” McEntee wrote, “passing much of the summers together and daily enjoying each other’s society during the winter in the city.” McEntee praised his friend’s gentle spirit, “the very simplicity of his character,” and his generosity. After describing the range of Gifford’s paintings he added: “Whoever may cavil or question—his fame is secure. There is not a doubt of it and the future will confirm his position among the great landscape painters in the world.” Gifford’s paintings were “the clear and decisive expression of a profoundly thoughtful and poetic soul.”23 Eleanor Jones Harvey has positioned Gifford as a key figure in the transition from the midcentury appreciation of landscapes to the emerging tastes of the Gilded Age. She also interprets the exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum as “a symbolic funeral for the fading Hudson River School aesthetic.” To be sure, McEntee, Whittredge, and other surviving members of the Hudson River School carried on, but even before Gifford’s death McEntee had become keenly aware of the shifting sands of public taste. Years earlier, critics had begun to denounce Hudson River School landscapes for their formulaic qualities, their literal attention to detail, and their lack of poetic sensibility. McEntee’s work stood apart from the mainstream of the Hudson River School: he remained deeply attached to the place where he lived his entire life, and evoked the mood of the river and mountain landscape with imagination and poetry, but he was nevertheless deeply affected by such criticism, both personally and professionally. If a number of his diary entries before 1876 sometimes expressed frustration because of his inability to sell paintings or the invasion of foreign taste, after 1876 such complaints increased in frequency and tone. The tenor of these entries was undoubtedly affected by the deep and continuing grief he experienced after his beloved Gertrude’s death in 1878, but McEntee was nevertheless describing how much and how rapidly the New York art world was changing.24 McEntee’s technique as a painter had evolved significantly since his days as a student of Church. Over the course of his career he moved away from the highly detailed portrayal of the landscape favored by Church and Bierstadt and adopted a much looser brushstroke. In 1885 he questioned the “wisdom of so much actual study from nature” and expressed his belief that “our pictures would be more interesting if we painted more from our impressions.” Winter Storm (ca. 1885) (plate 13) is a powerful example of this. Snow covers much of the ground, though some grasses and other vegetation are visible, and a deep evening haze suffuses the painting. A stream meanders through the center of the painting, and a human figure walks along a split-rail fence toward a barn in the middle distance and a house, with a light in one

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window, in the distance. The brushstrokes display a freedom that was not characteristic of McEntee’s early work. Although the technique he employed in this painting is usually associated with the Barbizon school, and McEntee had the opportunity to study recent French landscape painting during his two trips to Europe as well in galleries and exhibitions in New York, nothing in the documentary record suggests a direct connection between Barbizon and his work. Nevertheless, the change emerged after McEntee’s 1868–69 visit to Europe, as the large paintings he completed while in Italy or shortly after returning home retain the careful articulation of detail he learned from Church. He may well have found in the Barbizon school a sense of liberation from the precise depiction of natural features, which enabled him to paint with greater freedom, but he remained decidedly hostile to the Barbizon artists and their approach to landscape painting, and he deeply resented their popularity in New York. McEntee was quite dismissive of Corot, whose work he found “unsatisfactory,” really “incomplete and slovenly,” as he explained to George W. Sheldon, and he believed that “Wall street connoisseurs” were attracted to Barbizon painters more for their reputation than for the quality of their art.25 As a student of Church and intimate friend of Gifford, Kensett, Whittredge, and Johnson, McEntee simply could not understand the new art: it didn’t conform to all he had learned to value in painting over his long career. In 1884 he visited the exhibition of the Society of American Artists, the group that represented the newer trends in painting, and his comments reveal the chasm separating his world from current taste: “The ignoring of all grace and beauty seems the idea in most of the pictures,” he wrote. “The landscapes to me are simply idiotic generally and the most of the collection is foreign to all my ideas of art, poor in color, in conception and exhibiting the utmost poverty of invention.” Two years later he and Whittredge visited an exhibition of French impressionism, and McEntee’s reaction was predictable: “All that is really Impressionist is to me simply absurd, foolish and unlovely from any point of view.” The exhibit, he concluded, “shocks all my ideas of art or even common sense.”26 One consequence of the ascendancy of the new taste in art was a declining interest in McEntee’s work. He found that fewer and fewer people visited his studio, where he had often sold smaller pictures. Those who were interested in acquiring a painting often would offer far less than his asking price, sometimes about half of what McEntee considered fair value. At times he sold paintings at low prices simply because he desperately needed the money. He, Whittredge, and Johnson talked about starting an art union to support American art and artists—as opposed to European-trained or European-influenced painters—by providing a venue for the sale of their work. McEntee hoped that “our strictly American art will grow more into favor if we get an Art Union fairly going” because “people are getting tired of

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mere decoration.” To publicize the art union McEntee and his collaborators hoped to publish a journal, but other artists refused to cooperate, and his vision of a new institution to promote American painting would not be realized.27 McEntee’s effort to differentiate the native landscape tradition from the invasion of foreign taste, ironically, reversed the denunciation of the Hudson River School by critics and artists as a stale, unimaginative artistic tradition that had outlived its usefulness. The new art was decorative, he insisted, not something creative that sprang from American soil. But McEntee’s comments were buried in his diary, not published in newspapers and prominent journals. Even if he had made his thoughts public, and written letters to editors or essays for publication, he would not have changed many minds. After all, the people who weren’t buying his pictures were not likely to be convinced to sell their new art and buy what McEntee considered American paintings. In fact, the reverse was happening. People were selling their American paintings, often for substantially less than they had paid for them, and buying European art or works by European-trained artists. McEntee described a conversation with the critic George W. Sheldon, a champion of the new direction in art who had seen McEntee’s painting Over the Hills and Far Away at an auction house and visited the Studio Building to compliment the artist on it. McEntee had sold the painting at the annual Academy exhibition for half its listed price—an indication of how much he needed the money—and two years later the buyer, a Mr. Wickes, had traded it for “foreign pictures.” The problem, as McEntee tersely put it, was that New Yorkers in particular and Americans in general simply didn’t appreciate what he considered truly American art.28 Throughout the 1880s McEntee became quite despondent if not outright depressed, and he often found it difficult to concentrate on his art. His finances were so desperate that his old friend Edwin Booth stepped into the breach. Booth had purchased McEntee’s The Woods and Fields in Autumn in 1864, and when Booth faced challenging financial circumstances McEntee had helped (some of Booth’s possessions were stored in Rondout for more than a decade). Knowing of McEntee’s difficulties, Booth commissioned his friend to paint a series of portraits of him in his most important roles. This was a challenge, as McEntee was not a figure painter, as he put it, but he worked assiduously at the job, and Booth was generally pleased with the results. Still, income from the Booth portraits only enabled McEntee to pay current bills, and as he was not selling enough other paintings, his future looked bleak. Thus Booth purchased the mortgages on McEntee’s Rondout house/studio and his father’s much larger house; however, with continuing expenses and quarterly interest payments McEntee soon found it difficult to pay his bills once again.29 In 1886 McEntee was so desperate for money that he considered trying to sell a number of small painted sketches rather than one or two large canvases. Inspired by

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an advertisement for John Rogers’s statuettes, he thought: “Why should not I paint small sketches, frame them simply and tastefully and advertise them at $25 and $50 each?” McEntee anticipated that he could easily paint at least one such sketch a day, perhaps two or three, but worried that this marketing approach might devalue his work as an artist. Nevertheless, he enlisted the aid of his nephew, Bowyer Vaux, who took McEntee’s draft text and prepared an advertisement for the illustrated monthly Century. McEntee enjoyed painting a number of small sketches, but he found the cost of an ad prohibitive and apparently nothing came of this venture.30 McEntee continued to move to his New York studio each fall, but he found himself isolated there. Though he anticipated few sales, he had no alternative: painting was the only profession he had ever known. Year after year he complained of few if any sales, either from his studio or at the Academy exhibitions. McEntee’s studio, once a lively place visited daily by fellow artists and frequently by friends and people interested in viewing his art, was in the 1880s sorely lacking in sociability and potential patrons. Rarely did anyone come to visit. “So far as any interest in my work is manifested,” he wrote resignedly, “I might as well be in Patagonia.” After a particularly bleak winter in New York he conceded: “I seem to have dropped out of the public sight as an artist and if I were to die tomorrow I feel I should not be missed.” Moreover, the camaraderie of the Studio Building that he recalled so vividly from earlier years was lost—Kensett and Gifford were dead; Church, suffering from debilitating arthritis, was at Olana and rarely came to New York; Weir had long since moved to New Haven, where he was teaching art at Yale; and Whittredge had left New York for a house in Summit, New Jersey—and McEntee felt uncomfortable with the new generation that had moved in. On varnishing day at the Academy in 1883 he found that he didn’t know most of the artists, and only one of the four paintings he submitted was hung on the line. “I could not help the feeling that times have changed since my pictures were a feature of the exhibition,” he wrote. “A crowd of young men have come up since but I look in vain in their work for the spirit which seemed to animate the older artists.”31 Chronically short of money and with a studio cluttered with unsold paintings, McEntee was desperate. In 1887 Whittredge sold seventy-five of his own paintings at auction, which brought $12,000. Although Whittredge was “entirely satisfied” with the result, McEntee thought the crowd had assembled to buy cheaply, and he fretted that one of Whittredge’s best large works sold for only $400. Nevertheless, at Whittredge’s urging, McEntee determined to put seventy-five of his paintings on the auction block. When he had assembled the pictures for the sale in February 1888, Casilear came by and, McEntee noted, was “greatly pleased as well as surprised at the variety and excellence of my collection.” Johnson also stopped by and told McEntee that the paintings were “even more interesting than he thought they would be” and

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predicted a successful auction. Just before the sale the New York Times published a favorable review of the collection, so McEntee must have been hopeful. But the result was disastrous: the auctioneer, Ortgies & Company, expected the sale would surpass $10,000, but the bidding was “timid and spiritless.” When the final gavel fell the paintings realized only $6,375. The highest price, for Fickle Skies of Autumn, was $350; the painting was acquired by Samuel P. Avery on behalf of the Century Association. McEntee felt “humiliated and injured” and took consolation only in the realization that he needed the money so badly.32 Depressed as he was, and worn down by years of almost constant worry about making ends meet, McEntee nevertheless returned to his New York studio. He took little solace in the award of honorable mention for one of the works he had submitted to the 1889 international exhibition in Paris, and entered three small paintings at the 1889 National Academy exhibition, and two larger ones in 1890, none of which sold. At least one of those paintings survives, Winter in the Country (1890), which was hung, McEntee wrote, “on the second line in the West room, with disagreeable greenish pictures about it entirely inharmonious with it.” The focus of the picture, in the middle distance, is a group of skaters. A man stands to the left, observing the skaters, and patches of grass lead the eye visually to the pond. A split-rail fence extends to the left and right from either side of the pond, and dense foliage serves as a backdrop to human activity. Hills stand in the distance, and a small flock of birds soars in a sky illuminated by the sun, which has set just beyond the horizon. The last major work McEntee completed, Winter in the Country demonstrates his skillful composition and use of muted color in evoking the mood of the landscape in a season few other artists attempted to paint.33 Even as he continued painting, McEntee felt isolated and obsolete in New York, no longer at home in the place where he had established his reputation and lived a good part of the year for more than three decades. As he returned to Rondout in April 1890 he felt that he “had made little impression as an artist on the people among whom I have lived for the past thirty years,” and wondered if he would ever return to New York City. He never did. McEntee traveled to the Maine woods in October and returned to Rondout with failing eyesight and in poor health. The last entry in his diary, dated November 1, recounted these travails. Learning of McEntee’s decline, Whittredge wrote: “There are a great many outside of your kindred who love you and hope for your speedy recovery.” But it was not to be. Following McEntee’s last diary entry, someone, probably his sister Sara, wrote: “Died Jan 27th 1891 11 a.m. of Bright’s Disease. Was in bed sixteen days.”34 Weir faithfully traveled to Rondout to deliver an address at McEntee’s funeral, which took place on January 30, 1891. He described McEntee’s art as “an expression of pure poetic feeling” and stated: “Within the range of his powers he excelled.”

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Weir spoke of McEntee’s preference for late autumn and winter landscapes and related them to his personality: “The range of his art was adjusted to the scope of his sympathies in viewing the landscape,” he said, “and within these limits he had no superior as an interpreter of Nature.” Weir’s remarks devoted considerable space to McEntee’s personality as well—the purity of his life, his “sparkling wit,” his keen awareness of his own limitations, his dedication to his profession and to the National Academy, and above all his loyalty to family and friends. Reflecting on more than thirty years of intimate friendship, when he and McEntee went on sketching trips to the Catskills, the seashore, and Italy as well as the winters they spent together in New York City, Weir remarked: “What now fills my mind in this connection is the thought of the value of that friendship, for it was based upon a reverence for all that is noble and pure and of good report.”35 The Hudson River School painters were quickly passing away; the once-vibrant group of friends who shared a camaraderie and love of the American landscape was becoming smaller and smaller. Only Whittredge joined Weir at McEntee’s funeral in Rondout. Church was too infirm to attend, and Daniel Huntington was too ill to travel (as was Booth). Church sent his condolences to Sara McEntee: “You have lost a brother and I a life-long friend—a man pure, upright, and as modest as he was gifted.” Huntington described McEntee’s death as “a great loss to our circle of artists, to the Academy, the Century, and to the great number of his friends and admirers.” Describing the artist as “hearty and keenly appreciative of all that was good and beautiful in nature and art,” he stated that McEntee’s death “will be irreparable to all his artistic and literary associates.”36 The coda was not yet complete. In March 1892 McEntee’s estate auctioned eighty-six of his paintings at the Fifth Avenue Art Gallery in Manhattan, the same place where his previous auction had taken place. The New York Times reported: “Most of the lots were landscapes, for which the artist was especially noted, and many of them were Autumn scenes in Mr. McEntee’s best style.” The result was even more dispiriting than that of the previous auction. Only one painting sold for a substantial price, Clouds ($1500), which was purchased by McEntee’s Rondout neighbor Sam Coykendall, who had earlier purchased two of the artist’s Academy paintings, Ginevra in 1875 and Winter in 1877. The average price for the other eightyfive paintings was $65, though some sold for as little as $20. If Gifford’s funeral was a key moment in the slow decline of the Hudson River School, the McEntee estate auction was elegiac, a testament to how far out of public favor the American landscape tradition had fallen.37 Jervis McEntee was part of an important group of artists and writers who were central to New York’s cultural milieu for more than thirty years. He developed long and devoted friendships with writers such as Bayard Taylor, Richard Henry

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Stoddard, and Edmund Clarence Stedman as well as with his fellow painters and sculptors. These men thought of themselves as collectively striving to raise the level of culture in the city and the nation, and McEntee cherished these friends and associates and shared at least some of the ideals literary historian John Tomsich has described as a “genteel endeavor.” The artists and writers thought of themselves as a community, and McEntee believed that they needed to stand together to promote their mutual interests. Unsurprisingly, he played an instrumental role in honoring Asher Durand, the longtime president of the National Academy. He had sought out Durand for advice early in his career and always considered him the model artist and individual. When Durand retired to his family property at Maplewood, New Jersey, McEntee suggested that his fellow artists organize a picnic and surprise their friend. Most of the Studio Building group and other luminaries, including the poet Bryant, arrived in Maplewood to demonstrate “our veneration for the old man.” McEntee was in turn highly regarded by his literary peers at the Century. Taylor dedicated his “Picture of St. John” to Kensett, McEntee, Gifford, Johnson, Church, Whittredge, and Samuel Colman. Stoddard composed the sonnet “To Jervis McEntee, Artist,” which expressed his admiration for McEntee’s ability to convey the beauties of the landscape to the heart.38 Just as he was deeply devoted to his friends, McEntee cherished the landscape of the Hudson Valley and especially the Catskill Mountains near his Rondout home. Like Cole, he grieved that improvement was destroying scenery that was dear to his heart. In 1881, for example, he traveled to the Hotel Kaaterskill, which was being built on South Mountain. The hotel required construction of a new road from Palenville as well as a reservoir and laundry that, he wrote, would be built “in the track where Sanford, Whittredge and I used to go sketch along the stream.” Two years later he noted with sorrow that everywhere he traveled in the vicinity of Kingston “they are cutting down the woods.” He found the Catskills becoming too popular, and as a result of new development “our dear old haunts [have been] invaded and spoiled to a certain degree.” On a sketching trip to Shokan he walked along the west branch of Rondout Creek and found “all the timber gone,” the ruins of three sawmills along the watercourse a mute testament to human profligacy. Farther up the stream he was surprised at the number of settlements he encountered: a place that only a few years earlier had been forest had now been cleared. But unlike Cole, who witnessed the same pattern of development fifty years earlier and took the intellectually courageous leap of denouncing “the ravages of the axe” in his “Essay on American Scenery,” once again McEntee confined his distress to his diary. Perhaps because he was having so much difficulty selling his paintings, perhaps because of diffidence, McEntee did not speak out publicly against the abuses that, he realized, were destroying places of ineffable beauty.39

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McEntee thus emerges as a complicated individual who was much more than a conscientious and insightful if at times opinionated diarist. The New York Times described him in 1888 as “a link between the old and new in American art”—between the Hudson River School and recent developments in painting—but it is unlikely that the artist would have felt comfortable with that statement. Whatever stylistic differences there were between his work and that of his mentor Church or other artists associated with the landscape tradition, McEntee deeply resented the new taste in painting that had supplanted the Hudson River School. As a landscape painter he developed a distinctive subject, the late autumn and winter landscape, and a style that focused intimately on the scene he was depicting. Although he traveled to Europe on two occasions, went on frequent sketching tours throughout the Northeast, and made at least journey to the American West, in his art McEntee remained devoted to the landscape close to home, the Catskills and the Hudson River valley. Broad as was his ambition for the American landscape tradition, his vision was local. And McEntee succeeded far more than his disappointing sales would indicate. “No painter of the period stamped his individuality upon his work more strongly than did McEntee,” Whittredge observed: his paintings were poems.40

7 The Naturalist’s River J OHN BURROUGHS

D

uring the second half of the nineteenth century the Hudson River itself became industrialized—not only through the location of factories along its shores but also in the development of two industries that, while not new, took place on an unprecedented scale and left their marks throughout the valley. Ice harvesting had been practiced for generations, but after the Civil War, as the populations of the river cities and the metropolis to the south grew rapidly, a supply of pure ice became essential for the preservation of food. The river was the most reliable nearby source, with the result that the scale of the ice industry in the Hudson Valley increased dramatically. Similarly, urban growth up and down the valley necessitated tons of bricks for building, which were made of clay from the mudflats and low-lying areas along the river. The landscape of the Hudson River valley still bears the imprint of these activities—the cavernous, boxlike structures where ice was stored, the rough gouges in the land where clay was excavated, and the surviving buildings associated with the brick-making industry. But even as the river industrialized, it also inspired environmental concerns, which were best captured in the essays of the literary naturalist John Burroughs. The Riverby edition of Burroughs’s writings runs to twenty-three volumes, and he was widely published in both serious and popular journals during his lifetime. His audience was vast, his friends and acquaintances in the literary, cultural, and political worlds numerous and deeply appreciative. More than any of his contemporaries, Burroughs helped Americans see the natural world in a new light, to appreciate birds and wildflowers and the simple beauties of nature close at hand. And the perch from which he viewed the world, the place where he wrote many of the essays so eagerly anticipated by readers, was a house he built overlooking the Hudson River at West Park, New York, which he named Riverby. Burroughs was born on a farm near West Roxbury, New York, at the western edge of the Catskill Mountains, in 1837. His father was a taciturn Yankee whose

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John Burroughs, ca. 1909. Prints & Photographs Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

grandparents had moved to the Catskill region from Connecticut. Burroughs’s education was limited to local schools and to a term at the Cooperstown Seminary. According to his granddaughter, Elizabeth Burroughs Kelley, the time Burroughs spent at the seminary was a critical period in which he accomplished much and developed “an inner confidence and conviction.” At the seminary he first encountered the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, though he later conceded that only upon rereading did he grasp the full significance of Emerson’s example. “Emerson was my spiritual father,” Burroughs noted in his journal. “It seems as if I owe nearly all, or whatever

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I am, to him. I caught the contagion of writing and of authorship before I knew his books, but I fell in with him just in time. His words were like sunlight to my pale and tender genius.” Burroughs taught school for several years in upstate villages as well as in New Jersey and Illinois, courted and married Ursula North, and in 1863 moved to Washington, D.C., where he found a job in the Department of the Treasury.1 In Washington, Burroughs met Walt Whitman, whose poetry he had read and admired. Whitman was living in the capital caring for wounded soldiers and assembling material that would become his volume of war poems, Drum Taps. The two became exceedingly close friends, often taking long walks along Rock Creek and in the countryside beyond the capital, and Whitman became the subject of Burroughs’s first book, Notes on Walt Whitman as Poet and Person (1867), as well as the more complete defense of the poet’s life and significance written shortly after his death, Whitman: A Study (1896). Burroughs later described Whitman’s Leaves of Grass as “like some new fruit that we have never before tasted.” Whitman was the great poet of democracy who courageously captured in verse the meaning of America. According to Burroughs’s biographer Edward Renehan, Whitman “seems to have helped the young writer focus and clarify his ambitions with regard to literature and nature.” While at his desk at the Treasury, staring at blank walls and an iron bank vault, Burroughs let his imagination soar to a different world, one populated by birds and defined by the freedom to ramble in nature that he associated with his childhood experiences and familiar haunts in the Catskills. He worked hard to develop a personal approach to the nature essay and started submitting his work to the Atlantic Monthly and other journals. Eight of those early essays were collected and published by Hurd & Houghton as Wake-Robin in 1871. The title, reportedly chosen by Whitman, is the familiar name of the white trillium, which blooms in the spring at the time the birds return to the north woods.2 The essays in Wake-Robin include several devoted to birds and their habits as well as accounts of camping in the Adirondacks, of spring’s arrival in the capital, and of Burroughs’s childhood landscape, the western Catskills. “Birch Browsings,” the essay based on a two-day outing in the Catskills, reveals Burroughs at his selfdeprecating best. While following one of the tributaries of the Delaware River he and his companions became lost on their way to Thomas’s Lake, which is surrounded by mountains. After making camp and going to bed hungry, Burroughs and his companions were devoured by mosquitoes, and upon awakening they proceeded to lose their way once again. Burroughs eventually did find the lake, but his companions had had enough of the wilderness and the group retreated to civilization. The experience taught Burroughs “how poor an Indian I should make, and what a ridiculous figure a party of men may cut in the woods when the way is uncertain and the mountains high.” In this and other essays the author introduced himself to

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readers as a witty writer who recorded his observations of the natural world faithfully and explained their meanings lucidly. In later years Burroughs frequently remarked that he only really understood the significance of what he saw on his walks when he sat down at his writing desk: likening his own practice of keeping a journal of his observations to Henry David Thoreau’s, he explained that it was while transforming experience into writing that its true significance emerged. “It was not till after I got home that I really went to Maine, or to the Adirondacks, or to Canada. Out of the chaotic and nebulous impressions which these expeditions gave me, I evolved the real experience. There is hardly anything that does not become much more in the telling than in the thinking or in the feeling.” In the later introduction to the Riverby edition of his collected works Burroughs similarly described the process of composition as “a second and finer enjoyment of my holiday in the fields or woods. Not till writing did it really seem to strike in and become part of me.” Throughout his essays Burroughs proved to be a skillful interpreter of the natural world, providing the key that would enable readers to unlock the cipher of nature. But for all his knowledge of flora and fauna, Burroughs’s essays are intensely personal: the author is rarely absent from the scenes and activities he describes, and, as he acknowledged in “An Egotistical Chapter,” his essays are infused with his “personal feelings and attractions,” his love of nature. Over more than four decades readers responded enthusiastically to this genial guide to the outdoors.3 The publication of Wake-Robin marked the emergence of a new voice speaking for nature. William Dean Howells described its author as “one who writes of birds not only with thorough and original science, but also as a poet and as a lover of them.” Howells, who had first published four of the essays in the Atlantic Monthly, praised the book as “fresh, wholesome, sweet, and full of a gentle and thoughtful spirit.” Wake-Robin, the New York Times reported, was “an excellent introduction to the fascinating study of ornithology, and contains many interesting facts, a knowledge of which would add greatly to the pleasure of recreations in the fields and woods in Summer time. Its manner is easy and natural, and therefore calculated to give pleasure to the reader.” Reviewers and readers alike found Wake-Robin an original and appealing book and appreciated the grace with which Burroughs unfolded his narratives.4 Four years later, in 1875, Burroughs collected eight essays into a second book, Winter Sunshine, which, in addition to observations on the natural world, included a lengthy account of his visit to England and France in October 1871. In these essays he wrote about four-legged as well as winged creatures and described seasonal change poetically—in an essay on autumn, for example, he likened the brilliantly colored maples to “great bonfires along the hills” that were “a feast for the eye.” There are descriptions of making maple sugar and an appreciation for the apple,

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which he considered as beautiful as a rose, and a keen assessment of the orchard as an expression of domestic life, a “sort of outlying part of the household.” The essay “Exhilarations of the Road” testifies to the third important American literary influence on Burroughs, Henry David Thoreau. Although Burroughs later attempted to distance his work from Thoreau’s, and occasionally criticized Thoreau’s knowledge of natural history, “Exhilarations of the Road” clearly owes much to Thoreau’s posthumously published “Walking,” and Burroughs found Walden inspirational if annoyingly egotistical. Thoreau, he wrote, “gave us our first and probably only nature classic, he gave us an example of plain living and high thinking that is always in season, and he took upon himself that kind of noble poverty that carries the suggestion of wealth of soul.” More than one hundred pages of Winter Sunshine present Burroughs’s observations about England and include assessments of architecture, domestic life, national characteristics, and the parks of London, which astonished him, as they had Andrew Jackson Downing a generation earlier, with their breadth and the freedom they afforded residents of the great metropolis.5 As had been true with Wake-Robin, Winter Sunshine garnered enthusiastic reviews. A lengthy essay in the New York Times began with the observation “A more delightful book of its kind than this it would be hard to find in the literature of the day.” Subsequent paragraphs summarized the contents of the book and praised Burroughs as an author who possessed “the fruit of knowledge that comes of careful observation!” The Atlantic Monthly described Burroughs as “an old friend who has proved his right to be listened to when he comes to tell us what he has found within eyeshot and ear-shot.” While the Atlantic reviewer praised Burroughs’s observations about his visit to England and France, he or she nevertheless conceded: “We like Mr. Burroughs best when he stays at home, and he seems himself, for all his enjoyment abroad, to be heartily glad to be among the scenes which he owns by virtue of a thorough use of them.” Henry James expressed his appreciation for Winter Sunshine in a review published in The Nation. Praising the “minuteness of his observation” and the “keenness of his perception,” James described Burroughs as “essentially and genially an American.” The essays “are full of charming touches, and indicate a real genius for the observation of natural things.” Burroughs, he concluded, was “a sort of reduced, but also more humorous, more available, and more sociable Thoreau.” As the reviews of Wake-Robin and Winter Sunshine indicate, what contemporaries found so striking about Burroughs as essayist was his attention to things close at hand, his careful observation of the natural world, and his ability to bring the reader to appreciate the profound beauty he discovered all around him. These attributes would continue to characterize Burroughs’s nature essays for decades.6 Although life in Washington and friendship with Whitman proved to be critically important in his development as a writer, Burroughs tired of the capital.

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Rambles about the countryside only whetted his appetite for rural life, and in early 1873 he left Washington to become a federal bank examiner for the Hudson Valley. Proximity to the east bank railroad was important for his work, as was a place near his beloved Catskills. After considerable searching, in September 1873 Burroughs purchased a nine-acre farm overlooking the Hudson River at West Park, opposite Hyde Park. He knew the neighborhood well, having taught school in Marlborough, only a few miles to the south. Burroughs immediately began designing a house, which he hoped would achieve a picturesque expression, provide a comfortable dwelling for the couple, and stand as a model for architectural taste in the neighborhood. As was true of Downing, Burroughs believed that the design of a house was the outward expression of the owner’s character and personality. The two men also

Riverby. “House-Building,” Scribner’s Monthly 11 ( January 1876): 337. Archives & Special Collections, Franklin & Marshall College.

