Catskill Mountain House

Discussing the Catskill Mountain House, the art-historian Alan Wallach summarizes its importance as a destination: "Opened in 1824, it was situated on a high palisade overlooking the Hudson River. During the two decades before it opened, a small number of tourists and travelers had made their way to the site, attracted by the spectacular view. In 1823 the Catskill Mountain Association was formed to improve the road to the site and build a hotel. The following year the Association opened the Mountain House, which immediately began to attract "the elite of American society." Roland Van Zandt has attributed the initial popularity of the Mountain House to a series of articles that William L. Stone, editor of the Federalist New York Commercial Advertiser, published in his newspaper in 1824. A year earlier, James Fenimore Cooper had described at length the spectacular view from the Pine Orchard [at the site] in his widely read novel, The Pioneers, and over the next two decades written accounts and images of the Mountain House and its surroundings multipled." (Thomas Cole: Landscape into History, Washington, D.C., 1994, p. 31)