The Cottage Colony on the Summit of Mt. Beacon

Cottage colony on Mount Beacon.

Aerial view of Dutchess Ski Area, showing cottages near summit, c. 1968.

1941 Topographic Map of Mount Beacon from the University of New Hampshire collection http://docs.unh.edu/nhtopos/WestPoint.htm.

Now there remains only one. But in its heyday--from the early 1900's through the 1920's-- the cottage colony on Mount Beacon was a bustling, seasonal community of twenty families. The Incline Railway made cottage life on the mountains possible, delivering by the trolley cars everything from the lumber to build the cabins to the summer guests themselves. Some owners gave their mountain retreat whimsical names, like Senator Stuhr's cottage "Sans Souci," or the Welton's (mother and daughter) tandem cottages "Kamp Upanuff" and "Up-Hi-Er." In 1911, life in the colony became more bearable (and popular) with the building of a water delivery system, linking by a pipeline the cottages to the Mt. Beacon Reservoir, and thus ending the laborious chore of lugging pails of water up to remote cabins. Surprisingly, a number of cottagers that summer of 1911 were Newburgh residents and seasonal commuters to the mountain. Dr. W.V. Randall, a Newburgh dentist, was a "hearty endorser [according to the local paper] of mountain air and scenery, and will spend most of the summer time at his cozy cottage on Mount Beacon." Today, only a single, much vandalized, cottage remains. However, hikers still can walk along "Howard's Path" and see the shells and collapsed ruins of a half dozen cottages, with their quaint rockeries still coming into seasonal bloom.