About Springside
The best way to learn about Springside is to visit it. Just follow the
signs at Route 9 and Academy Street in Poughkeepsie. Springside
Landscape Restoration (P.O. Box 4915, Poughkeepsie, New York, 12602,
tel. 914/454-2060) is a nonprofit group dedicated to restoring the property.
It provides some literature at the site, including a self-guided tour, hosts walking tours by appointment,
and arranges volunteer work days (in addition to doing administrative,
restorative, and fund-raising work). New volunteers and tax-deductible
contributions are always welcome.
Springside’s past appearance is best described and depicted in Benson
J. Lossing,
Vassar College and Its Founder (New York, 1867),
a book that’s hard to find outside the Vassar library. Two very useful
works appeared in 1989. The first, by a professor of geography at Vassar
College, Harvey K. Flad,
“Matthew Vassar’s Springside: ‘. . . the hand of Art, when guided by Taste,’”
in Prophet with Honor: The Career of Andrew Jackson Downing, 1815-1852
(Washington, D.C., 1989), pp. 219-57, gives a thorough, illustrated history
of the site, dating from Vassar’s acquisition of the land to the battle
to save it from development. Robert
M. Toole, “Springside: A. J. Downing’s Only Extant Garden,” Journal
of Garden History 9.1 (1989): 20-39, also illustrated, surveys the
property’s history from the 1850s and gives detailed landscape diagrams
of past plantings and possible restoration schemes.
About Downing
David Schuyler, Apostle
of Taste: Andrew Jackson Downing, 1815-1852 (Baltimore and London,
1996), is primarily a career biography of Downing; as such, it gives brief
attention to Springside, including a few illustrations. Judith
K. Major,
To Live in the New World: A. J. Dowing and American
Landscape Gardening (Cambridge, Mass., and London, 1997), is more of
an intellectual history. The Internet has yet to catch up with Downing--there
don’t seem to be any sites devoted to him or his other architectural and
landscaping works.
About Vaux
Calvert Vaux, Downing’s associate at the time of the Springside commission,
is the subject of two recent books, both of which mention Vaux’s involvement
with Springside’s design. Francis R. Kowsky,
Country,
Park, and City: The Architecture and Life of Calvert Vaux (New York
and Oxford, 1998), is a scholarly biography. William
Alex and George B. Tatum, Calvert Vaux: Architect and Planner
(New York: 1994), is more of a coffee-table book, with extensive (and sometimes
color) illustrations.