Catskill Mountain House Was a Hub for Creatives in the Hudson Valley

Two centuries ago last summer, a new hotel opened in the Catskills. Perched on the thousand-foot ledge of the Catskill Escarpment, the northeastern end of a plateau that runs south to Alabama, the hotel offered guests an expansive view of rolling farmland, distant river, and even more distant mountains; the Hudson Valley stretched out like a carpet at their feet. The hotel quickly captured the imaginations of writers, artists, and travelers not only in New York but across the young and restless country and in much of the English-speaking world.

The view was already well-known. In The Pioneers, the first of James Fenimore Cooper’s “Leatherstocking Tales,” published in 1823, the woodsman Natty Bumppo tells a younger hunter about the site. The hunter asks, “What see you when you get there?” “Creation!” Bumppo replies, “all creation, lad.”

That same year, investors in the nearby village of Catskill decided to clear a grove of pine trees and build a permanent structure on the site. Formally named Pine Orchard, it was known near and far as the Catskill Mountain House.

As famous as the scenery was the grueling trek to it: Ten hours by steamboat from Manhattan to Catskill, then a winding five-hour stagecoach ride along the edge of a steep gorge. But it was worth it, 19th-century chronicler Benson Lossing wrote, to arrive at the top and find yourself “bathed—immersed—in pure mountain air.”

For more than a century, Americans of means flocked to the Mountain House to get away from the grime and enclosure of cities. Yet if the hotel offered an escape from industrialization, it was also made possible by its fruits. In the middle of the woods, a traveler could sample wines and dishes on par with the offerings of the finest Manhattan hotel. “How the proprietor can have dragged up…so many superfluities from the river level to the eagle’s nest, excites your wonder,” wrote journalist and poet Nathaniel Parker Willis in 1842.

Embodying the ideal balance between nature and civilization, wilderness and cultivation, the Mountain House appealed to generations of American romantics. Writers invariably called the vista “indescribable,” prolific author Carl Carmer once noted, then spent several pages attempting to describe it. Deeming the view itself impossible to capture on canvas, painters preferred to depict the mountain-cradled hotel, a “palace built for angels,” as one poet wrote. A year after it opened, a 24-year-old immigrant named Thomas Cole stopped by, and the Hudson River School was born.

According to Jonathan Palmer, Greene County’s historian, the Mountain House eventually attracted so many to the area it could no longer offer an intense encounter with unspoiled nature. It closed for good during World War II. In 1963, the structure was demolished by the state.