Before the Catskills inspired books and paintings, their spirit and beauty were captured in the stories and legends of American Indians, who, it’s said, called the mountains Onteora, “Land in the Sky.” One Iroquois story tells of the “Great Little People,” who appeared to a young hunter in the forest. When he helped the elf-like creatures with their hunt, they rewarded him with food and drink, which made the hunter fall into a deep sleep—an Iroquois precursor to Washington Irving’s Rip Van Winkle, whose tale was set in the Catskill High Peaks.

Many people believe this quiet mountain region is enchanted. The Indians believed it was inhabited by a fierce spirit called Manitou. Thomas Cole, founder of the Hudson River School of Art, claimed that it was the spirit of God in nature that drew him to Greene County, NY. Certainly, over the last two centuries, the Catskills have inspired much in art and literature to enchant the world.

Almost a decade ago, in March 2000, Greene County, NY rang in its two hundredth birthday with churches and schools throughout the county tolling their bells 200 times in celebration. Many of those who found their inspiration in the beauty of the Catskills were remembered as part of that celebration. Now, ten years later, it seems fitting to remember them once again.

Mary Ann Willson
One of the earliest American folk artists, Mary Ann Willson lived in Greene County, NY in the early 1800s. Few details are known of her life, but in his 1893 book, The Picturesque Catskills, Lionel DeLisser reproduced two of Willson’s paintings lent to him by Thomas Cole’s son Theodore, which suggests a connection between Willson and the Cole family.

Willson’s work would have been lost to time but for the discovery in 1943 of a portfolio of 20 of her watercolors at the Harry Stone Gallery in New York City. Along with the paintings was a mysterious open letter, written around 1850 and signed “An Ardent Admirer of Art.” The letter spoke of Willson and her companion, Miss Brundage, coming from an “eastern state” and having a “romantic attachment” for each other. The eastern state is most likely Connecticut, which saw a migration of some of its population to Greene County, NY at about the time Willson and Brundage moved there. The two women built a cabin in Greenville, where Brundage farmed and Willson sold paintings to help support them. The paintings, according to the letter, were bought by people from as far away as Alabama. When Miss Brundage died around 1825, Willson was so heartbroken that she left Greenville, never to be heard of again.

Willson’s simple pictures, painted with colors derived from materials like berries and brick dust, were considered important enough that most of them now hang in the National Gallery in Washington, D.C. A few are in private hands, and one is in Cooperstown, New York, not far from the mountains in which she and her friend sought happiness.

Ann Stephens
Born in Humphreysville, Connecticut, in 1810, Ann Sophia Stephens was one of the 19th century’s most celebrated authors. A friend of Zadock Pratt and his fourth wife Mary, Stephens was a frequent visitor to Prattsville in western Greene County. She chose Catskill as the setting for her book Malaeska: The Indian Wife of the White Hunter, published in 1860. In the sad tale, Stephens depicts the life and customs of New York’s early Dutch settlers and describes the clash between Indian and white cultures. The novel was wildly popular, and its success as the first of New York publisher Beadle and Adams’ mass market “dime novels” inspired thousands more in the series.

Ned Buntline
Another of Beadle and Adams’ popular writers was Edward Zane Carroll Judson, better known by his pen name, Ned Buntline. Buntline was born March 20, 1823, in Stamford, Delaware County, just west of Prattsville. A colorful character, he ran away to sea as a boy and began a life of adventure—if the tales he told can be believed.

Buntline married four times—supposedly once neglecting to shed one wife before taking on another—yet he still found time for extracurricular romance. In 1846, he killed Robert Porterfield in a duel in Nashville, Tennessee, after bring caught with Porterfield’s wife. Although Buntline was captured, beaten, threatened with hanging, and shot at by the victim’s brother, he managed to escape relatively unharmed.

Buntline’s greatest feat, however, as a writer, for it was he who wrote the dime novels about Buffalo Bill Cody that would make Cody a household name. The first story, entitled Buffalo Bill: The King of Border Men, appeared as a serial in the New York Weekly and was an immediate success. Buntline went on to write many other novels about Buffalo Bill’s exploits in the Wild West, as well as crime dramas and other books. In fact, Buntline’s prolific output earned him the nickname, “King of the Dime Novels,” and he was reputedly the best-paid novelist in America. In 1870, he returned to the Catskills and created a large estate in Stamford. He named the estate “Eagle’s Nest,” and lived there, lecturing on temperance between drinking bouts, until his death in 1886.

Candace Wheeler
Candace Wheeler, the country’s first important female textile designer, was born Candace Thurber in 1827 in the rural western Catskills settlement of Delhi. Growing up as one of eight children, she was taught to spin, sew, knit, and perform other forms of “domestic manufacture” that were to influence her later in life.

After her marriage to Thomas Wheeler, the couple went to live in New York City and was soon moving in an artistic and literary circle that included Frederic Church, Lewis Comfort Tiffany, William Cullen Bryant, and other luminaries of the times.

In 1876, Wheeler visited the first World’s Fair in Philadelphia. There she saw an exhibit of women’s handiwork from England’s Kensington School of Art Needlework. Wheeler was much impressed that sewing and embroidery, the common work of women, had been elevated to an art form, and one that could provide women with an income. She decided to form such an organization in America and sent out a circular to friends announcing her decision—an act she was to call one of the “most effective seeds sown in that day of women’s awakening to the duty of self-help.”

