The Hudson River Historic District, also known as Hudson River Heritage Historic District, is the largest Federally designated district on the mainland of the contiguous United States.The Nantucket Historic District includes all of the island of Nantucket. Montana's Butte-Anaconda Historic District, the next largest, covers 9,774 acres (15.2 square miles). The Adirondack Park, also in New York, and Alaska's Cape Krusenstern are larger, but are not conventional historic districts. It covers an area of 22,205 acres (34.6 square miles, 89 km2) extending inland roughly a mile (1.6 km) 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, the district was characterized by 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 small riverside communities. This semi-feudal arrangement is still reflected in land use and architecture within the district today, since it has not seen major development.
In 1990, two separate historic districts were combined and expanded into a National Historic Landmark District (NHLD), in recognition of this unique history and character. Only 2% by acreage of the properties within the district are not considered historic. With
Geography
The Hudson River Historic District roughly corresponds to the 40 estates established along the river on lands originally granted to the Livingston family. Portions, the Sixteen Mile District and Clermont Estates Historic District, were previously included in two other smaller districts that were later incorporated into the district.
Two of its boundaries are political. On the west it ends at the Ulster county line in the middle of the river channel. The Kingston-Rhinecliff Bridge provides the only access from this direction. In the north it is the line between the towns of Clermont and Germantown. The south boundary is not a municipal line but rather coterminous with the south boundary of Margaret Lewis Norrie State Park north of Staatsburg.
Only to the east does the delineation get complicated. It follows an irregular line parallel to US 9 north to Weys Corners, the junction with NY 9G north of Rhinebeck, and then 9G from there to the north boundary. It has been drawn very tightly to exclude some newer properties that do not reflect the traditional character of the area yet include some lands still reflecting their development as estates that had not previously been recognized. There are no signs or other indicators of the district boundary along the local and county roads that serve it.
The land within the district is generally a gentle and gradual slope from the low glacial ridge followed by routes 9 and 9G to the river, which generally remains about 10 feet (3 m) above sea level at this point. The railroad tracks built for the Hudson River Railroad to connect New York City and Albany, still used by Amtrak and CSX today, run at the river's edge through much of the district.
Most of the land reflects its past as large country estates, with large fields and meadows alternating with woodlots. The slope allows for expansive views from cleared areas of not only the river and the higher glacial ridges on the west side but the Catskill Mountains in the distance. This prospect has attracted homebuilders from the earliest times of settlement to the present, and is considered an essential quality of the district: "There is a sense of openness that belies [the district']s constrained width because it is counterpointed by the persistent vision of the mountains in the west," writes architectural historian Neil Larson in the NHL application. "The district benefits from such a direct and imposing profile of the mountains, and its legendary country estates would lose much of their appeal without this extraordinary setting."
The district's permanent human population and attendant development is densely concentrated in the small riverside communities — from south to north, Rhinecliff, Barrytown, Annandale and Tivoli. This, too, reflects the years of estate and country house development, as well as the historic importance of the river and rail transportation corridor to the local economy.
History
The history recognized by the NHLD designation began in 1688 with the first colonial land grants and continues to the end of country house development in the area around 1940. It can be divided into several phases: the colonial era when only Clermont Manor stood, the post-Revolutionary period in the early 19th century when more houses were built in newer architectural styles, the later 19th and early 20th century when the area became less attractive to wealthy homebuilders, and the later 20th century when efforts to preserve and protect the properties began.
Colonial era
Robert Livingston the Elder was the first member of the family to obtain the patent on the that would later become identified with his family. His son Robert Livingston Jr. established the first country seat on Livingston Manor in the 1730s when he built Clermont, reserving the entire that fronted on the river for himself. He designed Clermont carefully to be a working farm as well as an estate, to be made financially viable when portions further inland were leased in portions to tenant farmers. The sweeping view of the lands further emphasized the Livingstons' dominance over many of the lands visible. This, as well as Clermont's name and position, strategically overlooking the Hudson and its commercial traffic, was influenced strongly by European feudal practices, setting a pattern other estates in Livingston Manor were to follow long after his lifetime.
