HUDSON, N.Y. - "Nature has been very lavish here in the gifts of her beauty," the landscape painter Frederic Edwin Church wrote to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow from Hudson, N.Y.
Church was boasting about Olana, the Persian-style mansion he had built on his hillside overlooking the Hudson River. A century later, Church's assessment still holds true, not only for Olana itself but for all of Columbia County.
Columbia County stretches from the Massachusetts border to the Hudson River. About a three-hour drive from New York City, Columbia County has a full-time population of 63,200 people, along with plenty of cows and sheep.
Although bagels and cappuccino can be tracked down in towns like Hudson, weekenders from New York City haven't brought too many pretensions to Columbia County. It's still farm country, where most of the tallest structures are silos and it's hard to find a road that's not breathtakingly scenic.
There is open, rolling farmland on the western side of the county, the legacy of huge tracts claimed by Dutch and British landholders in the 17th century. To the east, where New Englanders pushed into New York state, the land furrows and rises toward the Taconic Mountains and the Berkshires.
History on the hillsides
Along with the cows, there's history built on the hillsides, from opulent river estates like Olana and Clermont (the Livingston family mansion in Germantown, N.Y.) to the idealistic austerity of a former Shaker village in the hills of New Lebanon.
A stretch of Route 10 has a sign announcing it was the "National Beauty Award Highway 1969," but in Columbia County it's just an average street; there are equally bucolic stretches on Route 203, on Route 31, on Route 23 and even on parts of Route 9.
Bed-and-breakfast inns dot the county from end to end. The Inn at Green River, in Hillsdale, was built in 1830 and was once a parsonage for the Lutheran church next door. It's tucked into the Berkshires foothills at the Massachusetts border, and the rooms look out on a meadow.
Hillsdale is an unprepossessing town, but it has a showplace restaurant, Aubergine, in a handsome old Federal house. Hillsdale also has the Rodgers Book Barn, well stocked and far more extensive than it appears, although it's 3] miles from any main road.
In southeastern Columbia County is an oddity - the Inn at Blue Stores, in Livingston. It's a Spanish-Mission-influenced building
built in 1908, with a stucco exterior and a terra-cotta-tiled roof, in a working farm on Route 9.
Inside, the inn is a Victorian apparition, with dark wood paneling, leaded-glass windows and old brass light fixtures. The rooms, which have televisions, are filled with mirrors, figurines, a butterfly in a glass box, embroidered flowers and lace everywhere, from the lampshades to the shower curtain. There were Dutch apple pancakes for breakfast.
Across the street is a pair of rusting gas pumps that Edward Hopper might have depicted. And up Route 9 in Claverack is a true country flea market, open on weekends in a former apple-processing barn at Bryant Farms.
With three dozen dealers, it's a place to find silver dollars, sleds, books, fishing rods, shotgun ammunition, old door hinges and all sorts of other things on the border between antiques and junk, such as a nice selection of stag heads, along with a stuffed bear.
The Shaker way
In the north toward Chatham is a bastion of New England-style and Shaker architecture.
Chatham (population 1,920) was a thriving whistle-stop at the end of the 19th century, with four railroad stations. Railroad crossings still stop traffic in the center of town, which holds an 1811 inn, a movie theater, an antiques center and a jaunty old clocktower.
In nearby New Concord and Old Chatham, white clapboard farmhouses loom among the pastures.
The Shaker Village in New Lebanon, where more than 30 Shaker buildings still stand, must have seemed like a hamlet of skyscrapers when it was built, from the end of the 18th century to just before the Civil War.
Its three- and four-story buildings have an image of straight-backed rectitude, with long windows that are narrow as if to point heavenward; originally, many of them were painted ocher yellow, while the meetinghouse, with its arching roof, was white. Earthly and spiritual wisdom is still being sought on the site, which is now divided between main owners.
One is the Darrow School, which allows visits to some of the buildings. Just over a hill is the Abode of the Message, a Sufi Muslim order that presents courses, lectures and retreats.
At the Shaker Museum in Old Chatham, the exhibits delineated the sober, diligent lives behind the inspired design sense.
The Shaker way of life required confession, celibacy, communal living and withdrawal from the world. Celibacy was enforced with detailed regulations, which are on display; a sister, for example, was forbidden to sew on a brother's button while he wore the garment. Meals were eaten in silence, and lasted about 15 minutes; then, it was back to work.
The museum's collection includes sublime Shaker furniture and baskets as well as less widely known Shaker artifacts: angular (and very modern-looking) cast-iron stoves, industrial-size drills and planers, an early powered washing machine, even a radio from 1924.
A temporary exhibit commemorates a master cabinetmaker, Orren Haskins, born in 1815, who upheld the Shakers' old ways as the 20th century loomed. "The world at large can scarcely keep pace with itself in its stiles and fashions which last but a short time, when something still more worthless or absurd takes its place," he wrote. "Let good enough alone, and take common sense for our guide in all our pursuits, and we are safe within and without."
Across the street from the Shaker Museum is the Old Chatham Sheepherding Company Inn, a restaurant and a luxurious, English country house-style inn on a working sheep farm. The barns welcome visitors. As perfectly enunciated baas filled the air, we saw groups of sheep being herded into the milking apparatus for their two minutes of productivity. Lambs, some of them very young, were in outdoor pens; as we approached, each group rushed toward us, bleating eagerly.
The menu includes an appetizer of sheep's-milk cheese grilled in a grape leaf, rack of lamb and desserts of ice cream and an ambrosial hazelnut creme brulee, both also made from sheep's milk. Main courses were bold, hearty New American cooking, like hefty sorrel-flavored rabbit ravioli with morels and fiddlehead ferns. Dinner for two came to $100.
Presidential home
Kinderhook ("children's corner" in Dutch) was named by Henry Hudson when he saw Mohawk children on the banks of the river. It's an old town, settled in the 1640s and "organized" in 1772, with a village center that's a designated historical district. Magisterial Federal homes line Broad Street.
Kinderhook (population 8,112) was the birthplace of Martin Van Buren, the eighth president. He used to sign memos "OK," for "off to Kinderhook," possibly adding the term to the language. A one-term president, Van Buren retired to a mansion in Kinderhook called Lindenwald, now a National Historic Site.
It started out as a symmetrical Federal-style building but was turned into an Italianate mansion with a 19th-century addition. The wallpaper and carpeting in the elegant public rooms have been meticulously recreated; in one room is a piano given to Van Buren by a woman who turned down his marriage proposal.
The tour also leads through servants' quarters and the wine cellar, and past what was one of the first flush toilets in a private home; the bowl is blue-and-white Wedgwood porcelain. The Columbia County Historical Society has its library and museum in Kinderhook and has published an attractive book, Ruth Piwonka's and Roderic H. Blackburn's "Visible Heritage: Columbia County in Art and Architecture" (Black Dome Press, 1996, $24.95 paper).
The society has opened two of Kinderhook's venerable houses: the grand, but mostly empty Federal-style James Vanderpoel House, built in 1810, which was used in the film "The Age of Innocence," and the more rustic and intriguing Luykas Van Alen House, built in 1736.
Pub Date: 8/20/98