Olana and Grant Cottage: New York State’s Park Department Treasures

Public/private partnerships make historic sites stronger.

L ast week, I wrote about Olana, Frederic Church’s High Victorian home near Hudson in Upstate New York. I focused on its unique interior, inspired by Church’s travel to the Near East and Greece in the 1860s and very much an eclectic, eccentric home. Church (1826-1900) was the renowned painter of New England and Upstate panoramas and sweeping South American views, but he was a visionary landscape architect, too, and designed Olana mostly on his own.

Specialized education has its purpose and strengths, but Church was self-taught and, as a landscape painter, felt confident in his skills and taste as he tackled his 250 acres. Church very possible coined the term “landscape architect” in 1887 as he described his work on the property he’d purchased 25 years earlier when it was a rambling, modest farm and largely deforested wood lots.

Over time, Church composed, carved, dug, built, and planted. He installed a ten-acre lake, a big peach orchard, and carriage roads and paths targeting views. He placed the house itself in a spot where it surveyed thousands of acres of valleys and mountains. Church called the views from the house and the scenic overlooks he built as his muse. He might have retired from the high-octane art market around 1875, but he continued to paint small, precious, textured landscape views from his estate.

In its prime, Olana was America’s premiere Picturesque-style residential landscape. It’s an English style using rough terrain, woods, lakes, and rolling meadows, arranging them asymmetrically to suggest nature’s untouched state, however touched the land might be to get there. Versailles is its counterpoint, packed with formal gardens and privileging axial geometry. In America, Thoreau’s Walden was an inspiration for a home set in wild nature, “wild nature,” though, having had a haircut. Andrew Jackson Downing (1815-1852) brought the “Walden” aesthetic to residential gardens. He set the stage for Olana, which didn’t have much precedence, at least in America. In the 1860s, big country estates were rare.

Church died in 1900. His daughter-in-law lived in the house and changed very little there, dying in 1964. Last week, I wrote about the trove of treasure she left. Church’s landscape, though, was another matter altogether. Not much of his composition was visible. Some of the outbuildings were gone, and overgrowth was a big issue.

Olana has been part of the New York State government’s Historic Sites program since 1966. I’d been to Olana a dozen times over the years, since my central academic field is in 19th-century American painting, and the house has always been well maintained. On my visit two weeks ago, I paid close attention to what was happening with the estate. I knew Olana had big plans.

First of all, I focused on the new visitors’ center, improved after my last visit, which was probably ten years ago. I dreaded the thought. What did they do? Would it be a ghastly blot on the landscape, a repulsive monument to commerce, a palace of toilets, brochure racks, and information desks that are never staffed? The visitor center, praise the Lord, is a discreet faux stone cottage. It’s modest. Too many T-shirts for sale and no Christmas ornaments are my only beefs, with the visitor center, with the house, and with all 250 acres of Olana.

The 250-acre landscape is a work in progress. It started only a few years ago, in 2015 with the visitors’ center, more parking, and a bus turnaround. Then, in 2019, the retaining wall supporting the house and abetting its views was fixed. Church installed only one garden we’d call formal. He called it a “mingled garden,” but it was beyond dilapidated. The Churches threw nothing away. Researchers found receipts for the original plantings in the attic. Lots of clearing has happened, too, restoring some of the views. Lots of native trees and shrubs were planted around the house and invaders removed.

Church developed multiple views, some out from the property toward the Hudson, the river valley, and the Catskills, and some sweeping views from a hill at the edge of the estate encompassing the house and the land around it. These have been restored.

The next project focuses on Olana’s historic farm zone. Olana started as a farm, and for years, the family called it “the farm,” only settling on “Olana” in the 1880s. The estate’s orchards were always an integral part of Church’s larger landscape vision. Olana’s trustees completed the design phase and the fundraising for what they are calling the Historic Farm Restoration Project. A new kitchen garden will emerge, and the old barn will be fixed. Some of the orchards will return. Lots of work will happen to restore native meadows.

The capital campaign for the landscape work is $25 million. This is a doable goal. The New York State Parks Department, which runs the Historic Sites program, is a responsible, generous partner. Olana is a fantastic house, to be sure, but the Hudson Valley is not short of rich people. With the Hamptons and the Berkshires, it’s the premier weekend and summer retreat for Manhattan people. Unlike the Hamptons, which I don’t like, and which is a playground for people who have too much money and want to be seen, the Berkshires and the Hudson River Valley and Upstate New York mountains attract people who love the cultural amenities and support them.

