Year: 2022

Ocean Bank, Stonington, Connecticut

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The First National Bank building, formerly the Ocean Bank, on the north side of Cannon Square in Stonington, in November 1940. Photo by Jack Delano, courtesy of the Library of Congress, FSA/OWI Collection.

The scene in 2021:

The first photo was taken in November 1940 by Jack Delano, a noted photographer who was employed by the Farm Security Administration in the late 1930s and early 1940s. In this capacity, he was part of a team of photographers who traveled around the country, documenting life in America during the Great Depression. He was in Connecticut during the fall of 1940, where he visited a number of cities and towns, including here in Stonington. His caption for this photo is simply, “A bank for sale in Stonington, Connecticut,” and he perhaps chose this subject as a way of representing the effects of the Depression on the once-prosperous whaling and fishing port.

Nearly a century before its demise in the Great Depression, the First National Bank of Stonington had its origins in 1851, with the incorporation of the Ocean Bank. This small Greek Revival bank building was constructed around this time, and the bank’s first president was Charles P. Williams, a former whaling ship captain. Williams had gained considerable wealth in the whaling industry, and he went on to further expand his fortune through real estate speculation. By the time he died in 1879, he was said to have been the wealthiest man in eastern Connecticut, with an estate valued at around $3 million.

In the meantime, the Ocean Bank became the First National Bank of Stonington in 1865, and it would remain in business here in this building for the next 75 years. However, the bank ultimately closed in February 1940, leaving the town of Stonington without any financial institutions. The bank’s president at the time, Judge J. Rodney Smith, explained in newspaper accounts that, although the bank itself was financially sound, the business conditions in town made the bank unprofitable for investors. He apparently did not cite specific reasons for this, but a likely cause was the ongoing Great Depression, along with the recent hurricane in September 1938, which battered coastal Connecticut.

As the sign in the first photo shows, the bank building was still for sale when Jack Delano took the photo some nine months after the bank closed. The building would ultimately be acquired by the Stonington Historical Society in 1942. The organization originally intended to turn the building into a museum and headquarters, but over the years it has instead been used as a rental property. Today, the historical society still owns the building, which has remained well-preserved in its 19th century appearance. It has also retained its original use as a bank, and it is currently a branch of Dime Bank, as shown on the sign on the left side in the 2021 photo.

Boston and Albany Railroad Arch Bridge, Becket, Mass

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An early 20th century postcard showing the view looking east along the Boston and Albany Railroad, with a stone arch bridge on the left side and the Westfield River on the right. Image from author’s collection.

The scene in 2021:

The first railroads in the United States were constructed starting in the late 1820s. These were mostly concentrated in the northeast, and they tended to be relatively short lines that linked neighboring cities. Here in New England, Boston soon emerged as an important railroad hub, and by the mid-1830s it had three different lines that radiated outward as far as Lowell, Providence, and Worcester. However, railroad investors had far more ambitious plans, including one proposal that would extended the line west of Worcester all the way to Albany.

Throughout the colonial era, and into the early 19th century, Boston had been one of the most important seaports in the present-day United States. However, as settlers moved west, and as the country acquired new territory, Boston found itself on the far eastern edge of a nation that was rapidly expanding westward. The opening of the Erie Canal in 1825 further threatened Boston by linking New York City with the Midwest, making it the primary seaport for trade with the inland regions.

As early as 1826, the Massachusetts state legislature had begun exploring the possibility of a railroad from Albany to Boston. This would prevent Boston from becoming economically isolated from the rest of the country, by providing an alternate route to the sea for goods transported along the Erie Canal. The state subsequently hired prominent civil engineer James F. Baldwin to examine potential routes through the state. The most promising was a southerly route, which would head west from Worcester through Springfield and Pittsfield before crossing into New York. This is, more or less, the route that would ultimately be opened a little over a decade later.

To achieve this goal, the Western Railroad was incorporated in 1833, although construction work did not start until 1837. The eastern half of the railroad, from Worcester to Springfield, was relatively easy to build, and it opened on October 1, 1839. However, the western portion, which crossed the mountains of the Berkshires, was a far more challenging engineering feat. By this point, railroad technology was still in its infancy, and there were still significant questions about the ability of steam locomotives to operate on steep grades. Some doubted whether a locomotive could handle grades greater than one percent (one foot of vertical rise for every hundred feet of track), and many early railroads used steam-powered inclined planes to pull trains up steep sections of the route. However, any crossing of the Berkshires would require consistent grades in excess of one percent, in some places even exceeding 1.5 percent.

To reach the divide between the Connecticut River and Housatonic River watersheds, the route of the railroad followed the Westfield River to the west of Springfield. In the town of Huntington, the river splits into three main branches, with the railroad continuing upstream along the west branch. From there, the river valley becomes increasingly narrow and winding, particularly in the last 13 miles from Chester to the watershed divide in Washington.

In order to oversee this project, the railroad hired George Washington Whistler as chief engineer. An 1819 graduate of West Point, Whistler was one of the nation’s leading civil engineers, and he was involved in the construction of many early railroads. He would go on to earn international fame from his accomplishments here on the Western Railroad, and Czar Nicholas I of Russia subsequently hired him to build the Saint Petersburg–Moscow Railway. However, Whistler’s fame would ultimately be eclipsed by his son, the prominent artist James Abbott McNeill Whistler, who was a young child living with his family in Springfield when George Washington Whistler built the Western Railroad.