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believed that a house should, above all, convey its domestic purpose—“the need of shelter,” Burroughs wrote, “the love of home, of wife, child and friend”—rather than aspire to architectural pretension. Burroughs designed a three-story dwelling (because of the slope of the land, only two stories are evident on the west) that used stone found on the property for the walls of the first two floors and half-timber construction for the third. The wood for the framing and interior paneling likewise came from the farm he had purchased.7 When the house was completed, Ursula sold their Washington dwelling and joined him at Riverby. Although in later years Burroughs expressed dissatisfaction with the design of the house, particularly the inefficient arrangement of its interior spaces and the smallness of its windows, which made the paneled interiors too dark, he was initially “pleased with the work and proud of the design.” As he and Ursula set up housekeeping, Burroughs next turned his attention to the landscape and planted a vineyard and orchard: in succeeding years he would ship grapes to the New York and Boston markets and earn approximately $3,000 annually to supplement his income from the government and his writing.8 Burroughs clearly loved the Hudson River valley. There is no other explanation for why he would have bought the farm, with its extensive river views, and erected a house that had two large porches that overlooked the river. He particularly appreciated the region as a major flyway for migrating birds as well as those who lived near Riverby, yet he also delighted in the clouds and ever-changing weather patterns, the sailboats that plied the water and the endeavors of nearby farmers. Shortly after moving into Riverby he evocatively described Indian summer along the Hudson: “The river was so smooth at times as to be almost invisible, and in its place was the indefinite continuation of the opposite shore down toward the netherworld. One seemed to be in an enchanted land, and to breathe all day the atmosphere of fable and romance.” During winter months, when most of his avian companions had departed for more seasonal climes, he appreciated activities such as ice boating and the harvesting of ice that took place near his new home. All of these simple pleasures informed the essays he wrote throughout much of the rest of his life, which, along with entries in his journals, included an ecstatic account of the sublimity of the Highlands at the base of Storm King Mountain and the pastoralism of the Dutchess County landscape as well as the distant view from there west across the river to the Catskills. Riverby became the center of Burroughs’s far-flung world: from there he could travel to nearby cities as he continued to work as a bank examiner for more than a decade, a job that he greatly disliked but that was his only reliable source of income, and while at home engage in the pastoral pursuits he deeply missed while living in Washington.9 Burroughs’s relationship with the Hudson Valley was complicated. In the summer of 1880 he published an essay, “Our River,” that reflected his initial enthusiasm

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for Riverby and life along the Hudson: “Our river,” he wrote, “is doubtless the most beautiful of them all.” The Hudson was placid, standing in equipoise amid stunning scenery, more like a mountain lake than other rivers. The essay’s very title conveys that its author felt a sense of belonging on its banks, if not at least partial ownership. Sometime after the publication of “Our River,” however, Burroughs began to find less satisfaction in the sweeping vistas and river views and longed for the more intimate landscape of his childhood. When he revised “Our River” for publication in Signs and Seasons (1886) and retitled it “A River View,” he added new introductory paragraphs that presented the river in a much different, less favorable light. The Hudson, to Burroughs in 1886, was a magnificent stream, but it was distant, psychologically more than physically. The Hudson was simply too large, too much an arm of the sea, to enable even a longtime resident to develop a deep attachment to it. The sense of being a part of the river, of ownership, was gone: “I think one might spend a lifetime upon its banks without feeling any sense of ownership in it, or becoming at all intimate with it,” he wrote; “it keeps one at arm’s length.” Nevertheless, as in “Our River,” he conceded that the Hudson “idealizes the landscape, it multiplies and heightens the beauty of the day and of the season,” and most of the rest of the essay, largely unrevised from the article, belies the opening statements, as it describes seasonal change, when the river comes alive again in the spring with the melting of the ice, as well as the harvesting of ice, the migrating birds that delighted him, and the geology of the river and surrounding mountains.10 Why Burroughs’s perspective changed in so short a time is difficult to determine. Perhaps the death of his parents led to a stronger psychological attachment to the Old Home in West Roxbury, as he called it, and a deepening nostalgia for the sights and sounds of his childhood landscape. Perhaps the changing attitude toward the Hudson reflects how distraught Burroughs was as a result of a deeply troubled marriage that seemed to unravel while at Riverby. Surely there were elements of both in his changing attitude toward the river. As he wrote in 1894, “Here have I lived in this place twenty years, and am not yet wonted to it. Twenty years of youth here, and these hills and valleys and the river would seem like a part of myself; now I look upon them with alien, reluctant eyes.” In any case the following year Burroughs acquired a second property of twenty acres about a mile west of Riverby and after blasting rock to drain a swamp built a retreat from what he described as “domestic tyranny.” Slabsides, as he named the smaller, one-and-a-half-story building, took its name from the boards used in its construction, which were the first cut of the tree and retained their bark, which Burroughs believed would give the dwelling a more picturesque appearance. He created a smaller, more comfortable dwelling, with a bedroom and a guest room, a great fireplace, and a porch overlooking the rocky landscape he sometimes called Whitman land, and he made most of the

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Slabsides. Undated photograph by C. E. Browne. Prints & Photographs Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

furniture himself. There he could go to entertain friends whom Ursula found intrusive, enjoy the lovely, hemlock-rich landscape filled with wildflowers and the birds and other wildlife that were his constant companions, and hike along Black Creek and swim or canoe in its pools. Slabsides became Burroughs’s haven from the tensions that afflicted his marriage and the place that, to his contemporaries, captured the essence of the man. There he also planted a large garden and grew celery and onions for market.11 Burroughs wrote frequently while at Slabsides, and “Wild Life about My Cabin,” the most important essay about his life there (perhaps ironically, it was written while visiting his son Julian in Cambridge, Massachusetts), continues several of the themes he first expressed in “A River View.” To friends who asked how he could turn away from the Hudson and camp in a wilderness setting he explained: “To a countryman like myself, not born to a great river or an extensive water-view, these things, I think, grow wearisome after a time. He becomes surfeited with a beauty that is alien

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to him. He longs for something more homely, private, and secluded.” The property at Slabsides fit his desire for “a more humble and secluded nook or corner,” which, he wrote somewhat disingenuously, “you can fill and warm with your domestic and home instincts and affections.”12 “Wild Life about My Cabin,” which again testifies to Thoreau’s influence, as it bears resemblance to the chapter “Brute Neighbors” in Walden, details the new world Burroughs created. The author delighted in the birds that nested on the rafters of his porch or in nearby trees or rocks, the wildflowers that were omnipresent during much of the year, the tree canopy and the watercourses that characterized the landscape. At Slabsides, Burroughs created a second home that was “shut off from the vain and noisy world of railroads, steamboats, and yachts.” He entertained numerous guests, including then-president Theodore Roosevelt, by roasting chickens in the great fireplace and cooking onions and potatoes in the ashes. As Burroughs’s fame spread and admiring readers made visits to Slabsides, the rustic cabin became the physical extension of the literary naturalist.13 Burroughs left behind a prodigious amount of writing: in addition to the nature essays for which he is best known and the biographies of Whitman, he was a wideranging literary critic, a poet, and a philosopher who wrestled with the meanings of science and religion in the modern world. He published extended essays on Emerson and Thoreau as well as Matthew Arnold, championed Charles Darwin’s writings on evolutionary naturalism, and was deeply influenced by Henri Bergson, whom he described as a “prophet of the soul.” He wrote a book about camping and tramping in Yellowstone National Park with Roosevelt; visited the Grand Canyon, Petrified Forest, and Yosemite with John Muir; traveled to Alaska with Muir and others as members of E. H. Harriman’s expedition and recorded his observations in a lengthy account entitled “In Green Alaska”; and went on extended automobile-touring and camping trips with his friends Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, and Harvey Firestone, who described themselves as vagabonds.14 Burroughs’s intensely personal style of nature writing, and his appeal to readers, were shaped by his belief in the importance of seeing and recording the natural world accurately. This is the first key to his authorial strategy. Burroughs’s essay on the English ornithologist Gilbert White is revealing of his own personality and sense of authorial responsibility. White, he wrote appreciatively, was “closely observant of the face of the day and of the landscape, . . . into which the disturbing elements of the hurly-burly outside world do not enter.” The starting point for a true appreciation of the natural world was careful observation. His essay “Sharp Eyes” is the first of several significant explications of this theme. Following a general statement about visual acuity, Burroughs illustrated his essays about observation with his own experiences and those of correspondents: “One must not only see sharply,” he wrote, “but read

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aright what he sees. The facts in the life of Nature that are transpiring about us are like written words that the observer is to arrange into sentences.” The natural world was filled with everyday dramas and tragedies, which would be apparent only to an observer with sharp eyes and the ability to pursue the tiny hints that nature afforded to understand the significance of what she or he had seen. In a brief piece, “Keen Perception,” Burroughs distinguished between careful and hasty observation. The careful observer had an “alertness of mind and quickness to take a hint,” while his or her careless counterparts, not recognizing the difference between the human and natural worlds, “make the mistake of reading their own thoughts or mental and emotional processes into nature” and attribute qualities to animals that are “quite beyond them.” Burroughs returned to this theme in “The Art of Seeing Things,” his most sustained explication of how to read the sometimes impenetrable “book of nature.” That book was difficult to comprehend, he noted, because most animals had evolved to survive based on their ability to conceal their presence from others that preyed upon them. Once again contrasting the few who saw “finely and discriminatingly” with the many who saw only “coarsely and vaguely,” he emphasized the importance of being “keenly alive to all outward impressions” and of developing a power of observation and “a mind sensitive to outward objects” in order to perceive and understand the book of nature. An individual could cultivate the art of seeing only as a pedestrian, a saunterer (a term Thoreau had used to striking effect in his essay “Walking”), who learned to combine visual acuity with a love of nature: “You must have the bird in your heart before you can find it in the bush.” And yet the very title of the essay, “The Art of Seeing Things,” belies Burroughs’s claim that his writings were unmediated observation, a point he made in his journal to contrast his writing with Thoreau’s more symbolic constructions of the natural world. The ability to read the book of nature was not innate but required careful study.15 The second key to Burroughs’s nature writing was his insistence that the author be true to nature. In “Spring Jottings,” for example, he looked back over more than a decade of recording his observations of the natural world in a notebook and stated that “what they have to recommend them to the general reader is mainly their fidelity to actual fact.” Burroughs had long criticized others, including Thoreau, for their mistakes in observing and interpreting the natural world, and in the essay “Nature and the Poets” conceded that while writers could take license in their work, when poets particularized they should not “belie the botany or the natural history.” He then criticized a host of English and American poets, including Emerson, Bryant, Longfellow, and Whittier, for the inaccuracies in their verse. Throughout his long career Burroughs resisted the tendency of some writers to anthropomorphize the natural world, and in March 1903 he was exasperated enough to launch a wholesale assault on several would-be naturalists for their misrepresentations. That essay, “Real

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and Sham Natural History,” begins with a brief appreciation of some authors— especially the botanist Bradford Torrey and Dallas Lore Sharp, who is best remembered as author of Wild Life near Home—but Burroughs devoted most of the text to criticism of recent popular books by Ernest Thompson Seton and William J. Long for their infidelity to the facts of the natural world and their tendency to romanticize and anthropomorphize animal life and behavior. He chastised Seton for presenting findings in Wild Animals I Have Known that were at variance with those of virtually every naturalist in the Anglo-American world. Burroughs rejected Seton’s animal portraits for their humanizing of the natural world—for, in effect, fictionalizing the behavior of animals. But he was even more ruthless in his condemnation of Long’s School of the Woods and other books as “mock natural history.” Over several pages he countered Long’s claim that animal young learned how to behave from their parents—an implicit rejection of instinct—and concluded that the author could only have written such an account by confining himself to his study rather than familiarizing himself with the real workings of the natural world. Long, he wrote, was a “false prophet” who was profiting by purveying such inaccuracies to the youth of America.16 Even as “Real and Sham Natural History” testifies to Burroughs’s belief that authors should represent with fidelity the natural world they took as their subject, the essay proved controversial. As he recounted in “Straight Seeing and Straight Thinking,” a number of journals and newspapers rushed to the defense of Seton and Long. And as Long and other natural history “romancers” continued to publish books and articles that attributed human behavior, even conversation, to animals, Theodore Roosevelt entered the fray and denounced the “nature fakers” who fictionalized the natural world. Long, he wrote, was a “cheap imposter” whose books were “exceedingly clumsy fabrications” that Roosevelt likened to the great nineteenth-century fraud the Cardiff Giant. As charges and countercharges appeared in print, Burroughs wrote several thoughtful essays on animal intelligence and human traits in animals that rejected the “sentimental ‘School of Nature Study’ ” he associated with the “romancers.” He again denounced the nature fakers for misrepresenting the workings of the natural world to the reading public and urged them to base their writing on concrete observations in the field rather than on invention. Anything less would not measure up to a cardinal tenet of Burroughs’s standard of literary naturalism.17 The third key message Burroughs emphasized was to focus on nature close at hand. Burroughs insisted that careful study of the local transformed it into something much greater than the everyday. In “A Sharp Lookout” Burroughs explained: “One’s own landscape comes in time to be a sort of outlying part of himself; he has sowed himself broadcast upon it, and it reflects his own moods and feelings; he is

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sensitive to the verge of the horizon: cut those trees, and he bleeds; mar those hills, and he suffers.” He returned to this theme in “The Art of Seeing Things,” in which he observed that the people who grew up in a place, especially in the countryside, proved to be the most careful observers of nature: “They have read the fine print that escapes the hurried eye and that is so full of meaning. Every horizon line, every curve in the hill or valley, every tree and rock and spring run, every turn in the road and vista in the landscape, has its special features and makes its own impression.” Burroughs’s concern for the local, his advice that readers stay at home and explore their familiar surroundings, paralleled James Russell Lowell’s unsigned essay, “Fireside Travels,” published in Putnam’s Monthly in 1854. In recalling a conversation he had with a friend in Rome, Lowell had argued that “a man should have travelled thoroughly round himself and the great terra incognita just outside and inside his own threshold, before he undertook voyages of discovery to other worlds.” Lowell also insisted that “the wisest man was he who stayed home.”18 Burroughs stayed at home and watched the procession of nature pass by his door. Although he traveled extensively, particularly in his later years, save for brief periods while teaching in New Jersey and Illinois and his decade of working in Washington, Burroughs spent his boyhood on the western flank of the Catskills and the majority of his adult life on the other side of the mountains, on the west bank of the Hudson. From the vantage of Riverby and Slabsides, and later his summer retreat, Woodchuck Lodge, in West Roxbury, he transformed the landscape close at hand into a stage that embraced the natural world. Everyday surroundings became places of transcendent importance to Burroughs—and to his readers.19 Throughout his life Burroughs educated readers in how to perceive, understand, and love the natural world that surrounds them. Thus it is more than a little ironic that some critics have questioned whether or not he was an environmentalist. Burroughs was a contemporary and friend of John Muir. The two men were widely recognized as John O’Birds and John O’Mountains, one finding inspiration in nature close at hand, the other in far-off places such as the Sierra and the glaciers of Alaska. Muir visited Burroughs at Slabsides in June of 1896, and the host described his guest as “a poet, almost a seer” who needed the entire continent for his wanderings. Muir, he wrote, was “probably the truest lover of Nature, as she appears in woods, mountains, glaciers, we have yet had.” They became fast if sometimes exasperating friends, kindred spirits who devoted their lives to understanding the natural world. Following their trip through the West in 1909 Muir read Burroughs’s essays on the Grand Canyon and Yosemite in draft and in response criticized his friend’s interpretation of the origins of the Yosemite Valley (Muir attributed it primarily to glaciers, whereas Burroughs thought it was partly the result of ice but more so of erosion). Burroughs recognized that Muir struggled as a writer, and encouraged him

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to turn his notes, taken over more than forty years, into a series of books, one of which, My First Summer in the Sierra (1911), may well have resulted from that encouragement. Although the two met infrequently in later years, they remained steadfast in their mutual admiration and corresponded frankly and frequently. Together Burroughs and Muir taught the nation the “gospel of outdoor life,” which Century editor Robert Underwood Johnson considered “one of the sanest influences of our berated times.” Theodore Roosevelt similarly linked the two men as the most important naturalists of their time. “John Burroughs’ writings and John Muir’s volumes on the Sierras,” he wrote, “should be in the hands of every lover of outdoor life.”20 Yet they were opposites in temperament—Muir was garrulous yet loved solitude and was never happier than when alone in the mountains, whereas Burroughs was reticent, craved company, and had pastoralism in his veins. They were as different as their favorite haunts, the Sierra and the Catskills. Moreover, their public personae also differed: Muir became a heroic figure in the conservation movement for battling (albeit unsuccessfully) to prevent the transformation of the Hetch Hetchy Valley, a spectacularly beautiful canyon in Yosemite National Park, into a reservoir for San Francisco, whereas Burroughs rarely took a public stand that contributed to the origins of the environmental movement, even when the New York State legislature was considering a bill to establish a forest preserve in his beloved Catskills in 1885. As a result, some critics and biographers have cast Muir as a pioneering environmentalist and Burroughs as essentially peripheral to modern environmental concerns. In his introduction to an edition of Burroughs’s essays, Birch Browsings, for example, Bill McKibben observed that “Burroughs had a tendency to stand gazing with bovine nonchalance at environmental destruction he should have been able to foresee,” an assertion that would hardly endear Burroughs to ecologists or naturalists today. Biographer Edward Renehan also questions Burroughs’s environmental credentials. He relates that shortly after Burroughs criticized the automobile as a disruptive force in the American landscape, in 1913, Henry Ford presented him with a Model T. After the two men became friends, “Burroughs completely revised his opinion of Ford’s machine. It was no longer a demon on wheels.” Renehan mentions the deep friendship the two men forged over their mutual love of birds and relates that Ford so cherished Burroughs that he erected a bird fountain in his honor at Fair Lane, his estate in Dearborn, Michigan, with stone from walls at Woodchuck Lodge, part of the Burroughs family farm in West Roxbury, but he nevertheless describes Ford’s generosity as “a brilliant publicity gimmick.” It is hard to imagine a more devastating criticism—that Burroughs’s enormous influence with the reading public was purchased with friendship and a Tin Lizzie (Ford also subsequently purchased the West Roxbury farm and gave it to Burroughs).21

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More recently several scholars have presented more favorable assessments of Burroughs’s contributions to environmental thinking. Literary historian Frank Bergon has argued persuasively against the “widespread opinion” that Burroughs was “not a committed environmentalist.” He points to passages in Burroughs’s journals in which the naturalist despaired that the “earth is overlaid with inventions and improvement,” and denounced the increasing artificiality of life in a society dominated by the pursuit of wealth. Bergon then demonstrates that the sentiments expressed in these passages, written in 1866, appeared in many of the essays Burroughs published in the early twentieth century. He cites the oft-quoted passage from Leaf and Tendril (1908) as indicative of Burroughs’s response to industrial development and the consumption of natural resources—“One cannot but reflect what a sucked orange the earth will be in the course of a few more centuries”—and also includes the passage in which Burroughs describes driving through Pittsburgh, which he compared to the “devil’s laboratory.” In “A Strenuous Holiday,” published in one of his last books, Under the Maples, Burroughs tellingly added: “We live in an age of iron and have all we can do to keep the iron from entering our souls.” Ultimately, Bergon concedes that “Burroughs must be appreciated as primarily an environmental artist who was also a teacher,” but he nevertheless insists that Burroughs “did assume a stance of environmental concern in that he publicly advocated preservation of natural resources and protested environmental destruction.” Clearly, Burroughs’s brand of literary naturalism promoted the values that became central to twentieth-century environmentalism, even if the movement largely neglected his memory.22 Burroughs did in fact occasionally articulate his concern for the human impact on the natural world directly. In his essay “The Grist of the Gods,” he lamented that modern civilization was “terribly expensive to all its natural resources” and that a century of modern life had exacted a greater toll on the natural world than that of the preceding millennium. More recently, Daniel G. Payne and Stephen M. Mercier have argued persuasively that Burroughs was in fact an environmentalist, perhaps too reticent to make a Muir-like public stand against Hetch Hetchy but someone who influenced Theodore Roosevelt’s crusade to set aside wildlife refuges and who helped persuade Congress to enact protections for migratory birds.23 In his study of Roosevelt as conservationist Douglas Brinkley provides the fullest explication of Burroughs’s relationship with the governor and president. Roosevelt was an accomplished ornithologist, a big-game hunter, and a founder of the Bronx Zoo, which raised buffalo that he reintroduced to the Great Plains. According to Brinkley, Roosevelt considered Burroughs “the wooded country personified” and learned from him the importance of making the “most minute and detailed observations of nature.” At a lunch when the two men first met, Roosevelt surprised Burroughs by relating how he had given copies of Wake-Robin and Winter Sunshine to

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disadvantaged boys at a club in the Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood of New York City to inspire them with a love for the natural world. The two men were kindred spirits united by their love for birds and the outdoors, and the younger Roosevelt adopted the name “Oom John” to address Burroughs—“Oom” being the affectionate Dutch word for uncle. Brinkley describes Burroughs as Roosevelt’s “primary muse” in establishing bird sanctuaries and attributes Roosevelt’s increasing concern for the preservation of the natural world to Burroughs’s influence. He argues that the third volume of Roosevelt’s hunting trilogy, Outdoor Pastimes of an American Hunter (1905), which is dedicated to Burroughs, reveals the extent to which the president’s thinking had evolved as a result of Burroughs’s influence: it includes the chapter “Wilderness Reserves,” which recounts their experiences together at Yellowstone National Park and articulates Roosevelt’s belief that the nation needed to take steps to protect the majestic animals of the American West by creating sanctuaries within the national parks. In the dedication of Outdoor Pastimes Roosevelt wrote to Oom John: “Every lover of outdoor life must feel a sense of affectionate obligation to you. Your writings appeal to all who care for the life of the woods and the fields, whether their tastes keep them in the homely, pleasant farm country or lead them into the wilderness. It is a good thing for our people that you should have lived; and surely no man can wish to have more said of him.” The vast expansion of national parks, monuments, and wildlife preserves undertaken by Roosevelt was at least in part the result of Burroughs’s writings and the example of his life.24 Burroughs was one of the most important writers and revered individuals of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. According to historian David Shi, the “consensus portrait that emerges from the dozens of essays on Burroughs that appeared in turn-of-the-century magazines is that of a genial and tender saint, renowned for his rustic sincerity and friendliness.” Burroughs entertained thousands of visitors at Slabsides, enchanted schoolchildren who read his essays as part of their nature studies, and was a familiar and beloved voice to readers across the United States. Shortly after his death his many friends and admirers established the John Burroughs Association, which preserved Slabsides and established the John Burroughs Medal, awarded annually since 1926 to the best book of nature writing published in the United States.25 Still, for all his popularity during his lifetime, for all the awards he received, Burroughs’s reputation was eclipsed in the years following his death. Scholars who have attempted to explain how this happened have pointed to the ascendancy of literary modernism, or to the emergence of an urban and subsequently a suburban nation that had little understanding of or interest in the everyday surroundings Burroughs portrayed. Still another clue lies within Burroughs’s own account of Gilbert White, whose Selborne he much admired. After listening to a lecture in which critic

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Richard Grant White stated that he found ornithologist White’s writings “a bare record of uninteresting facts” that were “void of interest to him,” Burroughs defended Selborne and its author but conceded that many readers might be disappointed in reading it for the first time. “It is not seasoned quite up to the modern taste,” he wrote. “White is content that the facts of nature should be just what they are; his concern alone is to see them just as they are.” The same was undoubtedly true as many readers in the second half of the twentieth century confronted Burroughs and found that his leisurely essays described a world far from their everyday existence. Perhaps most important, Burroughs was primarily an essayist: he never produced a classic book in natural history, the very yardstick he used in measuring Thoreau’s greatness. 26 Nevertheless, Burroughs remains important, both as arguably the greatest literary naturalist in the nation’s history and as a writer whose message is acutely important in our time. Historian William Cronon offers a compelling explanation for the increasing relevance of Burroughs’s close-to-home literary naturalism. In “The Trouble with Wilderness,” Cronon rejects the concept of wilderness as a place apart from the human presence and as the antithesis of civilization. By positioning nature and civilization at opposite ends of a moral spectrum, he writes, we “leave ourselves little hope of discovering what an ethical, sustainable, honorable human place in nature might actually look like.” Cronon urges environmentalists to find meaning in landscapes all around them, in city and suburb and farmstead as well as in national parks and distant wilderness. A perspective that appreciates all of these types of landscapes will enable us to “get on with the unending task of struggling to live rightly in the world.” That is a lesson John Burroughs’s writings teach so well. His essays explore the natural and humanly created landscapes nearby. “After long experience,” he wrote in 1919, “I am convinced that the best place to study nature is at one’s own home,—on the farm, in the mountains, on the plains, by the sea,—no matter where that may be. One has it all about him then. The seasons bring to his door the great revolving cycle of wild life, floral and faunal, and he need miss no part of the show.” In an essay on Burroughs as regionalist, literary historian H. R. Stoneback concludes with the telling observation “The works of John Burroughs, as well as the paradigm of his life, may show the way home.”27 Burroughs lived during a time of tremendous social, cultural, and technological change. He witnessed those changes and occasionally recoiled from them, but ultimately retreated to the sanctuary of Slabsides or Woodchuck Lodge and perhaps to the comforts he remembered from an earlier time. Burroughs’s vision looked outward, toward the flora and fauna so abundant near Slabsides, or above, to the trees and sky of his beloved birds, but perhaps as a result of his psychological distancing from the Hudson River he rarely commented on the industrialization that was

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transforming the landscape or the pollution—the industrial waste from factories as well as the human waste from cities, towns, and homes—that was despoiling the river. In short, Burroughs never understood, or at least never articulated forcefully, what was so evident to his friend Theodore Roosevelt. “Here in the United States,” Roosevelt wrote in 1913, “we turn our rivers and streams into sewers and dumpinggrounds, we pollute the air, we destroy forests, and exterminate fishes, birds, and mammals—not to speak of vulgarizing charming landscapes with hideous advertisements.” The naturalist’s river had not yet become the environmentalist’s river.28

8 A River in Time P RESERVING L ANDSCAPE , CELEBRATING H ISTORY

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any people think of rivers and other natural features as timeless. Indeed, the very scale of geologic time is so vast that it is difficult to grasp. In certain ways the Hudson River is timeless: it continues to flow from the Adirondacks to the Atlantic Ocean, as it has for millennia, though its path and its length have changed as a result of glaciers, floods, and other natural phenomena. Just as these forces have altered the river, so has human intervention. Even in the middle of the Hudson Highlands and the heights of the Catskills the human presence is ubiquitous, and almost four centuries of settlement by European Americans has transformed much of the adjacent landscape even as it has polluted the river and fundamentally altered its ecosystem. In the essay “The Lordly Hudson” journalist and art critic Clarence C. Cook looked backward from the vantage of 1897 over more than a half century of living by the river to a time before the antirent wars disrupted the old manorial system that was a dark legacy of the colonial past. At the beginning of Cook’s long and deep attachment to the Hudson, a few market towns stood on its banks, but otherwise the valley existed in what he termed a “sleepy, pastoral peace” that continued until the “demon of steam,” with its “ear-splitting scream and thunderous tread,” shattered the tranquillity of that earlier time. The graceful sloops and other sailing vessels that once plied the river had been displaced by garish steamboats with glaring lights that intruded upon the solitude of the landscape. Technological change was only part of the transformation of the Hudson River valley that Cook and his contemporaries experienced during their lifetimes. Skyscrapers towered over Trinity Church’s spire in Lower Manhattan, warehouses crowded once noble buildings, and a commercial ethos had displaced civic culture. Above all, New York was severing its connection with its past. “The generation that knew and loved the valley in this pastoral time is rapidly passing away,” just as had the age of sail, “and the newcomers who

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are remaking the land are in large measure of a different race.” Cook’s essay was an elegy for a time and place lost amid incessant change: “The old order,” he wrote, was “giving place to new.”1 Cook’s brief essay, a nostalgic paean for a beloved place transformed by change, was nevertheless suggestive rather than definitive. The author paid only allusive attention to the effects of the Industrial Revolution, which had transformed market towns into industrial cities along the river’s banks, or to the lives of the immigrants who provided the labor that shaped modern America. But his essay is important because it captures a sense of how dramatically the landscape of the Hudson Valley had changed in the nineteenth century. Cook’s reaction, his sense of personal loss, was shared by others of his generation who saw their familiar world transformed by forces beyond their control. One significant response to this change, in the Hudson Valley and elsewhere, was the attempt to preserve at least pieces of the local landscape that were in danger of being lost. At the time Cook wrote, loggers had already felled some of the stands of trees that once topped the Palisades, and quarrymen were excavating stone that was used in building modern New York and its suburbs. He wondered how the Palisades would look, how meaningful the sheer wall of rock would be to future generations, when buildings dominated its heights and when terraced gardens and houses and roads stood amid the ancient and forbidding landscape.2 Some New Yorkers who shared Cook’s concerns about the impact of change on the sense of place in the valley had organized to promote the preservation of scenes of natural beauty and historical significance two years before publication of “The Lordly Hudson.” Organized in 1895 as the Trustees of Scenic and Historic Places and Objects, the group changed its name in 1898 to the Society for the Preservation of Scenic and Historic Places and Objects and finally to the American Scenic and Historic Preservation Society in 1901. The society’s purpose was to preserve the artifacts and places associated with the nation’s early history as well as the natural scenery long considered the birthright of the American continent. Andrew Haswell Green, a New York City civic leader often described as the father of Greater New York, was founder and president. A legislative charter gave the society power to “acquire by purchase, gift, grant, devise or bequest, historical objects or memorable or picturesque places in the State” and to make improvements to those properties for the use and benefit of the public. It also provided that the society could manage and maintain state-owned properties of scenic or historical interest.3 The society’s trustees and members were patrician New Yorkers. Green was longtime comptroller of the Board of Commissioners of the Central Park; an important member of the Committee of Seventy, which brought about the downfall of the Tweed “ring”; and the former law partner of Samuel J. Tilden, a reform Democratic

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governor and presidential candidate in the disputed election of 1876. The list of society members includes individuals, overwhelmingly men, who were leaders in economic, professional, and cultural realms. The society appealed to people who shared its goal of preserving scenes of natural beauty and protecting historic places, which had great urgency given the pace of economic development around the turn of the twentieth century. In appeals to prospective members or in addresses at semiannual meetings, Green invariably portrayed the society as a modern-day David battling the goliaths of the time, speculators and philistines who were ruthlessly developing places of historical significance or natural beauty. “While patriotic sentiments and traditions still keep alive the memory of these events,” he wrote, “the visible evidences that are an essential aid to preserve them for coming generations are fast disappearing.” Green urged those who heard or read his words that it would be fitting to rescue places of historical or scenic importance “from the grasp of private speculation” and to preserve them for the public, and called upon private individuals to donate properties to the society that such sites “may remain protected and preserved for the instruction and enjoyment of the people of this and coming generations.”4

Benson J. Lossing, “Stony Point and Verplanck’s Point.” Lossing, Pictorial Field-Book of the Revolution (1850; New York, 1852), 2: 175. Archives & Special Collections, Franklin & Marshall College.