Her organization, the Society of Decorative Art, was intended to “encourage profitable industries among women who possess artistic talent, and to furnish…a market for their work.” This ambitious effort evolved into the Women’s Exchange, with branches across the country offering women a chance to sell everything from pottery to pies.

In 1879, she, Lewis Tiffany, Samuel Colman, and Lockwood DeForest formed the Associated Artists, a decorative arts partnership in which Wheeler concentrated at first on needlework. As the company began to take on interior decorating projects (Mark Twain’s house in Connecticut was a notable example), Wheeler found that there were no American designers for textiles and wallpaper and she set out to fill the gap, forming a design studio that employed young female artists. The studio won all four prizes in a wallpaper design competition soon after forming and was to become renowned enough that distinguished visitors like Oscar Wilde and Lily Langtry would drop in when in town.

Wheeler’s talents were very much in evidence at “Pennyroyal,” her Greene County retreat in Onteora Park. She planned the house from the ground up, overseeing the workmen, designing the furniture, and attending to every detail of the decoration.

It was at Onteora that an arts community evolved. The park was 2,000 acres of land in Tannersville that Wheeler and her brother had purchased to build retreats. Wheeler sold parcels to various visitors who wanted to do likewise. Her son Dunham, an architect, designed and built a clubhouse there, as well as an inn, the Bear and Fox. (Mark Twain quipped that the walls of the inn were so flimsy you could hear people on the other side changing their minds.)

In June 1892, Wheeler was appointed Director of the Woman’s Building of the Columbian Exposition at the World’s Fair in Chicago, a mark of her standing as a designer. Though she wrote in her biography that she considered the “responsibility outweighed the honor,” she was proud to have created an auditorium that showcased the contribution that the women of the world had made “in art, science, literature, ethics, and industries.”

Wheeler died in 1923. The houses that remain in Onteora Park are now in private hands. Pennyroyal itself was demolished about two decades ago, but Wheeler’s textile designs are still available today. A retrospective of Wheeler’s work was exhibited by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2001.

Mary Mapes Dodge
One of those who were to build a haven at Onteora was Mary Mapes Dodge, author of the classic children’s story, Hans Brinker: or the Silver Skates and editor of St. Nicholas, the hugely successful children’s magazine.

In the mid-1880s, Dodge, who had been in ill health, traveled to Europe at her doctor’s suggestion. There she met Candace Wheeler, who was founding her summer arts colony in the Catskills, and Wheeler invited her to visit Onteora. Dodge accepted, and found the place so hospitable that in 1888 she built a “cottage” of her own there, naming it “Yarrow” after the flower that grew in such abundance around the place.

As one of the 19th century’s most respected editors, she had connections with many literary lights, and just as Wheeler attracted artistic visitors to the Tannersville area, so Dodge had members of the literary world come calling.

In 1905, Dodge died in her Onteora home after a brief illness. She was 74. A memorial service was held for her in the little stone church in Onteora. She was buried in her home state of New Jersey, where, at her request, she was laid to rest with a Catskills bluestone as her grave marker.

Elizabeth Custer
The wife of General George Armstrong Custer, Elizabeth Custer wrote a number of books about her experiences on the western frontier, among them, Boots and Saddles: Or Life in Dakota with General Custer. Most were an effort to keep alive the memory of her husband. When Candace Wheeler and Mary Mapes Dodge discovered that the general had left his wife with nothing but a tiny pension, they hired her as their joint secretary. “Libbie” Custer began spending her summers at Onteora in 1894, staying at first at the Bear and Fox Inn, and then, in 1898, building a “cabin” of her own. “The Flags,” as she named it, was to become the literary equivalent of Mark Twain’s “Balsam,” or John Burroughs’ “Slabsides.” She became a close friend of Burroughs, another frequent visitor to Onteora, who found her “a bright charming woman.” But it was among the women in the colony that Custer was to find professional support and camaraderie.

Maude Adams
It’s probably true to say that the actress Maude Adams was one of America’s first superstars. Born in Salt Lake City in 1872, she made her first stage appearance at the age of nine months, and went from there to become immensely popular. During a London engagement she met Sir James Barrie, who was so taken with her that he was inspired, he told her, to write his play Peter Pan. Though Adams at first intended to play Wendy, it was the role of Peter himself that she brought to life on the American stage.

In 1900, Adams bought a tract of woodland in Onteora Park and built a summer home on it. She named her stone cottage “Caddam Hill,” after a scene in The Little Minister, another Barrie play, and one that had made her rich.

Adams was another of the Onteora women who could be called what Mary Mapes Dodge’s biographer described as an “anti-feminist feminist.” An independent woman who had traveled extensively and who enjoyed a degree of freedom usually reserved only for men at the time, she was a feminist more by example than by commitment to women’s causes, which she disavowed.

Adams died in her home in Tannersville in July 1953.

Goodman & Locker
Today the Catskill High Peaks are still muse to many artists and writers. In 1998, Allegra Goodman published her novel, Kaaterskill Falls, a book based on her experiences growing up as part of Tannersville’s Orthodox Jewish summer community.

Artist Thomas Locker’s many books, including In Blue Mountains, an Artist’s Return to America’s First Wilderness, celebrate the landscape of the Catskill Mountains in a romantic style that pays homage to the painters of the Hudson River School. Coming full circle, Locker has also illustrated the tale of Rip Van Winkle, joining the ranks of prestigious artists like Thomas Cole, N.C. Wyeth, and Arthur Rackham, who all helped keep alive both Irving’s American icon, and whether they knew it or not, the legend of the Iroquois.