For Whistler, the most difficult part of the project would be the 13 miles between Chester and Washington, where the railroad rose in elevation from 600 feet in Chester to 1,459 feet at the watershed divide. This was a serious challenge, given the concerns about the technical limitations of steam locomotives, but Whistler also had to build this railroad within the confines of a narrow, sinuous river gorge. This meant the railroad would require a series of deep rock cuts and high embankments, along with repeated crossings of the river, in order to maintain a reasonable grade. Even so, the finished railroad would have a six-mile section with an average grade of 1.51 percent, and a maximum grade of 1.57 percent.

Probably the most distinctive feature of this section of the railroad is its many bridges. The railroad crossed the river a total of 21 times in these 13 miles, and ten of these bridges were masonry arch bridges, including the one shown here in these two photos. The original intent had been to use simpler bridges with rubble masonry abutments, but these would have been vulnerable to spring flooding, so the railroad opted for more substantial arch bridges. This required excavating down to bedrock to anchor the abutments, and it also meant bringing in quarried stone from elsewhere, since the local stone proved to be of inferior quality. This was a significant expense for the railroad, as these quarried blocks—which weighed upwards of a thousand pounds each—had to be transported along rough roads to these remote work sites along the river.

Aside from the bridges, other labor-intensive work included the many cuts and fills along the railroad bed. A little to the east of the bridge in this photo, just beyond the curve in the distance, is a deep rock cut, measuring about 575 feet long and 30 to 40 feet deep. In the days before dynamite and other high explosives, this work would have been done using only black powder and hand tools such as picks and shovels. Beyond this rock cut was an embankment, with a long stone retaining wall that had to be built to keep the railroad bed from sliding off the steep cliff down to the river. A few miles to the west of the stone bridges, at the highest point of the railroad in the town of Washington, was an even larger rock cut. It was about a half mile long, and 55 feet deep at its deepest point.

All of this work, including the unanticipated need for stone arch bridges, led to significant cost overruns for the Western Railroad. In 1838, prior to the start of construction, the cost of building section of the railroad to the west of the Connecticut River was estimated at $2.1 million. The actual cost turned out to be a little over $2.5 million, including nearly $1 million just to build a 13-mile section here in the Berkshires. The single most expensive mile was just a little to the east of the scene in these photos, between mile markers 127 and 128. Within that mile, the railroad crossed the river three times on large stone arch bridges, and cost nearly $220,000. The company’s January 1841 annual report explained some of the reasons for these added expenses, quoting the engineer (presumably Whistler), who wrote about the challenges of building the railroad through this section along the Westfield River:

With the limited knowledge of the character of the stream here, at the time of the original estimate, and, judging of its effects in times of freshets, from the comparatively unstable character of the structures then existing on the turnpike, occupying almost the immediate line of the rail-road, in tolerable security, it was then judged that structures of the more ordinary kind, with common rubble masonry for bridge abutments and side walls, would give ample security to the road, and such was estimated for. But the experience in time of our personal knowledge of the effects of freshets in this stream, proved the necessity of abandoning such structures, and resorting to others of a more costly and permanent character. Stone arches of large openings were adopted, requiring masonry of a very different and superior character to support them;—rendering it necessary too to resort to great depths in search of permanent rock foundations below the bed of the stream. This was the more readily acceded to at the time, from the belief (as every appearance indicated) that materials suitable for such structures would be obtained from the rock cuts in their immediate vicinity. But soon after they were commenced, and the character of the stone exposed by the opening of the cuts, it proved entirely unfit; and the contractor was compelled to resort to quarrying and hauling the stone from a distance, and over roads almost impassible;—thus rendering it necessary to increase his prices to meet this additional cost.

The work of actually building the railroad was largely done by immigrant laborers, primarily the Irish. At one point there were several thousand workers employed here, and this is evident in the 1840 census, which was conducted in the midst of the railroad construction. In a sort of precursor to the later railroad boom towns that would follow the First Transcontinental Railroad several decades later, the town of Middlefield—located on the north side of the river—saw a particularly dramatic increase in population. From a population of 720 in 1830, Middlefield grew to 1,717 in 1840, with the census noting that 686 were from “Middlefield proper,” while the rest were counted as “extraneous population.”

These workers generally lived in temporary shantytowns along the river, and the census indicates that most were in their 20s or 30s, with few over the age of 40. The 1840 census does not provide much specific demographic information, and only the heads of the households are individually named, but the census data suggests that most of these men lived here with their families. Most of the households included both a man and a woman who were between the ages of 20 and 40, along with several young children who were generally under the age of 10. The surnames of the heads of household were overwhelmingly Irish, with Murphy being a particularly common name among the workers in Middlefield.

The arrival of so many foreign immigrants in a small, rural community was not without controversy. Early in the construction process, in the spring of 1839, the Hampshire Gazette published an article titled, “The Irish on our Public Works,” which addressed concerns about the societal impact of the Irish immigrants who were working on the railroad. The article warned that, “[i]f some measures are not taken for the education and moral reformation of the multitudes of Irish and other foreign emigrants that swarm the country, our republic will be much in danger from them.” Perhaps in response to these concerns, a few months later a resident of Middlefield began raising funds to establish three schools for the children of the laborers. It seems unclear as to whether these contributions were motivated by genuine altruism or by nativist fears about an under-educated immigrant class, but a subsequent article in the Boston Evening Transcript declared that the students were “learning rapidly, and doing credit to the labors of their benefactors.”

