After a two-year anti-development campaign led by scholar David C. Upon Sally Church's death in 1964, a nephew inherited the estate and intended to sell it to developers at a public auction. Louis and Sally Church maintained the property largely as it had been left to them, adding additional acreage for farming. After Isabel Church's death in 1899 and Frederic Church's death in 1900, the property was inherited by their son Louis Church, who married Sarah Baker Good (known as Sally) in 1901. Although the Churches often wintered in warmer climates, and spent time in New York City, Olana was their main residence. Ĭhurch continuously improved the property, plotting scenic carriage roads and adding a studio wing to the house over the period 1888–1891. For Christmas in 1879, Isabel Church gave her husband several books on the geography of the ancient Middle East, and shortly thereafter the couple began calling their property 'Olana'.

Osborn and his wife Virginia, and humorist Mark Twain. The Churches hosted notable figures from the literary, religious, artistic and business worlds: writer Charles Dudley Warner and his pianist wife Susan, author and artist Susan Hale, sculptor Erastus Dow Palmer and his wife Mary Jane, industrialist William H. After an 18-month trip to Europe and the Middle East, Church hired architect Calvert Vaux and worked with him on the design of the mansion, which was constructed between 18. In 1867 Church acquired a parcel of mature woods at the top of his hill, and began planning a large house for the site. Frederic Joseph Church was born in autumn 1866, the first of three sons and a daughter that were raised to adulthood at Olana. Late in 1865, the couple returned to Cosy Cottage to start anew.

Grieving from this, the greatest emotional blow of their lives, the parents traveled with sympathetic friends to Jamaica for four months, then to a retreat in Vermont. The family's bucolic life at Olana was forever changed in March, 1865, with the deaths of the children from diphtheria. Two children were born to the Churches, a son in 1862 and a daughter in 1865. Frederic and Isabel Church called their house 'Cosy Cottage' and their property 'the Farm'. In addition, Church laid out gardens and orchards, dredged a marsh to create a 10-acre (4.0 ha) lake, planted trees, and built a studio. The first element he added to the property was a small country cottage, believed to have been designed by Richard Morris Hunt. On March 31, 1860, a few months before his marriage to Isabel Carnes, Church returned to purchase a 126-acre (51 ha) hardscrabble farm on a south-facing slope of a hill in Columbia County, near the thriving towns of Hudson and Catskill, New York. He was then a student of Thomas Cole, now considered a founding figure of the Hudson River School of painters. In 1845, Frederic Church first sketched on the property that was to become Olana. The house contains Church's last studio, built as an addition from 1888 to 1890.Ĭlouds over Olana, by Frederic Edwin Church, 1872 The house is intricately stenciled inside and out Church designed the stencils based on his travels in the Middle East. The interior remains much as it was during Church's lifetime, exotically furnished and decorated with objects from his global travels, and with some 40 paintings by Church and his friends.

The stone, brick, and polychrome-stenciled villa is a mixture of Victorian, Persian and Moorish styles. The main building is an architectural masterpiece designed by Frederic Church in consultation with the architect Calvert Vaux.

It is owned and operated by the New York State Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation, and is also supported by The Olana Partnership, a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization. The house is also a prime example of Orientalist architecture. Olana is one of the few intact artists' home-, studio- and estate-complexes in the United States it was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1965. Church and his wife Isabel (1836–1899) named their estate after a fortress-treasure house in ancient Greater Persia (modern-day Armenia), which also overlooked a river valley. The residence has a wide view of the Hudson River Valley, the Catskill Mountains and the Taconic Range. The centerpiece of Olana is an eclectic villa which overlooks parkland and a working farm designed by the artist. The estate was home to Frederic Edwin Church (1826–1900), one of the major figures in the Hudson River School of landscape painting. Olana State Historic Site is a historic house museum and landscape in Greenport, New York, near the city of Hudson.

Frederic church