Gateway and Foothills

I returned to walk past the Testimonial Gateway, built in 1908 in honor of Albert and Eliza Smiley’s 50th wedding anniversary the year before (1,200 of their friends raised the money to build it), to see those salamander pools from another point of view, this time by the light of day. How different they look now, with their marshy edges where cattails and sedges grow, from the ornamental “lily ponds,” they were a century ago. Now their fountains are stilled, and their lily pads gone, but frogs and salamanders are using them for their own purposes. I walked further along this drive, an “allée” of pin oaks that are also over a century old, having been planted in 1909. How much more open the view from this drive of the ridge and Skytop must have been in the early years of the 20th century, giving travelers bound for Mohonk Mountain House in horse-drawn carriages a thrilling foretaste of the scenic splendors they were to enjoy. But how fortunate we are today, in this century, to be able to walk past these now-stately trees knowing that the newly acquired Foothills where they stand, with their diversity of wildlife habitat, including grassland and marsh, will belong to Mohonk Preserve and to all of us, for all times to come.