These workers remained here throughout the summer of 1841, and the railroad was ultimately completed in the early fall, with the final tracks laid at the rock cut in Washington on October 2, 1841. The railroad opened two days later, linking Boston and Albany. In the process, the railroad set a number of records. It was, up to that point, the longest and most expensive railroad in America, and it was also the first to be built through mountains without using steam-powered inclined planes to assist locomotives. As such, it was a significant engineering milestone, and it was enough to gain the attention of the czar, who brought Whistler to Russia as soon as his work here on the Western Railroad was finished.

However, despite the completion of the railroad, there would continue to be challenges, including a fatal accident that occurred on October 5, 1841, just a day after the line opened. The railroad originally just had one track, with occasional passing sidings for trains heading in opposite directions, including ones at Chester and Westfield. On this particular day, both the eastbound and westbound trains were given instructions to meet at Chester before proceeding. However, the eastbound conductor apparently never received this message, and was expecting to meet the other train further down the line in Westfield. This resulted in a head-on collision about four miles west of Westfield, killing the conductor of the eastbound train and one passenger, along with injuring many others. The accident was a personal tragedy for George Washington Whistler, whose niece, Caroline Bloodgood, was on the train. She was among those injured, and her young son was the one passenger who was killed in the accident.

The Western Railroad did manage to help dispel the myth that steam locomotives were unable to ascend steep grades under their own power, but the section of the railroad here in the Berkshires was nonetheless challenging for trains. Whistler had selected locomotives that were built by Ross Winans of Baltimore, a friend of his whose daughter Julia would later marry his son George. Nicknamed “crabs,” presumably because of their eight drive wheels and Maryland origins, these locomotives proved unreliable here on the Western Railroad, and the railroad ultimately resorted to custom building their own mountain locomotives at their shops in Springfield.

Despite these setbacks, the railroad overall proved to be a success, and for many years it was the only east-west railroad through the Berkshires, providing an important transportation link between Boston and the rest of the country. Although it was originally built as a single-track railroad, Whistler had wisely designed the bridges and other structures to accommodate a second track. This made the initial construction costs higher, but in the long run it saved the railroad money by making it easy to add a second track without having to reconstruct all of the bridges.

For travelers along the route, this section through the Berkshires was a highlight of their journey. The 1847 travel guide A Chart and Description of the Boston and Worcester and Western Railroads, published only six years after the railroad opened, provides the following description:

No language that we are master of could give the traveller any proper description of the wildness, the grandeur, or the obstacles surmounted in the construction of this portion of the route. The river is exceedingly crooked, and the lofty mountains, which are very steep and rugged, and of solid rock, shut down quite to the river on both sides, their sharp points shooting by each other, rendering crossings at every bend of the stream indispensable. In addition to this, the points of the hills must be cut away, and for many miles these rock cuttings and bridges follow each other in regular and rapid succession. . . . Nor does the passing traveller, hurling along as rapidly as he is, see much of the beauty of this mountain gorge. It is not until he has seen, from the base of these mighty structures of art, the passage of the cars, that their magnificence is really felt.

The Western Railroad would ultimately merge with the Boston and Worcester in 1867, forming the Boston and Albany Railroad. This company would, in turn, be leased by the New York Central starting in 1900, although this line retained the Boston and Albany name well into the 20th century. In the meantime, the railroad continued to make improvements to the route, including some changes here along the banks of the Westfield River. A few of the original bridges were replaced, including the easternmost one, which was replaced in 1866 with the current double arch bridge. The next bridge upstream from there was replaced in 1912 with the current steel deck truss girder bridge, although the original stone abutments appear to still be there, encased in poured concrete. Much further upstream, the westernmost two bridges were apparently reconstructed in 1928 after having been damaged in a flood, although it is possible that portions of the original bridges are still underneath the concrete.

However, the most significant change to this portion of the railroad occurred in 1912, when about a mile of the railroad was rerouted, including the section shown here in these two photos. The first photo was probably taken only a few years before this occurred. The postcard is undated, and does not have a postmark, but it has an undivided back, suggesting that it was printed before 1907. As part of this realignment, the railroad shifted to the south side of the river, eliminating two of the river crossings. One of the original bridges, located about 300 yards west of here, was demolished as part of this project, in order to make room for a new bridge. Three other original bridges were simply abandoned, including this one here, which is the westernmost of the three.

Today, more than a century after the railroad was rerouted, these three bridges are still standing. One of them, the easternmost, is still on land owned by the railroad, and it is directly adjacent to the active rail line, so it is not accessible to the public. However, the other two bridges, along with the 3,000-foot section of abandoned railroad right-of-way between them, are now owned by the state as part of the Walnut Hill Wildlife Management Area. The bridges are accessible by way of the Keystone Arch Bridge Trail, a 2.5-mile long trail that starts in Chester. Despite being over 180 years old, and despite not having been maintained in well over 100 years, these bridges remain in good condition, clearly fulfilling Whistler’s goal of creating bridges of “a more costly and permanent character.”