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One of the earliest campaigns of the American Scenic and Historic Preservation Society was to secure the public future of Stony Point, a small peninsula that extends from the west bank into the Hudson north of Haverstraw, opposite Verplanck’s Point, another fortified position on the east bank. At its highest point the rocky peninsula rises 140 feet above the river. Washington Irving compared the two peninsulas to the Pillars of Hercules; together they guarded the southern entrance to the Highlands and had enormous strategic importance in the Revolutionary War. George Washington had been alarmed when the forts on either side of the river fell into British hands on June 1, 1779, and was determined to recapture Stony Point in response to British depredations then taking place in Connecticut.5 Like Washington, the British recognized the strategic significance of the Highlands and strengthened the fortifications at both Verplanck’s and Stony points. General Henry Clinton also increased the number of troops stationed at each garrison. Washington considered an assault on Stony Point important to the morale of the Continental army and entrusted the task to General Anthony Wayne. Wayne reputedly told Washington that he would “storm hell if you will only plan it,” and Washington devised a strategy to take a position considered impregnable, with Wayne leading a small regiment of light infantry—Washington’s elite soldiers—against the British garrison. Together with several officers Wayne studied approaches to the peninsula in early July, and with Washington he prepared final plans for the assault, which, as Washington urged, would occur at midnight. On July 15, 1779, Wayne and his men reached the vicinity of Stony Point in darkness, divided into three columns, and successfully made their way through marsh and water, across treacherous ground and entrenched fortifications, to the British garrison. The columns approaching the fortifications from the south and north carried unloaded rifles with fixed bayonets (Wayne feared that an accidental shot would alert the British of the attack), took the garrison by surprise, and overwhelmed the British. “Our officers and men,” Wayne wrote Washington, “behaved like men who are determined to be free.” The surprise attack and stunning victory against seemingly insurmountable odds earned Wayne the sobriquet “Mad Anthony” even as it boosted the military standing of the Continental army at a crucial point in the Revolution. Washington realized that he did not have the resources to defend Stony Point—the main part of the army was protecting West Point several miles north—and rather than leave his troops vulnerable to a subsequent British attack, ordered the soldiers to destroy the fortifications and remove the artillery and munitions before withdrawing. It was a symbolic victory, to be sure, but it led Clinton to recall the troops that had been raiding the Connecticut countryside and proved to be one of the most daring military feats of the Revolution.6

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As was true of many other important sites of the Revolutionary War, in later years Stony Point remained private property. The federal government acquired the eastern tip of the peninsula and erected a lighthouse in the center of the old fort in 1826, but most of Stony Point continued to be owned by farmers who found little use for the rocky peninsula. A group of citizens of Rockland County organized as the Stony Point Association in 1857 and laid the cornerstone for a monument to Wayne and his men, but nothing more came of their efforts. As the centennial of the battle neared, the Wayne Monument Association organized in 1879, though its efforts were as fruitless as those of its predecessor. The gala celebration of the centennial organized by the association, according to the New York Times, was a “grand fizzle” marked by the “utter incompetency” of the event’s managers. Even after construction of the west bank railroad severed the peninsula, Stony Point remained, at best, marginal land, as a marsh rendered the route between the railroad and the peninsula impassable during much of the year. Then, in 1895, the Empire State Society of the Sons of the American Revolution urged the state to acquire the battlefield as a public reservation and to entrust its care to the recently organized Trustees of Scenic and Historic Places and Objects. When the state acquired the peninsula from Watson Tompkins and the heir of Frederick Tompkins in January 1899, it conveyed management of the battlefield site to the society.7 “Few places along this majestic river possess a dramatic and picturesque interest equal to that of Stony Point,” Edward Hagaman Hall observed in the society’s 1899 annual report. To determine the best strategy for managing the site Andrew H. Green sent landscape architect Samuel Parsons Jr. and sculptor Henry Kirke BushBrown to survey the property. They found it thickly overgrown and the road to an old ferry dock impassable. Parsons and Bush-Brown recommended the “judicious opening of a few vistas” to the river, the grading of a carriage way and rustic paths, rehabilitation of the dock to serve steamboat excursions, and construction of a pavilion and sanitary facilities for visitors. Most important was the identification of surviving Revolutionary War–era fortifications, which at the society’s request were surveyed by engineers from West Point and subsequently restored.8 When these improvements were completed, the society organized an elaborate ceremony on July 16, 1902, the 123rd anniversary of the battle, to dedicate the new state reservation. Cadets and troops from West Point marched, as did members of the Grand Army of the Republic and a regiment of Minute Men in Continental dress, along with representatives from a number of civic and patriotic groups. Before a crowd estimated at 13,000 Governor Benjamin B. Odell Jr. described the peninsula as ground “made sacred by heroism.” After his remarks Judge Samuel W. Pennypacker, president of the Pennsylvania Historical Society, gave an oration that attributed the stunning victory to his fellow Pennsylvanian Wayne’s generalship and

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called the assault on Stony Point “the most conspicuous and imposing illustration of American military valor” in the nation’s history. Then Colonel William Wayne, a descendant of the general, raised the flag over the new park, a place, fittingly, that combined history and dramatic scenery. Edward Hagaman Hall concluded his history of the battle and the preservation of the site with the statement “By the work of the American Scenic and Historic Preservation Society, Stony Point has been saved from the despoiling hand of the quarryman, and henceforth will stand, in all its native grandeur, as one of Nature’s rugged monuments to the sublime heroism of patriots.” Whether intentionally or not, Hall omitted the role of the state in making that day possible. He may also have been thinking of another important preservationist battleground, the Palisades, in his reference to quarrying.9 The preservation of the Stony Point battlefield was one of the first successes of the American Scenic and Historic Preservation Society. Improvements continued in succeeding years, and in 1909 the New York State Society, Daughters of the American Revolution, erected the stone Memorial Arch, designed by Bush-Brown, at the entrance to the park. At the dedication of the arch Governor Charles Evans Hughes delivered one of the most curious speeches imaginable—the future chief justice praised “the madness that makes histories and empires, the madness that has given us the American Republic, and will cause it to endure; the madness that must permeate the American people and rescue them from the pitfalls of their overwhelming prosperity”—while other speakers recounted the details of Wayne’s assault on the British position and emphasized the significance of the Hudson Valley in the Revolution. Even as its members celebrated its success in preserving Stony Point, the society was active in myriad other ways: under the leadership of Green and Hall, it was actively promoting the preservation of historic houses, defending New York City’s parks against unsympathetic intrusions, and dedicating markers at important historic sites throughout the state. But as was true of many wealthy New Yorkers, the society was particularly concerned about the fate of the Palisades.10 Since Henry Hudson first sailed into the river that bears his name the Palisades have long captivated many who have gazed on the sheer cliffs. This natural formation, which extends approximately fifteen miles along the west bank of the river from Fort Lee, New Jersey, to just south of Piermont, New York, was formed in the Triassic period, when lava forced its way through sandstone on the earth’s surface and hardened into diabase. The cliffs reach a height of more than five hundred feet, and some of the land at the top, although long settled by the end of the nineteenth century, was still covered by forest and meadow as well as imposing homes erected to take advantage of the spectacular view. The earliest Europeans who sailed the Hudson as well as generations since have waxed poetic about this spectacular natural feature. The Palisades, Washington Irving wrote, “spring up like everlasting walls,

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reaching from the waves unto the heavens.” William Cullen Bryant described them as a “brow of rock on the Hudson’s western marge,” while the visiting Englishman James Silk Buckingham likened the cliffs to “rude basaltic columns, or huge trunks of old and decayed trees, placed closely together in a perpendicular form for a barricade or defense.” The Palisades were “the precise spot where this son of Vulcan sat down so heavily and so hot upon his brother of the sedimentary deposits,” John Burroughs wrote in one of his more poetic moments. A writer in Leisure Hour contrasted the Palisades with the more pastoral scenery nearby and compared them to “the walls and battlements of some ancient feudal stronghold.” The Palisades also became a favorite subject of Hudson River School artists, including Jasper F. Cropsey and Sanford R. Gifford, as well as numerous engravers and etchers.11 Although quarrying had been a fact of life at the Palisades for decades—N. P. Willis described and William H. Bartlett depicted small sloops loading stone at their base in American Scenery (plate 14)—the pace of activity increased in the 1890s, as did the level of destruction caused by the use of dynamite. As quarrying threatened the beauty of the natural feature Irving considered timeless, those who favored preservation became more urgent in their pleas. New Jersey historian W. Woodford Clayton described the Palisades as “remarkable for their picturesque and sublime appearance” and judged them “among the most interesting objects of natural scenery in America.” A writer in the New York Times concurred, calling the Palisades “one of the uncommon beauties of an uncommonly beautiful river.”12 Members of the American Scenic and Historic Preservation Society and other elite New Yorkers did not accept the future Cook anticipated for the Palisades, when the noble face of rock would give way to terraced dwellings, gardens, and other evidences of civilization. They expressed alarm that the rate of quarrying, which was literally blasting away the face of the Palisades, had increased dramatically in recent years to provide traprock—stone used in street paving and the cement that served as the foundations of Manhattan’s skyscrapers. To members of the society as well as many other New Yorkers, private economic activity was destroying the very landscape they believed ought to be held as a public trust.13 There were several difficulties in preserving the Palisades, which are largely in New Jersey but extend northward into Rockland County, New York. In addition to the complexities of acquiring and managing property in two states, few residents of New Jersey, especially in the central and southern parts of the state, could imagine how they would benefit from a park that, essentially, preserved a viewshed from New York City and southern Westchester County. As a writer in the New York Times explained, “The Palisades turn their backs on New Jersey, their faces to New York. Their beauty and picturesqueness is all for us, but they are wholly within the control of the State across the river.” But recognizing the threat to the Palisades, in 1895 the

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two states formed a joint commission to persuade the federal government to eliminate bistate jurisdictional problems and take possession of the site. One proposal for preserving the Palisades was to create a military reservation atop the cliffs, with the states of New Jersey and New York acquiring land to the south and north as parks. When the War Department rejected an additional military reservation near New York as unnecessary, some, including members of the New Jersey Forestry Association, suggested establishment of a national park, arguing that the Palisades were as important for their natural beauty as Yosemite and Yellowstone and were also accessible to a vastly larger population. Still others argued for preservation because of significant events that had taken place there during the Revolutionary War, or for the construction of a scenic drive between the river and the base of the cliffs.14 The New York Times played a major role in publicizing the destruction caused by quarrying and advocating the need to preserve the Palisades, and helped turn public opinion in favor of some action. When the federal government refused to consider a military reservation or national park on the Palisades, the Times sent reporters to interview prominent residents of northeastern New Jersey, who were almost unanimous in decrying the work of the quarrymen and expressed their support for the idea of a park. John H. Stoddard, who lived atop the Palisades, judged the impact of quarrying there to be “as much of a sacrilege as would be a similar destruction of Niagara Falls,” while a certain Judge Von Hovenberg urged the states to act to save the cliffs from the “greedy inroads of soulless contractors.” Through both extensive coverage of the Palisades and publication of numerous letters to the editor advocating preservation, the Times surely influenced public sentiment. As citizens on both sides of the river raised their voices in favor of preservation, New Jersey state legislator Samuel Bullock wondered: “Why can’t commerce let nature alone?” The reason, the Times responded in dismay at the lack of progress in preserving the Palisades, was similar to Andrew H. Green’s defense of places of scenic and historical beauty against the efforts of philistines: “The dynamiting money-makers have the interest and sympathy of a money-making community.”15 The struggle over the future of the Palisades, in the American Scenic and Historic Preservation Society’s eyes, pitted public good against private gain, a park that residents of the two states would enjoy in years to come against immediate economic profit. Of course definitions of public good varied enormously at the turn of the twentieth century. For the Italian immigrants who worked at the quarries, blasting meant jobs and a livelihood for their families. For contractors who were building roads and erecting skyscrapers, a reasonably priced and convenient supply of crushed stone was good for business. For bicyclists who envisioned a paved roadway along the bluffs or hikers who looked forward to outings along shaded trails or campers eager to escape the confines of the city, the proposed park meant something else,

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the closest thing to wilderness in the metropolitan area. And for those in New York City and southern Westchester County who were disturbed by the noise of the blasting and by windows that literally rattled with each explosion or for those who were outraged by the scarring to the Palisades that the quarrymen left in their wake, public good meant something still different, the end of a constant nuisance or of an environmental devastation they abhorred. Ultimately, the fight to preserve the Palisades was as much about competing definitions of public good as it was about scenic preservation.16 In this battle, wealth and political influence triumphed, one good won out over another. Those who supported preservation—the American Scenic and Historic Preservation Society, the New Jersey Federation of Women’s Clubs (which joined the fray in 1897) as well as other organizations, members of a series of commissions appointed by each state, and private individuals who contributed to the effort in various and significant ways—were financial, social, and cultural elites on both sides of the Hudson River. These were people who knew how to make government work for their interests, who had the personal connections to speak to elected officials and the financial resources to disseminate their opinions and later to support park acquisition and development. In short, wealth and one vision of highest use prevailed.17 But that victory took time and tremendous effort on the part of many. The two state legislatures were dominated by rural interests far from the Palisades or New York City, and despite the efforts of a succession of governors, until the end of the 1890s neither state did more than temporize even as the pace of quarrying intensified. In New York the Palisades gained a powerful supporter in Theodore Roosevelt, who was elected governor in 1898. A patrician New Yorker who, as a child, had overcome illness and gained robust health in the American West, Roosevelt knew from his own experience the importance of nature in a metropolitan area. Best remembered as a conservationist and progressive on social and economic issues during his presidency, he played a crucial part in the preservation of the Palisades during his brief tenure as governor. More enthusiastically than his New Jersey counterpart, Foster M. Voorhees, Roosevelt embraced the idea of a ten-member bistate commission, with five individuals appointed (in identical legislative acts) from each state. Although the commission had authority to acquire land for park use, it did not have the resources to enable it to do so: the legislatures, wary of challenging economic interests and obviously less enthralled than the governors with the idea of an interstate park, appropriated only $15,000 ($10,000 from New York, $5,000 from New Jersey) in support of the commission’s efforts. To those who didn’t care about the Palisades, this surely seemed a harmless gesture, certainly an ineffectual one in the eyes of the quarrymen, and to taxpayers inured to legislative abuses at least an inexpensive one.18

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But the men Roosevelt and Voorhees named to the Palisades Interstate Park Commission turned that first legislative act into a powerful mandate. In selecting his appointees Roosevelt sought the counsel of Andrew H. Green, who recommended several leading members of the American Scenic and Historic Preservation Society for the Palisades board, all of whom the governor named to the commission, while Voorhees chose an equally distinguished group to complement Roosevelt’s nominees. Led by George W. Perkins, a self-made man who became an insurance executive, trustee of the American Scenic and Historic Preservation Society, and ultimately a partner of J. P. Morgan, the commission included Abram S. Hewitt, an industrialist, philanthropist, and former mayor of New York City who had since retired to New Jersey, landscape architect Nathan F. Barrett, and Edwin A. Stevens, whose family was prominent in philanthropy in New Jersey.19 Under Perkins’s leadership the commission moved quickly to stop quarrying on the Palisades. It decided to use the New Jersey contribution to pay for a careful survey of the various properties within the Palisades, and the New York share to buy time through the purchase of an option on the Carpenter Brothers quarry, the most notorious of the operations, which was aggressively blasting at an especially visible point along the cliffs. But the $10,000 option was simply an option, a down payment on the purchase price Perkins had negotiated, which left a balance of $122,500. Given the time it would take for a state appropriation, as well as the continuing resistance of many elected officials to the interstate park, Perkins realized that he had to act quickly and raise the money from the private sector. He visited legendary financier J. P. Morgan, a fellow trustee of the American Scenic and Historic Preservation Society, and bluntly asked him for $125,000, which Morgan agreed to provide if the donation were anonymous. With that money in hand the commission completed acquisition of the Carpenter Brothers quarry, and dynamiting on the site ceased on December 24, 1900. The first crucial battle to preserve the Palisades had been won.20 Morgan’s money came with a condition, that the states appropriate additional funds to enable the commission to acquire the rest of the Palisades. Perkins’s challenge was all the greater because Roosevelt had been elected vice president and his successor in Albany, Benjamin Odell, was less enthusiastic about the work of the commission—he promptly vetoed a bill that would have given it greater authority to acquire land in New York—and because the central and southern parts of New Jersey remained generally opposed to the idea of a Palisades park. At the urging of Governor Voorhees, and with energetic lobbying by the Federation of Women’s Clubs, the New Jersey legislature appropriated $50,000 for land acquisition in March 1901. A month later elected officials in Albany approved a bill allocating $400,000 for the commission. While negotiations with the many individual property owners

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would continue for some time, the funds to complete the acquisition of the approximately 175 individual properties along the Palisades were in hand.21 The preservation of the Palisades proved to be only a first step in protecting the landscape of the Hudson Valley. The quarrymen who sold their land to the commission didn’t go out of business—they moved north, across the New York State line, and began operations at Hook Mountain, north of Nyack, the most prominent peak between the Palisades and the Hudson Highlands. One writer in the Times described Hook Mountain as a “magnificent promontory,” while another praised its “picturesque eminence” as “one of the scenic delights of the lower Hudson.” The blasting so disturbed John D. Rockefeller, whose estate at Pocantico Hills overlooked Tarrytown and the Hudson, that he determined to stop the quarrying across the river. Rockefeller persuaded his local state senator to introduce a bill that would extend the jurisdiction of the Palisades Interstate Park Commission fifteen miles north to the New York State Reservation at Stony Point. According to the New York Times, Rockefeller, James Speyer, and other wealthy residents of Westchester County would pay for the acquisition of the additional land simply to end the blasting and disfigurement of the mountain. This was accomplished in 1906, when the state legislature extended the authority of the park commission to include Hook Mountain.22 Moreover, there was still the issue of acquiring land at the top of the Palisades as well as how to develop the property as a park. The initial work of the commission had, necessarily, focused on ending the quarrying that was disfiguring the face of the cliffs. But the commission’s vision for a park embraced more, and with the support of the Federation of Women’s Clubs, cyclists, outdoor enthusiasts, and other supporters it began acquiring, sometimes by gift, sometimes by purchase, land for a pleasure drive and park facilities along the top of the Palisades. One of the earliest proposals for the Palisades had advocated construction of a pleasure drive along the base of the cliffs, an idea that became reality with the opening of the Henry Hudson Drive in 1921.23 The successful preservation of the Palisades and Hook Mountain proved to be only a beginning for the interstate park. Edward L. Partridge, a prominent physician and educator who lived in Cornwall, New York, envisioned a much larger park that embraced all of the Hudson Highlands. In 1907 he urged the creation of a national park consisting of 122 square miles of land on both sides of the river to protect the scenic gorge and its many historic sites. The Highland Preservation Commission he proposed would have “full authority to prevent the ruthless cutting of timber” and “the establishment of disfiguring and offensive industries,” including quarrying. Taking as a model the commissions that administered Civil War battlefield parks such as Chickamauga, Shiloh, and Gettysburg, Partridge proposed to give the Highland Preservation Commission the power to acquire land or purchase easements that

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would effectively regulate the kinds of uses that might have an adverse impact on the landscape. Two years later, a writer in Century asserted that New York should act “to place its noble beauty once and for all beyond the power of private parties to impair what should continue to be part of the heritage of humanity,” and reported that the Hudson-Fulton Celebration Commission had “resolved to take active measures toward the permanent defense of the scenery of the Hudson River against such injuries as are to be feared from forest destruction and blasting and, let us hope, from vulgar advertising and all the other forms of desecration by which beauty is sacrificed to commercialism.” John B. Marie published a letter in the New York Times urging immediate action by the state legislature “to preserve for the present and future generations the noble scenery of the Hudson River and the historic spots abounding along its shores.”24 Even as these efforts to preserve the Highlands gained public attention, other threats loomed, most immediately the plan to erect a new state prison at the foot of Bear Mountain on the west bank of the river. Prisoners from Sing Sing had already built a stockade there and had begun quarrying stone to be used in building the new facility. Partridge and other advocates of preservation were alarmed, as was the family of E. H. Harriman, the railroad tycoon whose 20,000-acre estate, Arden, lay on the other side of Bear Mountain. As Morgan had done, Harriman’s widow offered to give a substantial sum to the commission ($1 million, along with 10,000 acres of land for park use) if other individuals contributed to a fund for land acquisition, and the state appropriated $2.5 million. When Perkins raised the money from private sources (most of it from Rockefeller and Morgan), and the state voters approved a bond issue, on October 29, 1910, W. Averell Harriman delivered a deed for the land and money to fund improvements and purchase additional properties. The prison at Bear Mountain was scrapped, and the land turned over to the commission for park use. Much of the Hudson Highlands too had been preserved. The American Scenic and Historic Preservation Society, the Palisades Interstate Park Commission, other supportive organizations, and individuals had achieved remarkable success in the fifteen years since Green organized the society, and much of the landscape of the lower Hudson Valley is a monument to their efforts.25 THE DEDICATION of Palisades Interstate Park took place on September 27, 1909, at a building at the foot of the Palisades used as a headquarters by British general Charles Cornwallis during the Revolutionary War. The ceremony was an event in the Hudson-Fulton Celebration. This merging of scenic preservation and historical significance was part of an ambitious attempt to bring history alive for residents, yet it is also a reminder of just how tenuous history’s claims on the public imagination

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really are in a city and region continually tearing down the past to build anew: the grand festival is little remembered, its lessons largely unheeded. Ironically, millions of people witnessed at least part of the festival, far more than read popular nineteenth or early twentieth-century histories of the Hudson by Benson Lossing, Edgar Mayhew Bacon, and others, yet there is little evidence that the awareness of history the Hudson-Fulton Celebration hoped to inspire had an enduring impact on New Yorkers. Folklorist Carl Carmer, who ended his delightful book The Hudson (1939) at the dawn of the twentieth century, didn’t mention it, while a more recent history by Tom Lewis devotes a single lengthy paragraph to the event. The Hudson-Fulton Celebration hasn’t fared much better in other writings: Edward Hagaman Hall, the longtime secretary of the American Scenic and Historic Preservation Society and the official chronicler of the event, published a two-volume report to the state legislature that, although rich in detail, borders on hagiography, while more recently Brooks McNamara dismissed the celebration as a failure that marked the end of large-scale public commemorations in New York.26 The Hudson-Fulton Celebration was the result of a complex set of initiatives that reaches back to New York City’s failure to be chosen as host of the World’s Columbian Exposition, which was held instead in Chicago in 1893. Perhaps chastened by that loss and the prestige the White City conferred on the midwestern metropolis, several of New York’s civic and cultural elites sought an event that would burnish their city’s reputation at a time when, to many Americans, it was tarnished by political corruption and a large foreign-born population. Almost simultaneously one group focused on the upcoming centennial of Robert Fulton’s first practical application of steam-powered navigation, which would occur in 1907, while another sought to commemorate the tercentenary of Henry Hudson’s discovery of the Hudson River in 1909 (yet another group wanted to remove Fulton’s remains from Trinity Church Cemetery and place them in a more suitable, and grand, tomb overlooking the Hudson adjacent to Riverside Park). The two principal groups had received official sanction of their activities but by 1906 realized that one large event would be more memorable than two smaller ones only two years apart, and together they were incorporated by the state legislature as the Hudson-Fulton Celebration Commission and entrusted with responsibility for planning the event, which took place between September 25 and October 9, 1909.27 Four principles guided the commission. First, the commissioners determined that New York, the nation’s dominant commercial metropolis, would stage a celebration that was educational rather than commercial. This meant not simply avoiding advertising and corporate involvement; it also resulted in the determination that no festival event would charge an admission fee so that cost would not exclude any interested residents. Second, the commissioners intended that the celebration

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would promote the significance of New York’s history to the nation, which it claimed was long neglected, and particularly that of the Dutch period, which was still dominated by the caricatures of Washington Irving’s Knickerbocker History in the public’s mind, and thereby stimulate “an historical awakening throughout the State.” Third, the commissioners were keenly aware that much of New York City’s population was foreign born, and hoped to use the celebration to promote the assimilation of immigrants, inculcating in them a stronger sense of civic pride and making them better citizens. At a time of tremendous social and economic change, the celebration’s organizers believed that historically based public events would effectively serve as a “balance wheel” promoting stability. “Historical culture,” Hall wrote in his introduction to the official account of the celebration, “thus materially promotes the welfare of the Commonwealth.” Finally, the commissioners hoped that the celebration would impress international visitors with “the best aspects of American life” and promote friendship among the peoples of “every civilized nation.”28 These were ambitious goals for any public festival, even more so for one that attempted to commemorate two quite distinct historical events separated by two centuries and also to have such a significant impact on current residents. This latter goal, and the public imagery the elites sought to project in the commemoration, were at least as important as the celebration of history. Although in his oration at the official banquet Senator Elihu Root insisted that the goal of the Hudson-Fulton Celebration was to honor two men, their achievements, and their ideals, commemoration was only part of a broader agenda through which, organizers hoped, New York presented its best self to the world: the celebration of the past was a means to civic and commercial ends, not history for its own sake.29 Preparing for an event that lasted a fortnight and that involved cities and towns extending from New York to Troy and Albany, as well as the cooperation of distant nations, required commitment, money, and diplomacy. Members of the commission volunteered their time and expertise and called upon friends and business associates to help the cause when appropriate. Funding for the large number and scale of events would be expensive—the commission ultimately spent more than a million dollars, most of which was allocated by the state legislature and each municipality along the river that participated in the celebration, the remainder contributed by private individuals and corporations. Diplomacy involved reaching out to foreign governments, especially that of the Netherlands, which contributed a replica of Hudson’s ship, the Half Moon, to the celebration as a gift to the citizens of New York. The Half Moon was constructed at the Royal Ship Yards, Amsterdam, following plans prepared by C. L. Loder of the Dutch navy. Loder’s plans were based on written descriptions and careful study of the design of Hope, the sister ship of the Half Moon, because there

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The Half Moon with Crew on Forecastle. Edward Hagaman Hall, The Hudson-Fulton Celebration 1909: The Fourth Annual Report of the Hudson-Fulton Celebration Commission to the Legislature of the State of New York (Albany, 1910), 1: 533.

were no known surviving images of Hudson’s vessel. The new Half Moon measured 63 feet in length and 17 feet from beam to beam. Brought to New York aboard the Holland-America steamship Soestdyk, the replica of the Half Moon became one of the most important artifacts in the Hudson-Fulton Celebration. Diplomacy was also a component of negotiations with other nations whose people had contributed to the history of the city, state, and nation.30 Festivities officially began on September 25 with a massive naval parade. Millions of spectators lined the river as warships from many nations anchored in rows approximately ten miles long on either side of the Hudson’s main channel, through which the Half Moon and a replica of Robert Fulton’s Clermont sailed. The Clermont, paid for by the commission and constructed at Mariners Harbor, Staten Island, was 150 feet in length and 16 feet wide (3 feet wider than the original to give the ship

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greater stability). The Dutch sailors, from the warship Utrecht, were not especially skilled in the ways of seventeenth-century seamanship, and at the beginning of the naval parade they crashed the Half Moon into the replica of the Clermont. Fortunately, the damage was limited, and both ships were able to participate in the parade and other events, though the accident, witnessed by so many and reported extensively in the press, was a huge embarrassment, as the Half Moon replica had to be towed through the modern warships on its inaugural voyage up the Hudson.31 Events during the first week of the fortnight took place in Manhattan and the outer boroughs. In addition to the naval parade, there were three parades on land, the most important of which was the Great Historical Pageant. Pageants were great civic events in the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as were parades, but the Hudson-Fulton Celebration merged the two traditions, turning the parade into a moving pageant with fifty floats, each presenting a different historical event and collectively acting as a “moving tableaux [of ] memorable scenes.” The parade, orchestrated by A. H. Stoddard, who had long been associated with the Mardi Gras in New Orleans, focused on four epochs in New York’s history: Native American life, the Dutch era (1609–64), the English period (1664–1783), and independent New York. Individual floats told of such events as the Dutch purchase of Manhattan Island from the Indians; the trial of John Peter Zenger, which was a landmark in establishing the freedom of the press; New York’s reaction to the British Stamp Act; the Revolutionary War battle of Stony Point; the capture of British spy Major John André; George Washington taking the oath of office as president; the reception of the Marquis de Lafayette in 1824; the introduction of Croton water in 1842; and the Statue of Liberty. Perhaps surprisingly, given the commission’s desire to correct what it considered erroneous impressions of the Dutch period that it attributed to the Knickerbocker History, three floats were a reminder of Washington Irving’s continuing influence: one was devoted to Rip Van Winkle, another to Ichabod Crane, and the final float in the parade to Father Knickerbocker. Millions of spectators lined Manhattan’s streets to witness the themed floats and marchers that together formed a procession extending some three miles in length. Other events were designed for schoolchildren or were intended to appeal to the many ethnic groups in New York City.32 Particularly significant were the exhibitions of historic arts and crafts prepared by many of the city’s cultural institutions. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, for example, presented two loan exhibitions, one devoted to Dutch paintings and decorative arts of the era of Hudson’s voyage, the other to examples of American decorative arts and paintings from the seventeenth century to 1825, a decade after Fulton’s death. This was the “first time an American museum is giving a prominent place to American domestic art,” Robert W. de Forest wrote, “and exhibiting it in such a way

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“Float No. 54: Father Knickerbocker Receiving.” Edward Hagaman Hall, The Hudson-Fulton Celebration 1909: The Fourth Annual Report of the Hudson-Fulton Celebration Commission to the Legislature of the State of New York (Albany, 1910), 1: 681.

as to show its historical development.” In what was perhaps the most lasting contribution of the 1909 celebration, the enthusiasm the display of American artifacts generated resulted in the establishment of the Metropolitan Museum’s American Wing in 1924. Before the exhibit closed, the museum, with funds provided by Mrs. Russell Sage, acquired Eugene Bolles’s extensive collection of American furniture, but the display of those pieces in larger galleries convinced the museum staff, and de Forest, that smaller period rooms would be the optimal way to display early Americana. When the American Wing opened in 1924, de Forest and others pointed to the Hudson-Fulton Celebration as its genesis.33 If the Metropolitan Museum of Art produced the largest and best-attended exhibition, the New-York Historical Society, in collaboration with the Colonial Dames of America, presented an impressive collection of paintings, sculpture, maps, and documents chronicling the life of Robert Fulton and the significance of his invention. The Sons of the American Revolution displayed Revolutionary War relics at Fraunces Tavern, where Washington said farewell to his officers in 1783; the

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American Scenic and Historic Preservation Society and the National Arts Club organized an exhibition chronicling three centuries of life in New York City through paintings, photographs, and drawings; and the New York Public Library presented its collection of prints, manuscripts, and books related to Henry Hudson, Robert Fulton, and the Hudson River. There were dozens of other exhibits throughout the five boroughs, as well as in smaller cities and towns upstate, that attempted to evoke the region’s history and link current residents with their past. Their cumulative result, organizers hoped, was a celebration that was inclusive and that promoted a widely shared sense of pride in New York’s history.34 Even as the Hudson-Fulton Celebration looked backward, it also embraced the modern age and anticipated the future. On the first night of the celebration thousands of arc lights and more than a million incandescent bulbs illuminated the harbor as well as many of the public buildings, cultural institutions, bridges, and other prominent structures in Manhattan. But if a city bathed in light was one measure of the transformative impact of electricity on urban life, the highlight of the modernist impulse behind the celebration was a competition between pioneering aviators

Newburgh Ceremonies: Half Moon and Clermont in Bay. Edward Hagaman Hall, The Hudson-Fulton Celebration 1909: The Fourth Annual Report of the Hudson-Fulton Celebration Commission to the Legislature of the State of New York (Albany, 1910), 2: 1285.