His son Judge Livingston followed feudal tradition further by marrying Margaret Beekman, daughter of Henry, another large local landowner whose holdings were concentrated around present-day Rhinecliff, which grew up around them. Beekman lived at Kipsbergen, a Dutch-style stone house that burned down in the early 20th century. Its appearance is recalled in the peaked roof of the Rhinebeck post office, built in 1940. Judge Livingston participated in the Stamp Act Congress. His son, Robert helped draft the Declaration of Independence.
He and Margaret would have nine children. The eldest, Robert R. Livingston, built another estate, Belvedere, just south of Clermont. In retaliation for the family's revolutionary activities, in October 1777, the British burned both Clermont and Belvedere.
Around the time of the Revolution, Margaret Beekman Livingston, had begun parcelling out smaller tracts of her holdings to her children. This led to the construction of another dozen estates during the early years of the new nation. They were joined by her son-in-law, Governor Morgan Lewis, who settled on south of Rhinecliff in 1790 and built a small house there.
19th century
At first, some of the younger Livingstons' estates followed the British colonial patterns of Clermont. Rhinebeck House, today known as Grasmere, is the best-preserved example. Later on the houses began to show the influence of contemporary French tastes, abandoning the large central hall in favor of smaller rooms and passageways inside and focusing more attention on the garden side of the house, which usually faced the river and mountains as well. Montgomery Place, built by Janet Livingston Montgomery after the death of her husband Richard, is the only example from this period that remains largely as it was when first built.
A direct French presence, in the form of a visiting French friend of Robert Livingston's, was also responsible for creating Tivoli. He laid out streets and a plan for Red Hook Landing, a small boat-building town on the river, and renamed it. His plans were never fully realized, but they did guide the community's development. In 1870 it incorporated as a village, taking in the adjacent commercial center of Madalin.
The Romanticism that flourished in the succeeding years drew a good deal of its inspiration from the Hudson Valley, in the form of the Hudson River School in painting and the architectural theories of Andrew Jackson Downing, put into practice there and elsewhere by his protegés Calvert Vaux and Frederick Clarke Withers as well as Richard Upjohn and Alexander Jackson Davis. "No part of the United States had a more correct kind of Romantic scenery to offer", wrote Catskill historian Alf Evers. The Livingstons took full advantage of this gift dumped into their laps by a whim of the gods. They appropriated the Catskills as a feature of their landscape and as a source of aesthetic pleasure to Livingstons and their guests ... [F]rom the Livingston country, the entire eastern wall of the Catskills with its higher peaks rising within the wall may be grasped in one delighted glance. Many of the then-popular locust trees were planted on the Livingston estates to frame the views. The Livingstons, as was customary for the owners of large country estates at the time, opened their grounds to the public on weekends as parks, and to this end followed Downing's theories of landscaping by building curving paths and rustic benches and shelters from which to admire the river and distant mountains.
The Livingstons also spurred the population of the area through the tenants they attracted to work the farms. Many were poor German immigrants, who settled in the area from the 1710s onward because other settlers were wary of the feudal "three-life" leases the Livingstons had traditionally offered, under which the property reverted to the original landowner if it could not be paid off in the lifetime of the original lessee, his son and grandson after him (It rarely was). Occasionally these led to "Anti-rent Wars", uprisings that sometimes directly affected the landlords, as in 1832 when Lewis's mansion was burned, supposedly by angry tenants. He replaced it with a 25-room Greek Revival home, the root of the current structure.
Those who did not go into farming settled instead into the hamlets that served them, starting with Rhinecliff, where ferries crossed the river to Kingston. The completion of the railroad stimulated the development of not only Rhinecliff, which took that name in 1849 from the railroad station, but Barrytown as well, where an icehouse was built in what had previously been a landing between the Massena and Edgewater estates into a small community. Another hamlet, Staatsburg, sprung up around the station near William Dinsmore's "Locusts on Hudson" in the 1860s and 70s.