The Olana Partnership

After Isabel and Frederic’s deaths, Olana passed to their son, Louis, and his wife, Sally. They cherished and preserved Olana for more than half of the 20th century, but Louis died in 1946 and Sally in 1964, at which time Olana faced an uncertain future. Frederic Church was largely forgotten and the Hudson River School largely unappreciated. A place like Olana was no longer valued, in this period when iconic landmarks such as New York’s Pennsylvania Station and the famed Catskill Mountain House were destroyed. Olana’s collections were tagged for auction… This master work of American landscape art was to be sold and dispersed.

David Huntington, the activist art historian, led the battle to save Olana from destruction in the mid-1960s, forcing the reappraisal of the American landscape tradition in art and culture. He identified Olana as “the monument of Emerson’s, Thoreau’s, and Whitman’s America” and inspired a LIFE Magazine illustrated feature that brought national attention to this pending disaster with an article titled: “An Imperiled American Treasure.” Saving Olana was a landmark public and private effort, engaging local citizens and national figures, including Jackie Kennedy and Philip Johnson, and Governor Nelson Rockefeller who pressed legislation to preserve Olana as a New York State Historic Site in 1966.

From this miraculous preservation victory, The Olana Partnership emerged as a committed non-profit steward that champions and interprets Olana as a national landmark of American landscape and environmental thinking. Our precedent-setting advocacy to protect Olana’s viewshed yielded dramatic results for the Hudson Valley and the country as a whole. In the 1970s, a successful campaign prevented the construction of a nuclear plant on the river below Olana, enlisting art and cultural historians and curators nationwide to establish aesthetic impact as a measurable criterion in the federal environmental review process. In the late 1990s, joining with Scenic Hudson and the grassroots Friends of Hudson, The Olana Partnership used these tools to stop the construction of a massive coal-fired cement plant on a prominent ridge just east of Olana.