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Wilbur Wright and Glenn Curtiss, as well as the presence of a number of zeppelins. Although weather conditions prevented any but a few short jaunts by Wright and Curtiss, organizers of the celebration represented the age of flight as the newest stage in the revolution in transportation that followed in the wake of Fulton’s innovation in steam navigation.35 From its beginnings in New York City the celebration moved north throughout the Hudson Valley during its second week. The Half Moon and Clermont set sail northward from Manhattan on September 29, and citizens celebrated Hudson River Day on October 1. On that day the two replica ships, as well as part of the naval armada, sailed into Newburgh Bay, just above the Highlands, and from there each city and town held its own day. Throughout the valley river communities hosted part of the naval parade as well as Governor Hughes and other dignitaries; each city and town organized a concert and parade yet also chose to celebrate themes or events particular to its own history. Newburgh harked back to its original 1709 settlers, who came from the Palatinate seeking religious freedom; Poughkeepsie organized an Old Home Week, a tradition begun in New England to entice former residents and their children to return for a visit; Kingston dedicated a monument to Thomas Chambers, the town’s founder, in Montrepose Cemetery; Catskill borrowed a page from Washington Irving and, during an excursion to the nearby mountains, the audience listened to the tale of Rip Van Winkle, read in both Dutch and English, near the site where Irving’s fictional protagonist had met the old Dutchmen playing ninepins; Albany touted its Dutch origins, while Troy acquired land adjacent to the river for a public park, which it dedicated as a permanent memorial to the Hudson-Fulton Celebration. Then, as the two ships slowly set sail for New York City, on the final night of the celebration a series of beacon fires stretched along the length of the river from Albany and Troy to Staten Island. Although the beacon fires were intended to “closely resemble the Pillars of Fire of Bible Times,” they were fittingly symbolic: signal fires atop Mount Beacon had alerted George Washington and the Continental army to British troop and ship movements in the final months of the Revolutionary War. Moreover, the sequential lighting of the fires united cities and towns along the Hudson in a common event: the fires were a quiet reminder that the river was the bond that brought together diverse people and places.36 As the embers of those fires faded, and the Hudson-Fulton Celebration officially ended, few persons other than Edward Hagaman Hall, the official historian, attempted to assess the significance of the events or measure how successfully the commission had met its ambitious goals. Whereas the Old Testament pillars of fire illuminated the Israelites’ path from slavery in Egypt to a new Canaan, the hope of the HudsonFulton Celebration’s organizers—that the festivities would mark the beginning of an enduring historical awakening in New York—met the same disappointment as did

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Moses, who never reached the promised land. The fate of the two ships that were the centerpiece of the celebration, the Half Moon and the Clermont, is a telling reminder of the failure of the festival to have a long-term impact on New Yorkers’ sense of history. Given the commission’s financial problems, its members decided that it would be unable to maintain the Half Moon adequately and make it accessible to the public as a historic shrine. They thus resolved to transfer ownership, “in perpetual trust for the people of the State of New York,” to the recently created Palisades Interstate Park Commission, which took possession of the ship on July 15, 1910. For a time it was moored in Pollopel’s Creek, north of Bear Mountain, and eventually placed on exhibit, in dry dock, at Cohoes, the city at the confluence of the Mohawk and Hudson rivers. Unfortunately, the Half Moon replica, which Dutch ambassador Jonkheer J. Loudon had described in 1909 as a “symbol of the ties” uniting his country with New York and the United States, was destroyed by fire in the 1930s. The fate of the Clermont is a similarly sad commentary on the fleeting awareness of the importance of history that the Hudson-Fulton commissioners had attempted to promote. After the celebration the steamboat was sold to the Hudson River Day Line, which promised to “maintain, care for, exhibit, and, when practicable, operate the Clermont as an object lesson in the science of steam navigation.” After repairs the ship was docked at a pier at 129th Street in Manhattan and opened as a museum, but less than a year later it was moved to Poughkeepsie and then to Kingston. As the cost of maintenance increased, and public attention waned, the Day Line dismantled the replica during the Great Depression, at which time the machinery that powered the Clermont was purchased by Henry Ford’s museum in Greenfield Village, Michigan. Tellingly, timbers from its hull remain on the ground near Kingston Point, mute reminders of the aspirations that motivated the organization of New York’s great festival of history— and of course of the limitations of that vision.37 Hall ended his introduction to the commemorative history of the HudsonFulton Celebration with an assessment of what the event accomplished. While he conceded that the celebration had lost more than $50,000, Hall nevertheless asserted that it more than paid for itself in increased commerce and, most important of all, in an unquantifiable increase in human sentiment that would “advance civilization.” Predicting that monuments yet to be erected would teach future generations the record of the Hudson-Fulton Celebration, Hall was confident that its “most enduring monument is that which has been erected in the minds of our people, a memorial of a brilliant past and an inspiration to a more lustrous future.” The stone and metal monuments Hall envisioned were never built to commemorate the HudsonFulton Celebration, which quickly became a footnote to history, a culmination of nineteenth-century public celebrations that, Janus-like, looked backward to the past as a means of shaping the present, and forward, anticipating the future. Instead, like

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those replica ships, which were built at considerable cost but quickly passed from the scene, the celebration is a kind of ghost ship that haunts the historical imagination. In its wake the celebration surrendered the burden of memory to the thousands of souvenirs created by enterprising businessmen to mark what its idealistic promoters hoped would be the greatest, most educational, and least commercial public festival in New York’s history.38 Although the monuments to the Hudson-Fulton Celebration that Hall envisioned never materialized, the city worked with private organizations to honor the two men. In 1909 the Robert Fulton Memorial Association announced plans to erect a massive and expensive water gate extending into the Hudson River from Riverside Park between 114th and 116th streets. Following a competition for designs, the association selected architect H. Van Buren Magonigle’s plan for a pier extending 350 feet into the river, with neoclassical columns, stairs, balustrades, a building to house historical collections relating to Fulton and steam navigation, and a bridge connecting the water gate to the park across the New York Central’s railroad tracks. The project was expensive—the initial cost was estimated at $2.5 million but quickly rose to $3 million—and the association experienced difficulty raising private contributions, with the result that the grandiose project had to be scaled back and ultimately abandoned. Henry Hudson fared better. During the tercentenary of Hudson’s discovery of the river, Hall turned over a shovelful of sod on Spuyten Duyvil Hill and, under the auspices of the American Scenic and Historic Preservation Society and the Hudson Monument Committee, Governor Hughes laid the cornerstone of a monument to Hudson, a hundred-foot-tall Doric column overlooking the river that bears his name. The original design called for a life-size statue of Hudson by Karl Bitter to stand atop the column, but the monument association ran out of money, and Bitter died unexpectedly. The monument was not completed and dedicated until 1938, with the opening of the Henry Hudson Parkway, which extended along the West Side of Manhattan and through Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux’s Riverside Park.39 The stillborn Robert Fulton memorial and the dedication of the monument to Henry Hudson so long after the end of the Hudson-Fulton Celebration were symptomatic of the broader failure of the 1909 celebration to establish an enduring public memory of the age of exploration and the subsequent political, social, and technological transformations the city and state had experienced. In retrospect this is arguably the greatest shortcoming of the Hudson-Fulton Celebration. Perhaps that was an impossible goal, given that change has been the one constant in New York’s history. The Hudson-Fulton Celebration was too limited in conception to change the way New Yorkers thought of their history. Save for the illumination of landmarks

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and the flights of Wright and Curtiss, the celebration looked backward: its focus was on the colonial past and the early nineteenth century, not on the great transformations that had occurred as a result of industrial and urban growth and the changing demographic complexion of the nation. Nevertheless, the festival brought millions to the banks of the Hudson, many undoubtedly for the first time, and opened at least some eyes to the beauties of the river. The efforts of the American Scenic and Historic Preservation Society and the Palisades Interstate Park Commission preserved both the landscape of long stretches of the Hudson Valley and historic sites along the river, finally giving some permanence to the sanctification of the river of Thomas Cole’s imagination.

Conclusion

O

n September 27, 1909, Governor Charles Evans Hughes spoke eloquently at the dedication of Palisades Interstate Park. “The river should be kept, so far as possible, free from pollution,” he stated. “We must maintain this noble stream as a wholesome river and not permit it to become a mere sewer.” But his remarks denied what had already become apparent to others: the Hudson was no longer America’s river. It had become the polluters’ river. Every city and town along its banks, as well as family homes, factories, and other buildings of all shapes, sizes, and functions, dumped raw sewage and other waste directly into the river or its tributaries. The Hudson River had become exactly what Hughes warned against, a tidal sewer, the most convenient destination for human and industrial waste. This was a result of a series of collective decisions, made in small village offices, city halls, and corporate boardrooms alike, to foul air and water rather than absorb the cost of remediation— what businessmen and environmentalists alike call the externalizing of cost—and the cumulative effect was devastating. Consequently, in the first half of the twentieth century most communities along the river turned away from its banks, growing east or west but not casting their future with the waters that had defined their history and culture.1 Toward the end of his lovingly written history of the river, The Hudson (1939), folklorist Carl Carmer, who lived in an octagonal house in Irvington undoubtedly inspired by the quirky phrenologist Orson Squire Fowler’s book A Home for All (1848), was optimistic about the river’s environmental future. The very people he celebrated throughout the book—ordinary women and men who “have loved the big stream” over centuries—were cheered by the (slow) process of cleaning up the waterway and the end of quarrying that had scarred mountains. Carmer looked forward to a landscape defined by clean water, parks, parkways, and other recreational amenities, and a people reconnected to their river. He anticipated a time

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when communities came together to share in their environmental bounty. “After three centuries of struggle and waiting,” he concluded, residents “will rejoice at last in a valley of happy reality served by a free and mighty river.” But Carmer later acknowledged that he had been too optimistic in his fond vision for the Hudson River valley, and in 1966 he sounded an environmentalist alarm. The river was not improving but worsening. Since the beginning of the twentieth century, he wrote, “pollution between Albany and Manhattan has increased immeasurably, and almost every tributary adds its filth.”2 A relatively small handful of individuals had articulated a different future for the river in the nineteenth century, a vision that celebrated its beauty and history as central to the nation’s collective heritage. But Washington Irving’s folklore, the paintings of Thomas Cole and later generations of Hudson River School artists, and the effort of Andrew Jackson Downing to encourage every community along the river’s banks to organize tree-planting societies had largely fallen on deaf ears. To be sure, John Burroughs had taught generations of readers to love the call of birds and to cherish landscapes close to home, and the efforts of George W. Perkins and a host of supporters had successfully preserved the Palisades and much of the Hudson Highlands, but the water that flowed between the majestic mountains had become an ecological nightmare. Still, Irving, Cole, Downing, Burroughs, and their contemporaries were, collectively, trying to claim the Hudson that Burroughs once described as “Our River” and the scenic beauties of its adjacent landscape. They cherished the river and its mountains, sought inspiration in its vales, which they found poetic and beautiful, and felt a powerful sense of ownership of the Hudson. When Irving traveled to Europe or the prairies, Cole to Italy, and Downing to England, the Hudson was always their frame of reference in appreciating art and culture and scenery in distant places. The Hudson was their river. Their paintings, their poetry, their designs for buildings and grounds, their evocation of the chirping of birds along a creek in the Catskills, brought the beauties and folklore of the Hudson to people across the United States. As western migration progressed throughout the nineteenth century, few of the frontier settlers were readers of Downing’s Horticulturist or visitors to exhibitions of Hudson River school paintings, but the national press made even pioneer families familiar with the landscape and the art and the literature of the Hudson Valley. Books, magazines, and newspapers conveyed eastern expectations about how to build and decorate a home to residents on the frontier, as the one surviving building in Fort Dalles, Oregon (of several that were built), erected according to Downing’s published plans, testifies. Many a parlor or simple kitchen far from eastern towns or cities was decorated with prints of the Hudson Valley from American Scenery (1840) or colored lithographs distributed by Nathaniel Currier and James Ives. Ideas hatched

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or nurtured in the Hudson Valley spread across the continent. The template set along Henry Hudson’s river became the national ideal, the standard for creating homes and organizing communities that extended to the far west. The younger generation of landscape painters who succeeded Cole brought the Hudson River aesthetic west and introduced easterners to the beauties of the Sierra Nevada, the Rocky Mountains, and the chasm of the Colorado River. Prominent members of the second generation of New York painters, who learned or refined their profession in New York and sketched the Hudson Valley or the Catskills, traveled across the continent, to the Southern Hemisphere, and to other distant and exotic places. Albert Bierstadt and Thomas Moran established their reputations painting the Yosemite Valley, Yellowstone, and the Grand Canyon in the American West, Sanford Gifford traveled to Egypt, and several of Frederic Church’s paintings meticulously document, in Humboldtian fashion, the landscape of South America and the Middle East. The artists returned east, most of them to houses overlooking the Hudson River, and transformed their pencil sketches and oil studies into majestic canvases. As a number of exhibitions have demonstrated, the work of these and other artists was grounded in an aesthetic born along the Hudson River.3 Collectively, the artists of the Hudson River School and writers such as Irving, James Fenimore Cooper, and Benson J. Lossing had defined the Hudson as America’s river. Its banks were the locale where the Revolution secured the nation’s future and where later generations were wrestling with how best to reconcile industrial progress and the natural world. Cole, perhaps more than anyone else in the antebellum years, denounced what he termed “improvement,” though he never articulated a way to balance development and the preservation of natural scenery. Yet he did take a public stand, as few of the next generation of landscape painters were willing to do. George W. Perkins accomplished more: he translated vision into reality through the efforts of the Palisades Interstate Park Commission, which preserved much of the west bank of the Hudson from the Palisades to Bear Mountain. In retrospect, as Carmer realized, their success was limited. They cherished scenic views but did not understand the river and region holistically, did not comprehend how human agency was fouling the water, and only in a few exceptional cases were they able to stop the march of improvement that was destroying the landscape they held so dear. But in important ways these individuals established the foundations for a modern environmental ethic. When the Scenic Hudson Preservation Conference challenged Consolidated Edison’s plan to build a pumped-storage power plant on Storm King Mountain, the northern gateway to the Hudson Highlands, Yale architectural historian Vincent Scully testified in evocative words about the legacy of these nineteenth-century artists and writers and asserted that Con Ed’s plans would destroy a place that all Americans should cherish. Storm King, Scully

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stated, “strongly reminds me of some of the natural formations which marked sacred sites in Greece and signal the presence of the Gods.” Finally, the gods seemed to be on the side of people who were committed to preserving rather than developing the landscape, as the Storm King case established the basis for modern environmental law and surely contributed to enactment of the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969 and the Clean Water Act adopted the following year. Just as important, Scully’s testimony, and the efforts of Scenic Hudson, reminded residents of the valley in particular and Americans in general of the legacy of nineteenth-century individuals who sanctified the river and defined the responsibility their generation shared for protecting the landscape that was so significant in forging a regional and ultimately a national identity.4

Notes

Introduction 1. Thomas Cole, “Essay on American Scenery,” American Monthly Magazine, n.s., 1 (January 1836): 1–12. Two books that explore the river in its length have been important as I have thought about the Hudson: Tom Lewis, The Hudson: A History (New Haven, Conn., 2005) and Frances E. Dunwell, The Hudson: America’s River (New York, 2008). 2. See Charles B. Hosmer Jr., Presence of the Past: A History of the Preservation Movement in the United States before Williamsburg (New York, 1965), 29–40. 3. “Great Horticultural Society of the Valley of the Hudson,” Magazine of Horticulture 4 (June 1838): 233–35; “Horticultural Association of the Valley of the Hudson,” ibid. 4 (September 1838): 353–54; A. J. Downing, “Horticultural Association of the Valley of the Hudson,” ibid. 4 (December 1838): 462–65. A copy of the circular is preserved in the Thompson Collection, DKI0367, box 12, New York State Library, Albany. See also David Schuyler, Apostle of Taste: Andrew Jackson Downing, 1815–1852 (Baltimore, 1996), 32–34, 246 n. 19. 4. Carl Carmer, The Hudson (New York, 1939), 9. 5. Although this book focuses principally on culture and environment, I have benefited from the following scholarship on political, social, and economic developments in the Hudson Valley: Charles W. McCurdy, The Anti-Rent Era in New York Law and Politics, 1839–1865 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2001); Reeve Huston, Land and Freedom: Rural Society, Popular Protest, and Party Politics in Antebellum New York (New York, 2000); Thomas Wermuth, Rip Van Winkle’s Neighbors: The Transformation of Rural Society in the Hudson River Valley, 1720–1850 (Albany, 2001); and John L. Brooke, Columbia Rising: Civil Life on the Upper Hudson from the Revolution to the Age of Jackson (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2010). 6. Diedrich Knickerbocker [Washington Irving], A History of New York, from the Beginning of the World to the End of the Dutch Dynasty . . . (1809; Philadelphia, 1871), 392.

1. The Tourists’ River 1. James Fenimore Cooper, The Pioneers; or, The Sources of the Susquehanna (1823; New York, 1988), 292–94. 2. Roland Van Zandt, The Catskill Mountain House (1966; Hensonville, N.Y., 1991), 19–44; Alf Evers, The Catskills: From Wilderness to Woodstock, rev. ed. (1972; Woodstock, N.Y., 1982), 351–65; “The Hudson River,” Knickerbocker 46 (September 1855): 269–74; John Sears, Sacred Places: American Tourist Attractions in the Nineteenth Century (1989; Amherst, Mass., 1998), 3–11; The Tourist, or Pocket Manual for Travellers on the Hudson River, the Western Canal, and Stage Road (New York, 1830), 15. See also Kenneth Myers, The Catskills: Painters, Writers, and Tourists in the Mountains, 1820–1895 (Yonkers, N.Y., 1988); and

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Harvey Flad, “Following ‘The Pleasant Paths of Taste’: The Traveler’s Eye and New World Landscapes,” in Humanizing Landscapes: Geography, Culture, and the Magoon Collection (Poughkeepsie, N.Y., 2000), 69–102. 3. Kenneth John Myers, “On the Cultural Construction of Landscape Experience: Contact to 1830,” in American Iconology: New Approaches to Nineteenth-Century Art and Literature, ed. David C. Miller (New Haven, Conn., 1993), 75; James Fenimore Cooper, Home as Found (1838; New York, 1961), 202. In a review of Adam Seybert’s Statistical Annals of the United States of America (1818), Sidney Smith wrote: “In the four quarters of the globe, who reads an American book, or goes to an American play, or looks at an American picture or statue?” Edinburgh Review 33 (January 1820): 79. See also Sears, Sacred Places, 4. 4. Andrew Jackson Downing, “A Visit to Montgomery Place,” The Horticulturist, and Journal of Rural Art and Rural Taste 2 (October 1847): 153; Myers, Catskills, 50–51. 5. Auguste Levasseur, Lafayette in America in 1824 and 1825; or, Journal of a Voyage to the United States, trans. John D. Godman (Philadelphia, 1829), 1: 99–100; John Fowler, Journal of a Tour in the State of New York, in the Year 1830 (London, 1831), 38. 6. Washington Irving, A History of New York, from the Beginning of the World to the End of the Dutch Dynasty . . . by Diedrich Knickerbocker (1809; Philadelphia, 1871), 389–90. According to Benson J. Lossing, geologists unequivocally believed that the Highlands were “a barrier to the passage of the waters [of the Hudson], and caused a vast lake which covered the present Valley of the Hudson” that extended miles to the north. Lossing, The Hudson: From the Wilderness to the Sea (1866; Hensonville, N.Y., 2000), 207–8. 7. James Silk Buckingham, America, Historical, Statistical, and Descriptive (London, 1841), 2: 241– 42; George Wilson Pierson, Tocqueville in America (1938; Baltimore, 1996), 172; Irving, History of New York, 391–92. Several publications described the mountain as St. Anthony’s Nose. See, for example, Sketches of the North River (New York, 1838), 58–59; and The New York State Tourist, Descriptive of the Scenery of the Hudson, Mohawk, & St. Lawrence Rivers (New York, 1842), 20–21. 8. In his afterword to Irving’s Sketch-Book, for example, Perry Miller characterized “Rip Van Winkle” as “an adaptation to the Hudson River landscape of an old German tale” and dismissed it and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” as “plagiarisms from German folklore.” Irving, The Sketch-Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. (New York, 1961), 377. A more persuasive assessment of Irving’s sense of place and contribution to American folklore is Judith Richardson, Possessions: The History and Uses of Haunting in the Hudson Valley (Cambridge, Mass., 2003), 40–80. See also Timothy Dwight, Travels in New England and New York, ed. Barbara Miller Solomon (1822; Cambridge, Mass., 1969), 3: 281, 250, 312–13. 9. Raymond O’Brien, American Sublime: Landscape and Scenery of the Lower Hudson Valley (New York, 1981), 140–41; The Tourist, 15; A. J. Downing, “American Highland Scenery: Beacon Hill,” NewYork Mirror 12 (March 14, 1835): 293–94; Willis Gaylord Clark, “Ollapodiana,” Knickerbocker 8 ( July 1836): 72; T. Addison Richards, Appleton’s Illustrated Hand-Book of American Travel (New York, 1857), 128; Wallace Bruce, The Hudson River by Daylight (1873; New York, 1876), n.p. 10. Fowler, Journal of a Tour, 39; Frances Trollope, Domestic Manners of the Americans, ed. Donald Smalley (1832; New York, 1960), 368; Pierson, Tocqueville in America, 172; Buckingham, America, Historical, Statistical, and Descriptive, 2: 214–42; John Hill, with engravings after watercolors of William G. Wall, The Hudson River Port Folio (1821–25; New York, 1828), text accompanying plate XVI. For information on John Agg, see Myers, Catskills, 188. 11. Thomas Cole, “Essay on American Scenery,” American Monthly Magazine, n.s., 1 (January 1836): 1–12; Benson John Lossing, The Pictorial Field-Book of the Revolution; or, Illustrations, by Pen and Pencil, of the History, Biography, Scenery, Relics, and Traditions of the War for Independence (New York, 1850), 2: 98–102; O. L. Holley, The Picturesque Tourist; Being a Guide through the Northern and Eastern States and Canada (New York, 1844), 55; Charles Newhall Taintor, The Hudson River Route: New York to Albany, Saratoga Springs, Lake George, Lake Champlain, Adirondacks, and Montreal (New York, 1869), facing p. 31; New York State Tourist, 20; Cooper, Pioneers, 292. “Besides its physical beauties, however,” the author of another guidebook observed, “the Hudson is consecrated by hallowed memories of some of the most heroic and touching passages in the story of our War of Independence.” See The Hudson Illustrated with

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Pen and Pencil (New York, 1852), 3. George W. Curtis called the Hudson “the most interesting, both poetically and historically, of all our regions” and described the Revolutionary War as “almost a struggle for the possession of the Hudson River.” [George W. Curtis], “Editor’s Easy Chair,” Harper’s Monthly 22 (February 1861): 412. See also Frances F. Dunwell, The Hudson River Highlands (New York, 1991), 13–31. 12. Dunwell, Hudson River Highlands, 25–31; Tracie Felker, “First Impressions: Thomas Cole’s Drawings of His 1825 Trip up the Hudson River,” American Art Journal 24, nos. 1 and 2 (1992): 60–93. See also Lossing, Pictorial Field-Book, passim; and Lincoln Diamant, Chaining the Hudson: The Fight for the River in the American Revolution (New York, 1989). 13. Dwight, Travels in New England and New York, 3: 303–4, 313. 14. Ibid., 2: 346–47; Downing quoted this passage in “The Moral Influence of Good Houses,” Horticulturist 2 (February 1848): 346. See also Solomon’s introduction to Dwight, Travels in New England and New York, 1: xxxiii-xxxiv. 15. Hill, Hudson River Port Folio, text accompanying plate XV. 16. O’Brien, American Sublime, 85–101; Hill, Hudson River Port Folio, text accompanying plate XV (quoting Isaiah 40:3–5). 17. Cecilia Tichi, New World, New Earth: Environmental Reform in American Literature from the Puritans through Whitman (New Haven, Conn., 1979), 1–36; Downing, “American Highland Scenery,” 293–94; A. J. Downing, “The Dans-Kamer: A Reverie in the Highlands,” New-York Mirror 13 (October 10, 1835): 117–18; Hudson Illustrated with Pen and Pencil, 3. The author of New York State Tourist shared Downing’s assessment that the view from Beacon Hill was superior to that from the Catskill escarpment. See New York State Tourist, 30. 18. Nathaniel Parker Willis, with illustrations by William H. Bartlett, American Scenery; or, Land, Lake, and River Illustrations of Transatlantic Nature (1840; Barre, Mass., 1971), 6, 2, 74, 69, 321. Cole believed that “American associations are not so much of the past as of the present and the future.” “Essay on American Scenery,” American Monthly Magazine, n.s., 1 (January 1836): 11. 19. Hill, Hudson River Port Folio, text accompanying plate XIV; Willis, American Scenery, 74, 69; Hudson River, and the Hudson River Railroad, with a Complete Map, and Wood-Cut Views of the Principal Objects of Interest upon the Line (New York and Boston, 1851), 41; Lossing, Hudson, 203, 214–15, 174; “The Romance of the Hudson: Third Paper,” Harper’s Monthly 53 (June 1876): 37. On the preservation of the Hasbrouck house, see David Schuyler, “The Sanctified Landscape: The Hudson River Valley, 1820 to 1850,” in Landscape in America, ed. George F. Thompson (Austin, Tex., 1995), 93–109. 20. Washington Irving, “The Catskill Mountains,” in A Landscape Book, by American Artists and American Authors: Sixteen Engravings on Steel from Paintings by Cole, Church, Cropsey, Durand, Gignoux, Kensett, Miller, Richards, Smillie, Talbot, Weir (New York, 1868), 22–29; Sketches of the North River, 70; Willis Gaylord Clark, “Ollapodiana,” Knickerbocker 10 (August 1837): 169, 171; Lossing, Hudson, 152; Downing, ‘Visit to Montgomery Place,” 155. 21. Willis, American Scenery, 321. 22. Dwight, Travels in New England and New York, 4: 122–23; Bruce, Hudson River by Daylight, n.p., 57, 67. 23. Van Zandt, Catskill Mountain House, 3–44; Lossing, Hudson, 155–56; Harriet Martineau, Retrospect of Western Travel (1838; New York, 1969), 1: 84; Fowler, Journal of a Tour, 171; Buckingham, America, Historical, Statistic, and Descriptive, 2: 252, 259–60. 24. Willis, American Scenery, 152–53; Willis Gaylord Clark, “Extract from the ‘Ollapodiana’ Papers of Willis Gaylord Clark,” in [Charles L. Beach, compiler], Scenery of the Catskill Mountains as Described by Irving, Cooper, Bryant, Willis Gaylord Clark, N. P. Willis, Miss Martineau, Tyrone Power, Park Benjamin, Thomas Cole, and Other Eminent Writers (New York, 1843), 14; Mrs. [Elizabeth Fries] Ellett, “The Fourth at Pine Orchard,” in Scenery of the Catskill Mountains, 24–25; T. Addison Richards, Appletons’ Illustrated Hand-Book of American Travel (New York, 1857), 145. See also Van Zandt, Catskill Mountain House, passim; and Evers, Catskills, 351–65. 25. Myers, Catskills, 56–57. 26. W. L. Stone, “Ten Days in the Country,” New York Commercial Advertiser, September 3, 1824, as quoted in Evers, Catskills, 362–63; Felker, “First Impressions,” 80–81; Myers, Catskills, 40–46; Ellett,

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“Fourth at Pine Orchard,” 26; George W. Curtis, Lotus-Eating: A Summer Book (New York, 1852), 47–56; T. Addison Richards, “The Catskills,” Harper’s Monthly 9 (July 1854): 149–50. The “canny sawmiller,” to borrow Catskills chronicler Alf Evers’s characterization, saw an opportunity to turn a profit: he built a shanty at the top of the falls, and when tourists neared the base of the cataract the manager, for a fee, “opened the gates of the millpond” and provided them with a spectacle of nature. Evers, Catskills, 363. Bayard Taylor disagreed with these critics: “The damming up of the water, so much deprecated by the romantic, strikes me as an admirable arrangement.” Taylor, Travels at Home, excerpted in Charles Rockwell, The Catskill Mountains and the Region Around: Their Beauty, Legends, and History, With Sketches in Prose and Verse, by Cooper, Irving, Bryant, Cole, and Others (New York, 1867), 257. 27. Willis, American Scenery, 152–54. 28. The Tourist, 22–23; Myers, Catskills, 50–51. 29. Sears, Sacred Places, 72–86, 122–81; Van Zandt, Catskill Mountain House, 291–309; Myers, Catskills, 74–76. See also Dona Brown, Inventing New England: Regional Tourism in the Nineteenth Century (Washington, D.C., 1995); and Theodore Corbett, The Making of American Resorts: Saratoga Springs, Ballston Spa, Lake George (New Brunswick, N.J., 2001). 30. Van Zandt, Catskill Mountain House, 293–309. 31. Irving, “Catskill Mountains,” 23; Cooper, Pioneers, 212, 248. 32. Evers, Catskills, 332–40, 384–93. Kevin Avery presents a conservationist interpretation of Hunter Mountain, Twilight. See his catalogue entry in John K. Howat, American Paradise: The World of the Hudson River School (New York, 1987), 229–31. In Gifford Pinchot and the Making of Modern Environmentalism (Washington, D.C., 2001), Char Miller also interprets Hunter Mountain, Twilight as a conservationist painting. By contrast, Oswaldo Rodriguez Roque is less persuasive in arguing that the “well-established formulas of anecdotal landscape painting first set down by Cole in this country served admirably in allowing American artists to deal with the march of progress.” Roque, “The Exaltation of American Landscape Painting,” in American Paradise, 41. 33. Cole, journal, July 5, 1835, in Thomas Cole, The Collected Essays and Prose Sketches, ed. Marshall Tymn (St. Paul, Minn., 1980), 130; Downing, “Visit to Montgomery Place,” 153; [Beach], Scenery of the Catskill Mountains, n.p.; Elizabeth Cromley, “A Room with a View,” in John S. Margolies and Alf Evers, Resorts of the Catskills (New York, 1979), 5–30; Rockwell, Catskill Mountains and the Region Around, 323–31; New York State Tourist, 42. 34. “The Fine Arts: Exhibition at the National Academy,” Literary World 1 (May 15, 1847): 347–48. See also Nicolai Cikovsky Jr., “ ‘The Ravages of the Axe’: The Meaning of the Tree Stump in Nineteenth-Century American Art,” Art Bulletin 61 (December 1979): 611–26. 35. George Pope Morris, “Woodman, Spare That Tree,” in Edmund Clarence Stedman, Poems, Lyrical and Idyllic (New York, 1860), 64–65. 36. Frederick Law Olmsted, “Autobiographical Fragment A: Passages in the Life of An Unpractical Man,” in The Papers of Frederick Law Olmsted, vol. 1, The Formative Years, 1822–1852, ed. Charles Capen McLaughlin and Charles E. Beveridge (Baltimore, 1977), 99–100; Nancy Siegel, “Decorative Nature: The Emblematic Imagery of Thomas Cole,” in Within the Landscape: Essays on NineteenthCentury American Art and Culture, ed. Phillip Earenfight and Nancy Siegel (Carlisle, Pa., 2005), 43–78. For other assessments of the impact of tourism, see Sears, Sacred Places; and Brown, Inventing New England.