As the travel guide had indicated back in 1847, it is hard to get a sense of the scale of these bridges from the railroad. Even today, it is hard for visitors to tell just how big these bridges are while standing atop them, and photographs are likewise unable to capture the full scope of these structures. Only by climbing down to the river and looking up at the arches can a visitor fully appreciate the size of the bridges, and the work that went in to building them in the middle of a river gorge in one of the most remote areas of the state.

Of the three surviving bridges, the one here in this scene is the largest. Including the wingwalls, the structure of the bridge is over 500 feet long, the bridge deck is about 25 feet wide, and the top of the bridge rises about 75 feet above the river. The bottom of the arch is about 60 feet above the water, and the total span of the arch is 54 feet. The bridge is mostly in its original condition, although about three-quarters of the parapet stones are gone, having apparently been pushed over the edge by vandals over the years.

In 1980, this bridge was added to the National Register of Historic Places as a contributing structure in the Middlefield–Becket Stone Arch Railroad Bridge District. Then, in 2021, the two surviving stone arch bridges on public property, including this one, were designated as National Historic Landmarks as part of the Western Railroad Stone Arch Bridges and Chester Factory Village Depot district. The district is also comprised of the railroad bed in between the two bridges, including the large rock cut and stone retaining wall, along with the historic railroad station in the center of Chester, several miles to the east of here. This station is owned by the Chester Railway Station and Museum, which features an extensive collection of artifacts relating to the Western Railroad and the construction of these bridges.

For more information on the history of these bridges, the National Historic Landmark Nomination Form is an excellent resource. The Friends of the Keystone Arches also has an excellent website, with plenty of historical information and photographs, along with information about hiking to the bridges.

Eastern View From Catskill Mountain House, Catskill, New York

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The view looking east from the Catskill Mountain House, around 1902. Image courtesy of the Library of Congress, Detroit Publishing Company Collection.

The scene in 2021:

These photos were taken from the same spot as the ones in the previous post, but these are facing more to the east, directly across the Hudson River Valley. When the first photo was taken, this was the site of the Catskill Mountain House, a hotel that had been constructed here in 1824. Because of its dramatic views and easy accessibility from New York and other large cities, the hotel soon became one of the country’s most popular resort destinations. These views also helped to inspire a number of prominent artists, including Thomas Cole, the founder of the art movement that would come to be known as the Hudson River School.

Originally, most guests would have reached the Mountain House by taking a Hudson River steamboat to the village of Catskill, which is located in the distance on the far left side of these photos. From there, it was a 12-mile stagecoach ride to the Mountain House, which took about three or four hours. However, by the time the first photo was taken at the turn of the 20th century, railroads had shortened this travel time to just 40 to 50 minutes. The narrow gauge Catskill Mountain Railroad took guests to the base of the escarpment, and then the remaining portion of the journey was by way of the Otis Elevating Railway, a 1.3-mile-long funicular railroad that rose more than 1,600 feet in elevation from the valley to the Mountain House. A portion of this railroad, including the large trestle near the base of the incline, is visible in the lower center of the first photo.

For guests at the Mountain House, one of the highlights of their stay was to watch the sunrise from this vantage point. Early in the summer season, the sun rises on the extreme left side of these two photos, but as the summer progresses the sunrise location migrates steadily to the west. By mid-October the sun rises directly above Mount Everett in the center of this scene, and by the winter solstice the sunrise is on the far right side, although few 19th century visitors would have seen it, since the hotel was only open during the warmer months.

Among those inspired by the sunrise here was artist Frederic Edwin Church, a student of Thomas Cole. One of his earliest paintings, Morning, Looking East over the Hudson Valley from Catskill Mountains (1848), shows the sunrise here, with an emphasis on sunlight and clouds that would become a major characteristic of his later works. Church would subsequently travel the world for subject matter for his landscape paintings, but in the early 1870s he returned to the Catskills and built his one, Olana, on the east side of the Hudson River, opposite the village of Catskill. This house still stands as a museum, and it is barely visible in the distance of the second photo.

Today, some 120 years after the first photo was taken, the Catskill Mountain House is long gone, having been deliberately burned in 1963 after sitting vacant for more than 20 years. However, the view from here is as impressive as ever, and from this distance there are not too many major changes to the landscape. Perhaps the most significant difference is the number of trees in this scene. When the first photo was taken, there were many open fields here in the valley. However, with the decreased importance of agriculture in this region, many of these fields have now been reclaimed by trees, resulting in a landscape that is far more forested than what the 19th century guests of the Mountain House would have seen.

Northeastern View From Catskill Mountain House, Catskill, New York

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The view looking northeast across the Hudson River Valley from the Catskill Mountain House, around 1900-1910. Image courtesy of the Library of Congress, Detroit Publishing Company Collection.

The view in 2021:

As explained in an earlier post, the Catskill Mountain House was built in 1824 on a ledge along the Catskill Escarpment. This site is located on the far eastern edge of the Catskill Mountains, about 2,200 feet above sea level. From here, the landscape drops abruptly to the east, with the Hudson River just eight miles away. As a result, this site offers dramatic views of the river valley, which is visible for many miles in either direction. Further in the distance, on the eastern edge of valley, are the Taconic Mountains, which run along the New York-Massachusetts border. Among the peaks visible in this scene is Mount Greylock, the highest point in Massachusetts, located 54 miles to the northeast of here.

