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Timely return, Daily Freeman, September 7, 2006

Woodstock history tells of a sweeter time, Woodstock Times, July 27, 2006

Woodstock Artist Celebrated Anew, Daily Freeman, October 24, 2003

Women of the Catskill Mountains—The Art of Anita Miller Smith, Catskill Mountain Region Guide, October 2002

Woodstock: Town in upstate New York marks a century of arts and oddballs, USA Today, July 9, 2002

Herb Lady of the Catskills
Woodstock Times, January 31, 2002

It Happened in Woodstock / Legendary artifacts get set for re-publication
Woodstock Times, August 16, 2001

Woodstock history tells of a sweeter time

By Paul Smart, Woodstock Times, “Smart Art”

There's a quaint beauty surrounding the newly expanded second edition of Anita M. Smith's classic town history, Woodstock History and Hearsay (WoodstockArts; August 1, 2006), from its elegant inclusion of copious illustrations to the manner in which its cloth cover editions are coming wrapped, á la the great art books we recall from our youths.

The aura around the book captures the times when it was written . . . an epoch in local history it's hard not to see, nearly fifty years later, as one of Woodstock's Golden Ages. If not IT.

“The reader will note that the voice and perspective of this book are those of 1959,” co-author/publisher Julia Blelock writes in the introduction to the new edition she and brother Weston have spent the last five years lovingly polishing back to life. “Many of us today are looking for wise and comforting voices redolent of an earlier time, and we feel that Anita's story resonates in that way.”

The original work is well known to anyone with an interest in this town deep enough to take them to the local library for research. It was Woodstock 's first history, and since the release of its second printing in the early 1970s, by the Blelocks and their late mother, Nelle, has become something of a find in local book sales.

Unlike the better-known work of the late historian Alf Evers, who did the introduction to Woodstock History and Hearsay as town historian in 1959, Smith's style is chatty, anecdotal, and more focused on telling tales and incidents than the bigger picture serious historians tend to aim for. And as such, it fits the small town aspects of Woodstock like a glove, bringing to light the procession of eccentrics that have made their home hereabouts, and shaped who we are today.

Moreover, the Blelocks' sumptuous production, with its inclusion of several portraits of the author whose home they now inhabit, as well as two collections of her paintings—which they have been simultaneously having restored and reintroduced to the art market—brings out these personable qualities.

“Anita M. Smith's stories of one-with-nature Catskill Mountain folk, early environmentalists, peace workers like James T. Shotwell, and such internationally known artists as George Bellows, Henry Mattson, Alfeo Faggi, Doris Lee and Andrew Dasburg hold answers for readers of today as we all try to creatively connect to a sustainable Mother Earth,” the new publishers write of their plans to market Woodstock History and Hearsay. “WH&H is a book that celebrates Woodstock as an international brand, identified with an alternative lifestyle.”

What has driven them to this project, along with their publication of other Smith books and the gradual restoration of her Meads Mountain Road home, Stonecrop, and its once-revered gardens?

In their preface, the Blelocks write of how the childless, spinster painter had taken their family under wing when they moved to town from Quebec after their father took employment with Rotron. At first they were just renters of Stonecrop, with Smith inhabiting the property's cottage, her former herb shop. But gradually she became much more.

“To my brother, Weston, and me, Anita Smith was 'Nietsie' (an affectionate soubriquet used by her nephews),” writes Julia. “Nietsie proved to be very supportive of our mother's creativity and lent her an old studio so she could write her plays in peace, away from family interference. In turn, our mother became like a daughter to Anita, and assisted her in the final stages of writing the first edition of this book.”

She goes on to describe “Nietsie” balancing a sharp opinion of all children with her sponsorship of the Blelocks for art and pottery classes at the Woodstock Guild in the early 1960s. Eventually, the two were invited to dinners “for her delicious meals of coq au vin or coquilles Saint-Jacques,” and evenings of forbidden television watching. Eventually, Miss Smith took the Blelocks with her to France for a summer and wrote recommendations for Julia and Weston to attend preparatory schools in Connecticut (Miss Porters) and Scotland (Gordonstoun, where wee Prince Charles was also in attendance).

It was while both were in school that Smith passed away in May 1968 at the age of 74.

“When our mother passed on in 1999, Weston and I returned to Woodstock—to the house she had inherited from Anita,” Julia Blelock continues in the new art book edition's preface. “After much thought and discussion, we resolved to honor Anita and our mother through a program of restoration— including the Stonecrop buildings and gardens and a collection of intellectual property. Further, we determined to embrace and celebrate a mindset and way of living that had been handed down to us from Anita.”

