The Catskill Mountain House Collection

Collection — Multiple Containers

Identifier: MSS 2021.0002

Staff Only

Scope and Contents

This collection compiled by the staff of the Vedder Research Library comprises an assortment of materials related to the history and operation of the Catskill Mountain House. The majority of the materials in this collection are from two separate donations, the first being a selection of thirteen registers of the Catskill Mountain House and miscellaneous material donated to the Greene County Historical Society by the estate of Milo Claude Moseman in 1963. The second batch of materials is an array of legal papers and correspondence of the law firm of Osborn, Bloodgood, Wilbur and Fray, which was the firm that represented the heirs of Charles L. Beach in their various personal and business ventures from circa 1910 through the 1930s. Most of the services rendered by this firm seem to have been provided by Frank Osborn, who was well acquainted with the family and their various interests. Interspersed with these papers are correspondence, news clippings, ephemera, and miscellaneous images donated by various individuals, including some material given by Roland Van Zandt prior to his death which was not subsequently included within his own collection of papers.

Of particular note are materials related to the management of the natural resources at Pine Orchard, North Lake, and South Lake by the heirs of Charles L. Beach following his death in 1902. Also of note is a selection of material related to the creation of the scale model of the Catskill Mountain House by Egbert Saxe of Kiskatom.

Dates

1823 - 1991

Biographical / Historical

The Catskill Mountain House, a seasonal resort in the Northern Catskills of Greene County originally constructed in 1824, is widely celebrated as being the heart of a cultural phenomenon that defined the Catskills as an artistic, literary, and social epicenter of national significance for more than a century. While a comprehensive review of that resort and the nature of the phenomena it represented is beyond the scale suitable for this document, the inseparable nature of the Mountain House's ascendancy and its management for more than ninety years by Charles L. Beach and his heirs is of direct relevance to the contextualization of the materials in this colleciton.

Charles L. Beach, who took over the Mountain House as owner and operator in 1839, was the owner of several shipping and transportation interests based in Catskill, New York. The Mountain House was a destination which had already garnered much attention among affluent regional social circles, but Beach expanded the private holdings of land surrounding the Mountain House to further develop a parklike wilderness setting which he understood to be the fundamental interest of many of his visitors. By cornering a market not only on the celebrated environs of the Mountain House, but also on the transportation infrastructure needed to access it, Beach made the Mountain House a comprehensively curated experience which remained exceedinly popular as a destination of Society's elite for the rest of the 19th century.

The Mountain House eventually sported several thousand acres of real estate along with a rail line to convey visitors from the steamboat landing at Catskill, and Charles L. Beach was sensitive to development only as far as it facilitated access to the "untouched wilderness" at pine orchard which the Mountain House nested in. A number of factors culminated in the dismantling of this infrastructure in the years following Charles L. Beach's death in 1902, and by World War One the natural resources contained on the Mountain House's expansive acreage were being exploited to bolster revenue.

Several legal entities were formed and adapted over the course of the existence of the Catskill Mountain House to govern and hold title to the real property that comprised the operation. Among those companies were the Catskill Mountain House Association formed originally around 1823, the Catskill Mountain House Company managed by the Beach family beginning in the 1870s, and the family firm of George H. and Charles Beach in its various iterations following the death of Charles L. Beach and the dissolution of the Catskill Mountain House Company in 1910. Assets transferred between these firms was subject on numerous occasions to chattel mortgages which eventually brought the firm to court in the 1930s as interest in and visitation to the Mountain House contintued to wane. The Mountain House last welcomed guests in the summer of 1941.

Milo Claude Moseman, an attorney from Tannersville, was the final owner of the Mountain House, and struggled for years to make the property generate revenue. The Mountain House itself was largely gutted and scrapped by the 1950s, and the State of New York continued to express serious interest in purchasing the property to add to the boundaries of the Catskill Park. In 1962 the State acquired the land, and the destroyed shell of the Mountain House was burned to facilitate its safe removal and restoration of the landscape in 1963.

The Moutain House remains preeminent in the collective consciousness of local residents, and just one of the many manifestations of this was the construction of a scale model of the Mountain House by Egbert Saxe in the 1950s. Mr. Saxe lived for years within sight of the Mountain House from his home in Kiskatom, and the model he created was given to the Greene County Historical Society in the 1960s. During this same period Roland Van Zandt completed his authoritative history of the Catskill Mountain House, and this seminal work on the resort is the basis for almost all subsequent attempts to contextualize the Mountain House and its impact.