Hands-On Experience

The Hudson Valley is often referred to as America’s Rhine. Mid-way between Albany and New York City and under the shadow of Overlook Mountain is Woodstock, NY. The beauty of the area and the human landscape is deftly evoked via Anita Smith’s Woodstock History and Hearsay.

As an early painter in 1912 she felt she needed to know the history of the land before she could depict it on her canvases. She met many Catskill Mountain farmers who shared their family stories at quilting bees and canning parties. In time she became herbalist and worked the soil herself.

After the Second World War she started writing her book. Undoubtedly her connection with the earth/soil guided Smith’s herstory. For example, her book opens with the Native American story of how the area came to be formed. “When the great sea subsided and the Catskill Mountains emerged, the Indian god Manitou sent down from the sky the first woman in the form of a tortoise—and she became the ancestor of the Mohicans…”

Rock City Group

The cover of Woodstock History and Hearsay, second edition, is entitled Rock City Waterfall. This painting is by the author, Anita Miller Smith, and was executed in 1920. In the background is Rosie Magee’s boardinghouse. It is in the impressionist style and displays Smith’s colorful palette.

Mrs. Magee, sometimes known as Mother Magee, served good food and attracted a host of local artists to her dinner table. Artists like John F. Carlson, Henry Lee McFee and Andrew Dasburg had nearby studios, but trouped over to Rosie’s for their meals.
In about 1911 the Eugene Speichers boarded here.

Anita Smith lived for a time in the turner’s mill that was located to the right of the Rock City waterfall (not pictured). Rosie Magee passed away in 1927. In the 1930s Anita Smith built her bluestone house in one Mrs. Magee’s former fields. She liked to say that she took care of Rosie’s apple trees—and hoped that her old friend would be pleased with her ministrations.

The painters who worked in the area were known as the Rock City Group.

Woodstock History and Hearsay/Early Days

James T. Shotwell, the great worker for peace and a Bryce Professor Emeritus of the History of International Relations, Columbia University asked Anita Smith to compile a database of all the men and women who served during the Second World War. This project, together with research gathered since the founding of the Historical Society of Woodstock in 1931, served as a foundation for Woodstock History and Hearsay.

The book is a balance of painstaking scholarship and folkloric tales gathered first-hand at quilting and canning parties from hardy Catskill mountain farmers and hunters. In addition, Smith who was a painter wrote countless vignettes about the denizens of the early golden age of the Woodstock art colony—including such notables as George Bellows, Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Philip Guston, Henry Morton Robinson, Hervey White, Ralph Radcliffe Whitehead, Doris Lee, Helen Hayes, Charles Rosen and many, many more.

This title was the town’s first official history. Smith also wrote an herbal, As True As The Barnacle Tree; an art book, The Landscape of History; and a family memoir, The Quest of Abel Knight: The Quakers and The Shakers.