page_title: Hudson River Historic District
section_title: 20th century
hierarchical_section_title: Hudson River Historic District / History / 20th century
caption_attribution_description: English: This image was taken in 2007; it shows Stone Row, a landmark facility in the center of Bard's campus.
context_page_description: The Hudson River Historic District, also known as Hudson River Heritage Historic District, is the largest such district on the mainland of the contiguous United States. It covers an area of 22,205 acres extending inland roughly a mile from the east bank of the Hudson River between Staatsburg and Germantown in Dutchess and Columbia counties in the U.S. state of New York. This area includes the riverfront sections of the towns of Clermont, Red Hook, Rhinebeck and part of Hyde Park. This strip includes in their entirety the hamlets of Annandale, Barrytown, Rhinecliff and the village of Tivoli. Bard College and two protected areas, Margaret Lewis Norrie State Park and Tivoli Bays Unique Area, are also within the district.
  From the colonial era to the early 20th century, it was characterized by the large "country seats" built by members of the Livingston family, such as Clermont Manor and Montgomery Place, both National Historic Landmarks. For most of that period, these estates were worked by tenant farmers, with much of the rest of the population concentrated in the small riverside communities.
context_section_description: Livingston Manor's prestige began to diminish somewhat in the later years of the century. The new money of the Gilded Age had come from industrialization, not landownership, and preferred newer hot spots like Long Island and Newport for its summer mansions and retreats, or followed Jay Gould and the Rockefellers in building or improving estates further downriver, closer to the city.
  The influence of the newer wealth and its tastes on design and living was still felt along the Hudson most in the changed approach to the pleasure grounds around the estates. What had once been used for gardening and ornamental farms was now used for recreation, and some of the earliest golf courses, tennis courts and country clubs were built on the country seats.
  Some significant new buildings were added to the future district during this period. Stanford White converted Lewis's old home into a new mansion for Ogden Mills, as well as doing some renovations at Rokeby. Another Astor had Mott B. Schmidt design Valeur, and Charles A. Platt designed an American Renaissance home for the Chapman family. The last major country seat came when Harrie T. Lindeberg built Fox Hollow on the thousand acres (4 km²) Tracy Dows had acquired.
  In 1860, the Bard family had provided money so that a small Episcopal seminary near their Tivoli estate could be expanded into St. Stephen's College, later renamed after them. It eventually expanded into three of the former country seats. This was the beginning of a second life for some of the old country seats, as some moved out of private residential use and became institutions. The Catholic Church received Ellerslie, Ferncliff and Linwood, using them for various purposes. Dorothy Day made Rose Hill the location of one the Catholic Worker Movement's farms during the 1960s.
  By the 1930s, many of the old estate houses were becoming difficult to keep up and burdens on family fortunes that were being divided as the Livingstons' had once been. Some survived by selling and subdividing the farms to offset rising property taxes. Others, like Clermont, the Mills Mansion and Wilderstein, were eventually given to the public or private trusts and turned into museums of the life once led in them.
  The end of the country-seat era and of any major new construction locked the existing buildings and their architectural styles in place. At the same time the rise in automotive transportation and attendant road improvements, particularly the bridge, made the district more accessible than before. Preservation efforts in the wake of the establishment of the National Register of Historic Places led to the 1979 creation of the Clermont Estates Historic District in Columbia County and the Sixteen Mile District to its south. Shortly afterwards, the state Department of Environmental Conservation designated the area the state's first scenic district. Later research by the group Hudson River Heritage led to findings that the two needed to be combined into a larger district extending as far south as the Mills Mansion, and that it was significant and well preserved enough to be accorded National Historic Landmark District status. The National Park Service (NPS) added it to the list in 1990.
caption: Stone Row dormitories built in the 1880s - Bard College
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