Springside was the estate of Matthew Vassar in Poughkeepsie, New York, United States. It is located on Academy Street just off US 9. Detailed plans for a landscape, villa, and complex of farm buildings were drawn up by the influential Andrew Jackson Downing with assistance of Calvert Vaux prior to the former's death. The landscaping was completed and remains Downing's most intact surviving landscape, but only a few of the buildings he planned were ever built; most have since been lost to fire and structural failure. A cottage where Vassar resided was dismantled and removed in the mid-1970s. Its facade is on display in the New York State Museum.
Downing's landscape, in the English landscape gardening tradition, has survived several serious efforts to redevelop the property in the last half-century due to opposition from local preservationists. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places as Matthew Vassar Estate, and further it was declared a National Historic Landmark in 1969, but the estate was not permanently protected for almost two decades, when a lawsuit was settled with the transfer of the land to its current owners, Springside Landscape Restoration.
History
Springside's development took up much of the last two years of Downing's life, and the latter years of Vassar's. The unfinished estate was maintained and developed by several other families for a century afterward. Their descendants were more amenable to selling the land for development in the years afterward, which led in turn to the efforts to protect and restore it.
Planning and development under Vassar
The Springside property was the "Allen farm", first a family farm, then an ornamental farm of roughly 45 acres (18 ha), twice its current size. It takes its name from a spring on the property. It was considered as a site for a cemetery by the then-village of Poughkeepsie in 1848. Vassar, a village trustee and founder of the nearby college that bears his name, bought the property from its last owner George Bloom Evertson for $8,000, intending to sell subscriptions to future plots at the cemetery to local investors, a common practice at the time. However, there were few takers. He had planned to develop the property as a private summer estate himself if the cemetery plan failed, and so he contracted Downing, who lived downriver in Newburgh, to begin planning the landscape for the property.
By 1851, Downing, in collaboration with his associate Calvert Vaux and Vassar, had detailed landscape plans ready. The next year, the city of Poughkeepsie chose another site for the cemetery, ending that possibility. Downing's death in a steamboat boiler explosion the following year did not halt development, as Vassar and Vaux continued along the lines Downing had established. At least two of Downing's planned structures, a barn and a gardeners' cottage, were built, and he eventually invested $100,000 in developing the site. The villa they designed to be the main house of the estate, a semi-Jacobethan work, was abandoned (although artists' renderings survive), since Vassar preferred the cottage as a residence. As Springside continued to grow and develop, Vassar regularly opened the lands to the public until he retired to it full-time in 1867, the year before his death. It became a popular place to visit and inspired poetry and songs. One visitor, Russell Comstock, wrote:
After Vassar
After Vassar's death, the lands were divided among several other local families, who continued to work the landscape. Judge Homer Nelson, New York's Secretary of State, bought the southern half of the property and renamed it Hudson Knolls. He lived elsewhere while a boardinghouse operated on the site. The northern half was purchased by local shoe manufacturer John Whitehouse, who merged it with his own adjoining property to the west of the site, retaining the Springside name. It passed to his son-in-law Eugene Howell upon his death, who kept up the landscape, at one point using it as a golf course, despite the failure of the shoe factory in 1891.
In 1901, the property was reunified under the ownership of William Nelson Jr. (1829 - 1905), who had previously purchased the southern half when Judge Nelson (to whom he was not related) died in 1881, bought Howells' half following the shoe heir's bankruptcy. Nelson, who for the latter half of the 1800s, ran the Red Ball Line shipping company founded by his father, William Nelson Sr. in the 1820s, lived in the former boardinghouse with his family. He bequeathed it to his wife Marie Christiana Nelson (1860 - 1932), and she in turn passed it on to their children, Gerald, Geraldine, and Gertrude.