2. The Artist’s River 1. John K. Howat, The Hudson River and Its Painters (New York, 1972), 27–51; Edward J. Nygren with Bruce Robertson, Views and Visions: American Landscape before 1830 (Washington, D.C., 1986). 2. Louis Legrand Noble, The Life and Works of Thomas Cole, ed. Elliot S. Vesell (1853; Cambridge, Mass., 1964), 34, 148. 3. Cole, journal, May 14, 1837, in Noble, Life and Works of Thomas Cole, 176–77; Marshall B. Tymn, ed., Thomas Cole, The Collected Essays and Prose Sketches (St. Paul, Minn., 1980), 143; Ellwood C. Parry III, The Art of Thomas Cole: Ambition and Imagination (Newark, Del., 1988), 21–23; Tracie Felker,

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“First Impressions: Thomas Cole’s Drawings of His 1825 Trip up the Hudson River,” American Art Journal 24, nos. 1 and 2 (1992): 71–75, 88–89. 4. Alan Wallach, “Thomas Cole: Landscape and the Course of American Empire,” in Thomas Cole: Landscape into History, ed. William H. Truettner and Alan Wallach (New Haven, Conn., and Washington, D.C., 1994), 23; Parry, Art of Thomas Cole, 21–23; Felker, “First Impressions,” 69– 70, 76, 89; William Dunlap, A History of the Rise and Progress of the Arts of Design in the United States, ed. Frank W. Bayley and Charles E. Goodspeed (1834; Boston, 1918), 3: 149; Noble, Life and Works of Thomas Cole, 34–35. 5. Noble, Life and Works of Thomas Cole, 258–59. 6. American [William Dunlap], New-York Evening Post, November 22, 1825, and reviews of Cole’s works exhibited at the American Academy, are reproduced in Parry, Art of Thomas Cole, 25–28; Wallach, “Thomas Cole,” 23–24; William Cullen Bryant, “A Funeral Oration, Occasioned by the Death of Thomas Cole, Delivered before the National Academy of Design, New York, May 4, 1848” (1848), in Bryant, Orations and Addresses (New York, 1873), 12–13. 7. Bryant, “Funeral Oration,” 12–13, 37; Felker, “First Impressions,” 76–81; Cole to Asher B. Durand, January 4, 1838, Thomas Cole Papers, New York State Library, Albany (hereafter cited as Cole Papers, NYSL); Cole to Robert Gilmor, December 25, 1826, Cole Papers, NYSL, reprinted in Baltimore Museum of Art, Annual II: Studies on Thomas Cole, An American Romanticist (Baltimore, 1967), 47 (Noble, in Life and Works of Thomas Cole, 63, dates the letter 1825); J. Fenimore Cooper to Louis Legrand Noble, January 6, 1849, Cole Papers, NYSL, reprinted in The Letters and Journals of James Fenimore Cooper, ed. James Franklin Beard (Cambridge, Mass., 1960–68), 5: 396–99. 8. Parry, Art of Thomas Cole, 334–94; Kenneth John Myers, “Art and Commerce in Jacksonian America: The Steamboat Albany Collection,” Art Bulletin 82 (September 2000): 503–28; Bryant, “Funeral Oration,” 9–11. 9. Thomas Cole, MSS journals, entries dated October 7 [1835] and November 8 [1834]; Cole to Asher B. Durand, September 12, 1836, June 12, 1836, August 30, 1836, and November 18, 1836, all in Cole Papers, NYSL; Noble, Life and Works of Thomas Cole, 141, 161–65; Bryant, “Funeral Oration,” 39. 10. William Cullen Bryant, “To Cole, the Painter, Departing for Europe,” in American Art, 1700– 1960: Sources and Documents, ed. John W. McCoubrey (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1965), 96; Noble, Life and Works of Thomas Cole, 35. 11. Cole to William Dunlap, n.d. but probably 1834, in Dunlap, Arts of Design, 152; Nancy Siegel, Along the Juniata: Thomas Cole and the Dissemination of American Landscape Imagery (Huntingdon, Pa., 2003), 45–61, 75–80; Parry, Art of Thomas Cole, 107–11. 12. Cole, as quoted in Dunlap, Arts of Design, 150–54; Cole to Robert Gilmor, March 1, 1830, Cole Papers, NYSL, reprinted in Baltimore Museum of Art, Studies on Thomas Cole, 68–69. 13. Dunlap, Arts of Design, 154–56; Cole to Robert Gilmor, January 29, 1832, Cole Papers, NYSL, reprinted in Baltimore Museum of Art, Studies on Thomas Cole, 72–74; Noble, Life and Works of Thomas Cole, 101; Joy S. Kasson, Artistic Voyagers: Europe and the American Imagination in the Works of Irving, Allston, Cole, Cooper, and Hawthorne (Westport, Conn., 1982), 103; Bryant, “Funeral Oration,” 22. 14. Dunlap, Arts of Design, 154–56; Marshall B. Tymn, ed., Thomas Cole’s Poetry: The Collected Poems of America’s Foremost Painter of the Hudson River School Reflecting His Feelings for Nature and the Romantic Spirit of the Nineteenth Century (York, Pa., 1972), 67. 15. Cole to Robert G. Rankin, n.d., Cole Papers, NYSL. For the date and setting of Cole’s address, see “Transactions of the American Lyceum,” American Annals of Education 5 ( June 1835), which included the sentence “The Lyceum then adjourned to meet at 8 o’clock in the Lecture room, in Clinton Hall, to hear the Essay of Mr. Cole, on American Scenery, written at the request of the society” (271); Theodore Dwight to Cole, April 28, 1835, Thomas Cole Papers, Detroit Institute of Arts Research Library, Detroit, Michigan (hereafter cited as Cole Papers, DIA). When inviting Cole to present a second address a year later Dwight revealed how disappointing the crowd must have been on May 9, 1835: he promised that the Lyceum Society would “make arrangements which will secure a larger audience than was assembled on the previous occasion.” Dwight to Cole, January 7, 1835, Cole Papers, NYSL. The letter is obviously misdated and was written in 1836. On the difficulties Dwight experienced in

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arranging publication of the “Essay,” see his letter to Cole, October 21, 1835, Cole Papers, NYSL. See also “The American Lyceum,” American Monthly Magazine, n.s., 1 (January 1836): 110. Parry, Art of Thomas Cole, 152–53, 164, 171–72, dates Cole’s lecture May 8, whereas Cole in his journal, as quoted in Noble, Life and Works of Thomas Cole, 143, gives the date as after May 16. See also William H. Gerdts, “The American ‘Discourses’: A Survey of Lectures and Writings on American Art, 1770–1858,” American Art Journal 15 (Summer 1983): 61–79. 16. Robert Rankin to Cole, July 26, 1834, Cole Papers, NYSL; Cole, “Essay on American Scenery,” American Monthly Magazine, n.s., 1 (January 1836): 1, 5, 6, 8, 10. 17. “Transactions of the American Lyceum,” 274; Cole, “Essay on American Scenery,” 1, 2, 3, 5, 6; Cole, journal, July 5, 1835, in Tymn, Collected Essays and Prose Sketches, 130. My assessment of the educational mission of the lyceum movement is based on review of the American Annals of Education in the mid-1830s. For an assessment of Cole’s concern about utilitarian progress, see Harvey Flad, “Following ‘The Pleasant Paths of Taste’: The Traveler’s Eye and New World Landscapes,” in Humanizing Landscapes: Geography, Culture, and the Magoon Collection (Poughkeepsie, N.Y., 2000), 69–102. Important studies of the lyceum include Angela G. Ray, The Lyceum and Public Culture in the NineteenthCentury United States (East Lansing, Mich., 2005), and Carl Bode, The American Lyceum: Town Meeting of the Mind (New York, 1956). 18. Cole, “Essay on American Scenery,” 3, 12; Cole to Luman Reed, March 6, 1836, March 20, 1836, Cole Papers, NYSL. Cole’s apprehension about Reed’s reaction to his denunciation of the “treedestroyers” proved unwarranted. Reed responded: “You refer to a former letter in which you made some remarks on the cutting down of the beautiful trees & say perhaps you was [sic] rather severe, not so they met my feelings exactly, I despise that sordid mind that will sacrifice the beauties of nature for ages to put a little ‘filthy lucre’ in his pocket.” Reed to Cole, March 30, 1836, Cole Papers, NYSL. In an annotation in later editions of The Spy, James Fenimore Cooper wrote: “Improvements is used by the Americans to express every degree of change in converting land from its state of wilderness to that of cultivation. In this meaning of the word, it is an improvement to fell the trees; and it is valued precisely by the supposed amount of the cost.” The new introduction to the 1842 edition that contains this quote was written in Paris and dated April 4, 1831. Cooper, The Spy, a Tale of the Neutral Ground (Leipzig, 1842), 4. Henry David Thoreau used language similar to Cole’s and Cooper’s in denouncing improvement: “Nowadays almost all man’s improvements, so called, as the building of houses, and the cutting down of the forest and of all large trees, simply deform the landscape, and make it more tame and cheap.” Thoreau, “Walking,” Atlantic Monthly 9 (June 1862): 660. 19. Baltimore Museum of Art, Studies on Thomas Cole, 82–101; Cole to Robert Gilmor, January 29, 1832, Cole Papers, NYSL, reprinted ibid., 72–74. 20. Cole to Luman Reed, September 18, 1833, Cole Papers, NYSL. Cole’s description of The Course of Empire was published in “The Fine Arts,” Knickerbocker 8 (November 1836): 629–30. For Berkeley’s poem, see Alexander Campbell Fraser, ed., The Works of George Berkeley, D.D., formerly Bishop of Cloyne (Oxford, 1901), 4: 365–66. 21. “Fine Arts,” 629–30. 22. There are several important interpretations of The Course of Empire. I am particularly indebted to Alan Wallach, “Thomas Cole: Landscape and the Course of American Empire,” 79–98; Angela Miller, “Thomas Cole and Jacksonian America: The Course of Empire as Political Allegory,” Prospects 14 (1990): 65–92; and Kasson, Artistic Voyagers, 116–28; Cooper to L. L. Noble, January 6, 1849, in Beard, Letters and Journals of James Fenimore Cooper, 5: 398; Bryant, “Funeral Oration,” 23. See also Nancy J. Siegel, “Hellfire and Damnation: The Presence of God and the Hope for Salvation in Thomas Cole’s The Course of Empire and Selected Writings” (PhD diss., Rutgers University, 1999), 85–95; and Alan Wallach, “Cole, Byron, and the Course of Empire,” Art Bulletin 50 (December 1968): 375–79. For Reed’s collection, see Ella M. Foshay, Mr. Luman Reed’s Picture Gallery: A Pioneer Collection of American Art (New York, 1990). 23. Kasson, Artistic Voyagers, 116–28. 24. Christine Stansell and Sean Wilentz, “Cole’s America,” in Truettner and Wallach, Thomas Cole, 3–21; David Schuyler, The New Urban Landscape: The Redefinition of City Form in NineteenthCentury America (Baltimore, 1986), 32–33.

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25. Cole, journal, August 1, 1836, in Tymn, Collected Essays and Prose Sketches,141; Cole, “Essay on American Scenery,” 12. 26. Tymn, Thomas Cole’s Poetry, 103–6. A variation of the manuscript “Complaint of the Forest” was submitted to Lewis Gaylord Clark, editor of Knickerbocker, who was less than pleased with some of the phraseology of the verse. He asked their mutual friend William Cullen Bryant to edit and revise the poem, which was published as “Lament of the Forest” in Knickerbocker 17 (June 1841): 16–19. See James T. Callow, Kindred Spirits: Knickerbocker Writers and American Artists, 1807–1855 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1967); and Wallach, “Thomas Cole,” 67. 27. Bryant, “Funeral Oration,” passim. 28. Cole to Luman Reed, March 20, 1836. 29. Wallach, “Thomas Cole’s River in the Catskills as Antipastoral,” Art Bulletin 84 (June 2002): 334– 50; Cole, “Lecture on American Scenery: Delivered before the Catskill Lyceum, Apr. 1, 1841,” Northern Light 1 (May 1841): 25–26, copy in Cole Papers, DIA, and reprinted in Tymn, Collected Essays and Prose Sketches, 211. Wallach’s interpretation differs from, and is more convincing than, Kenneth W. Maddox’s “Thomas Cole and the Railroad: Gentle Maledictions,” Archives of American Art Journal 30 (1990): 146–54. 30. Perry Miller, “Nature and the National Ego,” in Errand into the Wilderness (Cambridge, Mass., 1956), 204–16; Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The Young American,” in The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Alfred R. Ferguson and Robert E. Spiller, (Cambridge, Mass., 1971), 1: 222–44. 31. Cole, journal, May 19, 1838, in Noble, Life and Works of Thomas Cole, 195; Joy S. Kasson, “The Voyage of Life: Thomas Cole and Romantic Disillusionment,” American Quarterly 27 (March 1975): 42–56; Alan Wallach, “The Voyage of Life as Popular Art,” Art Bulletin 59 (June 1977): 234–41; Wallach, “Thomas Cole” 90–101; Bryant, “Funeral Oration,” 33. 32. The New York Evening Mirror is quoted in Miller, “Nature and the National Ego,” 213; Bryant, “Funeral Oration,” 3, 40–41.

3. The Writers’ River 1. James T. Callow, Kindred Spirits: Knickerbocker Writers and American Artists, 1807–1855 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1967); William Cullen Bryant, “Thanatopsis,” in The Oxford Book of American Verse, ed. F. O. Matthiessen (New York, 1950), 50. 2. Geoffrey Crayon [Washington Irving], A Book of the Hudson, Collected from the Various Works of Diedrich Knickerbocker (New York, 1849), vii. This passage had originally been published in “The Crayon Papers: To the Editor of the Knickerbocker,” Knickerbocker 13 (March 1839): 209. 3. In 1930 Henry A. Plochman argued that “Rip Van Winkle” and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” were based on German folktales. This became so widely acknowledged among literary historians that Perry Miller, in the afterword to the New American Library edition of the Sketch-Book, of all places, characterized “Rip Van Winkle” and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” as “plagiarisms from German folklore.” Irving had, in later editions of the Sketch-Book, conceded that the tales bore some resemblance to time-honored European folklore. See Judith Richardson, Possessions: The History and Uses of Hauntings in the Hudson Valley (Cambridge, Mass., 2003), 40–80. Cole’s description of his visit to Rip Van Winkle’s hollow was published in Louis Legrand Noble, The Life and Works of Thomas Cole, ed. Elliot S. Vesell (1853; Cambridge, Mass., 1964), 147–49. For analysis of the artistic representations of Irving’s writings, see Kathleen Eagen Johnson, Irving Illustrated: Graphic Design and Literary Art in the Collection of Historic Hudson Valley (Sleepy Hollow, N.Y., 1999); and Jules David Prown, “Washington Irving’s Interest in Art and His Influence upon American Painting” (master’s thesis, University of Delaware, Winterthur Program in Early American Culture, 1956). 4. This brief biographical sketch is based on Stanley Thomas Williams, The Life of Washington Irving, 2 vols. (1935; New York, 1971); Edward Wagenknecht, Washington Irving: Moderation Displayed (New York, 1962); William L. Hedges, Washington Irving: An American Study (Baltimore, 1965); and Mary Weatherspoon Bowden, Washington Irving (Boston, 1981). 5. Diedrich Knickerbocker [Washington Irving], A History of New York, from the Beginning of the World to the End of the Dutch Dynasty . . . (1809; Philadelphia, 1871), 23, 35–36, 19–20, 385–92.

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6. Williams, Life of Washington Irving; Wagenknecht, Washington Irving; Hedges, Washington Irving; and Bowden, Washington Irving. 7. David M. Sokol, “Washington Irving: Friend and Muse to American Artists,” in Visions of Washington Irving: Selected Works from the Collections of Historic Hudson Valley, ed. Historic Hudson Valley (Tarrytown, N.Y., 1991), 17–18; Joseph T. Butler, “Washington Irving: Squire of Sunnyside,” ibid., 11; Irving to Samuel Rogers, February 3, 1836, in Irving, Letters, ed. Ralph M. Aderman et al. (Boston, 1978–82), 2: 853; Irving to George Harvey, November 23, 1835, ibid., 2: 844–46; Irving to George Harvey, November 14, 1836, ibid., 2: 880; Irving, “Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” in The Sketch-Book of Geoffrey Crayon (1819–20; New York, 1961), 329–30; Irving to Peter Irving, July 8, 1835, in Life and Letters of Washington Irving, ed. Pierre M. Irving (New York, 1863–64), 3: 75; “Sunnyside,” in Along the Hudson with Washington Irving, ed. Wallace Bruce (Poughkeepsie, N.Y., 1913), 109; Irving to Sarah Storrow, June 6, 1847, in Irving, Letters, 4: 133–34. 8. Geoffrey Crayon [Washington Irving], “A Chronicle of Wolfert’s Roost,” Knickerbocker 13 (April 1839): 318; Irving to Peter Irving, October 8, 1835, in Irving, Letters, 2: 843–44; Crayon [Irving], “Crayon Papers: To the Editor of the Knickerbocker,” Knickerbocker 13 (March 1839): 206–10. 9. A. J. Downing, A Treatise on the Theory and Practice of Landscape Gardening, Adapted to North America . . . , 2nd ed. (1841; New York, 1844), 379–80; [T. Addison Richards], “Sunnyside,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine 14 (December 1856): 4; Benson John Lossing, The Pictorial Field-Book of the Revolution; or, Illustrations, by Pen and Pencil, of the History, Biography, Scenery, Relics, and Traditions of the War for Independence (New York, 1850), 2: 192–93. On Richards as author as well as illustrator of the Harper’s article, see Irving to George P. Morris, September 6, 1855, in Irving, Letters, 4: 550; Irving to T. Addison Richards, December 15, 1855, ibid., 4: 566; and Irving to T. Addison Richards, November 20, 1856, ibid., 4: 605. 10. Irving to Sarah Storrow, June 6, 1847, in Irving, Letters, 4: 133–34; Irving to Gouverneur Kemble, July 8, 1847, ibid., 4: 139. 11. Irving to Catharine Parris, April 28, 1835, in Irving, Letters, 2: 869; Irving to Pierre M. Irving, May 18, 1836, ibid., 2: 928; Irving to Sarah Storrow, June 13, 1841, ibid., 3: 112; Irving to Flora Foster Dawson, February 5, 1846, ibid., 4: 14; The River Hudson (New York, 1860), 11. The author of The Hudson Illustrated with Pen and Pencil (New York, 1852) described Sunnyside as being “surrounded with foliage, in one of the most enchanting little nooks on the river” (5). See also Robert M. Toole, “An American Cottage Ornee: Washington Irving’s Sunnyside, 1835–1859,” Journal of Garden History 12 ( January-March 1992): 52–72. 12. Irving to Sarah Storrow, June 6, 1846, in Irving, Letters, 4: 133–34; Irving to Sarah Storrow, August 23, 1847, ibid., 4: 144; Irving to Charlotte Grinnell, August 13, 1847, ibid., 4: 141; Irving to Gouverneur Kemble, July 8, 1847, ibid., 4: 139; Irving to Sabina O’Shea, February 24, 1850, ibid., 4: 207; Irving to Sarah Storrow, June 27, 1855, ibid., 4: 542; Irving to Gouverneur Kemble, April 23, 1856, ibid., 4: 582. 13. Downing, Treatise, 380; Richards, “Sunnyside,” 7, 12. For examples of Irving’s attention to the landscape, see note 11 above, as well as Irving’s letters to Sarah Storrow, May 8 and May 25, 1841, in Irving, Letters, 3: 92–96, 98–103. 14. Irving to Sarah Van Wart, [early December 1840], in Irving, Letters, 3: 63–64; Irving, “Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” 329; Irving to Sarah Van Wart, August 29, 1847, in Irving, Letters, 4: 147–49. Irving also informed his niece Sarah Storrow, a one-time resident of Sunnyside, that “this neighborhood is daily growing more and more beautiful, from the improved taste in building, in decorating grounds, in setting out trees &c.” Irving to Sarah Storrow, August 13, 1847, ibid., 4: 144. 15. Irving, “Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” 329. 16. Irving, Life and Letters of Washington Irving, 4: 36, 67; Historic Hudson Valley, Visions of Washington Irving, 122; Richards, “Sunnyside,” 8; Adam Sweeting, Reading Houses and Building Books: Andrew Jackson Downing and the Architecture of Popular Antebellum Literature, 1835–1855 (Hanover, N.H., 1996), 138. 17. Edgar Mayhew Bacon, The Hudson River from Ocean to Source: Historical—Legendary—Picturesque (New York, 1902), 246 (this chapter was also published as “The Literary Associations of the Hudson,” The Critic 41 [1902]: 221–29); Historic Hudson Valley, Visions of Washington Irving, 67–68.

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18. “Nathaniel Parker Willis,” New York Times, January 22, 1867. There are two modern biographies: Cortland P. Auser’s Nathaniel P. Willis (New York, 1969) and Thomas N. Baker’s Sentiment & Celebrity: Nathaniel Parker Willis and the Trials of Literary Fame (New York, 1999). A volume in Twayne’s United States Authors Series, Auser’s biography is valuable for its analysis of much of Willis’s prose and verse, but it does not address many of the themes presented in this chapter. Baker’s book is invaluable in its assessment of Willis as a self-fashioned celebrity and the double-edged sword that notoriety brought to his life, but it does not assess the significance of the author’s contributions to American Scenery. See also Edward F. Hayward, “Nathaniel Parker Willis,” Atlantic Monthly 54 (August 1884): 212– 22; and Van Wyck Brook’s assessment of Willis in The World of Washington Irving (New York, 1944), 334–46. 19. Baker, Sentiment & Celebrity, 13–85; Auser, Nathaniel Parker Willis, 66–67. 20. Baker, Sentiment & Celebrity, 86–87. 21. Callow, Kindred Spirits, 167; Nathaniel Parker Willis, with illustrations by William H. Bartlett, American Scenery; or, Land, Lake, and River Illustrations of Transatlantic Nature (1840; Barre, Mass., 1971), 3–4, v-vi. On Bartlett, see Gregory Pfitzer, “Eden’s Artist: William H. Bartlett as the First Popularizer of Hudson Valley Images,” in Lives of the Hudson, ed. Ian Berry and Tom Lewis (Saratoga Springs, N.Y., 2010), 73–77. 22. Willis, American Scenery, 11, 17–19, 84–85, 103–4, 159–60, 293–95. 23. Ibid., 14, 47, 157, 266, 241. 24. Ibid., 45–46, 57–58, 93–95, 81–83, 51, 189–91, 87–89, 74–77, 113–16. 25. Ibid., 321, 77, 14–15, 116–19, 170–73, 179–82, 27–28, 195–97, 229–31. 26. Ibid., 123, 8–10, 34–37, 45, 123, 176, 90, 69. 27. Ibid., 205–10, 357–59. 28. Callow, Kindred Spirits, 168. 29. “Nathaniel Parker Willis,” New York Times, January 22, 1867; Auser, Nathaniel Parker Willis, 47–52 and passim. Thomas Baker suggests, in Sentiment & Celebrity, that Willis was also retreating from the glare of notoriety that attended the sensational divorce trial of actor Edwin Forrest and Catherine Sinclair Forrest, in which Forrest accused Willis of having an affair with his wife (159). 30. Robert M. Toole, “ ‘Illustrated and Set to Music’: The Picturesque Crescendo at Idlewild,” Journal of the New England Garden History Society 4 (Spring 1996): 4; T. Addison Richards, “Idlewild: The Home of N. P. Willis,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine 16 ( January 1858): 148; N. P. Willis, “Highland Terrace,” in Out-doors at Idlewild; or, The Shaping of a Home on the Banks of the Hudson (New York, 1855), 17–29. The first two letters in Out-doors at Idlewild had originally been published in Washington Irving et al., Home Book of the Picturesque; or, American Scenery, Art, and Literature, Comprising a Series of Essays by Washington Irving, W. C. Bryant, Fenimore Cooper . . . etc., with Thirteen Engravings on Steel, from Pictures by Eminent Artists (New York, 1852). 31. Willis, Out-doors at Idlewild, 373–74. 32. Calvert Vaux, Villas and Cottages (New York, 1857), 248–49; Richards, “Idlewild,” 148–59. 33. Willis, Out-doors at Idlewild, 48, 37; Richards, “Idlewild,” 159, 146. 34. Irving to John P. Kennedy, August 31, 1854, in Irving, Letters, 4: 495; Richards, “Idlewild,” 146–48, 151. 35. Willis, Out-doors at Idlewild, passim. 36. “Nathaniel Parker Willis,” New York Times, January 22, 1867. 37. Ibid.; Hayward, “Nathaniel Parker Willis,” 212, 222; Brooks, World of Washington Irving, 339.

