Locust Grove Estate – History and Preservation

Locust Grove Estate is located in Poughkeepsie, New York right off of South Road. The 200-acre estate was built by architect A.J. Davis in 1851 for artist and inventor Samuel B. Morse for the family to use as a summer home. This home was built in the Italianate style, a popular style in the 1800’s in the wake of the Romanticism movement in art, architecture, and landscape design. Only 40 years after the home was built, the Morse family sold their summer home to William and Martha Young, who was a wealthy family from Poughkeepsie, who took up permanent residence in the estate. The couple lived in the home with their two children, Annette and Innis. Mr. and Mrs. Young made additions to the original home, adding a larger dining room wing, guest bedrooms, and modern conveniences like central heat, hot and cold running water, and electric lighting. The home is still decorated with the Young family’s original late 19th and early 20th century furnishings, featuring over 15,000 different antique pieces. Annette-Innis Young, who was born in 1895, lived in the home for her entire life; living to the age of 90 years old, the house was occupied by her until 1975. Annette began the preparations to turn the house into a historic site after her brother Innis died in 1953. Her goal was to turn the home into a non-for-profit foundation for “the enjoyment, visitation, and enlightenment of the public.” Upon Annette’s death in 1975, that estate began its transformation from a private home to a public historical site. Locust Grove officially opened to the public in 1979, offering tours of both the mansion and the grounds.

The acquisition of 15,000 antique pieces proved to be a big chore for the museum trustees. Since 1975, the museum coordinators have worked hard cataloging all of the antique pieces and preserve documents such as bills, receipts, photographs, newspapers, and the family’s old diaries. So far at my internship with Locust Grove, I have noticed that it can be difficult to catalog the abundance of information that is at the museum’s disposal. Recently, the museum decided to transcribe and upload Annette and Innis’ diaries into digital archives as a way of preservation, and to hopefully find useful historical information within the diaries. I have been working on transcribing Annette’s diaries; one from 1910 and the other from 1925. These diaries are helpful to the museum curators because they contain information on the home’s collections, and generally reveals interesting facts about the family’s lives throughout the decades. Annette’s diary entries have been useful so far in determining when particular systems and installations occurred in the home. For example, Annette revealed in her 1910 diary the family was using Ostrander & Co. for their electrical system. These entries gave the museum a lead on when the electrical system was installed. She also mentioned the construction of the family’s ice-house, which gives us a date of construction for the structure. Annette’s diaries also reveal some more entertaining and light-hearted information. Locust Grove has a large collection of pictures of the Young family’s pets. Many of the photographs are unmarked, but Annette wrote extensively about the animals in her diary. She talked about her dog’s names and breeds, which makes dating and identifying the animals in the photographs much easier. Although many of Annette’s diary entries in particular are more focused on family gossip and every day affairs, every so often her entries are useful for uncovering more of the estate’s history.