History Makers
Country Seats and Camp Retreats of 19th Century New Yorkers By Suzanne Clary
W hile some new york city for purposes of sailing and coaching during the summer, others gravitated to the mountains for hiking less trampled trails, hunting and even snake spotting! Where did a brownstoner from Manhattan go if he or she were tempted by cooler climes and climbs slightly further away? Beginning in the early to mid-1800s, clergy, writers, educators and health minded travelers sought fresh air and vigorous activities in Maine, the Catskills and Lake Otsego. They were inspired by the unmarred simplicity and romantic, raw wilderness of these locales as depicted by American artists and writers of the era including the “Father of the Hudson River School,” Thomas Cole, and Last of the Mohicans novelist James Fenimore Cooper. Charles Tracy, a lawyer and friend of JP Morgan (his daughter Frances Louisa would later marry the financier just as the Civil War ended), was one such member of this wave to regularly travel with a clutch dwellers constructed glamorous waterfront estates in Fairfield County during the 19 th century
PIERREPONT FAMILY “RUSTICATORS”
and our stay here is daily proving his impressions just.” The group would hike through what is known today as Acadia Park and later ascend Katahdin, eventually rowing down the Penobscot River. At the time of this trip, Church, a student of Cole’s, was not yet working out of the famous 1858 red brick Studio on Tenth Street in Greenwich Village where his atelier would one day attract thousands of art patrons. It was these earlier visits to Maine that inspired a whole catalogue of
of family and friends fromNew York and Boston to Eden, Maine (the area was later renamed Bar Harbor in 1918). In the mid 1850s, the painter Frederic Edwin Church accompanied them to capture the sublime peaks and tempest-hued skies of Mount Desert Island. Church had already spent weeks at a time translating surf hewn rocks and forested hillsides onto canvas with brush and oils. Tracy recorded in his diary, “Mr. Church says this island is remarkable for fine sunsets;
light infused masterworks, including “Twilight in the Wilderness,” a painting which Church completed on the eve of the Civil War, foretelling in its crimson palette the coming bloodshed and storm of disunion. This is a lesser known chapter of Church’s life prior to his purchase and transformation of the tranquil and pacific land for which he is better known–Olana on the Hudson. In Maine, the pilgrimage of “rusticators” like these each summer, who initially resisted aggrandized comforts and rented the simple homes of local fishermen, rapidly fueled the building of hotels including the Harbourside
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