Locust Grove Historical House visit

 On Saturday my brother and I visited Locust Grove in Poughkeepsie, NY. This is a house built in 1830 and was home to four families, the most well known being Samuel Morse, the inventor of the Morse Code, who lived there part time from 1847 to his death. However, even though the house is billed as the Morse Estate, the entire contents of the house are from the Young family, who bought the property in 1901 and lived there until 1975. It was created as a museum upon the death of Elizabeth Young as per her will and remains so ever since. It's believed that only one artifact in the house actually belonged to the Morse family, a large floor to ceiling mirror. The rooms are currently set up as the Youngs had it circa 1920.

Unfortunately, photographs are not allowed inside the home or the tiny museum, which has some of Morse's paintings and some artifacts on the telegraph. However, you can take as many photos of the outside of the house and the grounds and garden as you want, so of course, I did. However, I took only 72 photos, which is the lowest on any of the adventures yet!

The entrance to the property, taken from US 9. We didn't take the Edge- tours are only guided and only run at certain times. We were in a rush to get there and took my brother's car, the first adventure his "new" car has been on, although he's had it over a year already. We were the only ones who took the tour at that time, so essentially we got a private tour which normally costs more. We couldn't see one of the floors of the house because of maintenance but still paid full price, which we didn't know it wasn't fully open until the tour guide said that "normally we'd go upstairs next, but...". That's kind of lousy. 

While the house is all Young, the garden is actually Morse. He created it, and the Youngs maintained it. Some of the flowers are descendants of the original flowers from the 1840s.

The gardener's house on the property, not open for viewing.

This is the actual house, which is in the Italianate style. Although it was built originally in 1830, it was expanded several times, most recently in 1901.

A carriage on display in the portico.

The fields are lush and verdant.

In the background you can see the Young's pet cemetery, avid dog lovers.

The carriage house is sometimes open but wasn't that day, probably because it was rainy. Although you can't really tell it is drizzling during all the outside shots.

I put my camera right up to the glass and looked into the Carriage house. There are at least 4 carriages visible, (not all in this photo) as well as several modern lawn mowers.

You can just barely see the Hudson River here. You can walk on trails down to it, but with my health problems I chose not to. My brother has said he would likely do it at some point but because it was rainy chose not to do it then.

The top floor- which is never on the tour- surely has an excellent view of the Hudson, and likely did even more when it was built, before the trees filled in.

When my brother walks down to the River, this is where I'll be. They have benches throughout, which is nice.

A random unmarked statue which looks like Thomas Jefferson to me. It's the only statue we saw. 

some sort of nut growing on that really tall tree

Way too cloudy a day for the sun dial to be any help.

This is a nice touch, on the outside of the visitors center, which tells you the names of the flowers that are currently in bloom. 

Although I've shown the best photos here, there are more flower and outdoor shots on my website, here: Locust Grove

They did have three post cards, which I purchased, but since my scanner is still down you'll have to see them in another post. 

Honestly, even though it's billed as the Morse estate, I found the Youngs much more interesting. They are local, their collecting interests somewhat closely align with mine, and Morse was actually not a very nice person. 

We did enjoy it, and it's not a very long tour, about an hour only. 

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On a card related topic, I was digging around looking for some stuff I promised to give away, and happened to find two boxes of cards I missed during the typing process. I just found them yesterday and have not fully processed them yet, but I know one of them is about 3/4ths NASCAR, and I recognized that most of them are the same ones I typed in as missing when I did them. I will have to double check them to see, but there was also cards for just about every other topic in the boxes as well, the only thing I have not found in them so far is multi-sport or Olympics, but I just did a small handful last night. Luckily, I found them fairly early in the project, having only gone through NASCAR in full and hockey up to 1991-92 Pro Set Platinum, which is a set that's partially missing and WASN'T in those two boxes...which means I missed another somewhere. {audible sigh}. I'll get there eventually. 

Even though I'm going to consider these numbers the correct collection numbers when I'm all done, I already found one mistake by finding a card from 1990-91 Bowman that was in my paper listing but I missed when checking my paper listing vs. my Excel file. I honestly don't know if it's humanly possible to get a truly accurate number, but like I said before...I'm going to treat it as such going forward.