“Good Reader!—expect me not to describe the indescribable…It was a vast and changeful, a majestic, an interminable landscape; a fairy, grand, and delicately colored scene, with rivers for its lines of reflections; with highlands and the vales of states for its shadowings, and far-off mountains for its frame.” So wrote the young American poet Willis Gaylord Clark in the Knickerbocker magazine upon returning from his 1837 summer vacation at a grand hotel on the outskirts of Catskill, New York, about 110 miles upriver from New York City. Like those who had come before and the many who would come after, Clark reached the Catskill Mountain House after an arduous steamboat-to-stagecoach journey. Gazing at the building’s white-columned facade, he was bewitched by the “earth’s one sanctuary”—a biblical allusion to the tranquil city of Shiloh. “My name was on the book,” he added, and he checked in.
Earlier this fall, a leather-bound guest register for the Catskill Mountain House, covering the years 1839–43 and 1846–52, surfaced at auction in New York. Because I live near the hotel’s former location, which still charms hikers and artists, I was immediately intrigued and began brushing up on its history. I couldn’t help but leap at Clark’s reference to a book and the porter who asked after his bags, even though the book on auction wasn’t the one he might have signed upon arrival, indicating his room number and how long he would stay. That ledger appears to be lost to history, as this one was thought to be until the great-grandchild of someone who had worked at the hotel consigned it to auction.
Jonathan Palmer, archivist and deputy historian at the Greene County Historical Society (GCHS), told me he suspected the register was just one of many things that “got away” during the hotel’s fading and final years, before the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation acquired it and burned it to the ground in 1963 after years of ruin. The GCHS, headquartered in nearby Coxsackie, New York, has long owned four consecutive Catskill Mountain House registers, the earliest beginning in 1854, as well as room-assignment books and related ephemera. Palmer had believed those four were the only ones left. “So it was a big shock for us all to find out that there was this other ledger that’s out there and available,” he said prior to the auction. “We’d love to own it…it would be bringing something home for us. It’s a part of our story that’s very near and dear.” The GCHS planned to bid, but Palmer didn’t have high hopes of acquiring the ledger.