What was Woodstock like in the years before we lent our name to a generation? What, for this purpose, might Mill Hill Road have presented to the passerby before the world “found” us in the years prior to a certain festival? (Even though we were doing quite well, thank you.)
It could be one of Dutchess County’s best kept secrets. The Wethersfield Estate and Gardens is off the beaten path — well, gravel road — near the village of Amenia. Just the right amount of privacy and bucolic splendor make it the perfect getaway for an early 20th century industrialist, particularly one who enjoyed horse riding and generally communing with glorious nature.
Those who begin to study this town’s most elusive character at his end rather than at his beginning, won’t ever capture Hervey White. That’s why the godfather of Woodstock has eluded so many for so long. Scholars read Hervey’s last and least honest effort, that paid-for-but-never-published “Autobiography” and consider it gospel.
Erroneously named “founder” of Woodstock by Life magazine in 1938, Hervey White [1866-1944] is better described as godfather of a town he personally transformed into America’s most famous Bohemia, earlier even than 1920. But despite this fact, and although admired by artists and farmers alike, Hervey lived and died an enigma. Some knew part, but none knew all his secrets.
At some point in our studies, it’s impressed on us that, if he had wanted to, George Washington could have become King of America. But we’re never told exactly where or under what circumstances that happened. The answer may surprise you.
The eminent Swedish botanist and zoologist Carl Linnaeus, father of modern taxonomy, called Bartram “the greatest natural botanist in the world.” And aristocrats eagerly awaited the arrival of their “Bartram’s Boxes”: bundles of seeds, saps and specimens shipped from North America. What brought him to the Catskills?
One wouldn’t think that people in the business of hunting whales far out at sea would ever have imagined Hudson to be an auspicious place to set up shop. But they did, beginning in 1783, just as the Revolutionary War was drawing to a close.
Considered by many to be the jewel of the Hudson River bridges, the Mid-Hudson Bridge was created by the famous bridge designer Ralph Modjeski. And the financing of the Rip Van Winkle Bridge is considered by many to be an innovative precursor of FDR’s New Deal economic systems.
Civil-rights photographer and Hudson Valley resident Jim Peppler served the cause of freedom.
We need special nights, damn it, and until such time as it is all Applebees out there, someone is going to trade ten years of their life expectancy to give them to us.