This view drew visitors to the Mountain House for well over a century, and it was often declared, rather hyperbolically, to be one of the greatest views in the country. While unquestionably an impressive view, it pales in comparison to those from some of the higher peaks in the northeast, let alone the many grand views in the mountain ranges of the west. However, this site was probably the finest view that was readily accessible to the masses during the 19th century, as it was within easy reach of New York City and other large population centers.

The Catskills began to wane in popularity shortly after the turn of the 20th century, not long after the first photo was taken. In part, this was because of expanded transportation options; rather than depending on steamboats or railroads to taken them up the Hudson River to the Catskills, Americans now had the luxury of transcontinental trains, along with private automobiles that could take them to previously unreachable vacation spots. The Mountain House ultimately closed after the 1942 season, and the building steadily deteriorated for the next two decades before being deliberately burned in 1963.

Today, the site of the Mountain House looks very different, with an empty field marking the spot of what had once been the country’s finest resort hotel. However, as shown in these two photos here, the view that enticed so many visitors throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries is still largely unchanged. The Hudson River Valley is certainly much more developed than it was more than a century ago, but it is hard to tell from this view more than 1,600 feet above the valley. From this distance, modern developments like highways and suburban sprawl tend to blend in with the rest of the landscape. It is also interesting to note that there actually appears to be more forested now than in the early 1900s, reflecting changing land use patterns and a decline of large-scale agriculture here in the river valley.

Catskill Mountain House, Catskill, New York (2)

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The Catskill Mountain House, around the 1860s. Image courtesy of the New York Public Library.

The hotel around 1902. Image courtesy of the Library of Congress, Detroit Publishing Company Collection.

The scene in 2021:

As explained in more detail in the previous post, the Catskill Mountain House was the first major mountaintop hotel in the United States, along with being arguably the country’s first summer resort hotel. It was perched atop a scenic overlook along the Catskill Escarpment, where visitors could enjoy expansive views of the Hudson River Valley and the surrounding landscape. The hotel benefited from its proximity to New York City and other cities in the northeast, and throughout the 19th century it was a popular destination for the upper classes in American society.

The original section of the building, located behind the columns on the left side of the piazza, opened in 1824. However, the hotel was steadily expanded over the years until, by the 1860s, it had several large wings on the north side and a smaller wing on the south side. The first photo was taken sometime around the 1860s, showing this southern wing in the foreground. By the 1870s, though, this wing was significantly expanded to the rear of the building, as shown in the 1902 photo.

The Mountain House was still prosperous when this second photo was taken, but this would soon begin to change. In part, this was because of changing ways in which Americans traveled. The Catskills had benefitted from being located adjacent to a major transportation corridor, but the introduction of the automobile greatly expanded the places that Americans could visit on vacation. Aging hotels like the Mountain House had difficulty competing in this new environment, and the 1920s and 1930s were a period of steady decline. It eventually closed its doors for the last time after the 1942 season, and it stood here vacant and deteriorating for the next two decades.

The iconic piazza here on the east side of the hotel was badly damaged by a hurricane in 1950, and several years later most of the wings were dismantled for architectural salvage, in the hopes of using that income to restore the original portion of the building. However, these rehabilitation plans never materialized, and the property was eventually acquired by the state in 1962. With no interest in restoring the building, and recognizing the danger that the ruins posed to trespassers, the state deliberately burned it on January 25, 1963. Today, the site of the hotel is an open field, but visitors here can still enjoy the same expansive views that drew thousands of visitors up here to the Mountain House throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries.

Catskill Mountain House, Catskill, New York

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The view of the Catskill Mountain House, around 1900-1910. Image courtesy of the Library of Congress, Detroit Publishing Company Collection.

The scene in 2021:

The first photo shows the Catskill Mountain House, which was one of the most famous hotels in America during the 19th century. It opened in 1824 on a rocky ledge atop the Catskill Escarpment, and it was arguably the nation’s first resort hotel. The building steadily expanded over the years, in the process becoming a must-see attraction for any tour of the United States. Its luxurious accommodations, combined with the cool mountain air and expansive views, made it a popular summer destination. Many distinguished guests stayed here throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries, and the hotel also played a crucial role in the first truly American artistic movement, which came to be known as the Hudson River School.

Prior to the early 19th century, Americans did not place a high value on the mountains of the northeast. At best, mountain ranges such as the Catskills were seen as obstacles to transportation with little agricultural value; at worst, they were seen a dangerous, hostile wilderness. However, these ideas started to shift with the rise of the Romantic movement, and popular early 19th century writers such as Washington Irving and James Fenimore Cooper began to extoll the virtues of the American wilderness. Around the same time, artists such as Thomas Cole drew inspiration from the mountains and painted dramatic landscapes of the scenery. Drawn by these descriptions and paintings, the middle and upper classes of the northeast soon began to venture into the wilderness, particularly here in the Catskills.

Geologically, the Catskills are the northeasternmost portion of the Appalachian Plateau, a large dissected plateau that runs to the west of the main ridge of the Appalachian mountains. The plateau extends from Alabama to New York, before coming to an abrupt end here at the Catskill Escarpment. The escarpment is more than two thousand feet in elevation, but from here the landscape drops sharply to the east, with rocky cliffs and steep slopes that form a dividing line between the mountains and the Hudson River Valley. The river is less than eight miles away from here, so the escarpment had long provided a dramatic backdrop for travelers heading north and south along the river corridor. And, as a few adventurous visitors had begun to discover by the early 19th century, the top of the escarpment offered even more dramatic views of the landscape.

