It's Garbage Day.
16.5 degrees and clear at 6:30 a.m.
16.5 degrees and clear at 6:30 a.m.
The Wednesday afternoon forecast from YNN: "Tonight will be very cold with scattered snow showers and lake snow
continuing east of Lake Ontario. Lows will be in the teens to around
20. More of the same is expected on Thursday, although with a piece of
upper level energy swinging in later in the day, scattered snow showers
will pick up in coverage by evening. Highs will be close to 30 degrees.
Friday will feature plenty of clouds, unseasonably chilly temperatures and scattered snow showers. Highs will be in the 30s. This area of high pressure will bring quiet, but still chilly conditions for Saturday with highs in the upper 30s.
Unseasonably chilly weather looks as though it will stick around through the end of the month."
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Here & There
When I went to Municipal Hall to vote on Tuesday, I spent some time enjoying more of Skip Foppes' amazingly refurbished photographs on display in the lobby. There are four scenes that I'd never seen before.
I'm not going to show you any close-ups, here - but if you can, please go and see them for yourself!
More Winter to clean up!
But more flowers have bloomed on doorways!
Above, at Jill Getman's on West Bacon Street.
At the Falks' on Putnam .....
.. and at the VanDenbergh home in Forge Hollow.
It was sunny one minute and snowing the next!
Several times, I slowed down to watch pairs of Killdeer fling low over fields of corn stubble. It almost seemed that they were looking for the nests that they had begun to build before the snow covered the ground.
From the Cornell Lab of Ornithology: "A shorebird you can see without going to the beach, Killdeer are
graceful plovers common to lawns, golf courses, athletic fields, and
parking lots (as well as cropland around Waterville.) These tawny birds run across the ground in spurts,
stopping with a jolt every so often to check their progress, or to see
if they’ve startled up any insect prey. Their voice, a far-carrying,
excited kill-deer, is a common sound even after dark, often given in flight as the bird circles overhead on slender wings."
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SPECIAL EVENTS
Today at the Library
Pajama Story Time at 6:00 p.m.
Ages 3-7 | Sign Up
Come in your pj's for Easter stories, crafts and snacks!
Contact: Amanda Briggs 841-4651 amanda@watervillepl.org
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Today at 7:30 p.m. in Deansboro
The Marshall Historical Society
“Faces from Madison
County,”
by Madison County Historian Matt Urtz.
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Saturday from 8:30 - 1:30 at the Municipal Hall.
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FOR THE RECORD
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Women I wish I had known ....... Part III
Rosalie Osborn Ludlow Bierstadt.
1841 –
1893.
Whereas Genevie Brainard and Charlotte Buell Coman‘s names
have become well known because they themselves determined what they wanted to
do and did whatever it took to get it done – Genevie with her history of the
146th and Charlotte with her painting – it seems that Rosalie Osborn
Ludlow Bierstadt did neither!
She
was born into a wealthy family, she was very beautiful, and she was married
twice - to two of the most famous
men in America! Had they lived in
the late 20th century, surely Robin Leach would have found them
perfect subjects for the television series, “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous!”
Rosalie was born in Waterville in 1841 in a fine brick
residence that had been built by her grandfather, Amos Osborn, in 1811. Both he
and her father, Amos O. Osborn, a
lawyer, were among the most successful in the village and nothing was spared in
her upbringing.
The Osborn residence was located on the slight knoll where the Waterville Post Office and Dollar General now stand.
She was only eighteen when, in 1859, she married her first husband, Fitz Hugh Ludlow, whom she met at a health resort in the Catskills. Although sickly, he was already an
acclaimed young writer, famous in both America and Great Britain for his
semi-autobiographical novel, “The Hasheesh Eater,” and by the mid 1850s he had
become highly prominent in New York society.
After a lengthy honeymoon trip to Florida, the couple
returned to New York where she was described by members of the literary circle
in which the Ludlows both took an active part as both "very beautiful and very
flirtatious."
A few years later, her husband was hired as writing
companion to Albert Bierstadt the most celebrated American artist of the day,
on a lengthy trip to the “great Northwest” to explore possible rail
routes. During their travels,
Fitz Hugh told Bierstadt more and more about his beautiful wife and the more the
artist heard the more intrigued with her he became. Perhaps infatuated with this woman whom he had never met,
Bierstadt named a mountain in one of his paintings “Mount Rosalie.” In the meantime, Rosalie was either
entertaining or being entertained both in New York City or at her parents’ home
in Waterville.
"Storm in the Rocky Mountains - Mt. Rosalie"
Upon Ludlow and Bierstadt’s return to the East Coast, Ludlow, disturbed by rumors of his wife’s
unseemly behavior during his absence, turned again to his use of hasheesh and
the marriage began to deteriorate.
To make a long story short,
Bierstadt stepped into the picture and in 1866 Rosalie divorced Ludlow and
married Bierstadt in a ceremony at Grace Episcopal Church, here in Waterville.
They sailed immediately for a two-year honeymoon in England and Europe! There, they were received as
international socialites: in London, they met Queen Victoria; in Paris,
Bierstadt received the Legion of Honor; in Rome, the couple visited composer
Franz Liszt.
Returning to America, the Bierstadts visited Niagara Falls,
and also spent time in New Hampshire‘s White Mountains and in Waterville where Bierstadt painted in a studio that his father-in-law had made for him in
an older building on the property – a simple structure built by Benjamin White around 1792 and said by some to be the oldest building in the community - and where they entertained lavishly, once hiring the new "Putnam Hall" and inviting friends for an Oyster Supper on New Year's Day.
In 1871, the Bierstadts went to California, staying for two
and a half years. They stayed primarily in San Francisco, and were much
sought after socially. In 1876 they were guests of honor at a large
costume ball in Ottawa, Canada, where Rosalie was photographed elaborately
costumed in black velvet and lace as Mary Queen of Scots.
Later in 1876 Rosalie made her first visit to Nassau, and,
citing declining health, spent more and more time there, making the Bahamas her
Winter residence returning to the Bierstadts’ mansion on the Hudson or the
Osborn homestead in Waterville during the Summer.
Malkasten - Irvington-on-Hudson.
Over time she became increasingly frail and died in Nassau
in 1893 at the age of fifty-two. Described by the editor of the Waterville Times, "She was a woman of rare beauty and sweet disposition," she is buried in the Waterville Cemetery in the Osborn family plot.
*****
One of Rosalie's lifelong hobbies was that of collecting autographs.
In 1940 her autograph album was described by her niece, Rosalie Osborn Mayer, as containing signatures and even small notes or
poems by such famous people as: Admiral Farragut, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow,
John Greenleaf Whittier and William Cullen Bryant, Ralph Waldo Emerson and John
Pierpont, Oliver Wendell Holmes and letters from Horace Greeley – to name just
a few.
Missing from the collection are the signatures of two very
famous men: those of Fitz Hugh Ludlow and Albert Bierstadt.
Have a good weekend, everyone!
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