#HudsonValley: In Nyack, Toni Morrison Preserved African-American History With a Bench

An ex-slave turned businesswoman and abolitionist is remembered in Nyack thanks to the author of Beloved.

by Rich Watson 

Toni Morrison was one of the most critically acclaimed authors of the twentieth century. In addition to winning the 1993 Nobel Prize for Literature, she received the Pulitzer, the American Book Award, seven honorary doctorates and the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Her 1987 novel Beloved was the impetus for a project that commemorated the lives of African slaves. She used benches to mark their memories, in places across America—including her adopted hometown of Nyack.

#HudsonValley: “Death at Olana” by Glenda Ruby Imagines a Murder at the Landscape Painting Site

The century-and-a-half home of a Hudson Valley painter is the setting for a contemporary mystery novel.

by Rich Watson 

In the mid-nineteenth century, a group of landscape artists based in the Hudson Valley formed a movement that brought the region, and other parts of America, to life in a variety of paintings. 

One of them, Frederick Edwin Church, designed and lived in a mansion, Olana, that grew to personify the Hudson River School. Today it’s a museum that draws visitors from around the region and beyond.

In 2013, it was the subject of a mystery novel that drew upon the place’s history, called Death at Olana.

#HudsonValley: Washington Irving’s Tarrytown and the House He Made His Home, Sunnyside

One of the best American writers of the 1800s lived in this converted farmhouse in Tarrytown.

by Rich Watson 

Washington Irving was an acclaimed writer from the nineteenth century, whose works are well remembered today.

The New York City native (it was Irving who gave New York the Anglo-Saxon nickname “Gotham,” meaning “goat’s town”) served in the War of 1812. He then spent seventeen years traveling in Europe, beginning in 1815. He returned to America in 1832.

Three years later, he purchased a house in a town upstate in which he had stayed briefly as a child: Tarrytown.