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Touring the Hudson River Valley in Fall WHAT BETTER WAY TO SEE the famed Hudson River Valley than with the Historic Charleston Foundation? Friday dawned brilliant, and on arrival at Newark we set out for Mohonk Resort, the remains of the ten-thousand-acre Quaker Preserve in the Shawangunk Mountains. The six-hundred-room Victorian castle sits atop a mountain ledge. We settled into a comfortable lounge where tea and cookies were being served, and there was a huge roaring fire. Carriage paths surrounded the lake, which had ruffled white caps from the strong northwest wind. The next morning arrived cold, wet, and windy, as we visited the William Frederick Vanderbilt Mansion on a bluff on the Hudson River in Duchess County. With raincoats and umbrellas we were the lone guests in the Italian garden with its roses and begonias dripping water and its fountains and marble statues stark against the gray sky. Inside was warm, splendid, and unexpectedly inviting. Lit by old gas lamps and chandeliers, the place is comfortable with rose and blue oriental rugs, matching velvet chairs and sofas, and unique marbles and bronzes. Frederick William Vanderbilt (1856–1938) was a grandson of the famous commodore who made his fortune from steamboats and railroads. Frederick and his beautiful wife, Louise Anthony, used the Hudson Valley home in Hyde Park as a fall and spring retreat from the social life of New York City and Newport. We left the Vanderbilt Mansion for Rhinebeck, a small Victorian village where we stayed in the charming Delamater Inn. Olana, our first destination, has a breathtaking 180-degree view of the Hudson River Valley. Clouds and sun mixed a palette of green, blue, and yellow so familiar in the paintings of Frederick Edwin Church (1826–1900), whose Olana is a house with an amalgamation of Middle Eastern ceramics, braziers, minarets, arches, and views of the countryside. Church was the sole student of Thomas Cole (1801–1848), whose house is across the river in the Catskills. Two of Cole’s allegorical paintings adorn the house, including one with a moonrise over the Anglican graveyard in Rome. There are splendid Church paintings there: Mount Ida with its mauve tinted sky above black mountains; the gold fishbowl painted for his children; the two memorial paintings of the rising sun and rising moon to commemorate the death of his two oldest children of diphtheria; exquisite landscapes with setting suns; and a chromolithograph of an iceberg, used to authenticate his enormous iceberg painting. The setting is rich with tapestries and old oriental rugs. Outside in the sunny walled garden, the squeaks of chipmunks and the chirp of dying crickets combine with the pipe of wrens in a garden Touring the Hudson River Valley in Fall 171 palette of blues (delphiniums), yellow and oranges (zinnias, gaillardias), pinks (hollyhocks ), and the lingering sweet perfume of honeysuckle. We departed Olana for Montgomery Place. The driveway to the federal-style mansion is through an avenue of black locust trees. From the front porch we looked across meadows to the Hudson River. There are more than eight “designed vistas,” creating a spectacle of river, sky, and land. The house takes full advantage of its setting. The house has been owned since 1988 by the New-York Historical Society. Edgewater , our next destination, is one of the homes of Richard Jenrette, the New York stockbroker and collector of grand Belle Epoque city homes and plantations. It was built about 1804. There are pristine views from every window, and a front portico with Doric columns. Jenrette has recovered the original Duncan Phyfe furniture , and today it is restored with green and aqua silks that pick up the colors of the exterior lawns. Each room has mirrors, portraits, clocks, and silver of the early nineteenth century. A portrait of George Washington is over the mantel while a French George Washington gilt clock chimes the hours. All the walls are faux white marble and look like quarried marble. There is a small classical temple on the edge of the property that is gleaming white and adorned with a full set of the twenty lithographs of Henry Megarey from 1820 that show the Hudson River in all its pristine glory. The morning dawned brilliant with frost on the grass. Our destination was Cold Spring, whose evocative name comes from the fact that George Washington drank water from a wonderful cold spring in the region. Our first stop was Boscobel , the 1804 home of States Dyckman (1755–1806...

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