“There are great lessons to be learned through a partnership with nature, and we feel that Anita Smith's stories guide us toward a better understanding and appreciation of our wild selves,” adds Weston, in the same piece as his sister. “Anita's Stonecrop has proven to be our haven . . . The soil is now full of earthworms and is once again able to support a rich variety of herbs and flowers.”

As well as this sweet-natured book, with all its anachronisms . . . a gentle reminder of what this town once was, and likely still is in many hidden pockets.

In celebration of the publication of the new art book edition of the book, the Blelocks will be on hand with their book for Local History Day at Mowers' Market this Sunday, July 30; they will be doing a PowerPoint demonstration, reading and book signing at the Colony Café on Saturday, August 5, from 4 p.m. to 5:30 p.m., and will be at Oblong Books in Rhinebeck at 7:30 p.m., Saturday, August 19.++

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Woodstock Artist Celebrated Anew

By Bonnie Langston, Freeman staff

A largely forgotten Woodstock artist had something of a coming-out party this past weekend: The first exhibit of her work in 75 years was part of a major show at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia, the city of her birth.

She is the late Anita Miller Smith, a woman of privilege who journeyed in the early 1900s to Woodstock with money intended for a ball gown. On her second trip, she decided to stay and pursue her impressionistic style of painting.

Smith's early years in Woodstock were artistically successful under the tutelage of Frank DuMond and John F. Carlson, teachers at the Art Students League.

“Carlson would criticize her paintings of the day. Then she'd take that canvas home, rip it up and vow to do better,” said Weston Blelock, who along with his sister, Julia, became heirs to Smith's estate in 1999 following the death of their mother, Nelle Thornton Jones Blelock, a close friend to whom Smith bequeathed her holdings.

“Anita just would not be stopped,” Weston Blelock said. “As a child, I knew her. She was indomitable and had great style. She had a focus, and she was serious.”

But other interests eventually eclipsed Smith's art, including total care of three young nephews, writing the first official history of Woodstock and raising herbs for a national market. Smith's art career—certainly her exhibitions—essentially ended by the late 1920s. Her legacy had all but disappeared until the Blelock siblings decided to bring it once more to light.

The sister and brother, who run WoodstockArts, a foundation that honors Smith's home, her work, their mother and all arts in Woodstock, including the art of a sustainable lifestyle, also expect to bring out a revised second edition of Smith's Woodstock History and Hearsay next year.

This seemed the time to re-introduce Smith to the world of art, Blelock said. Roy Wood Jr., a New Jersey art scholar, collector and dealer who represents Smith's estate, joined the Pennsylvania Art Conservatory in exhibiting seven of Smith's newly restored works at the 12th annual USArtists: American Fine Art Show at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. More than 60 galleries were represented at the event, the largest exhibition of its kind on the East Coast.

As Blelock had hoped, Smith's paintings emerged from their lengthy dormancy to pique the attention of patrons, inspiring at least one person to speculate about a movie of her life and another to purchase a small work.

“It was great, which is an understatement,” Blelock said.

He said Smith's paintings, most balanced with both people and nature, stood apart from huge landscapes by noted Pennsylvania artists like Edward Redfield and Daniel Garber.

“Hers are intimate. They actually draw you in. The harmony is so remarkable,” Blelock said.

Smith, a single woman with a Quaker background, was serious about her art. And Blelock said it showed in the exhibit, which included “The Woodpile,” offered for $19,800, “Bearsville,” $10,500, “Willow Post Office,” $8,500, “Shady Valley,” $6,000 and “Woodstock Landscape,” $4,800.

Smith had studied art abroad in her teens, but it was in Woodstock that her career took off. In 1916, when she was 23, her work was shown at the National Academy of Design in New York City. Three years later, her “Houses in the Dunes” won a Lambert Purchase Prize at the Pennsylvania Academy in an exhibit that included the work of artists such as Paulette Van Roekens and Lilian Wescott Hale.

In addition, Smith's paintings were exhibited at venues such as the Art Institute of Chicago, the Toronto Gallery of Art, the J.B. Speed Museum in Louisville, Ky., and the Woodstock Artists Association.

Besides her domestic responsibilities and other careers, another event that sent her in directions outside art was World War I, which rocked her sensibilities both as an artist and a Quaker.

“It kind of shook her psyche. It shook her vision,” Blelock said.

