Overlook mountain house

The Catskill Mountains were America's premier resort area starting in the 1820s up until the 1920s. The high elevations offered clean air and sublime views of some of the greatest scenery in the world. In the early 1800s it was thought that America could not compare with the vistas offered in Europe. The work of the Hudson River School of painters, such as Thomas Cole, and writers such as James Fenimore Cooper and Washington Irving helped popularize the Catskills as a tourist attraction. The work of these painters and writers was part of a larger process of creating a sense of nationalism, by “imagin(ing) and propagat(ing) the idea of a historically unique people conjoined to its own state.”

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