The Porch at Cedar Grove

Cole moved to America with his family in 1818 at age seventeen. He grew up in northern England—then the biggest hub for industrialization in the world. Young Cole saw first-hand how factories and smokestacks took over the countryside of his hometown, so he was especially alarmed to see the same transformation taking place here in Catskill in the 1830s.

Cole first came to this area by traveling up the Hudson River by boat in 1825, when he fell in love with the surrounding landscape. He returned nearly every summer and made his permanent home here in 1836.

This view of the mountains is one that Cole painted many times. But even then, this landscape was changing significantly. A large hotel, the Catskill Mountain House, opened in 1824 drawing in crowds of tourists, and by 1836 there were over sixty mills, factories, and tanneries stretching west into the mountains.

A railroad built in 1836 brought pollution, noise, and social and environmental changes that would dramatically alter the land, and hillsides were being clear-cut for the leather tanning industry. Cole reacted strongly toward these changes through his writing and his paintings.

Inside the house you’ll hear about Cole’s thoughts on development through his own words and artworks. The push and pull between preservation and development was an emotionally charged issue then, just as now, and we still struggle with how to preserve natural beauty in an increasingly industrialized world.

Editing the Landscape

For years the view of the mountains from this porch was interrupted by phone and electric wires. Like Cole, the Site staff decided to “edit” this sign of industry out of the view, and embarked on the long process of burying the wires.