The Yaddo art colony in Saratoga Springs, New York arose out of great personal tragedy, an immense amount of wealth, and the patronage of high art during America’s Gilded Age. Tycoon Spencer Trask and writer Katrina Trask purchased the Yaddo estate outside of Saratoga Springs in 1881. The name Yaddo is attributed to their daughter Christina. Four years old at the time, Christina had noticed the impact of her older brother Alanson’s death on her parents and concluded that “yaddo” was the opposite of shadow. She felt that Yaddo would be a place of light and happiness, as opposed to the shadow of grief her parents experienced.

Sadly, Spencer and Katrina Trask’s fortunes would turn dramatically as they experienced a series of tragedies before the close of the century. Christina and her younger brother Spencer both died in 1888 after contracting diphtheria from their mother. A doctor had believed Katrina’s disease to be terminal, allowing the children into her room to say goodbye. Katrina recovered but both children died within two days of one another. The following year, Spencer and Katrina’s fourth and final child, Katrina died three days after birth. In 1891, the Yaddo mansion burned to the ground while Spencer and Katrina were in New York City. Determined not to let their tribulations overcome them, Spencer and Katrina threw themselves into rebuilding Yaddo as the present grand Tudor Revival mansion.

In 1895, Spencer decided that he wanted Yaddo to be used for a higher purpose after he and Katrina died. They struggled to decide what sort of institution or charity Yaddo would become. One beautiful summer’s day in 1899, Katrina had an epiphany while walking through the woods near the Stone Tower. She envisioned Yaddo as a pastoral art colony where artists, writers, and composers could retreat from the distractions and weariness of city life to focus on their work and socialize with one another in an endless series of house parties. The idea of Yaddo as an art colony gave Spencer and Katrina a renewed sense of purpose as they developed the Yaddo gardens and landscape. Very much influenced by Romanticism and a pre-Raphaelite nostalgia for the medieval past, they enhanced the landscape to become an idealized version of nature, designed gardens inspired by exotic places, and constructed buildings in the Tudor Revival style. They also included plans for their rustic Triuna Island retreat in Lake George to be used by the artists in residence in Yaddo. This development was made possible by an immense amount of wealth Spencer acquired as a venture capitalist and financier—he was worth $15 million, or about $1.1 billion today when adjusted for inflation.

Spencer suddenly died in a train accident on New Year’s eve in 1909. Katrina dedicated the rest of her life to securing Yaddo’s economic future, enabling the endowment to grow by moving into the caretaker’s cottage, and making plans for the art colony to initially only be open during the summer to save money. She also experimented with creating an artists’ community by building the Wakonda Lodge at Wiawaka in 1905. After her health failed dramatically in 1921, Katrina married her close friend and her husband’s former business partner, George Foster Peabody, to help ensure the creation of the art colony. Peabody oversaw Yaddo’s legal, financial, and practical inception after Katrina died in 1922.

Yaddo first opened to artists and writers in residence, known as guests, in 1926. Since then, many of America’s most influential artists, writers, and composers have completed residencies at Yaddo. Just a few of Yaddo’s most notable guests included: Newton Arvin, James Baldwin, Leonard Bernstein, Truman Capote, Langston Hughes, Flannery O’Connor, Sylvia Plath, and Eudora Welty.