The Blithewood Estate has significant connections to the heritage of the Hudson Valley region and the evolution of American landscape design. The Estate has a long history, beginning in 1680 when it was acquired from local native Americans by Colonel Pieter Schuyler. In 1790, 400 acres of this land were sold to John Armstrong and his wife Alida LIvingston. This included the Ward Manor area known then as ‘The Meadows.’ In 1801, Armstrong sold the property to John Allen and Mary Johnston. She was the first to name the property Annandale, after her family’s home in Scotland. In 1810, the Allens sold the estate to John C. Stephens of New York City, a noted yachtsman and sportsman, who then sold the land to John Church Cruger in 1833. In 1835, Cruger sold the property to Robert Donaldson, a North Carolinian living in New York City. The architectural importance of the estate dates from this period. Donaldson’s wife Susan named the estate Blithewood for the bird song that filled the woods. Donaldson worked with Andrew Jackson Downing and Alexander Jackson Davis, the most significant landscape designer and architects of the Romantic period. Donaldson envisioned Blithewood as an example of an estate designed in the Picturesque mode (fully natural and pleasingly wild). In 1860, John and Margaret Bard, who had purchased part of the Donaldson estate in 1853, donated 18 acres for the founding of St. Stephen’s College (renamed Bard College in 1934). At the turn of the twentieth century, new owners Captain Andrew C. Zabriskie (1853–1916) and his wife, Frances Hunter Zabriskie (1866-1951), commissioned Francis L. V. Hoppin (1867–1941), of the architectural firm Hoppin & Koen, to design a house and garden according to the tastes and trends of the Gilded Age. Hoppin’s Georgian manor house and Italianate garden that we see today are examples of the Country Place Era in the Hudson Valley. After Captain Zabriskie’s death in 1916, his widow, Frances, took an active part in the development and upkeep of the gardens and grounds. After Frances died in 1951, the Zabriskies’ son Christian donated Blithewood, by then an 865-acre estate, to Bard College. In 1987, it was renovated and transferred to the Levy Economics Institute of Bard College. The Garden continues to be maintained in the style created by Frances Zabriskie. On October 16, 2016, Bard College and the Garden Conservancy–—a national nonprofit organization dedicated to saving and sharing outstanding American gardens—signed an agreement to work together on the rehabilitation of Blithewood Garden. This partnership will continue to address the renovation and conservation of the historic garden’s structures and hardscape.