4. The River in a Garden 1. Diedrich Knickerbocker [Washington Irving], A History of New York, from the Beginning of the World to the End of the Dutch Dynasty . . . (1809; Philadelphia, 1871), 392; George William Curtis, “Memoir,” in Rural Essays, by A. J. Downing, Edited, with a Memoir of the Author, by George William Curtis; and a Letter to His Friends, by Frederika Bremer (New York, 1853), xiv, xvi; “The Downing Monument,” Horticulturist, n.s., 6 (November 1856): 489–91; John Clagett Proctor, “The Tragic Death of Andrew

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Jackson Downing and the Monument to His Memory,” Records of the Columbia Historical Society 27 (1925): 258; Downing, The Architecture of Country Houses (New York, 1850), v-vi; Downing, “The Moral Influence of Good Houses,” Horticulturist 2 (February 1848): 345–47. For biographical information on Downing, see David Schuyler, Apostle of Taste: Andrew Jackson Downing, 1815–1852 (Baltimore, 1996). 2. [Thomas B. Fox], “The Education of the Public Taste,” Christian Examiner 53 (November 1852): 358–72; Downing to Robert Donaldson, December 26, 1840, collection of Richard Jenrette. 3. Downing, A Treatise on the Theory and Practice of Landscape Gardening, Adapted to North America . . . , 2nd ed. (1841; New York, 1844), 343–47. On the emergence of the middle class, see Stuart M. Blumin, The Emergence of the Middle Class: Social Experience in the American City, 1760–1900 (Cambridge, 1989); and Mary P. Ryan, Cradle of the Middle Class: The Family in Oneida County, New York, 1790–1865 (Cambridge, 1981). 4. Downing, Treatise, 1844 ed., 10, 20, 48–49, 79, 309; Downing, Treatise, 1859 ed., 46–47, 288; Schuyler, Apostle of Taste, 37–38. 5. Downing, Treatise, 1844 ed., 49, 55–57; Downing, Treatise, 1859 ed., 53–54, 59–60. 6. Downing, Treatise, 1844 ed., 58, 64ff. The imperative to allow site conditions to determine the appropriate landscape design extends back to antiquity, but Downing was clearly influenced by Alexander Pope’s famous dictum “Consult the Genius of the Place in all / That tells the Waters or to rise, or fall.” See M. R. Brownell, Alexander Pope and the Arts of Georgian England (Oxford, 1978), 108–9. 7. Lindley is quoted in Curtis, “Memoir,” xxv; Schuyler, Apostle of Taste, 53–54. 8. Downing, Treatise, 1844 ed., 79–80. 9. Ibid., 346; Schuyler, Apostle of Taste, 21–26. 10. “Residence of A. J. Downing, Botanical Gardens and Nurseries, Newburgh, New York,” Magazine of Horticulture 7 (November 1841): 401–11; [Clarence C. Cook], “A Visit to the House and Garden of the Late A. J. Downing,” Horticulturist, n.s., 3 ( January 1853): 21–27; Curtis, “Memoir,” xxxii; Schuyler, Apostle of Taste, 24–26. 11. On Davis’s Rural Residences, see Jane B. Davies’s introduction to the 1980 DaCapo reprint edition as well as her essay “Davis and Downing: Collaborators in the Picturesque,” in Prophet with Honor: The Career of Andrew Jackson Downing, 1815–1852, ed. George B. Tatum and Elisabeth B. MacDougall (Washington, D.C., 1989), 81–123; Jane B. Davies, “Introduction: Alexander J. Davis, Creative American Architect,” in Alexander Jackson Davis, American Architect, 1803–1892, ed. Amelia Peck (New York, 1992), 14; “Residence of A. J. Downing,” 401–11; “Landscape Gardening and Rural Architecture in America,” United States Magazine and Democratic Review 16 (April 1845): 348. 12. Schuyler, Apostle of Taste, 26–27, 162–64. 13. Curtis, “Memoir,” xxxvi, xxxviii-xxxix. 14. Ibid., xxxiv-xxxv; Fredrika Bremer, The Homes of the New World: Impressions of America, trans. Mary Howitt (New York, 1853), 1: 19–20, 27; Lenora Scott Cranch, The Life and Letters of Christopher Pearse Cranch (Boston, 1917), 174; Curtis, “Memoir,” xxxiv-xxxv. 15. Downing, “American Highland Scenery: Beacon Hill,” New-York Mirror 12 (March 14, 1835): 293–94; Bremer, Homes of the New World, 1: 32. George William Curtis also described a visit to an old house across the Hudson noteworthy for its associations with the Revolutionary War, probably the Madame Brett Homestead in Beacon, and referred to Washington’s Headquarters in Newburgh in a way that indicated that he had visited that historic place as well. See Curtis, “Memoir,” lii, xxxiii. 16. On landscape tourism in the antebellum years, see John F. Sears, Sacred Places: American Tourist Attractions in the Nineteenth Century (New York, 1989). On Downing’s friendship with Robert Donaldson, see Jean Bradley Anderson, Carolinian on the Hudson: The Life of Robert Donaldson (Raleigh, N.C., 1996), 176, 214. 17. Bremer, Homes of the New World, 1: 33–36; Downing, Treatise, 1844 ed., 35–36; Anderson, Carolinian on the Hudson, passim. 18. Bremer, Homes of the New World, 1: 35–36. 19. Jacquetta M. Haley, ed., Pleasure Grounds: Andrew Jackson Downing and Montgomery Place (Tarrytown, N.Y., 1988), 11–12; McKelden Smith, ed., The Great Estates Region of the Hudson River Valley (Tarrytown, N.Y., 1998), 17–21.

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20. Susanne Brendel-Pandich, “From Cottages to Castles: The Country House Designs of Alexander Jackson Davis,” in Peck, Alexander Jackson Davis, 65; Downing, Treatise, 1844 ed., 346–47; Downing, Architecture of Country Houses, 357–58; Downing, “A Visit to Montgomery Place,” Horticulturist 2 (October 1847): 153–60. 21. Downing, “A Visit to Montgomery Place,” 154–55; Haley, Pleasure Grounds, 14–16. 22. Downing, “A Visit to Montgomery Place,” 157–60; Downing to Louise Livingston, [October 28, 1845], in Haley, Pleasure Grounds, 30; Haley, Pleasure Grounds, 14–16, 20–27, 30–34. Downing and the Bartons became embroiled in a controversy when Barton employed a German landscape gardener to plan the arboretum. Barton was dissatisfied with that man and, apparently as a result of Downing’s advice, hired Hans J. Ehlers, another German landscape gardener, who had studied at the Forest Academy at Kiel and worked at several estates in the mid-Hudson Valley. Ehlers claimed that everything that had been done at the arboretum before his employment in 1849 had “distorted the features of the landscape” and needed to be undone, with the result that it would be years before the trees assumed their mature form. Upon completion of the work Ehlers claimed that Barton refused to pay for his professional services, and as a result published a pamphlet criticizing Barton and Downing, whom Barton wanted to arbitrate their differences. In an appendix to the 1844 edition of the Treatise Downing had called one German then working in the mid-Hudson Valley a “foreign soi-disant landscape gardener” who had “completely spoiled the simply grand beauty of a fine river residence” by introducing walks and clumps of trees that destroyed the breadth of scenery. Ehlers was not the landscape gardener Downing described: he published Ehlers’s “Remarks on the Diseases of the Peach, Plum, and Cherry Tree” in the November 1849 Horticulturist and added a note describing its author as “one of the most intelligent German gardeners in the country.” Still, Ehlers was upset that Downing did not name the other landscape gardener—thus leaving his reputation in question—and in his pamphlet heaped abuse on Downing as well as Barton. Unfortunately, no planting plan for the arboretum has survived, if one ever existed, and few of the trees Ehlers planted between 1849 and 1851 still stand, making any assessment of his work, as well as any assessment of the validity of the dispute, all but impossible. See Downing, Treatise, 1844 ed., 493; Horticulturist 4 (November 1849): 233–34; and Ehlers, Defence against Abuse and Slander with Some Strictures on Mr. Downing’s Book on Landscape Gardening (New York, 1852). 23. Downing, “A Visit to Montgomery Place,” 160. 24. Curtis, “Memoir,” xxi; Bremer, Homes of the New World, 1: 37–38; Schuyler, Apostle of Taste, 21–26. 25. Bremer, Homes of the New World, 1: 44, 56–60. 26. Downing, Treatise, 1844 ed., 34–35, 29–30; on Hosack and Parmentier, see Robert M. Toole, Landscape Gardens on the Hudson: A History (Hensonville, N.Y., 2010), 51–56. 27. Downing, Treatise, 1844 ed., 35, 37, 33. 28. Ibid., 375. The Greek Revival was “actually in more common use than any other style, in the United States.” Ibid., 353. 29. Downing, Treatise, 1844 ed., 341, 348, passim; Downing, Cottage Residences; or, A Series of Designs for Rural Cottages and Cottage-Villas, and Their Gardens and Grounds, Adapted to North America (New York, 1842), ii, 25. 30. Downing, Cottage Residences, 32. 31. Downing to Robert Donaldson, January 21, 1842, collection of Richard H. Jenrette; Downing, Cottage Residences, ii; Davies, “Davis and Downing,” in Tatum and MacDougall, Prophet with Honor, 86; Downing to J. J. Smith, October 21, 1842, in “Downing’s Landscape Gardening,” Horticulturist, n.s., 8 (September 1858): 412–13 (the original is in the J. J. Smith Papers, Library Company of Philadelphia, placed on deposit at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania); Downing, Cottage Residences, 4th ed., 48; Bremer, Homes of the New World, 1: 111; Bremer, “To the Friends of A. J. Downing,” in Downing, Rural Essays, lxix; Adolph B. Benson, ed., “Fredrika Bremer’s Unpublished Letters to the Downings,” Scandanavian Studies and Notes 11 (May 1930): 51. For a longer discussion of the evolution of the Treatise, see Schuyler, Apostle of Taste, 28–29. 32. Downing, Cottage Residences, 149–50, 36, 40, 93, 174; Downing, “On Simple Rural Cottages,” Horticulturist 1 (September 1846): 105–10. The two workingman’s cottages became Designs I and II

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of Architecture of Country Houses, 73–83. For critiques on the cost of the designs in Cottage Residences, see “Reviews,” Magazine of Horticulture 8 (November 1842): 95; and Solon Robinson, “A Cheap Farm House,” Ohio Cultivator 2 (March 15, 1846): 41–42, reprinted in Solon Robinson, Pioneer and Agriculturist: Selected Writings, ed. Herbert Anthony Kellar (Indianapolis, 1936): 1: 553. 33. Bremer, Homes of the New World, 1: 48; Downing, Treatise, 1844 ed., 80. See also Schuyler, Apostle of Taste, 91–97. 34. “The Architecture of Country Houses,” Literary World 7 (August 3, 1850): 91; advertisement, “Horticultural Advertiser,” Horticulturist 6 (April 1851), n.p., copy in Special Collections Division, Morris Library, University of Delaware; Ohio Cultivator 7 (May 1, 1851): 136; N. P. Willis, “Sale of Mr. Downing’s Residence,” Home Journal, reprinted in Horticulturist 7 (November 1852): 527. 35. “Downing, “Our Country Villages,” Horticulturist 4 ( June 1850): 537–41; Downing, “The New-York Park,” ibid. 6 (August 1851): 345–49; Downing to J. J. Smith, October 30, 1851, reprinted in “Downing’s Familiar Letters.—No. III,” Horticulturist, n.s., 6 (April 1856): 161; Downing to J. J. Smith, March 29, 1852, ibid., 162. See also Francis R. Kowsky, Country, Park, & City: The Architecture and Life of Calvert Vaux (New York, 1998), 23–52; Kowsky, The Architecture of Frederick Clarke Withers and the Progress of the Gothic Revival in America after 1850 (Middletown, Conn., 1980), 19–27; Schuyler, Apostle of Taste, 155–229.

5. Change and the Search for Continuity at Midcentury 1. John Caldwell and Oswaldo Rodriguez Roque, American Paintings in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, vol. 1, A Catalogue of Works by Artists Born by 1815 (New York, 1980), 419–22; Linda S. Ferber, ed., Kindred Spirits: Asher B. Durand and the American Landscape (New York, 2007), 162–65; William Cullen Bryant, “Thanatopsis,” in The Oxford Book of American Verse, ed. F.O. Matthiessen (New York, 1950), 49–52. See also Erwin Panofsky, “Et in Arcadia Ego: Poussin and the Elegiac Tradition,” in Meaning in the Visual Arts (Garden City, N.Y., 1955), 295–320. 2. Mark C. Carnes, “The Rise and Fall of a Mercantile Town: Family, Land, and Capital in Newburgh, New York, 1790–1844,” Hudson Valley Regional Review 2 (September 1985): 17–40. For the impact of the Erie Canal, see Paul E. Johnson, A Shopkeeper’s Millennium: Society and Revivals in Rochester, New York, 1815–1837 (New York, 1979). 3. Carnes, “Rise and Fall of a Mercantile Town,” 33–34; information on Newburgh in 1822 is drawn from Samuel W. Eager, An Outline History of Orange County . . . (Newburgh, 1846–47), 228; for information on new construction during the early 1830s, see “Newburgh,” Newburgh Telegraph, October 8, 1835. 4. Carnes, “Rise and Fall of a Mercantile Town,” 33–37; “New-York City,” New York Times, September 9, 1852. 5. Mark C. Carnes, “From Merchant to Manufacturer: The Economics of Localism in Newburgh, New York, 1845–1900,” Hudson Valley Regional Review 3 (March 1986): 46–79. 6. Ibid.; “Know-Nothing Victory at Newburg,” New York Times, March 30, 1855; Calvert Vaux, Villas and Cottages: A Series of Designs Prepared for Execution in the United States, 2nd ed. (1857; New York, 1864), 255. See also David Schuyler, Apostle of Taste: Andrew Jackson Downing, 1815–1852 (Baltimore, 1996), 218–19, passim; and two books by Francis R. Kowsky, The Architecture of Frederick Clarke Withers and the Progress of the Gothic Revival in America after 1850 (Middletown, Conn., 1980) and Country, Park, & City: The Architecture and Life of Calvert Vaux (New York, 1998). 7. Stuart Blumin, The Urban Threshold: Growth and Change in a Nineteenth-Century American Community (Chicago, 1976), 2, 14–18, 50–55; Harvey K. Flad and Clyde Griffen, Main Street to Mainframes: Landscape and Social Change in Poughkeepsie (Albany, 2009), 23. See also Manville Wakefield, Coal Boats to Tidewater: The Story of the Delaware & Hudson Canal (South Fallsburg, N.Y., 1965); and, for the turnpike to Delaware County, Nathaniel Bartlett Sylvester, History of Ulster County, New York (1880; Woodstock, N.Y., 1977), 150–51. 8. Blumin, Urban Threshold, 77, 113, 120, passim. See also William C. De Witt, People’s History of Kingston, Rondout, and Vicinity (New Haven, Conn., 1943).

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9. Blumin, Urban Threshold, 52–55, 75–103. 10. Ibid., 104–25. 11. Flad and Griffen, Main Street to Mainframes, 21–24, 27–33. 12. Ibid., 27–33; Clyde Griffen and Sally Griffen, Natives and Newcomers: The Ordering of Opportunity in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Poughkeepsie (Cambridge, Mass., 1978), 2–3. 13. Flad and Griffen, Main Street to Mainframes, 32–33; “Serious Affray among Firemen at Poughkeepsie,” New York Times, July 15, 1857. 14. Thomas S. Wermuth, Rip Van Winkle’s Neighbors: The Transformation of Rural Society in the Hudson River Valley, 1720–1850 (Albany, 2001), 31, 91–113; A. J. Downing, “The National Ignorance of the Agricultural Interest,” Horticulturist 6 (September 1851): 394–95; Downing, “Address,” January 16, 1851, in New York State Agricultural Society, Transactions 10 (1850): 119–27; Schuyler, Apostle of Taste, 119–26. Solon Robinson, “A Flight through Connecticut” (1849), in Solon Robinson, Pioneer and Agriculturist: Selected Writings, ed. Herbert Anthony Kellar (Indianapolis, 1936), 2: 247–48; Robinson, “A Day in Westchester County” (1850), ibid., 2: 439. See also U. P. Hedrick, A History of Agriculture in the State of New York (Albany, 1933). 15. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Sixth, Seventh, and Eighth Census of the United States (1840–60), miscellaneous tables. Harvey Flad and Clyde Griffen emphasize the significance of Gail Borden’s innovation. Flad and Griffen, Main Street to Mainframes, 41–42. 16. For Lafayette’s voyage up the Hudson, see Auguste Levasseur, Lafayette in America in 1824 and 1825; or, Journal of a Voyage to the United States, trans. Alan R. Hoffman (1829; Manchester, N.H., 2006), 105–25. See also Stanley J. Idzerda et al., Lafayette, Hero of Two Worlds: The Art and Pagentry of His Farewell Tour of America, 1824–1825 (Queens, N. Y., 1989); and Fred Somkin, Unquiet Eagle: Memory and Desire in the Idea of American Freedom, 1815–1860 (Ithaca, N.Y., 1967), 131–74. 17. J. Q. Adams, “First Annual Message,” December 6, 1825, in A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents, ed. James D. Richardson (New York, 1897), 2: 874; Eager, Outline History of Orange County, 196; Michael Kammen, Mystic Chords of Memory: The Transformation of Tradition in American Culture (New York, 1991), 52–56 and passim. Marc H. Miller has pointed out that shortly before Lafayette’s visit the British earthworks at Yorktown, Virginia, had been destroyed. A newspaper commented: “As if we had not land enough already, and as if these works, the monuments of our glory, were not worth a million times the space they occupy.” As quoted in Idzerda, Lafayette, 134. 18. See George Callcott, History in the United States: Its Practice and Purpose (Baltimore, 1970); David D. Van Tassel, Recording America’s Past: An Interpretation of the Development of Historical Studies in America, 1607–1884 (Chicago, 1960); and David Levin, History as Romantic Art: Bancroft, Prescott, Motley, and Parkman (Stanford, Calif., 1959). 19. Benson J. Lossing, The Pictorial Field-Book of the Revolution; or, Illustrations, by Pen and Pencil, of the History, Biography, Scenery, Relics, and Traditions of the War for Independence (New York, 1850), 2: 98–102. On Lossing, see David D. Van Tassel, “Benson J. Lossing: Pen and Pencil Historian,” American Quarterly 6 (Spring 1954): 32–44; and Harold E. Mahan, Benson J. Lossing and Historical Writing in the United States, 1830–1890 (Westport, Conn., 1996). 20. Joseph J. Ellis skillfully describes these events and quotes Washington’s speech in His Excellency George Washington (New York, 2004), 140–46; New York State Assembly, Report of the Select Committee on the Petition of Washington Irving, and Others, document 356, March 27, 1839, p. 4, New York State Library, Albany. See also Whitfield J. Bell Jr., Colonel Lewis Nicola: Advocate of Monarchy, 1782 (Philadelphia, 1983); and, for invaluable nineteenth-century perspectives, Joel Tyler Headley, “Washington’s Headquarters at Newburgh,” Galaxy 22 ( July 1876): 7–20; and Lossing, Pictorial Field-Book, 2: 98–111. 21. Headley, “Washington’s Headquarters at Newburgh,” 13; Lossing, Pictorial Field-Book, 2: 99– 100, 117–18. 22. Charles B. Hosmer Jr., The Presence of the Past: A History of the Historic Preservation Movement in the United States before Williamsburg (New York, 1965), 35; Daniel Walker Howe, The Political Culture of the American Whigs (Chicago, 1979), 72, passim; Gulian C. Verplanck, “View of Washington’s HeadQuarters,” New-York Mirror 12 (December 27, 1834): 201–2.

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23. Verplanck, “View of Washington’s Head-Quarters,” 201–2; New York State Assembly, Report of the Select Committee on the Petition of Washington Irving, and Others, 2; Richard Caldwell, A True History of the Acquisition of Washington’s Headquarters . . . (Salisbury Mills, N. Y., 1887), 21; Hosmer, Presence of the Past, 35. 24. Hosmer, Presence of the Past, 35–36; Caldwell, Acquisition of Washington’s Headquarters, 24; A. Elwood Corning, The Story of the Hasbrouck House (Newburgh, N. Y., 1950); Daniel R. Porter, “The Knickerbockers and the Historic Site in New York State,” New York History 64 (January 1983): 35–50; and William G. Tyrrell, letter to the editor, ibid. 64 (July 1983): 349–50. The most comprehensive analysis of the context for the creation of Washington’s Headquarters as a historic shrine is Kammen, Mystic Chords of Memory. 25. “4th of July in Newburgh,” Newburgh Gazette, July 10, 1850; “The Fourth—The Celebration,” Newburgh Telegraph, July 4, 1850. Mrs. Monell’s ode was printed in the Literary World 7 ( July 13, 1850): 36, as well as in Caldwell, Acquisition of Washington’s Headquarters, 38–39, and excerpted in Lossing, Pictorial Field-Book, 2: 99. 26. For this interpretation I am indebted to the writings of numerous historians and cultural geographers, but see especially Howe, Political Culture of the American Whigs; Kammen, Mystic Chords of Memory; and David Lowenthal, “Past Time, Present Place: Landscape and Memory,” Geographical Review 65 (January 1975): 1–36. 27. “Relics of the Revolution,” New York Times, October 20, 1895; “Newburgh’s Old Memories,” ibid., November 30, 1881; “The Centenary of Peace,” ibid., April 8, 1883; Jervis McEntee, diary, June 3, 1878, Jervis McEntee Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. 28. Details of Newburgh’s centennial events, including the quotation from the New York Mail and Express, are drawn from John J. Nutt, Newburgh: Her Institutions, Industries, and Leading Citizens (Newburgh, N.Y., 1891), 43–48, and from “A National Centennial,” New York Times, October 1, 1883; “The Newburg Centennial,” ibid., October 16, 1883; and “The Newburgh Centennial,” ibid., October 18, 1883. John H. Duncan is best remembered as the architect of Grant’s Tomb in New York City and the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Arch in Grand Army Plaza, Brooklyn. See David M. Kahn, “The Grant Monument,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 41 (October 1982): 212–31, which discusses the Tower of Victory on p. 224.

6. Elegy for the Hudson River School 1. Kevin J. Avery, “Jervis McEntee,” in American National Biography, ed. John A. Garraty and Mark C. Carnes (New York, 1999), 15: 33–35; John K. Howat et al., American Paradise: The World of the Hudson River School (New York, 1987), 280–81; Henry T. Tuckerman, Book of the Artists: American Artist Life Comprising Biographical and Critical Sketches of American Artists; Preceded by an Historical Account of the Rise & Progress of Art in America (repr., New York, 1967), 544–45; Mary Bartlett Cowdrey, American Academy of Fine Arts and American Art-Union Exhibition Record, 1816–1852 (New York, 1953), 238. Thomas Bailey Aldrich also described Pickering’s influence on the youthful McEntee in “Among the Studios, V,” Our Young Folks 2 (October 1866): 624. On James McEntee, see Nathaniel Bartlett Sylvester, History of Ulster County, New York, with Illustrations and Biographical Sketches of Its Prominent Men and Pioneers (Philadelphia, 1880), facing p. 204. 2. Avery, “Jervis McEntee”; Jervis McEntee, “Arbutus” and “The Ruin” were included in Jervis McEntee: American Landscape Painter (n.p., 1892), 27–29. 3. J. Gray Sweeney, “McEntee & Company,” in McEntee & Company (Boston, 1997), 4; “Exhibition of the National Academy, First Article,” Crayon 3 (April 1855): 118; Calvert Vaux, Villas and Cottages: A Series of Designs Prepared for Execution in the United States, 2nd ed. (1857; New York, 1864), 165–68. 4. Vaux, Villas and Cottages, 165–68; Francis R. Kowsky, Country, Park, & City: The Architecture and Life of Calvert Vaux (New York, 1998), 64–65; Jervis McEntee, diary, November 1, 1883, Jervis McEntee Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. (hereafter cited as McEntee, diary).

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5. Thomas S. Cummings, Historic Annals of the National Academy of Design . . . (Philadelphia, 1865), 303; Worthington Whittredge, The Autobiography of Worthington Whittredge, 1820–1910, ed. John I. H. Baur (1942; New York, 1969), 60; Sweeney, “McEntee & Company,” 3–13 and chronology on pp. 36–37; John K. Howat, Frederic Church (New Haven, Conn., 2005), 151–52; McEntee, diary, December 11, 1888; December 18, 1888. 6. McEntee, diary, December 11, 1888; December 18, 1888; Sweeney, “McEntee & Company,” 3–13 and chronology on pp. 36–37. 7. The verse is from Bryant’s poem “The Death of a Flower.” Weir’s “Memorial Address,” delivered at McEntee’s funeral at Rondout on January 30, 1892, was published in Jervis McEntee: American Landscape Painter, 7–13; Tuckerman, Book of the Artists, 545; John F. Weir to McEntee, October 17, 1867, Jervis McEntee Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. (hereafter cited as McEntee Papers, AAA); Whittredge, Autobiography, 60. 8. Howat, “A Climate for Landscape Painters,” in American Paradise, 49–70; Sidney Smith’s remark was published in a review of Adam Seybert’s Statistical Annals of the United States (1818), which appeared in Edinburgh Review 33 (January 1820): 79; Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Marble Faun; or, The Romance of Monte Beni (1859; New York, 1961), vi; William Cullen Bryant, “To Cole, the Painter, Departing for Europe,” in American Art, 1700–1960: Sources and Documents, ed. John W. McCoubrey (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1965), 96; Asher B. Durand, “Letters on Landscape Painting, Letter II,” Crayon 1 (January 17, 1855): 34–35; on Ruskin, see Roger B. Stein, John Ruskin and Aesthetic Thought in America, 1840–1900 (Cambridge, Mass., 1967). 9. William Truettner et al., The West as America: Reinterpreting Images of the Frontier (Washington, D.C., 1991). 10. G. W. Sheldon, American Painters, with One Hundred and Four Examples of Their Work Engraved on Wood, enl. ed. (New York, 1881), 52–53. 11. McEntee, diary, September 19, 1886; “The Academy of Design, Second Notice: The Large Room,” New-York Evening Post, April 17, 1862; “Visit to the National Academy of Design,” Continental Monthly 3 (June 1863): 717; “An Hour in the Gallery of the National Academy of Design,” Continental Monthly 5 (June 1864): 686. 12. The Bryant Festival at “The Century,” November 5, M.DCCC.LXIV (New York, 1865), 38–42; John Bigelow, William Cullen Bryant (Boston and New York, 1890), 231; “The Bryant Album,” NewYork Evening Post, January 16, 1865; curatorial files, The Century Association. 13. Henry James Jr., “On Some Pictures Lately Exhibited,” Galaxy 20 (July 1875): 95–96. 14. See George M. Frederickson, The Inner Civil War: Northern Intellectuals and the Crisis of the Union (New York, 1965); and Drew Gilpin Faust, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (New York, 2008). 15. Maria K. Naylor, comp., The National Academy of Design Exhibition Record, 1861–1900 (New York, 1973), 1: 590–93; McEntee, diary, May 25, 1873; June 19, 1874; March 19, 1873; May 21, 1873; September 20, 1876; October 4, 1876. 16. McEntee, diary, September 20, 1876. 17. “American Painters.—Jervis McEntee, N.A.,” Art Journal 2 (1876): 178; Weir to McEntee, October 4, 1876, McEntee Papers, AAA. I am grateful to Jessica Waldmann for providing me with a copy of the Art Journal article. 18. Daniel Walker Howe, “Victorian Culture in America, “in Victorian America, ed. Daniel Walker Howe (Philadelphia, 1976), 3; McEntee, diary, November 10, 1872. 19. McEntee, diary, January 17, 1873; December 15, 1880; January 18, 1881; Naylor, National Academy of Design Exhibition Record, 1: 590–93. 20. McEntee, diary, August 4, August 6, August 9, August 18, August 28, August 30, August 31, and December 15, 1880; January 18, 1881; February 4, 1885; Naylor, National Academy of Design Exhibition Record, 1: 590–93. 21. McEntee, diary, September 24, 1880; September 25, 1880. Gifford and McEntee were devoted friends, and Gifford was particularly generous. When McEntee was strapped for money, which was often, at least once he turned to Gifford for a loan, certainly in 1868 to enable him to accompany

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Gifford on an extended trip to Europe, perhaps other times as well. As Gifford was failing he instructed his sister Mary that he wanted McEntee’s debt to him forgiven. McEntee recorded in his diary that this was an act “placing me, as Mary kindly said with his brothers,” who were also indebted to Gifford. McEntee, diary, September 4, 1880. 22. “Metropolitan Museum of Art,” New York Times, October 22, 1880; undated clipping of the New York World in McEntee Papers, AAA. In sending McEntee the World review of the Gifford Memorial Exhibition Johnson conveyed his disgust with it and suggested to McEntee: “Maybe you would get somebody to horsewhip” the critic. Johnson to McEntee, December 2, 1880, McEntee Papers, AAA. 23. McEntee, “Address by Jervis McEntee,” in Gifford Memorial Meeting of the Century (New York, 1880), 49–57. 24. Eleanor Jones Harvey, “Tastes in Transition: Gifford’s Patrons,” in Hudson River School Visions: The Landscapes of Sanford R. Gifford, ed. Kevin J. Avery and Franklin Kelly (New York, 2003), 87; McEntee, diary, March 3, 1877; March 19, 1885. See also Doreen Bolger Burke and Catherine Hoover Voorsanger, “The Hudson River School in Eclipse,” in Howat, American Paradise, 71–90; Kevin J. Avery, “A Historiography of the Hudson River School,” ibid., 3–20. 25. McEntee, diary, September 16, 1885; March 3, 1877; March 19, 1885; Sheldon, American Painters, 51. 26. McEntee, diary, June 12, 1884; April 10, 1886. 27. McEntee, diary, April 13, 1883. 28. McEntee, diary, January 18, 1881; January 26, 1881. In a diary entry dated March 31, 1877, McEntee described the American landscape tradition as “genuine native expression” and contrasted it with European and European-influenced contemporary painting. 29. McEntee, diary, May 23, 1878; January 27, 1880; February 4, 1880. 30. McEntee, diary, November 8, 1886; November 11, 1886; November 18, 1886; November 30, 1886. 31. McEntee, diary, April 8, 1886; April 11, 1887; March 30, 1883. 32. McEntee, diary, March 9, 1887; March 26, 1887; May 5, 1887; February 9, 1888; February 17, 1888; March 7, 1888; “Paintings by M’Entee, N. A.,” New York Times, March 2, 1888; “Sale of M’Entee Paintings,” ibid., March 8, 1888. 33. McEntee, diary, December 26, 1889; December 28, 1889; April 3, 1890; for a more complete discussion of Winter in the Country, see Howat, American Paradise, 282–83. 34. McEntee, diary, April 19, 1890; November 1, 1890; Whittredge to McEntee, January 12, 1891, McEntee Papers, AAA; McEntee, diary, note following the artist’s last entry of November 1, 1890. 35. Weir, “Memorial Address,” 7–13, 22, 21. 36. Weir, “Memorial Address,” 22, 21; the letters from Huntington and Church were published in Jervis McEntee: American Landscape Painter, 21–22. An obituary in a Kingston newspaper lists a W. Withridge as attending McEntee’s funeral, which surely was a reference to Worthington Whittredge (copy in McEntee Papers, AAA). 37. “Sale of M’Entee Paintings,” New York Times, March 30, 1892; Naylor, National Academy of Design Exhibition Record, 1: 592. 38. John Tomsich, The Genteel Endeavor: American Culture and Politics in the Gilded Age (Stanford, Calif., 1971); John Durand, The Life and Times of Asher B. Durand (1894; Hensonville, N.Y., 2006), 201–4; Edmund C. Stedman, “Bayard Taylor: His Poetry and Literary Career,” Scribner’s Monthly 19 (December 1879): 272; Stoddard, “To Jervis McEntee, Artist,” in Poems of Richard Henry Stoddard (New York, 1880), 322. 39. McEntee, diary, June 1, 1881; March 13, 1883; July 1, 1883; March 2, 1884; August 15, 1884; August 17, 1884. 40. “Paintings by M’Entee,” New York Times, March 2, 1888; Whittredge, Autobiography, 60.

