The big snow storm seems to have missed us entirely, so work continues on our landscape restoration. Here's a picture you don't see every day: giant construction equipment on Thomas Cole's front lawn. The truck in this photo is scooping out a roadway where the original entrance drive once curved through the property. The roadway will be a finished in gravel, as will all the other new paths throughout the historic site.

Very exciting development! (at least for us Thomas Cole and/or architecture finatics): the architect (the accomplished and wonderful Marilyn Kaplan) whom we hired to do the inital research on Thomas Cole's "New Studio", which stood here on the property from 1846 until 1973, has produced some initial drawings showing what the building actually looked like. At right is the west elevation, which would have faced Spring Street. How great is it to see this building rise from the ashes, at least on paper! Thomas Cole designed the building himself, and it served as his studio from 1846 until he died in 1848. It was a truly beautiful building, with italianate styling and whimsical details such as wooden acorns adorning the corners. These drawings are the first step in our process to bring the building back, in the exact footprint of the original (which was just across the lawn from the Main House.) Stay tuned for more progress on this front.

You heard it here first: our 2010 exhibition will be paintings by the women artists of the Hudson River School, of which there were quite a few, and whose work is extremely beautiful. I think it's about time that someone direct some attention towards these accomplished but little-known artists. Our guest curator Nancy Siegel also came up with the idea of having the opening event on Mothers’ Day weekend (May 8-9) and giving each mother a flower. As a mother myself, I think that mothers deserve all the flowers they can get.

In other news, starting this month we are getting free advertisements on WMHT, the PBS television station out of Albany. The National Parks in the area got together last winter to plan a partnership around the upcoming Ken Burns series about the National Parks called “America’s Best Idea.” The TV station decided to produce 1-minute pieces about each of our sites, and to broadcast them once per week for the 26 weeks leading up to the Ken Burns broadcast in the fall (September 27th). You can see the ad on a recent post on this blog.

I also spoke this week with Edith Cole Silberstein (Thomas Cole's great granddaughter), who told me that she had received letters from Raymond Beecher (the late Greene County Historian) every two weeks for the last fifteen years!  The letters tell all the details of what was happening at the Thomas Cole house from 1994 until Ray died last fall, and the pile of letters weighs nearly seven pounds. (She actually weighed the letters.) wow.