Yaddo

Yaddo occupies a wooded 400-acre estate on the southeast edge of Saratoga Springs, adjacent to the Saratoga Race Course. Spencer Trask, a New York financier, and his wife Katrina Nichols Trask, a poet and playwright, purchased the property in 1881 after the death of their first child. The name 'Yaddo' was reportedly coined by one of the Trask children to rhyme with 'shadow.'

The Trasks suffered repeated family tragedies in the late nineteenth century. All four of their children died in childhood: two died of diphtheria within days of each other, a third died days after birth, and a fourth was lost as well. In 1891, while Spencer Trask was seriously ill with pneumonia at their Brooklyn home, the original Yaddo mansion burned to the ground. The Trasks subsequently built the current Queen Anne-style mansion, completed in the early 1890s and designed with stone facades and a tower facing the property's central lake.

In 1899, walking through the woods near the property's Stone Tower, Katrina Trask reported an epiphany: a vision of Yaddo as a future retreat where artists, writers, and composers could work undisturbed. Spencer Trask formally decided to endow the estate as an artists' colony in 1900. Spencer died in a 1909 railroad accident; Katrina later married his business partner George Foster Peabody. The first residents arrived in 1926, four years after Katrina's death in 1922.

Yaddo has hosted more than 6,000 artists, writers, and composers, including Hannah Arendt, James Baldwin, Leonard Bernstein, Truman Capote, John Cheever, Aaron Copland, Patricia Highsmith, Langston Hughes, Carson McCullers, Flannery O'Connor, Sylvia Plath, Philip Roth, and David Foster Wallace. Yaddo is listed on the National Register of Historic Places and is the largest artist-residency program in the United States. The mansion remains closed to the public; the gardens, developed in the early twentieth century under Katrina Trask's direction, are closed until further notice because of storm damage.