Samuel Morse Locust Grove Estate and Nature Preserve | Hacker News Reader

Samuel Morse Locust Grove Estate and Nature Preserve

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23 pointsdnetesn9 comments

Stray connections: A few years ago we renovated an old house in a nearby part of New York State. It involved cleaning out things left in the attic by the owner in the 1930's. Based on the clippings and memorabilia left behind, we determined she was a granddaughter of this Morse. Given her age, I wonder now if she ever visited her grandfather while he was living at this estate. He died in 1872, so I think she may have just missed meeting him there, but since it was in their family until 1901 she almost certainly visited while it was still theirs.

I believe one of his descendants works or worked at Google so maybe he has a HN account and will chime in here and perhaps there would be one less stray connection. And the only reason I know about that was the parody/spoof commercial Google did for the GMail Tap. [1] Or maybe you can track him down.

[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bzuK1mxVH7c

> The main house of Locust Grove is an Italianate style designed by Morse in 1950, inspired by his visit to the Italian countryside and its gardens.

Amazing achievement for a man dead and buried for nearly 80 years!

This page has the correct century and more detail: https://www.lgny.org/historic-mansion

> The main house at Locust Grove is a villa in the Italianate style designed in 1850 for artist and inventor Samuel F. B. Morse by architect Alexander Jackson Davis. [...] Morse had very clear ideas about what he wanted in what was to be his summer home [...] For inspiration, Morse recalled the elegant villas that he had visited years earlier in the Italian countryside and he sketched towers, windows and floor plans on scraps of paper to give to his architect.

So strange to see this on HN, this place is 10 minutes down the road from me. It’s about 2 minutes away from IBM’s big quantum computing facility, too.

They host great events, and on nice days you can just go and explore or sit.

I don’t have much of a “tech angle” to add, except that I find it so beneficial to find places like this to get out of my office and away from the screen and just ~think~ in a different and beautiful place.

Having lived at worked in Poughkeepsie at IBM for several years found it strange to see it on HN as well. I've since moved to Massachusetts but something my wife and I really miss about the Hudson Valley are all of the historic sites along the river (Locust Grove, FDR's house, Vanderbilt mansion, Mills mansion, Olana, etc.) that were often free and were great places to just go sit and visit, as you say.

Thanks! Did not know about this and now it is on my list of places to visit.

Ah, Samuel Finley Breese Morse, the telegraph guy, not Samuel Finley Brown Morse, the real estate guy, responsible for the Del Monte Forest in Monterey.

Really random to see this hit the front page of HN. I love this place. Shame the area is strangled by stroads.

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