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Celebrating the 200th anniversary of Catskill Mountain House

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By Jonathan Palmer, Greene County Historian

Reprinted with permission

The Catskill Mountain House, destroyed in 1963, would have marked its 200th anniversary this year. Contributed photo

It was with great pleasure that I had the opportunity at the beginning of June to join the Greenville Local History Group in celebrating the bicentennial of Greene County’s most important historic site.

So many of us are well-versed in the nuances and salient details of this storied hotel — in fact, I often question whether anything else can be said about the Mountain House! Nonetheless, on this anniversary year, it is our responsibility as a community to reflect on the diverse roles of the Mountain House in shaping a part of our identity, transforming our relationship with nature, and challenging us as preservationists and caretakers of its legacy.

So, what exactly, then, is the legacy of the Mountain House?

When stirrings began in Catskill around 1820 concerning the construction of a hotel at Pine Orchard, the vision of the soon-to-be proprietors was a simple one — help the public encounter America’s “wilderness” outside of the context of conquest, colonization and capitalization.

While the very idea of slapping a hotel on a scenic overlook is anathema to the principles now espoused by naturalists and environmentalists, the idea that a mountain landscape in a predominantly agrarian region could be leveraged for uses other than cultivation and industry was still revolutionary among Americans.

This effort was bolstered by the perfect intersection of our own unique flavor of Romantic philosophy and a sense of inherited responsibility among those who took charge of the young republic after the founding fathers. The builders of the Mountain House seemed to ask aloud to all: “Where else but in America’s Edenic landscape could humanity encounter untrammeled creation and refresh our spirit? How could a Republic endowed with Nature as its inheritance do anything but succeed?”

Indeed, it is no surprise that the hotel opened in 1824 and would rapidly evolve into a Greek Revival temple seemingly dedicated to the Republic and the worship of American Romanticism.

This gross oversimplification, while capturing the idealistic essence of the endeavor, glosses over the messy reality of the phenomenon. The Mountain House, while serving as a bridge between the 19th century’s base industrialism and the nascent environmentalism of the Romantic Movement, also embodied an amorphous philosophy soon to be coined as Manifest Destiny.

Indeed, the Mountain House could never have existed were it not for the violent expulsion of Native Americans from their ancestral homelands, the exploitation of tenants on the leasehold system, and the enslavement and disenfranchisement of Black Americans. Each of these factors connects directly to both the people who were the instigators behind the organization of the Mountain House and the clientele that made the hotel a seminal cultural moment.

It is therefore little surprise that a phenomenon such as the Mountain House, borne from the collective visions of one era of the Republic, would wither and die with the Republic’s transformation and growth. The industrialism that the Mountain House seemed to refute, but could never have existed without, eventually resulted in such seismic changes in taste, infrastructure, and values that the Mountain House lapsed into abject irrelevancy — revered only by those in the valley who lived beneath its shadow and the memory of the vibrant economic landscape it once crowned.

While the resort industry survives in Greene County, it has never enjoyed the comfortable certainty and assertive preeminence once manifest in the Greek temple at Pine Orchard.

Ultimately, the end objective of the Mountain House, to help Americans encounter the natural world that remains the birthright of all humanity, hasn’t diminished since the destruction of the hotel in 1963.

Indeed, the scenery that once called America’s poets and painters to the Catskills are as beautiful as ever, and the remarkable silence that once filled the mountains — broken only by the wind and sounds of the mountain streams — is restored and accentuated by the Mountain House’s disappearance.

This article was reprinted with permission from the Greenville Local History Group.

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