7. The Naturalist’s River 1. Elizabeth Burroughs Kelley, “John Burroughs’ Student Days at Cooperstown,” New York History 44 ( July 1963): 282; Burroughs, The Heart of Burroughs’s Journals, ed. Clara Barrus (Boston and New

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York, 1928), 88; Barrus, The Life and Letters of John Burroughs (Boston, 1925), 1: 236; Burroughs, “An Egotistical Chapter,” in Indoor Studies (1889), in The Writings of John Burroughs, Riverby edition (Boston and New York, 1904), 8: 267–68 (the latter work hereafter cited as Riverby ed.). For biographical studies of Burroughs, see Perry Westbrook, John Burroughs (New York, 1974); Edward J. Renehan Jr., John Burroughs: An American Naturalist (1992; Hensonville, N.Y., 1998); and Edward Kanze, The World of John Burroughs (1996; San Francisco, 1999). Elizabeth Burroughs Kelley provides an intimate portrait of her grandfather in John Burroughs: Naturalist (New York, 1959). James Perrin Warren interprets Burroughs, John Muir, and Theodore Roosevelt as popularizers of the natural world in John Burroughs and the Place of Nature (Athens, Ga., 2006). 2. Burroughs, Whitman: A Study (1896), Riverby ed., 16: 15; Renehan, Burroughs, 77; Barrus, Life and Letters, 1: 112–13; Burroughs, introduction to the Riverby ed., in Wake-Robin (1871), Riverby ed., 1: xiii; Burroughs, “An Egotistical Chapter,” 273. 3. Burroughs, “Birch Browsing,” in Wake-Robin, 1: 176, xiii; Burroughs, “Spring Jottings,” in Riverby (1894), Riverby ed., 9: 169; Burroughs, introduction to the Riverby ed., 1: xiii; Burroughs, “Sharp Eyes,” in Locusts and Wild Honey (1879), Riverby ed., 4: 32; Burroughs, “An Egotistical Chapter,” 277. Burroughs’s description of how he composed his essays after returning home in striking ways parallels Thomas Cole’s method of translating sketches into finished canvases. 4. [William Dean Howells], review of Wake-Robin, by John Burroughs, Atlantic Monthly 28 (August 1871): 254; New York Times, June 17, 1871. 5. Burroughs, “Autumn Tides,” in Winter Sunshine (1875), Riverby ed., 2: 119; “The Apple,” ibid., 138; Burroughs, “Another Word on Thoreau,” in Last Harvest (1922), Riverby ed., 23: 108–9. Burroughs’s other essays on Thoreau include “Henry D. Thoreau,” in Indoor Studies (1889), Riverby ed., 8: 3–47; and “Thoreau’s Wildness,” in Literary Values and Other Papers (1902), Riverby ed., 10: 217–23. 6. New York Times, January 14, 1876; Atlantic Monthly 37 (March 1876): 377–78; The Nation 22 (January 27, 1876): 66. While the Atlantic Monthly reviewer was not enthralled with Burroughs’s travel essays, James found them enchanting. See also Barrus, Life and Letters, 1: 177–78. 7. Burroughs, “House-Building,” Scribner’s Monthly 11 (January 1876): 333–41 (quotation on p. 333). See also Jeff Walker, “The roughest of shells without . . . the mother of pearls within,” ATQ, n.s., 21 (September 2007): 207–21. 8. Burroughs to Myron Benton, [1873], in Barrus, Life and Letters, 1: 167; Burroughs, “RoofTree,” in Signs and Seasons (1886), Riverby ed., 7: 263–80; Walker, “roughest of shells without,” 207–21. 9. Burroughs, “Autumn Tides,” 112; Burroughs, Heart of Burroughs’s Journals, 155, 241, 115. 10. Burroughs, “Our River,” Scribner’s Monthly 20 (August 1880): 481–93 (quotation on p. 481); Burroughs, “A River View,” in Signs and Seasons, Riverby ed., 7: 195–96; Walker, “roughest of shells without,” 215–17; Jeff Walker, “Our River: The Essay Art of John Burroughs,” Hudson River Valley Review 25 (Autumn 2008): 41–55. 11. Burroughs, Heart of Burroughs’s Journals, 179; Barrus, Life and Letters, 1: 352–59; Burroughs, “Wild Life about My Cabin,” in Far and Near (1904), Riverby ed., 11: 131–56. 12. Burroughs, “Wild Life about My Cabin,” 131. Barrus, Life and Letters, 1: 371. 13. Burroughs, “Wild Life about My Cabin,” 131–32; Renehan, John Burroughs, 254–56, passim. I am grateful to Dan Peck for pointing out the influence “Brute Neighbors” had on “Wild Life about My Cabin.” 14. Burroughs’s essay on Bergson, “A Prophet of the Soul,” was published in Under the Apple Trees (1916), Riverby ed., vol. 19; Burroughs, Camping & Tramping with Roosevelt (Boston and New York, 1907); Burroughs, “In Green Alaska,” in Far and Near, Riverby ed., 11: 1–129; Renehan, John Burroughs, passim. 15. Burroughs, “Gilbert White’s Book,” in Indoor Studies, Riverby ed., 8: 179; Burroughs, “Sharp Eyes,” 32, 33, 52; Burroughs, “Eye-Beams,” in Riverby (1894), Riverby ed., 9: 126–27; Burroughs, “The Art of Seeing Things,” in Leaf and Tendril (1908), Riverby ed., 13: 5, 7, 9, 10, 11, 12, 23. See also Charlotte Zoe Walker, ed., The Art of Seeing Things: Essays By John Burroughs (Syracuse, 1001), pp. xiii-xx; and Ralph Black, “The Imperative of Seeing: John Burroughs and the Poetics of Natural History,” in Sharp Eyes: John Burroughs and American Nature Writing, ed. Charlotte Zoe Walker (Syracuse, 2000),

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39–50. I am indebted to Dan Peck for the telling observation that the title “The Art of Seeing Things” really belies Burroughs’s claim that his essays were unmediated observations of the natural world. 16. Burroughs, “Spring Jottings,” 167; Burroughs, “Nature and the Poets,” in Pepacton (1881), Riverby ed., 5: 85–126 (quotation on p. 93); Burroughs, “Real and Sham Natural History,” Atlantic Monthly 91 (March 1903): 298–309. 17. Burroughs, “Straight Seeing and Straight Thinking,” in Leaf and Tendril, 101–15; Burroughs, “The Literary Treatment of Nature,” in Ways of Nature (1905), Riverby ed., 12: 207; Burroughs, “Gathered by the Way,” ibid., 244; Theodore Roosevelt to the Editors of the Outlook, July 3, 1907, and Roosevelt to Mark Sullivan, September 9, 1908, in The Letters of Theodore Roosevelt, ed. Elting E. Morison et al. (Cambridge, Mass., 1952), 5: 700–704, 1220–23. See also Renehan, John Burroughs, 229–39; and Douglas Brinkley, The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America (New York, 2009), 502–6. 18. Burroughs, “A Sharp Lookout,” in Signs and Seasons (1886), Riverby ed., 7: 5; Burroughs, “Art of Seeing Things,” 9; [James Russell Lowell], “Fireside Travels: Cambridge Thirty Years Ago; A Memoir Addressed to the Edelman Storg in Rome,” Putnam’s Monthly 3 (April 1854): 379–80. 19. Burroughs, “Sharp Lookout,” 3. 20. Burroughs, Heart of Burroughs’s Journals, 192–93; Barrus, Life and Letters, 1: 360, 2: 134–38, 143; [Robert Underwood Johnson], “The President’s Trip and the Forests,” Century 66 (August 1903): 634–35; Theodore Roosevelt, Outdoor Pastimes of an American Hunter (1905; New York, 1926), 372. See also Warren, John Burroughs and the Place of Nature; Jim Butler and Elaine Butler, “Kindred Spirits: The Relationship between John Burroughs and John Muir,” in Walker, Sharp Eyes, 80–92; and Renehan, John Burroughs. 21. Burroughs, “Circuit of the Summer Hills,” in Summit of the Years (1913), Riverby ed., 15: 31; Bill McKibben, ed., Birch Browsing: A John Burroughs Reader (New York, 1992), xviii; Renehan, John Burroughs, 23–27, 271–76. 22. Frank Bergon, “ ‘Sensitive to the Verge of the Horizon’: The Environmentalism of John Burroughs,” in Walker, Sharp Eyes, 19–25; Burroughs, “The Grist of the Gods,” in Leaf and Tendril, 204; Burroughs, “A Strenuous Holiday,” in Under the Maples (1921), Riverby ed., 22: 111. 23. Bergon, “Sensitive to the Verge of the Horizon,” 21–22; Burroughs, “Grist of the Gods,” 204; Stephen M. Mercier, “John Burroughs and the Hudson River Valley in Environmental History,” Hudson River Valley Review 25 (Autumn 2008): 57–77; Daniel G. Payne, “Camping, Tramping, and Lobbying: Burroughs, Muir, and Roosevelt,” unpublished paper, cited ibid., 77; Payne, Voices in the Wilderness: American Nature Writing and Environmental Politics (Hanover, N.H., 1996), 68–83. 24. Brinkley, Wilderness Warrior, 214, 265, 217–18, 369, passim; Roosevelt, Outdoor Pastimes, 320–53; Roosevelt to John Burroughs, October 2, 1905, ibid, v-vi. 25. David E. Shi, The Simple Life: Plain Living and High Thinking in American Culture (New York and Oxford, 1985), 199. Shi published Burroughs’s 1906 essay, “What Life Means to Me,” in his collection In Search of the Simple Life (Salt Lake City, 1986). 26. Burroughs, “Gilbert White’s Book,” 177. 27. William Cronon, “The Trouble With Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature,” in Out of the Woods: Essays in Environmental History, ed. Char Miller and Hal Rothman (Pittsburgh, 1997), 28–50 (quotations on pp. 40, 50); Burroughs, “New Gleanings in Old Fields,” in Field and Study (1919), Riverby ed., 20: 213; H. R. Stoneback, “John Burroughs, Regionalist for the Millennium,” in Walker, Sharp Eyes, 265–78. 28. Theodore Roosevelt, “Our Vanishing Wild Life,” Outlook, January 25, 1913, 161–62 (review of William T. Hornady’s Our Vanishing Wild Life [1913]).

8. A River in Time 1. Clarence C. Cook, “The Lordly Hudson,” Century 54 (August 1897): 483–92. 2. Ibid. See also, for example, Michael Holleran, Boston’s “Changeful Times”: Origins of Preservation & Planning in America (Baltimore, 1998); and Randall Mason, “Historic Preservation, Public Memory,

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and the Making of Modern New York City,” in Giving Preservation a History: Histories of Historic Preservation in the United States, ed. Max Page and Randall Mason (New York, 2004), 131–62. 3. The society was incorporated under Chapter 166, Laws of the State of New York, 1895, and this enabling legislation was modified in succeeding years. A. H. Green to Dear Sir, n.d. [1898], in American Scenic and Historic Preservation Society Records, Rare Books and Manuscripts Division, New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations, New York City; “To Preserve Historic Places,” New York Times, April 20, 1901. On Green, see John Foord, The Life and Public Services of Andrew Haswell Green (Garden City, N.Y., 1913); and George Mazaraki, “The Public Career of Andrew Haswell Green” (PhD diss., New York University, 1966). On the origins of the American Scenic and Historic Preservation Society, see Edward Hagaman Hall, “Our Heritage of the Picturesque,” Municipal Affairs 5 ( June 1901): 349–66. 4. A. H. Green to Dear Sir, n.d.; American Scenic and Historic Preservation Society, Annual Report to the Legislature, typescript, April 10, 1899, American Scenic and Historic Preservation Society Records. This characterization of the members of the society is based on a reading of the minutes: prospective members had to be nominated by a member of the board, and as members paid significant annual dues (in 1898, $5). Most of the names are familiar New York elites. 5. “To Commemorate the Capture of Stony Point,” New York Times, June 22, 1902; Edward Hagaman Hall, Stony Point Battle-field: A Sketch of Its Revolutionary History (New York, 1902), 26. 6. This summary of the Battle of Stony Point is largely based on Benson J. Lossing, The Pictorial Field-Book of the Revolution; or, Illustrations, by Pen and Pencil, of the History, Biography, Scenery, Relics, and Traditions of the War for Independence (New York, 1850), 2: 175–82, Hall, Stony Point Battle-field; various reports to trustees of the American Scenic and Historic Preservation Society; and “To Commemorate the Capture of Stony Point,” New York Times, June 22, 1902. Benson Lossing believed that Wayne and his men were aided by an African American slave named Pompey, who was owned by a patriot and who had cultivated the British officers while surreptitiously passing information on their activities to Washington’s staff. Lossing reported that Wayne’s troops were led to the fortification by Pompey, who knew and compromised the guards. Benjamin Quarles, in his Negro in the American Revolution (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1961) casts doubt on the role of Pompey in the attack on Stony Point. On the significance of the light infantry, see John W. Wright, “The Corps of Light Infantry in the Continental Army,” American Historical Review 31 (April 1926): 454–61. For Washington’s decision to withdraw the troops from Stony Point, see Hall, Stony Point Battle-field, 37. 7. “Celebration at Stony Point,” New York Times, July 18, 1857; “Mad Anthony’s Exploit,” ibid., July 5, 1879; “Anthony Wayne’s Exploit,” ibid., July 17, 1879; minutes, January 21, 1899, Feb. 18, 1899, American Scenic and Historic Preservation Society. 8. American Scenic and Historic Preservation Society, Annual Report to the Legislature, typescript, April 10, 1899; Report of the Committee on the Stony Point Reservation, December 9, 1899; H. K. BushBrown et al. to the Scenic & Historic Preservation Society, November 6, 190[1]; all of these sources are located in the American Scenic and Historic Preservation Society Records. 9. “Stony Point Now a State Reservation,” New York Times, July 17, 1902 (Odell is quoted in this article); Samuel W. Pennypacker, “The Capture of Stony Point,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 26 (July 1902): 360–69; Hall, Stony Point Battle-field, 40. 10. “Dedication of the Stony Point Arch,” in Edward Hagaman Hall, The Hudson-Fulton Celebration 1909: The Fourth Annual Report of the Hudson-Fulton Celebration Commission to the Legislature of the State of New York (Albany, 1910), 1: 457–75; Hughes is quoted in “Dedicate Wayne Monument,” New York Times, October 3, 1909. 11. Robert O. Binnewies, Palisades: 100,000 Acres in 100 Years (New York, 2001), 2–3; Diedrich Knickerbocker [Washington Irving], A History of New York, from the Beginning of the World to the End of the Dutch Dynasty . . . (1809; Philadelphia, 1871), 386; Bryant and Buckingham are quoted in John K. Howat, The Hudson River and Its Painters (New York, 1972), 135, 136; John Burroughs, “Primal Energies,” in Time and Change, in The Writings of John Burroughs, Riverby ed. (Boston, 1904–22), 7: 173; “The Palisades,” Leisure Hour 14 (1865): 360–61. See also Edward Hagaman Hall, “The Palisades of the Hudson River: Their Geological Origin, Attempted Destruction, and Rescue,” in American Scenic and Historic Preservation Society, Twelfth Annual Report (Albany, 1907).

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12. Clayton is quoted in “The Palisades in History,” New York Times, October 8, 1895; “Save the Palisades from Ruin,” ibid., September 29, 1895. See also Nathaniel Parker Willis, with illustrations by William H. Bartlett, American Scenery; or, Land, Lake, and River Illustrations of Transatlantic Nature (1840; Barre, Mass., 1971), 21. 13. “The Palisades Driveway,” New York Times, October 6, 1895; American Scenic and Historic Preservation Society, Fifth Annual Report, typescript, March 27, 1900, American Scenic and Historic Preservation Society Records. The role of the American Scenic and Historic Preservation Society in the battle to save the Palisades is described is “To Preserve the Palisades,” New York Times, January 5, 1900. 14. “Who Cares for the Palisades,” New York Times, March 29, 1897; “The Palisades of the Hudson,” ibid., July 29, 1895; “To Save the Palisades,” ibid., August 27, 1895; “Government Purchase of Palisades,” ibid., September 1, 1895; “Park, Not Military Post,” ibid., October 7, 1895; “Preserve the Palisades,” ibid., October 8, 1895; “The Palisades Driveway,” ibid., October 6, 1895; “To Preserve the Palisades,” ibid., September 15, 1895; “The Palisades in History,” ibid., October 8, 1895. See also Hall, “Our Heritage of the Picturesque,” 349–54. 15. “New Plan for Palisades,” New York Times, October 9, 1895; “Preserve the Palisades,” ibid., October 8, 1895; “Preserve the Palisades,” ibid., October 10, 1895; “The Palisades,” ibid., November 27, 1897. 16. “The Palisades,” New York Times, November 27, 1897; “Preserve the Palisades,” ibid., November 11, 1895. When quarrying moved north to the vicinity of Hook Mountain the New York Times reported that the vibrations caused by the blasting “are so great that dishes have been shaken on tables five miles away.” “To Save the Palisades,” ibid., January 14, 1906. 17. “To Save the Palisades,” ibid., September 23, 1897; “To Preserve the Palisades,” ibid., January 5, 1900. 18. Binnewies, Palisades, 12–18. 19. Binnewies, Palisades, 13–20; “Preserving the Hudson Palisades,” Review of Reviews 24 ( July 1901): 49–56; “To Preserve the Palisades,” New York Times, January 5, 1900. 20. Binnewies, Palisades, 19–21; “Was Mr. Morgan’s Gift,” New York Times, May 15, 1901. 21. “Goodsell Bill Hearing,” New York Times, April 3, 1902; “Vetoes Goodsell Bill,” ibid., April 15, 1902. George W. Perkins recounted the early history of the commission, Morgan’s gift, and legislative appropriations in considerable detail in his address at the dedication of Palisades Interstate Park in 1909. See “Dedication of Palisades Interstate Park,” in Hall, Hudson-Fulton Celebration 1909, 1: 394–400. See also Commissioners of the Palisades Interstate Park, Twentieth Annual Report (Trenton, 1920), 4–7; and Binnewies, Palisades, 43–44. 22. “To Save the Palisades,” New York Times, January 14, 1906; New Yorker, “Plea for Natural Scenery,” ibid., September 8, 1905; “The Movement to Save Hook Mountain,” ibid., January 27, 1907; Binnewies, Palisades, 27–28. 23. “The Palisades Driveway,” New York Times, October 6, 1895; “To Build a Palisade Drive,” ibid., January 20, 1901; Binnewies, Palisades, 140, passim. 24. Edward L. Partridge, “A National Park on the Hudson,” Outlook 87 (November 9, 1907): 521–27; “Saving the Hudson Highlands,” Century 77 (January 1909): 469–70; “The Highlands,” New York Times, March 30, 1909; “The Hudson-Fulton Highlands Reserve,” ibid., September 13, 1909; “A State Highlands Park,” ibid., January 6, 1910; John B. Marie, “Saving Hudson Scenery,” ibid., May 26, 1910; Hall, Hudson-Fulton Celebration 1909, 2: 1106–11. See also Binnewies, Palisades, 35–37. 25. “60-Mile River Park Insured to the State,” New York Times, January 6, 1910; “Harriman Park Passes to the State,” ibid., October 30, 1910; Binnewies, Palisades, 49–56. Neil Maher’s article, “ ‘A Very Pleasant Place to Build a Towne On’: An Environmental History of Land Preservation in New York’s Hudson Highlands,” Hudson Valley Regional Review 16 (September 1999): 21–39, is limited to an analysis of the Stillman family’s effort to preserve Black Rock Forest and does not examine the broader crusade to preserve the Highlands. 26. Carl Carmer, My Kind of Country (New York, 1966), 247; Hall, Hudson-Fulton Celebration 1909; Brooks McNamara, Day of Jubilee: The Great Age of Public Celebrations in New York, 1788–1909 (New Brunswick, N.J., 1997), 165–70. See also Benson John Lossing, The Hudson: From the Wilderness of

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the Sea (New York, 1866); Edgar Mayhew Bacon, The Hudson River from Ocean to Source: Historical— Legendary—Picturesque (New York, 1902); Carmer, The Hudson (New York, 1939); and Tom Lewis, The Hudson: A History (New Haven, Conn., 2005), 254–55. 27. Hall, Hudson-Fulton Celebration 1909, 1: 5–8, 15–34. 28. Ibid., 1: 5–9. See also Kathleen Eagen Johnson, The Hudson-Fulton Celebration: New York’s River Festival of 1909 and the Making of a Metropolis (New York, 2009). 29. Root is quoted in Hall, Hudson-Fulton Celebration 1909, 1: 9–10. 30. Hall, Hudson-Fulton Celebration 1909, 1: 12, 8–9, 92–104. 31. Ibid., 1: 105–15, 198–245. The Hudson-Fulton Celebration was covered extensively in newspapers throughout the city and state. The accounts are distilled and synthesized in Johnson, HudsonFulton Celebration. 32. Hall, Hudson-Fulton Celebration 1909, 1: 282–304, 174–97; “Tell City’s History in Hudson Pageant,” New York Times, September 21, 1909; “2,000,000 View Land Pageant,” ibid., September 29, 1909. 33. On the art exhibitions and the genesis of the American Wing, see Robert de Forest, preface, and the text of Henry Watson Kent and Florence N. Levy, Catalogue of an Exhibition of American Paintings, Furniture, Silver, and Other Decorative Objects MDCXXV—MDCCCXXV (New York, 1909); Hall, Hudson-Fulton Celebration 1909, 1: 174–97; “Art at Home and Abroad,” New York Times, September 12, 1909; “Art at Home and Abroad,” ibid., October 10, 1909; “The Hudson-Fulton Celebration Exhibition,” Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin 4 (May 1909): 75–76; “The Hudson-Fulton Exhibition,” ibid. 4 (October 1909): 162ff.; R. T. Haines Halsey, “Early American Rooms in the Museum,” ibid. 17 (November 1922): 6–10; Robert de Forest, “Address on the Opening of the American Wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art,” Museum of Fine Arts Bulletin 23 (February 1925): 3–4. See also Kenyon Cox, “Dutch Paintings in the Hudson-Fulton Exhibition,” Burlington Magazine 16 (December 1909): 178–84; and Wendy Kaplan, “R. T. H. Halsey: An Ideology of Collecting American Decorative Arts,” Winterthur Portfolio 17 (Spring 1982): 43–53. 34. “The Hudson-Fulton Exhibitions,” New York Times, October 31, 1909; New-York Historical Society in cooperation with the Colonial Dames of America, Official Robert Fulton Exhibition of the Hudson-Fulton Commission (New York, 1909); Hall, Hudson-Fulton Celebration 1909, 1: 174–97. 35. Hall, Hudson-Fulton Celebration 1909, 1: 120–25, 486–97; “City Illumined as Never Before,” New York Times, September 26, 1909; “Wright Aeroplane Flies over the Bay,” ibid., September 30, 1909; William Chapman Sharpe, New York Nocturne: The City after Dark in Literature, Painting, and Photography, 1850–1950 (Princeton, N.J., 2008), 133–35. 36. Hall, Hudson-Fulton Celebration 1909, 2: 890–1097, 1: 124–25; “Fulton Pageantry Shifts up the River,” New York Times, October 1, 1909; “Upper Hudson Joins in the Celebration,” ibid., October 2, 1909; “Up-Hudson Cities Take Celebration,” ibid., October 4, 1909 37. Hall, Hudson-Fulton Celebration 1909, 2: 890–1097, 1: 104, 339; “Beacons to Flash Fulton ‘GoodNight,’” New York Times, October 8, 1909; Donald C. Ringwald tells the story of the Clermont’s final disposition in Hudson River Day Line: The Story of a Great American Steamship Company (Berkeley, 1965), 120–22, excerpted in www.hrmm.org/quad/1909hudsonfulton/chapter08.html (accessed December 8, 2008). 38. Hall, Hudson-Fulton Celebration 1909, 1: 48, 12–13. 39. “For a Monument to Fulton,” New York Times, February 18, 1906; “Honor to Fulton on Historic Day,” ibid., November 15, 1907; “Fulton Memorial to Cost $2,500,000,” ibid., September 25, 1909; “Planning the Water Gate Memorial to Fulton,” ibid., October 24, 1909; “Fulton Watergate Designs Selected,” ibid, April 10, 1910; “New York’s $3,000,000 Robert Fulton Memorial,” ibid., May 22, 1910; “Water Gate Plans on View,” ibid., May 26, 1910; “Ground Broken for Hudson Monument,” ibid., July 6, 1909; “Hudson Monument Is Set Under Way,” ibid., September 28, 1909; “Moses Is Rescued from an Art Error,” ibid., July 27, 1938.

Conclusion 1. Charles Evans Hughes, quoted in Edward Hagaman Hall, The Hudson-Fulton Celebration 1909: The Fourth Annual Report of the Hudson-Fulton Celebration Commission to the Legislature of the State of New York (Albany, 1910), 1: 401.

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2. Carl Carmer, The Hudson (New York, 1939), 402–6; Carmer, My Kind of Country (New York, 1966), 250. 3. For Hudson River school artists and their houses, see William B. Rhoads, “The Artist’s House and Studio in the Nineteenth-Century Hudson Valley and Catskills,” in Charmed Places: Hudson River Artists and Their Houses, Studios, and Vistas, ed. Sandra S. Phillips and Linda Weintraub (New York, 1988), 77–97. Catalogues of important exhibitions of Hudson River School paintings include John K. Howat et al., American Paradise: The World of the Hudson River School (New York, 1987); Andrew Wilton and Tim Barringer, American Sublime: Landscape Painting in the United States, 1820–1880 (Princeton, N.J., 2002); William H. Truettner and Alan Wallach, eds., Thomas Cole: Landscape into History (New Haven, Conn., and Washington, D.C., 1994); William H. Truettner et al., The West as America: Reinterpreting Images of the Frontier, 1820–1920 (Washington, D.C., 1991); Kevin J. Avery and Franklin Kelly, eds., Hudson River School Visions: The Landscapes of Sanford R. Gifford (New York, 2003); Linda S. Ferber, ed., Kindred Spirits: Asher B. Durand and the American Landscape (Brooklyn, N.Y., 2007); and Nancy K. Anderson and Linda S. Ferber, Albert Bierstadt: Art & Enterprise (Brooklyn, N.Y., 1990). 4. Scully’s testimony is quoted in Richard C. Smardon, “The Interface of Legal and Esthetic Considerations,” in Proceedings of Our National Landscape, ed. Gary H. Elsner and Richard C. Smardon (Berkeley, 1979), 676–85. See also Tom Lewis, The Hudson: A History (New Haven, Conn., 2005), 269–82; Frances E. Dunwell, The Hudson: America’s River (New York, 2008), 279–304; and John Cronin and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., The Riverkeepers: Two Activists Fight to Reclaim Our Environment as a Basic Human Right (New York, 1997), 22–38.