This particular site, which came to be known as Pine Orchard, is located near the northern end of the escarpment, about nine miles to the west of the village of Catskill. Here, the edge of the escarpment dips slightly, forming a low point between the 2,480-foot South Mountain and the 3,180-foot North Mountain. Just to the west of here are two lakes, North Lake and South Lake, which are drained by a stream that drops down Kaaterskill Falls, one of the most dramatic waterfalls in the Catskills. This stream then passes through Kaaterskill Clove, a scenic ravine that separates South Mountain from Kaaterskill High Peak further to the south. So, in short, this area around Pine Orchard formed a sort of microcosm of Catskill scenery; it had mountains, lakes, waterfalls, and ravines, along with rocky cliffs with scenic views of both the narrow, wild Kaaterskill Clove and the broad, cultivated Hudson River Valley.

One of the earliest published descriptions of this area was written by Timothy Dwight IV, the president of Yale College. He visited the Catskills in 1815 and subsequently wrote about the scenery in Travels in New England and New York, which was published posthumously in 1822. In this book, he described the two lakes, along with the “stupendous and awful grandeur” of Kaaterskill Clove, which he believed was second only to Niagara Falls among the many scenic places that he visited. He then described the escarpment itself, and the expansive views of the Hudson River Valley and beyond. Although he did not mention it by name, his vantage point on the escarpment was likely here in the vicinity of Pine Orchard, and he declared that “[a] more distinct and perfect view of a landscape cannot be imagined.”

Just a year after the publication of Travels of New England and New York, made an appearance in James Fenimore Cooper’s 1823 novel The Pioneers. The book is a work of fiction, and like Dwight’s book it does not mention the site by name, but Cooper’s protagonist Natty Bumpo was clearly describing this spot when he spoke of a place in the Catskills,

where one of the ridges juts out a little from the rest, and where the rocks fall, for the best part of a thousand feet, so much up and down, that a man standing on their edges is fool enough to think he can jump from top to bottom.

Further in the narrative, he describes how one can see “all creation” from here, and how,

If being the best part of a mile in the air and having men’s farms and houses your feet, with rivers looking like ribbons, and mountains bigger than the ‘Vision seeming to be hay-stacks of green grass under you, gives any satisfaction to a man, I can recommend the spot.

Natty Bumpo then goes on to describe several other nearby landscape features, including the lakes, the waterfall, and Kaaterskill Clove.

While writers such as Dwight and Cooper were using their literary talents to capture the scenic wilderness here in the Catskills, other more entrepreneurially-minded individuals were working to make this scenery more accessible to the general public. By 1822, the Catskills were described in the New York Spectator as a place that was “becoming an extensive place of fashionable resort.” The article went on to explain how “for the public accommodation a house of entertainment has lately been erected at what is called the Pine Orchard.” This was the site of a grand ball in September 1822, and the following spring a group of investors formed the Catskill Mountain Association in order to build a hotel here at Pine Orchard.

Early records indicate that there were “old buildings” at Pine Orchard prior to the Catskill Mountain Association purchasing this property in 1823, although it seems unclear as to whether this refers to the 1822 “house of entertainment,” or whether there were buildings here even before 1822. Either way, the hotel was operational during the 1823 season, using temporary quarters while construction was underway on a permanent hotel.

The new hotel was opened in the spring of 1824, and it would stand here atop the precipice for nearly 140 years, although it would undergo a number of alterations and expansions along the way. The original 1824 building was 60 feet long, 24 feet wide, and three stories high, and it featured a columned piazza here on the eastern façade. It had just 10 rooms, but a successful 1824 season prompted the owners to embark on a large addition for the next year, which added 50 rooms to the hotel. This project involved building two new wings, with one to the north of the 1824 structure and another in the rear to the west. Like the main section, the north wing had a columned piazza, although this wing was set back a little further from the cliff.

After 1825, the appearance of the building remained largely unchanged until the mid-1840s, when Charles L. Beach purchased the hotel. His father, Erastus Beach, was a livery company owner who operated stagecoaches from the village of Catskill to the Mountain House. As a 15-year-old boy, Charles Beach had worked for his father during the summer of 1823, bringing guests up the mountain to the temporary hotel here at this site. Charles would subsequently go on to have a successful business career, including owning several stagecoach lines of his own, before leasing the Catskill Mountain House in 1839. He then purchased the property in 1845, and soon set about improving both the building and the grounds.

Among the changes that Beach made was a large wing on the north side of the building, along with a smaller addition to the east side of the 1825. The latter made the building’s main facade longer, which enabled Beach to construct a large piazza here, with 13 large Corinthian columns. These columns, which were joined by four matching ones on the west side of the hotel, would become the hotel’s most distinctive architectural feature, and they would remain a part of its design for more than a century. Along with these improvements to the building, Beach also made changes to the surrounding land. The hotel’s holdings eventually grew to about 3,000 acres, with a network of trails that led to scenic overlooks and other points of interest. By the mid-19th century, the hotel also offered recreational opportunities like carriage and horseback rides through the grounds, and boating and fishing on the nearby lakes.

