Medusa Cemetery
A car pulls into the cemetery in Medusa, New York. Three people are inside the vehicle: two women—one younger, one middle-aged—and an old man wearing a hat. The middle-aged woman is driving, the old man...
Tagged: Catskill Mountains
The Refreshment Pavilion at Kaaterskill Falls
In 1825, a fellow by the name of Peter Schutt acquired a piece of property in the still-wild woolly wags of the Catskill Mountains. The purchase included a prominent waterfall. Two years earlier, the...
Fred the Artist
The artist Fred De Sawal had his studio in a ramshackle cottage along old Route 23 in Leeds, New York. It was located not far from the Jolly House resort, where some of his...
Hotel Kaaterskill
Hotel Kaaterskill was a house built of spite. Legend has it that in the summer of 1880, George F. Harding—a highly successful Philadelphia lawyer and habitué of the Catskill Mountain House—got into a row...
Poet’s Ledge
By John P. O’Grady At the annual exhibition of the National Academy of Design in 1861, Sanford Robinson Gifford’s latest artwork was hailed as “the great picture of the season, the crowning glory of...
Borrowed Scenery
Driving home from the other side of the river, I stopped for gas at a place close by Cedar Grove, the home of Thomas Cole—now a National Historic Landmark—in the village of Catskill. I...
Kate Hill
The “Great Wall of Manitou”—otherwise known as the Catskill Escarpment—extends for more than twenty miles, roughly paralleling the course of the Hudson River. Nearly fifty years ago, historian Alf Evers noted that the “great...
Old Tory Fort
We entered the woods armed with a treasure map of sorts. Or rather, we had a professional surveyor’s map to guide us to our destination. The spot we were seeking was high on an...
Apple Blossom Time
Now is when they come into their brief visibility, the fragrant ghosts of May. They hover along the periphery of mountain roads and in the thick of second-growth forests where once the orchards grew....
Casa Susanna
No historical marker stands in front of the ramshackle boardinghouse formerly known as Casa Susanna. Perhaps that’s for the best. After all, this is more a place of memory than a site of history....