Shadows of Windham
Windham in the Catskill Mountains of New York is said to be named after the town of Windham located in the “Quiet Corner” of northeastern Connecticut, which in turn is named after the...
John P. O'Grady Blog
Frederic Church’s Olana; or, Home Is Where the Art Is
Frederic Edwin Church was born in Hartford, Connecticut in 1826. At a young age, he expressed passionate interest in becoming a landscape artist. His father, Joseph—a silversmith by training and later a founder and...
The Unhappy Case of the Catskill Mountain Violinist
Frederick F. Hapeman is but one of the many forgotten artists of the Catskill Mountains. We know he was an artist because that’s what he told the army captain who came through Windham, New...
The Schoharie Kill
Well begun is half done, they used to say. As in the course of human events, so too with rivers. Make a good start and it’s downhill the rest of the way. Consider, for...
The Catskill Mountain House
In the summer of 1958, thirty-nine-year-old Roland Van Zandt—former U.S. Air Force bombardier, husband, father of four, and doctoral student of American history—was hiking in the vicinity of North Lake when he stumbled upon...
The Farm
On Saturday, May 27th, 1961, an estate auction took place on the Tryon farm just outside the hamlet of Norton Hill in the Town of Greenville. The weather that morning was unseasonably cold, gray,...
The Artist Olive Cheritree
The materials for a full and satisfying biography of Olive Eliza Cheritree probably no longer exist. What remains are fragments, the scatterings of a creative life gone awry—a couple of photographs, a handful of...
Create Meadows and Get Rid of Unruly Brush
Often I am permitted to return to a meadow as if it were a scene made-up by the mind, that is not mine, but is a made place ...
Walden in the Catskills
The writer Henry David Thoreau is famous for a hut he built with his own hands on the shore of Walden Pond in Concord, Massachusetts. To be more precise, he is famous for the...
Mountain Landscape with Plane Wreck
The wreckage is still there, high on one of the higher peaks in the Catskills, just below its summit, in balsam-brake and moss, close by Rip Van Winkle’s depleted spring. Broken wings, battered fuselage,...