During these early years, guests reached the hotel by way of the Old Mountain Road, which linked the hotel to the steamboat landings on the Hudson River in Catskill. It was on this road that the teenaged Charles Beach had transported guests during the summer of 1823, and it would remain in use throughout most of the 19th century, until the stagecoaches were finally replaced by railroads. During the 1820s and 1830s, fare from Catskill to the Mountain House was a dollar, and there were generally two daily trips up the mountain, with stagecoaches taking about four hours to make the 12-mile trip. The first two-thirds of this journey was over relatively flat ground, but the last portion was a strenuous climb, with the road gaining about 1,500 feet of elevation in four miles. Partway up this section of road was the Rip Van Winkle House, located alongside a stream at a place known as Sleepy Hollow. First constructed around the mid-1820s, and later expanded into a boarding house, this establishment offered rest and refreshment to travelers and horses on their journey up the mountain, while also making the dubious claim of having been the setting for Washington Irving’s short story “Rip Van Winkle.”

Over the years, the Catskill Mountain House was a popular summer resort destination for the upper classes of New York, Philadelphia, and elsewhere in the northeast, along with being a stop on the American equivalent of the Grand Tour. Many distinguished guests came to the hotel during this time, including presidents Ulysses S. Grant and Chester A. Arthur. However, perhaps the single most significant visit to the Mountain House occurred in the fall of 1825, when a young artist named Thomas Cole traveled to the Catskills. He subsequently produced five paintings of the scenery in the vicinity of the Mountain House, and these were put on public display in New York City. Cole had been only a marginally successful artist up to this point, producing a mix of portraits, landscapes, and genre paintings. With his Catskill paintings, though, he soon gained attention as one of the nation’s leading landscape artists, and he helped to popularize the Catskills as a scenic destination.

Cole would make many more visits to the Catskills over the years, eventually moving to the village of Catskill, and the mountains—including the Mountain House itself—became a common subject in his paintings. Many other artists followed his lead in painting the Catskills, along with other scenic landscapes in the northeast. The result was what became known as the Hudson River School, an artistic movement that emphasized dramatic, romanticized landscapes of the American wilderness. This was generally regarded as the first distinctly American art movement, and its name is based on its origins in the vicinity of the Hudson River, particularly here in the Catskills. Aside from Cole, many other prominent landscape artists spent time in the Catskills and featured the mountains in their paintings, including Frederic Edwin Church, Asher Durand, Sanford Robinson Gifford, and John Frederick Kensett.

For the first half century of its existence, the Catskill Mountain House was indisputably the premier resort in the region. The rooms here were priced accordingly, and by the mid-19th century it cost guests $2.50 per night to stay here. This was a considerable amount of money at the time, and part of the reason for the high rates was to cover the hotel’s operating expenses, particularly the cost of transporting food and other supplies up the mountain. However, these rates also helped maintain a level of exclusivity to the hotel, and the Mountain House did not face any serious competition here in the Catskills until late in the 19th century.

This period of hegemony came to an abrupt end in 1881, when two new resort hotels opened in the Catskills. The Mountain House had long been the largest in the region, but it now found itself only the third-largest, with an aging facility that could only be accessed via a bumpy uphill stagecoach ride. One of the two new resorts was the Grand Hotel, located about 25 miles west of here in the village of Highmount. However, a far more serious threat to the Mountain House was the Hotel Kaaterskill, which was practically built in the older hotel’s backyard. As the story goes, Philadelphia patent attorney George Harding was visiting the Mountain House during the summer of 1880, and he requested chicken for his daughter, who had dietary restrictions. However, the kitchen refused to prepare a meal that was not on the menu, and Charles Beach challenged Harding to build his own hotel if he wanted chicken. There are many variations of this story, but regardless of the details, Harding went on to do just that, sparing no expense to construct a massive hotel in time for the 1881 season.

Despite this new competition, the Mountain House still benefitted from its long history and tradition, which the new hotels could not replicate. However, nostalgia could only do so much, and the building’s age also worked against it. The hotel had been constructed piecemeal over the course of many years, and its guest rooms were small and corridors narrow compared to the modern competitors. The new hotels benefitted from direct railroad service, while Mountain House guests still arrived via the same route that Charles Beach and his father had operated some 60 years earlier.

Beach had come a long way since his first trip up the mountain as a teenaged stagecoach driver, but he was still operating the hotel throughout the late 19th century, and still introducing innovations. He had expanded the hotel several more times, including a south wing, which was built in the 1860s and stands on the left side of the first photo. Then, in the 1870s, he added a much larger wing on the southwestern side of the building, creating an enclosed courtyard within the building. At some point after that, a smaller addition on the west side created a second courtyard. The last major additions appear to have been completed by the early 1880s, giving the hotel a capacity of around 400 guests, and by the time the first photo was taken, the building had largely assumed its final appearance.

