“The community must earn its food and raiment, and to this end will want to sell part of its produce” Ralph Radcliffe Whitehead wrote in Grass of the Desert. “Consider the future of the arts when wood, and wool and brass and leather are worked…

Although now a theater, this was the site of the Byrdcliffe Studio and Library in the early twentieth century. As the purpose of Byrdcliffe was to encourage artistry and handcraftsmanship, it was one of the first buildings erected as a workspace,…

In 1909 Poultney Bigelow, reporting for American Homes and Gardens, described Ralph Radcliffe Whitehead’s Byrdcliffe as “frankly a benevolent despotism. Whitehead is the absolute monarch, and no one is tolerated who is not in sympathy with his…

According to keeper of Woodstock history, Anita Smith, if you were invited to Marie Little’s cottage and studio, dubbed The Looms, assuming she did not suddenly cancel the invitation “to savor control over another’s actions,” guests “would…

In the winter of 1902-1903 Bolton Coit Brown stepped into his home, Casa Carnola, which was at that point a construction site. As he descended into the cellar Brown spied a catamount: “I saw its round head, back beyond a beam,” Brown recalled,…