Olana is owned by the state, but a not-for-profit organization called the Olana Partnership runs the art side of it and raises money in tandem with what the legislature appropriates. It’s got a strong board. Its budget is about $1.5 million, which pays for Olana’s curatorial program and its fundraising expenses.

Meredith Kane is the board chair. She’s a counsel at the New York law firm Paul/Weiss and chaired its real-estate department. I read her biography on the law firm’s website. Very impressive, and I think she knows everyone. She handled legal issues surrounding the development and financing of expansions at the Park Avenue Armory, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, and many Broadway theaters.

New York State’s Historic Sites division is unusually good. Yes, lots of history happened in New York, but the state owns 37 historic properties from Buffalo to Manhattan, encourages private/public partnerships to steward them, and has a first-class conservation lab near Albany to care for troves of art and artifacts. The range of properties is impressive, from the abolitionist John Brown’s farm in Lake Placid to the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village, the bar outside of which gay men rioted in 1969 following a police raid.

I think Olana is the jewel in the crown, but one or two others tell us just how good the state’s historic-sites program is. Grant’s Cottage, north of Saratoga in the Adirondacks, is the place where Ulysses Grant spent his final weeks in 1885. It’s small and unassuming but is as close to how Grant knew it as a place could be. It evokes the time, the man, and the pathos of his situation. It’s not far from my home in Vermont, so I visited it a few weeks ago.

Grant’s autobiography was one of the biggest best sellers of the 19th century and, after 135 years, it’s still in print. Reading even Grant’s orders to subordinates during the war, we can see his style was crisp, clear, and staccato. The autobiography is that and more. It’s a pungent history of the war but also a portrait of a man whose early and many hard knocks obscured herculean discipline and strategic brilliance — obscured, that is, until Grant met his moment and won the Civil War.

In early 1885, Mark Twain, who’d just written Huckleberry Finn, persuaded Grant to write a two-volume autobiography covering his early life, service in the Mexican War, and his decisive generalship. Working for weeks at a cottage on Mount McGregor in the southern Adirondacks, Grant was in the race of his life, facing both the Grim Reaper and the bill collector. His son had lost all the family’s money, as well as money belonging to clients served by the investment company he managed using his father’s name on the masthead.

Grant was broke. He had terminal throat and mouth cancer. No president before Grant had ever written an autobiography, but there was no one like Grant. He came to the cottage, which a friend lent him, not only for its clean, cool air but for its solitude. Grant soldiered on, sinking by the day, mostly writing in longhand.

On July 16, Grant said he’d finished. On July 23, he died a happy man, knowing that Twain, his publisher, had already secured orders for 100,000 copies. His wife’s future was secure. There was a small funeral at the cottage. On August 8, another funeral unfolded in Manhattan. With 2 million people lining the streets, it was the biggest public event ever held in America up to that time.

It’s a time capsule. Bottles of cocaine water, which his doctor used to swab his throat, Grant’s mustache brush and top hat, his desk and pens, his deathbed, and lots of other ephemera and artifacts, are all scrupulously maintained and intelligently interpreted. Again, Grant’s Cottage has a volunteer board that helps with fundraising and the curatorial side.

There’s an engaging, unusual story on the Grant Cottage website about the sound of his voice. Benjamin Harrison was the first president whose voice was recorded, but Grant missed the technology. Throat cancer reduced his voice to a whisper in the months before he died, but, before that, his voice was quiet and reassuring, not as high-pitched as Lincoln’s and with a touch of a Southern accent. Ironic as this is, it makes sense. Grant grew up in southern Ohio. He used contractions such as “y’all” and phrases such as “one thing or t’other.”

The story is the kind of idiosyncratic thing I like to see coming from a historic house. It shows the people who run it both appreciate its singularity and have the autonomy to project it. This spirit, I think, comes from volunteer involvement, particularly high-power volunteers who give money. Left to bureaucrats someplace far away, initiative of this kind either doesn’t exist or is squelched.

I think the Ulysses S. Grant admiration society has lots of enthusiastic, discerning members now. Much as Benjamin Franklin was, in his lifetime, one of the world’s most famous and admired men, so was Grant in his. As a general, he was credited with saving the Union. Lincoln, of course, was a saint and martyr after his death in 1865, but Grant was the war hero without peer. He was president in an impossible, wild, fraught time and did better than anyone could have done. I wrote earlier about Grant’s many hard knocks before the Civil War. He never forgot them and was very much an Everyman in how he saw himself. His final weeks were epic, and Grant’s Cottage, simple and evocative, allows us to ponder his last triumph.