396 
AMERICAN HOMES AND GARDENS 
June, 1906 
The Gantley House, at Athens, New York 
By Elizabeth L. Gebhard 
The Old Gantley House 
%) HEN Robert Fulton made his trip up the 
Hudson in the first steamboat, in 1807, he 
carried as one of his passengers. young 
Daniel Gantley, of New York. In fact, Mr. 
Gantley was the youngest passenger aboard 
of transportation was continually enhanced by the beauty of 
the scenery about him. 
About thirty miles below Albany, opposite the city of 
Hudson, a venture in land had been made a few years earlier, 
by a company of Hudson men.. Already a large tract had been 
surveyed, and occasional houses of some pretension built upon 
lots at some distance from each other. ‘The scene was attract- 
ive. With green lawns sloping to the water’s edge, the river 
flowing steadily on its course like a neighbor constantly pass- 
ing their front doors, and the blue Catskills a tower of 
strength at their backs—it all made a picture likely to remain 
in the mind of a young and ardent traveler. Forty-one years 
later Mr. Gantley brought his family from New York and 
settled in a home built on the very spot that had attracted 
him at the earlier date. 
Five years after the Clermont’s first trip from New York 
to Albany, Samuel Haight, a Catskill merchant, began the 
building of the Colonial mansion which stands to-day at the 
southern end of the village of Athens, at the turn of the 
Catskill road, and has been known for over fifty years as the 
Gantley house. Before General Haight had his house finished 
he was called away to serve in the war of 1812, but he left 
behind him a wife whose architectural ideas were as pro- 
nounced and sound as his own. Some time previous she had 
become familiar with the construction of the Gantley house on 
Broadway in New York. In many ways General Haight 
was building his new home on the Hudson after the same 
design, but the general’s taste was satisfied with spacious 
square rooms, whereas Mrs. Haight, from the time she saw 
the house on Broadway, particularly craved a great oval 
drawing-room with a circular gallery around it. She was not 
able to bring the general to her way of thinking, and her 
plight would have beeen a sad one, and posterity would have 
lost much in an architectural way had not the war of 1812 
The Entrance to the Gantley House 
come to her assistance. When the general had gone to de- 
fend the rights of his country, his wife lost no time in direct- 
ing the tearing down of the square walls and the building of 
circular ones in their stead. 
The house is Colonial, but Mrs. Haight by birth was a 
Van Loan, and her Dutch ancestors had owned this end of 
the village of Athens. Perhaps it was her desire to put a 
Dutch hall-mark on the Colonial house, for under the cir- 
cular piazza at the rear she caused to be placed a heavy 
Dutch door which came originally from the Van Loan farm- 
house further back in the country. History does not relate 
either the general’s feelings or words when he returned from 
the war. It is probably one of the times when silence is 
golden. He was destined never to occupy the house he had 
erected, as he died before it was finished. Mrs. Haight, who 
had already shown her capability, brought the house to com- 
pletion, and lived in it with one child, a son, for a number 
of years. 
A story is told of a party given during this time, when 
friends came from far and near over the frozen river. Great 
logs burned in the mammoth fireplace, but though the guests 
danced the night away, neither the hospitable fires nor the 
rapid motion of dancing feet saved the company from a 
touch of zero in the far corners of the immense rooms. It 
was probably during a gathering of this sort that a list of the 
names of the Haight family was engraved indelibly on a 
window pane of the oval drawing-room. 
Samuel Haight, 
Jane Haight, 
Wm. Haight, 
Lydia Haight, 
Nova 1, 1817, 
stands the legend to-day, as clear and legible as if it were not 
written nearly a century ago. We wonder whose diamond 
was used for the writing, and can almost hear the laughter 
and quaint speeches as the writers planned to be remembered 
through the uncertain length of days of a window pane. 
On the opposite window, looking down river, a later gen- 
eration has tried also to leave its mark—two school girls this 
time in laughing imitation of their elders. Writing with 
