Introduction by William B. Rhoads
Elverhoj (Danish for “hill of the fairies,” pronounced “El-verhoy”) was established at Milton on the picturesque west shore of the Hudson River in 1912 by Andersen and a small group of artists he brought with him from the Midwest where they had taken first steps to form the colony. The site in southern Ulster County, rural but with easy access by train or steamboat to New York City, appealed to Andersen because of its elevated, panoramic view of the Hudson. Elverhoj publicity noted that this river scenery had long attracted leading American artists, including George Inness, who had spent several summers painting landscapes in Milton.
Andersen was fully aware of Byrdcliffe, the well-established Arts and Crafts colony formed in 1902 by Ralph Radcliffe Whitehead on a Catskill mountain slope in northern Ulster County. Whitehead, an English disciple of John Ruskin and William Morris whose writings were the foundation of the movement, was sufficiently wealthy to quickly build and populate the colony he ruled over. Andersen and his fellow colonists were not wealthy, but he had the ambitious dream of surpassing Byrdcliffe as a center for handcrafted metalwork, jewelry, and textiles, as well as paintings and L { 8 } etchings. Like Byrdcliffe, workers in the Arts and Crafts would live, create, and teach at the Hudson River site.
C. R. Ashbee, while reserved in his assessment of the quality of what Elverhoj made, praised the Milton experiment for continuing “the everlasting protest to Industrialism,” and he believed that giving the workers “their liberty of production,” the quality would improve. Moreover, when he traveled from Milton to Woodstock to inspect Whitehead’s Byrdcliffe, he observed that the shops were mostly empty, a consequence of Whitehead’s “dilettantism” and adopting the attitude of a “grand Seigneur,” in contrast to Andersen’s managing of Elverhoj “in a tactful and kindly way.”
The Elverhoj colonists took advantage of their proximity to New York and to Poughkeepsie, the smaller city rising a little to the north on the east side of the Hudson. From the outset, Andersen and others at Elvehoj maintained close connections with Vassar College in Poughkeepsie. Vassar’s president, Henry Noble MacCracken, and some faculty were colony patrons; Vassar students were colony visitors and customers; while Elverhoj artists exhibited, and textile artists Bessie and Henrietta Scott taught, at Vassar. Andersen designed rings for Vassar classes, and etcher Ralph Pearson designed Vassar bookplates. The Vassar community would be prime targets for sales of Elverhoj crafts at the colony’s shop in Poughkeepsie.
The colony was originally quartered in the mid-nineteenth-century Greek Revival mansion of Captain Sears with a fine view over the river. Publicity featured the columnar porch of the mansion and its view, while omitting the busy tracks of the West Shore Railroad just below. An old outbuilding was transformed with cobblestone chimney into a rustic studio, and cabins, huts, and tents on platforms were erected for colony members and visitors.
World War I took James Scott, the colony’s leading painter and a jewelry maker, to the horrors of combat in France, and the war effort weakened the colony at a time when the American Arts and Crafts movement was generally in decline. Scott was able to return after the war, but Andersen, always drawn to theatrical performance, sought to make up for the diminished interest in Arts and { 9 } Crafts by constructing a lightly framed theatre that nevertheless ran with Broadway connections from 1924 into the 1930s (Action on stage was routinely interrupted when steam locomotives ran by noisily on the nearby tracks.)
Theater goers and other visitors to the colony were dined and entertained at the old Sears mansion, which Andersen transformed into a “Moorish” dining terrace, promising pleasures at what now was called “the Riviera of the Hudson.” The staid Greek Revival porch was obscured behind a new stucco facade with band of upto- date casement windows furnishing river views.
Andersen’s ambitious projects of the twenties were brought low by the Depression of the thirties. Besieged by creditors, graphically represented by Andersen as dagger-wielding villains, Andersen called upon Eleanor Roosevelt, well known for her support of the crafts at Val-Kill across the river in Hyde Park, for help in saving the colony. Despite Mrs. Roosevelt’s best efforts, including a plea to Hallie Flanagan, the New Deal administrator and former director of Vassar’s Experimental Theatre, Andersen lost the colony. It was acquired in 1938 by followers of Father Divine, the charismatic Black leader, and became one of his best-known “heavens,” enjoyed by multitudes of Divine’s followers, transported by steamboat from the city.
Andersen retreated to a small cabin on the edge of the property. In his last years, when dark humor appears in his drawings, he was befriended by a Danish family living nearby in Newburgh. He died in 1944 and is buried in an obscure corner of Cedar Hill Cemetery with the simplest of stone markers, in contrast to the more prominent site and monument of nineteenth-century tastemaker Andrew Jackson Downing in the same cemetery.
The site of the Elverhoj colony was sold by the Divine movement in 1947. Most of the property has been owned by the Weiss family since 1957. Vandals and natural forces have attacked and sometimes destroyed the colony’s buildings. Fortunately, an archive Andersen created has survived, along with many paintings by Scott and etchings by Pearson, as well as a number of examples of Elverhoj metalwork and jewelry, mostly in private collections. Weavings by Bessie and Henrietta Scott from Elverhoj remain elusive. { 10 } Admirers of Elverhoj hope that more examples of the colony’s art and craft will come to light and be preserved, along with the remaining fragile structures on the Milton hillside.
William B. Rhoads
Professor Emeritus of Art History
Suny New Paltz