To address the transportation issue, Beach constructed the Catskill Mountain Railroad, a narrow gauge railroad that connected the village of Catskill to the base of the mountain. He also reached an agreement with George Harding, and built a road connecting the railroad station at the Hotel Kaaterskill with the Mountain House. This arrangement was mutually beneficial, as it made the Mountain House more accessible while also increasing ridership on Harding’s railroad. However, the most ambitious of Beach’s improvements was the Otis Elevating Railway, a 1.3-mile funicular railroad that ascended the steep Catskill Escarpment to the east of the Mountain House, providing direct access from the Catskill Mountain Railroad to the hotel. By making use of this railroad connection, guests could now make the journey from the Hudson River to the Mountain House in 40 to 50 minutes, in contrast to the thee or four hours that it had previously taken by stagecoach.

The first photo was taken sometime during the first decade of the 20th century. The Mountain House was still a prosperous hotel at this point, but it would soon enter a dramatic decline, as would the other grand resorts in the Catskills. There was an element of foreshadowing in the fall of 1902, when longtime rivals George Harding and Charles Beach both died within a month and a half of each other. Beach’s death occurred just shy of 80 years after he had brought his first stagecoach full of passengers to the Mountain House, and nearly 60 years after he had acquired ownership of the hotel.

His death certainly marked the end of an era here in the Catskills, but there were also more subtle changes that would soon affect the hotel, including the increasing trend of automobile ownership. The Catskills had long benefitted from its proximity to New York City and its many railroad and steamboat connections, but automobiles changed the way that Americans vacationed, now that they were no longer restricted to places within easy access of railroads. The Catskills also saw changing demographics here at the old resort hotels. Once the domain of upper-class Protestants, by the early 20th century the region had become popular among immigrants, including Italians, Jews, and other ethnic minorities.

The Beach family continued to own the Catskill Mountain House throughout the 1910s and 1920s, although by this point it would enter a decline that it would never recover from. In the mid-1910s the Otis Elevating Railway closed because of low ridership, and the tracks were removed in 1918 as scrap metal for the war effort. The nearby Hotel Kaaterskill burned in September 1924 and was never rebuilt, but this loss of its greatest rival did little to improve business here at the Mountain House. While the Kaaterskill had been destroyed by a spectacular blaze in a matter of hours, the demise of the Mountain House would prove much more prolonged and anticlimactic.

As bad as the 1920s were here at the Mountain House, the Great Depression of the 1930s proved even more challenging. In 1930, the family of Charles Beach sold more than 2,100 acres of the surrounding land to the state of New York. Soon after, they sold the hotel itself, with its dramatically reduced acreage. It would continue to operate throughout the 1930s, under the ownership of Milo Moseman and Clyde Gardiner. They, in turn, leased it to the Andron family, who renamed it Andron’s Mountain House and catered primarily to Jewish tourists, serving kosher meals in the dining room.

The Mountain House managed to limp through the Depression years, but the start of World War II proved to be the final blow for the old hotel. The Androns chose not to renew their lease for the 1942 season, leaving it to Moseman—by this point the sole owner—to attempt to run the hotel by himself in 1942. As a young man, Moseman had worked as a bellboy here during the hotel’s glory days, and as owner he tried in vain to preserve the building that he had fallen in love with. However, his 1942 season proved to be a failure, and the Mountain House closed its doors for the last time at the end of the season.

The fate of the historic building remained in limbo for the next two decades. The state was very interested in acquiring the property and incorporating it into the surrounding Catskill Park, but they had no intent to preserve the hotel, so Moseman rebuffed their offers in the hopes of restoring and reopening it himself. These plans were seriously hampered, though, by a hurricane that hit the area in the fall of 1950, destroying many of the iconic columns here on the main façade. Then, a year later, Moseman decided to sell the north and south wings to a demolition company for $70,000. These wings were dismantled in 1952 and 1953, resulting in the loss of about two-thirds of the building. Moseman only retained the central 1820s section of the hotel, including the remaining columns in the portico.

Moseman had hoped to use the income from the sale of the wings to fund the restoration of the remaining section, and he floated a variety of plans for the reuse of the building. However, he died in 1958 at the age of 70, ending the last real hope of saving the hotel. His heirs subsequently sold the property to a real estate company that, in turn, sold it to the state in 1962. By this point, the badly-deteriorated structure had become an attractive nuisance to hikers and other curious visitors who ventured into the ruins, so during the summer of 1962 the state demolished the piazza and its remaining columns. Then, in the early morning hours of January 25, 1963, the state deliberately burned the remaining portion of the nearly 140-year-old building.

Today, more than a century after the first photo was taken and nearly two centuries after the Mountain House was built here, there is little evidence of its existence here. The site of the hotel is now an open field, and perhaps the only real signs of its longtime prosperity are the many names and initials scrawled into the rocks here along the cliff. However, while there are no longer any grand 19th century resort hotels here, this area remains a popular destination for visitors to the Catskills, who continue to visit places like Kaaterskill Falls, the lakes, and the many scenic overlooks along the escarpment. The only overnight accommodations are campsites at the nearby North-South Lake Campground, which is a very different experience from staying at the Mountain House, yet it is perhaps more in keeping with the way that early visitors like Timothy Dwight would have seen this area in the early 19th century.

For further information, I would highly recommend The Catskill Mountain House by Roland Van Zandt, published in 1966. This book is well-researched and well-written, and contains detailed information about the Mountain House, the surrounding landscape, and its role in influencing the artists of the Hudson River School, along with many images of the abandoned hotel taken by the author in the early 1960s. It was a valuable resource for writing this blog post, and I would recommend it to anyone interested in the history of the Catskills.