Index

Note: Page numbers with an f indicate black-and-white figures; those with pl. indicate the color plates following page 82. Adams, John Quincy, 101 Adlard, H., 12f Agg, John, 13–18, 43 Albany, 6, 60, 169; map of, 4f; Post Road from, 98; railroad to, 99 allegorical painting: by Cole, 38–41, 45; by Durand, pl. 9, 92–93 Allen, Ethan, 61 Allston, Washington, 28 American Academy of the Fine Arts, 31 American Art-Union, 49, 117; and Cole, 44; and Durand, 93; and McEntee, 112 American Lyceum Society, 36–37 American (Know Nothing) Party, 96, 98, 99 American Pomological Society, 69 –70 American Scenery (Willis & Bartlett), 12f, 14, 17, 19f, 27, 32, 57, 59–64, 67, 157, 174 American Scenic and Historic Preservation Society, 3–4, 7, 109, 162, 168; Hudson memorial of, 171; Palisades project of, 157– 60; previous names of, 152; Stony Point project of, 153f, 154–56 André, John, 14, 52, 166 Anthony’s Nose (topographical feature), 11–12, 12f, 50 antirent wars, 151 Architecture of Country Houses (Downing), 71, 83, 89, 90 Arnold, Benedict, 14 Arnold, Matthew, 142 Astor, John Jacob, 68

Atlantic Monthly, 68, 135, 137 Avery, Samuel P., 129 Bacon, Edgar Mayhew, 57, 163 Ballston Spa, 23 Bancroft, George, 48f, 56, 101 Bannerman’s Island, pl. 8, 61 Barbizon school, 126 Barrett, Nathan F., 160 Bartlett, William Henry, 23, 24f; and American Scenery, 12f, 14, 17, 19f, 27, 32, 57, 59–64, 67, 157, 174 Barton, Thomas P., 82–83, 187 n22 Bartow, Maria, 33 Bartram, John, 61 Bayard, Thomas F., 109 Beach, Charles L., 25 Beacon, Mount, 16, 18, 79 –80, 169 Bear Mountain, 7, 11, 162, 175 Beaumont, Gustave de, 11, 13 Beaverwyck (Rensselaer’s house), 86 Beers, Henry E., 68 Bentley, J. C., 24f, 62 Bergon, Frank, 147 Bergson, Henri, 142 Berkeley, George, 38, 40 Bierstadt, Albert, 24, 117–19, 125, 175 Bigelow, John, 119 Birch, Thomas, 28 Bitter, Karl, 171 Blackburn, Henry, 121

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Blithewood (Donaldson’s house), 80, 81, 88 Blumin, Stuart, 97, 98 Bolles, Eugene, 167 Booth, Edwin T., 119, 127 Boughton, George H., 49 Bradley, Will, 49 Brandard, R., 21f Bremer, Fredrika, 79–81, 85–86, 89–90 brick-making, 133 Brinkley, Douglas, 147–48 Brodhead, John Romeyn, 101 Brooklyn Botanic Garden, 86 Brooks, Van Wyck, 68 Brown, J. G., 119 Bruce, Wallace, 13, 20 Bruen, George W., 30, 31 Bryant, William Cullen, 56; and Burroughs, 143; on Cole, 32–35, 40, 43, 45–46; and McEntee, 116, 119–21, 122f, 131; on Palisades, 157 Bryant, William Cullen, works of: American Landscape, 9; Among the Trees, 121, 122f; “ The Return of the Birds,” 120; “Thanatopsis,” 47, 92, 93; “The Catterskill Falls,” 62; “To an American Painter, Departing for Europe,” 33–34 Buckingham, James Silk, 11, 21, 157 Buel, Jesse, 3 Burr, Aaron, 61 Burroughs, John, 174; and Cole, 193 n3; as conservationist, 146–48, 150; and Emerson, 133– 34, 142, 143; marriage of, 135, 139, 141; on Palisades, 157; photograph of, 134f; popularity of, 7; Riverby house of, 5f, 138–40, 138f, 145; Slabsides studio of, 140–42, 141f, 145, 148–50; on Thoreau, 136, 137, 142, 193 n4; Woodchuck Lodge of, 145, 146 Burroughs, John, works of: “The Art of Seeing Things,” 143, 145; “In Green Alaska,” 142; Leaf and Tendril, 147; “Nature and the Poets,” 143; “Our River,” 139–40; “Real and Sham Natural History,” 143–44; “A River View,” 140–42; “Sharp Eyes,” 142–43; “A Sharp Lookout,” 144–45; Signs and Seasons, 140; Under the Maples, 147; Wake-Robin, 135–37, 147–48; “Wild Life about My Cabin,” 141, 142; Winter Sunshine, 136–37, 147–48 Bush-Brown, Henry Kirke, 155, 156 Buttermilk Falls, 30 Byron, Lord, 40, 67 Caldwell, Andrew J., 105 Callow, James T., 59, 62 Canajoharie and Catskill Railroad, 41, 43–45

Cardiff Giant hoax, 144 Carmer, Carl, 163, 173– 75 Carter, Enock, 107 Casilear, John W., 116, 128 Catherwood, Frederick, 84 Catskill Lyceum, 44–45 Catskill Mountain House, 9, 16, 20–25, 21f, 24f; Bartlett at, 62; Cole at, 23, 25, 37, 48–49; construction of, 20–21 Cedar Grove (Cole’s house), 5f, 6, 33 Century Association, 129, 131; Gifford memorial of, 124–25 Chambers, Thomas, 169 Church, Frederic E., 119, 175; and Free Niagara campaign, 27; and McEntee, 110, 112, 115–16, 118, 125; Olana house of, 5f, 6, 27, 128; and Olmsted, 27 Clark, Willis Gaylord, 13, 19–22 Clayton, W. Woodford, 157 Clermont replica, 165–66, 168f, 169–71 Clinton, Henry, 14, 97, 154 Clinton Institute, 111, 113 Cohoes Falls, 30 Cole, James, 30 Cole, Thomas, 17, 28–46, 116, 174; biographies on, 28; Bryant on, 32–35, 40, 43, 45–46; and Burroughs, 193 n3; at Catskill Mountain House, 23, 25, 37, 48–49; Cedar Grove house of, 5f, 6, 33; as conservationist, 35–36, 41–46, 131, 175; Cooper on, 33, 40; daguerreotype of, 29f; death of, 45–46, 92, 93; and Durand, 31–33, 47, 116; marriage of, 33; poetry of, 35–36, 41–43; on “sanctified landscape,” 1, 13–14, 100–101, 117, 172; trip to Europe by, 33–35; trip up the Hudson River valley by, 30–31; on utilitarianism, 37, 43 Cole, Thomas, works of: The Course of Empire series, pl. 2–6, 38–41, 43, 45; The Cross of the World, 45; A Distant View of the Falls of Niagara, 33, 34; “Essay on American Scenery,” 1, 7, 36–38, 43–45, 131; Falls of Kaaterskill, pl. 1, 31, 32; Garden of Eden, 33; Lake with Dead Trees (Catskill), 31; River in the Catskills, 43–46, 44f; Storm Composition, 30; Trees, 30; View from Mount Holyoke, 32; A View of Fort Putnam, 14, 30, 31; View of Schroon Mountain, 32; The Voyage of Life, 45; White Mountains, New Hampshire, 33, 34 Colman, William A., 31, 119 Colonial Dames of America, 167 Columbus, Christopher, 51, 68 conservationism, 25, 26, 173–74; Burroughs on, 146–48, 150; Cole on, 35–38, 41–46, 131, 175;

I NDEX

Cooper on, 182 n18; Cronon on, 149; Green on, 153; McEntee on, 131; Muir on, 146; Roosevelt on, 146–48, 150, 159–60; Thoreau on, 182 n18. See also Nature, culture versus Cook, Clarence C., 151–52, 157 Cooke, Edna, 49 Cooper, James Fenimore: on Cole, 33, 40; as conservationist, 182 n18; death of, 92; popularity of, 7; portrait of, 56 Cooper, James Fenimore, works of: Home as Found, 10; The Last of the Mohicans, 33; The Pioneers, 8–9, 25; The Spy, 2, 100, 182 n18 Copley, John Singleton, 124 Corlear, Antony van, 11, 12 Cornwallis, Charles, 162 Corot, Camille, 124, 126 Course of Empire (Cole), pl. 2–6, 38–41, 43, 45 Cousen, C., pl. 14, 157 Coykendall, Sam, 130 Cozzens’ Landing, 12–13 Cranch, Christopher Pearse, 85 Crayon, Geoffrey, 48–49, 52, 54, 183 n2. See also Irving, Washington Crayon, The (periodical), 113, 117 Cronon, William, 149 Cropsey, Jasper Francis, 26, 157 Cummings, Thomas S., 115 Cunningham, Ann Pamela, 3 Currier, Nathaniel C., 54, 55f, 174 Curtis, George William, 22, 23, 69, 79, 179 n11, 186 n15 Curtiss, Glen, 169, 171 Dans Kamer (topographical feature), 16–17, 50 Darley, Felix O. C., 48f, 49, 56–57 Darwin, Charles, 142 Daughters of the American Revolution, 156 Davies, Jane B., 88–89 Davis, Alexander Jackson, 74, 77, 81–85, 88–89, 95 Davis, Gilbert, 53 de Forest, Robert W., 166–67 Delaware and Hudson Canal, 111 DeWint, Caroline, 76, 85 Dixey, George, 30 Donaldson, Robert, 71, 80, 81, 88 Donaldson, Susan Gaston, 81 Doughty, Thomas, 28 Downing, Andrew Jackson, 1–2, 69–91, 99–100; and Burroughs, 137–39; on Catskill Mountains, 20; as conservationist, 174; daguerreotype of, 70f; death of, 91, 92; and Dwight, 15; and

Ehlers, 187 n22; and Irving, 17, 52, 54; marriage of, 76, 85; monument to, 69–70; Newburgh house of, 5f, 69, 76–78, 77f, 78f; partners of, 64, 96; popularity of, 7; on tourism, 10; Willis on, 90 Downing, Andrew Jackson, works of: The Architecture of Country Houses, 71, 83, 89, 90; Cottage Residences, 71, 88–89; Fruits and Fruit Trees of America, 71; Treatise on the Theory and Practice of Landscape Gardening, 18, 27, 52, 54, 71–81, 73f– 75f, 87–90 Downing, Charles, 71 Drake, Joseph Rodman, 62 Duncan, John H., 109 Dunlap, William, 31, 34, 35 Dunton, John, 60 Durand, Asher B.: and Cole, 31–33, 47, 116; and McEntee, 118–19, 130 Durand, Asher B., works of: American Landscape, 9; Kindred Spirits, 47; Landscape —Scene from “ Thanatopsis,” pl. 9, 92–93; “Letters on Landscape Painting,” 117 Dutch Reformed Church, 95 Dwight, Theodore, Jr., 36, 60 Dwight, Timothy, 12, 15, 17, 43; on Catskill Mountain House, 20; travelogue of, 60 Early Spring (McEntee), pl. 12, 120 economic development, 7, 17–18, 25–26, 106–7, 173–76; Cole on, 37–46, 175; Cook on, 151– 52, 157; Cooper on, 182 n18; McEntee on, 131; Thoreau on, 182 n18. See also Nature, culture versus Edison, Thomas, 142 Ehlers, Hans J., 187 n22 Elgin Botanic Garden, 86 Ellett, Elizabeth Fries, 22 Ellis, Joseph, 103 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 45, 48f, 56; and Burroughs, 133–34, 142, 143 Empire State Society, 155 environmentalism. See conservationism Erie Canal, 23, 30, 94 Erie Railroad, 95–96 Escosura, Ignacio de Leon y, 121 Esopus. See Kingston Evarts, William M., 109 Falls of Kaaterskill (Cole), pl. 1, 31, 32 Featherstonhaugh, George W., 33 Firestone, Harvey, 142 Fish, Hamilton, 105

201

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Fishkill Landing, 16, 18 Fitz, John, Jr., 49 Flad, Harvey, 98 Ford, Henry, 142, 146, 170 Fowler, John, 10–11, 13, 21 Fowler, Orson Squire, 173 Free Niagara campaign, 27 Fulton, Robert, 9, 61, 167–69; centennial of, 7, 162–72; memorials to, 163, 171; steamship of, 165–66, 168f, 169–71 Gibbons v. Ogden, 9 Gifford, Mary, 123 Gifford, Sanford R., 24–25, 119, 157, 175; and McEntee, 110, 115, 123–25, 130, 191 n21; memorial to, 124–25; retrospective of, 124 Gilmor, Robert, 32, 38 Glenmary (Willis’s house), 59 Goodwin, Francis, 76 Gothic Revival style, 55, 72, 76, 77f, 87–89, 92–93 Graceful style, 72–73, 73f Grand Canyon, 118, 142, 145, 175 Green, Andrew Haswell, 152–53, 155, 158, 160, 162 Greenough, Horatio, 35 Grey Day in Hill Country (McEntee), pl. 10, 116 Griffen, Clyde, 98 Half Moon replica, 164–66, 165f, 168f, 169–71 Hall, Edward Hagaman, 155, 156, 163, 169–71 Halleck, Fitz-Greene, 56 Hamilton, James Alexander, 86 Hancock, John, 107 Harley, Joseph S., 122f Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, 52, 55f, 64 Harriman, W. Averell, 162 Hart, William, 49 Harvey, Eleanor Jones, 125 Harvey, George, 51, 53 Hasbrouck house, 2–3, 92, 103–5 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 117 Hayward, Edward F., 67–68 Headley, Joel T., 104, 109 Healy, George, 115 Hewitt, Abram S., 160 Highland Preservation Commission, 161–62, 174. See also Hudson Highlands Hill, John, 14, 28, 43 Hinton, John Howard, 34 Hoffman, Matilda, 49 Hogarth, William, 72 Holley, O. L., 14 Home Journal (periodical), 57, 63, 67

Hook Mountain, 161 Horticultural Association of the Valley of the Hudson, 3 Horticulturist (periodical), 27, 71, 83, 89 Hosack, David, 18, 86 Hosmer, Charles B., Jr., 105 Hovey, C. M., 77–78 Howat, John K., 28, 117 Howe, Daniel Walker, 104, 123 Howe, William, 103 Hubbard, Richard William, 123 Hudson-Fulton Celebration (1909), 7, 162–72, 165f, 168f Hudson Highlands, 10–17, 61–62, 151, 175; and Anthony’s Nose, 11–12, 12f, 50; Bannerman’s Island in, pl. 8, 61; Bruce on, 20; Buckingham on, 11, 13; Burroughs on, 139; Cole on, 29–31; Downing on, 80; Dwight on, 15; historical significance of, 107, 109, 154; Irving on, 69, 154; map of, 5f; preservation of, 161–62, 174; as tourist destination, 10; Willis on, 61–63, 67 Hudson Monument Committee, 171 Hudson River Port Folio (Hill & Wall), 14, 28, 43 Hudson River Railroad, 99 Hughes, Charles Evans, 156, 169, 171, 173 Humboldt, Alexander von, 175 Huntington, Daniel, 49, 119, 130 Hyde Park, 18, 19f, 62, 86 ice industry, 133 Idlewild ( Willis’s house), 5f, 57, 63–68, 65f, 66f immigrants, 94, 96–99, 120, 158 impressionism, 126 improvement. See economic development Irving, Washington, 47–57, 105, 166, 169, 174; on Catskill Mountains, 18–19, 24–25; Darley’s painting of, 48f, 56–57; death of, 92; and Downing, 17, 52, 54, 69–71; illustrators of, 49; on Palisades, 156–57; popularity of, 7; pseudonyms of, 47; on railroads, 56; Sunnyside house of, pl. 7, 6, 48f, 51–57, 55f, 86; and Willis, 47, 57–58, 64, 67, 68 Irving, Washington, works of: A Book of the Hudson, 47, 48, 68; History of New York, 6, 11–12, 16–17, 48–50, 50f, 68; “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” 6, 11–12, 48, 49, 54, 166, 178 n8, 183 n3; “Rip Van Winkle,” 6, 11–12, 20, 48–49, 93–94, 166, 169, 178 n8, 183 n3 Ives, James I., 54, 55f, 174 Jackson, Andrew, 40 James, Henry, 120

I NDEX

Jay, John, 107 Jefferson, Thomas, 60, 101 Johnson, Eastman, 115, 119, 124, 128–29 Johnson, Robert Underwood, 146 Johnson, William, 60 Josselyn, John, 60 Juet, Robert, 61 Kaaterskill Clove, 20, 21, 33 Kaaterskill Falls, 9, 21, 22; Bryant’s poem on, 62; Cole’s painting of, pl. 1, 31, 32; Laurel House at, 25 Kalm, Peter, 61 Kasson, Joy, 35, 40 Kelley, Elizabeth Burroughs, 134 Kemble, Gouverneur, 54, 56 Kensett, John F., 49, 110, 115, 119, 124 Kieft, Wilhelmus, 19 King Philip’s War, 61 Kingston, 18, 94, 96–98, 131; founder of, 169; historic sites in, 109; maps of, 4f, 5f; original name of, 14, 96 Knapp, Samuel L., 61 Knapp, Uzal, 92 Knickerbocker, Diedrich, 16, 52, 183 n2; caricatures of, 50f, 164, 167f; and History of New York, 6, 11–12, 16–17, 48–50, 50f, 68. See also Irving, Washington Know Nothing (American) Party, 96, 98, 99 Kosciusko, Thaddeus, 14, 60–61 Lafayette, Marquis de, 10, 166; Hudson River tour of, 101, 104–5, 189 n16 landscape gardening, 87; of Blithewood, 81; of Montgomery Place, 83–85; of Riverby, 139; styles of, 71–73, 73f, 74f; of Sunnyside, 53–54. See also Downing, Andrew Jackson landscape tourism, 9, 30, 32, 80 “Legend of Sleepy Hollow” ( Irving), 6, 11–12, 48, 49, 54, 166, 178 n8, 183 n3 Leutze, Emanuel, 49, 119 Levasseur, Auguste, 10 Lewis, Tom, 163 Lewis and Clark expedition, 28, 117 Lindley, John, 74 Livingston, Louise, 82–83 Livingston, Robert R., 9 Livingston Manor, 86 Locust Grove (DeWint’s house), 85 Loder, C. L., 164–65 Long, William J., 144 Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, 56, 115, 143

Longworth, Nicholas, 79 Lossing, Benson John, 14, 18, 101–3, 109, 163; on Battle of Stony Point, 195 n6; on Catskill Mountains, 20 Lossing, Benson John, works of: Pictorial FieldBook of the Revolution, 14, 52, 102–4; “Stony Point and Verplanck’s Point,” 153f; “Washington’s Head-Quarters at Newburgh,” 102f Loudon, John Claudius, 71, 76 Louisiana Purchase, 28, 117 Lowell, James Russell, 145 lyceum movement, 37, 182 n17 MacMonnies, Frederick, 49 Magonigle, H. Van Buren, 171 Manifest Destiny, 117–18 Marcy, Mount, 4f, 63 Marie, John B., 162 Mariposa Big Tree Gove, 27 Martineau, Harriet, 20–21, 60, 62 McEntee, James, 111 McEntee, Jervis, 24, 110–32; biography of, 119; and Bryant, 116, 119–21, 122f, 131; and Church, 110, 112, 115–16, 118, 126; death of, 116, 129–30; and Durand, 118–19, 131; European trip of, 115, 126; and Gifford, 110, 115, 123–25, 130, 191 n21; house of, 5f, 113–15, 114f, 127, 128; on impressionism, 126; marriage of, 113, 125; photograph of, 111f; poetry of, 112–13; on Washington’s Newburgh headquarters, 107 McEntee, Jervis, works of: Autumn, 120; Early Spring, pl. 12, 120; The Fire of Leaves, pl. 11, 118–19; Grey Day in Hill Country, pl. 10, 116; Melancholy Days, 116, 118, 119; Mt. Tahawas, Adirondacks, 119; Over the Hills and Far Away, 127; Winter in the Country, 129; Winter Storm, pl. 13, 125–26; The Woods and Fields in Autumn, 127 McEntee, Sara, 129, 130 McKibben, Bill, 146 McNamara, Brooks, 163 Mercier, Stephen M., 147 Merrill, Frank T., 49 Metropolitan Museum of Art, 124, 125; during Hudson-Fulton Celebration, 166–68 Mexican War, 106 Miller, Angela, 40 Miller, Perry, 45, 178 n8 Monell, John J., Mrs., 106–7 Montgomery, Janet Livingston, 18, 81–82 Montgomery, Richard, 18

203

204

I NDEX

Montgomery Place, 18, 20, 81–85, 82f, 84f Moran, Thomas, 24, 118, 175 Morgan, J. P., 160, 162 Morris, George P., 26, 56–59, 63 Morse, Samuel F. B., 99 Moser, Barry, 49 Motley, John L., 101 Mount Holyoke, 32, 60, 61 Muir, John, 142, 145–46 Myers, Kenneth, 9, 23 National Academy of Design, 26, 36, 123; and McEntee, 113, 115, 116, 118 Nature, culture versus, 7, 10, 17–18, 33, 158–59; and Cole, 29–30, 32. See also conservationism; economic development Neagle, John, 28 Newburgh, 6, 18, 94–96; Downing’s residence at, 69, 76–78, 77f, 78f; Hudson-Fulton Celebration in, 169; maps of, 4f, 5f; Washington’s headquarters at, 2–3, 80, 92, 102f, 103–9, 108f Newburgh Conspiracy, 103 New Jersey Federation of Women’s Clubs, 159–61 New Jersey Forestry Association, 158 New-York Mirror (periodical), 16, 57, 58, 63 Niagara Falls, 21, 27, 34, 60 Nicola, Louis, 103 Noble, Louis Legrand, 28–29, 31, 34, 183 n3 North, Ursula, 135, 139, 141 Nutt, John J., 108 Nygren, Edward J., 28 O’Callaghan, Edmund B., 101 Odell, Benjamin B., Jr., 155, 160 O’Donovan, William Rudolph, 109 Olana (Church’s house), 5f, 6, 27, 128 Olmsted, Frederick Law, 26–27, 171, 180 n36 Olmsted, John, 26 Oram, William, 30 Palisades, 56, 152; map of, 5f; pictures of, pl. 14, 157; writers on, 156–57 Palisades Interstate Park Commission, 7, 160, 162, 173, 175 Panic of 1873, 115, 120 Parkman, Francis, 101 Parmentier, André, 18, 86 Parrish, Maxfield, 49 Parsons, Samuel, Jr., 155 Partridge, Edward L., 161–62

Paulding, James Kirke, 56 Paxton Boys’ massacre (1763), 60 Payne, Daniel G., 147 Peale, Titian R., 28 Peekskill, 4f, 5f, 11, 62 Pencillings by the Way (Willis), 58, 59, 67 Pennypacker, Samuel W., 155–56 Perine, Lolita, 49 Perkins, George W., 7, 160, 174, 175 Pickering, Henry, 111–12 Picturesque style, 72–73, 74f Pine Orchard hotel, 9, 16, 23–24 Plochman, Henry A., 183 n3 Pompey (slave), 195 n6 Poughkeepsie, 94, 98–99; Hudson-Fulton Celebration in, 169; maps of, 4f, 5f; museums of, 107 Prescott, William H., 101 progress. See economic development Puritans, 61 Putnam, Fort, 14, 30, 31 Putnam, Haven, 121 Putnam, Israel, 102 Putnam, Rufus, 14 Quarles, Benjamin, 195 n6 Quidor, John, 49 Rackham, Arthur, 49 railroad(s), 10, 92, 95–96, 120; to Adirondacks, 23; to Albany, 99; in Catskills, 41, 43–45; Irving on, 56; Willis on, 63–64 Reed, Luman, 37–38, 41, 43, 182 n18 Renehan, Edward, 135, 146 Rensselaer, William P., 86 Repton, Humphry, 71 Richards, T. Addison, 13, 32, 49; on Catskill Mountain House, 22–23; on Irving’s Sunnyside, 52, 54, 56; on Kaaterskill Falls, 22–23; on Willis’s Idlewild, 64–67; “ Up the Glen, from the Foot-Bridge,” 66f Richardson, G. K., 19f, 50f Richardson, Judith, 178 n8 “Rip Van Winkle” ( Irving), 6, 11–12, 20, 48–49, 93–94, 166, 169, 178 n8, 183 n3 Riverby (Burrough’s house), 5f, 138–40, 138f, 145 Robertson, Bruce, 28 Robinson, Solon, 100 Rockefeller, John D., 161, 162 Rogers, John, 49, 128 Roosevelt, Theodore, 142, 144; as conservationist, 146–48, 150, 159–60

I NDEX

Root, Elihu, 164 Roundout ( N.Y.), 97–98; McEntee at, 111, 113, 118 Rousseau, Theodore, 124 Ruskin, John, 117 Sage, Russell, Mrs., 167 Saratoga, 14, 23, 61 Sawyer, Gertrude, 113, 125 Scenic Hudson Preservation Conference, 175 Schussele, Christian, 48f, 56–57 Schutt, Peter, 22 Scott, Lenora Cranch, 79 Scott, Winfield, 106 Scully, Vincent, 175–76 Sears, John, 9 Sedgwick, Catharine, 80 Seton, Ernest Thompson, 144 Seven Years’ War, 60 Sharp, Dallas Lore, 144 Shaw, Joshua, 28 Sheldon, George W., 118, 126, 127 Shi, David, 148 Siegel, Nancy, 34 Slabsides (Burroughs’s studio), 140–42, 141f, 145, 148–50 Smillie, James, 45 Smith, Henry Wright, 58f Smith, Sidney, 10 Society for the Preservation of Scenic and Historic Places and Objects, 152–53 Society of American Artists, 126 Sons of the American Revolution, 155, 167 Sparks, Jared, 101 Spring, Marcus, 80–81 The Spy (Cooper), 2, 100, 182 n18 Stedman, Edmund Clarence, 121, 131 Stevens, Edwin A., 160 Stoddard, A. H., 166 Stoddard, John H., 158 Stoddard, Richard Henry, 121, 125, 130–31 Stone, William Leete, 22, 23 Stony Point, 5f, 153f; battle of, 154, 166, 195 n6; preservation of, 154–56, 161 Storm King Mountain, 10, 15, 139, 175–76 Storrow, Sarah, 53, 55 Stuyvesant, Peter, 11, 16–17, 50 styles: architectural, 55, 72, 76, 77f, 87–89, 92–93; landscape gardening, 71–73, 73f, 74f Sugarloaf Mountain, 15 Sunnyside (Irving’s house), pl. 7, 6, 48f, 51–57, 55f, 86

Suydam, James A., 116 Sweeting, Adam, 56 Tappan Zee, on Hudson River, 5f, 6, 7, 53–56 Tarrytown, 4f, 5f, 51, 54–55 Taylor, Bayard, 130–31 Temple Hill, 18, 101, 103, 104, 107 Thoreau, Henry David, 143; Burroughs on, 136, 137, 142, 193 n4; as conservationist, 182 n18 Thunder Hill, 11 Ticonderoga, Fort, 61 Tilden, Samuel J., 152–53 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 11 Tompkins, Watson, 155 Tomsich, John, 131 Torrey, Bradford, 144 tourism, 25–27; guidebooks for, 9, 14, 23; infrastructure for, 9, 10; landscape, 9, 22–25, 30, 32, 80 Tower of Victory (Newburgh, N.Y.), 108f, 109 Treatise on the Theory and Practice of Landscape Gardening (Downing), 18, 27, 52, 54, 71–81, 73f– 75f, 87–90 Trollope, Frances, 13 Troy, 169 Truettner, William, 117 Trumbull, John, 31 Trustees of Scenic and Historic Places and Objects, 152, 155 Tuckerman, Henry T., 56, 112, 116 Tweed, William M., 152 United States Hotel (Newburgh), 95 utilitarianism, 37, 43 van Corlear, Antony, 11, 12 Van Gaasbeek, Abraham, 109 Vassar, Matthew, 99 Vaux, Bowyer, 128 Vaux, Calvert, 96, 121; Idlewild house plans by, 64, 65f; McEntee cottage plans by, 113–15, 114f; and Riverside Park, 171 Verplanck, Gulian C., 104–5, 109 Verplanck’s Point, 153f, 154 Virtue, George, 59, 60, 62 Voorhees, Foster M., 159–60 Wadsworth, Daniel, 33 Wake-Robin (Burroughs), 135–37, 147–48 Wall, William Guy, 13, 28, 43 Wallach, Alan, 31, 40, 43

205

206

I NDEX

Wallis, R., pl. 8, 61 War of 1812, 61 Washington, George, 166; biographies of, 68, 101; “Circular Letter to the States” by, 103–4; monuments to, 106–9, 108f; Mount Vernon estate of, 3; and Newburgh Conspiracy, 103; Newburgh headquarters of, 2–3, 5f, 80, 92, 102f, 103–9, 108f; on Stony Point’s importance, 154 Washington, D.C., 60; Downing monument in, 69–70; National Mall in, 90, 106 Wayne, Anthony, 107, 154–56, 195 n6 Wayne, William, 156 Wayne Monument Association, 155 Weir, John F., 115, 116, 121, 125 West Park, 5f, 133 West Point, 12–15, 17, 30, 61–62; Kosciuszko Monument at, 60–61; and Newburgh monument, 105 Whig Party, 104 White, Gilbert, 142, 148–49 White, Richard Grant, 149 White Mountains (N.H.), 23, 33, 34, 60, 110 Whitman, Walt, 135, 137, 140, 142 Whittier, John Greenleaf, 143 Whittredge, Worthington, 24, 115, 116, 125, 128–30

Willis, Nathaniel Parker, 18, 57–68, 92; biographies of, 68, 185 n18; on Catskill Mountain House, 20, 21, 23; on Downing, 90; Glenmary house of, 59; Idlewild house of, 5f, 57, 63–68, 65f, 66f; and Irving, 47, 57–58, 64, 67, 68; on Palisades, 157; popularity of, 7; portrait of, 56, 58f Willis, Nathaniel Parker, works of: American Scenery, 12f, 14, 17, 19f, 27, 32, 57, 59–64, 67, 157, 174; The Convalescent, 67; Hurrygraphs, 63, 67; Letters from under a Bridge, 59; Out-doors at Idlewild, 67; Paul Fane, 67; Pencillings by the Way, 58, 59, 67 Wilson, John, 41 Winter Storm (McEntee), pl. 13, 125–26 Winter Sunshine (Burroughs), 136–37, 147–48 Withers, Frederick C., 78f, 90, 96 Woodchuck Lodge, 145, 146, 149 Wright, Wilbur, 169, 172 Wyeth, N. C., 49 Yellowstone National Park, 118, 142, 148, 175 Yosemite Valley, 27, 118, 142, 145, 146, 175 Zenger, John Peter, 166