Before the war, her paintings tended to be colorful. Afterward, they became “dour and grotesque” and in turn not palatable for the art-buying public, he said.

Now Blelock is hopeful the art world will take note of Smith's re-emergence.

“I would expect it's going to take some time, but she's in play. It's new. It's exciting,” he said. “She was just a very strong, principled person. I'm very hopeful that her vision will be valued and people can appreciate it.”

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Woodstock: Town in upstate New York marks a century of
arts and oddballs

By Michael Hill, Associated Press Writer, USA Today

WOODSTOCK, N.Y. (AP) — Ralph Radcliffe Whitehead took a fateful walk in the woods here 100 years ago.

Hiking on a hillside above the little hamlet, the wealthy Englishman finally settled on a spot for his arts and crafts colony. Ground was broken on the Byrdcliffe Arts Colony in 1902.

So began a steady flow of left-of-center types into Woodstock: landscape painters, Bohemians, socialists, writers, poets, cranks, dancers, dreamers, musicians.

Over the century, Woodstock has morphed into a countercultural tourist magnet, the sort of place where middle-aged hippies window shop outside boutiques selling batik baby clothes.

The scene might dismay Whitehead, a mannered man inspired by 19th-century ideals of natural simplicity. But he would see what is clear to any traveler this summer: At its heart, the Woodstock experience is still about art.

Consider the giant guitars.

Nine sculptures were planted near sidewalks this summer as eye candy for shoppers. The spectacle also is a nod to Woodstock's dual heritages in art and music. The guitars are abstracted — one is melting, another is topped by a nude woman dangling guitar strings from her fingers like a puppetmaster. All nine will stay on display through the end of this summer, when they will be auctioned.

The guitars are the most visible of a series of events at Woodstock this season. The Woodstock Poetry Festival on Aug. 22-25 will feature beat icon Lawrence Ferlinghetti and U.S. poet laureate Billy Collins. The Woodstock Film Festival runs from Sept. 19-22 and will honor actor-director Tim Robbins.

Byrdcliffe is planning a big centennial celebration — but for next year. A major exhibition is to open in June 2003 on the legacy of the arts colony. Next summer also is the target to reopen Byrdcliffe's main house, White Pines.

Visitors this summer can walk the Byrdcliffe grounds — a compound of weathered, pine-sided buildings set in a dense forest of oak, maple and pine. A self-guided tour consists of a mile loop though the woods. Outdoor sculptures were added June 22.

Byrdcliffe's bucolic setting fit Whitehead's vision for a utopian enclave inspired by the Arts and Crafts movement. But things weren't always that utopian. Whitehead's controlling manner — he was nicknamed "Dictator" — clashed with some of the free spirits attracted to Byrdcliffe.

Notable was Byrdcliffe co-founder Hervey White, who left to form a more freewheeling, less monied enclave across town called the Maverick. Needing to raise money for a well in 1915, White staged a music and dramatic festival in the woods that began a tradition of Maverick Concerts that continues this summer.

White's outdoor festivals are sometimes cited as spiritual forebears of the famous Woodstock 1969 concert, held 60 miles away in Bethel.

"The events of 1969, I think, started coming together in 1902," said resident Weston Blelock. "It powered and powered and powered up."

Blelock and his sister are marking the centennial by rereleasing "It Happened in Woodstock." First published in 1972, the book is an idiosyncratic recounting of the town's history.

Another Byrdcliffe alum, painter Birge Harrison, taught at the Art Students League of New York after it made its summer home in Woodstock starting in 1906. Over the years, hundreds of young artists set up in local fields with their easels and sketchbooks in hopes of capturing a bit of Catskills grandeur on canvas.

Landscape artists were particularly inspired by Overlook Mountain, which looms over the town. The 3,140-foot peak offers one of the best views in the Catskills — and, on clear days, five neighboring states. Atop the 2.6-mile dirt road is an old fire tower now maintained by a volunteer group. On the way up, check out the ruins of the Overlook Mountain House, a once-grand hotel.

Across the street from the Overlook trailhead is the main seat in North America for the Karma Kagyu sect of Tibetan Buddhism. The central temple houses a colorful shrine watched over by an 11-foot, gold-leaf Buddha.

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Herb Lady of the Catskills

Woodstock Times, January 31, 2002

Historian and herbalist Anita Miller Smith was said to have used family money meant for a ball gown to settle in Woodstock, where she first dabbled as a landscape painter before cultivating the métier “Herb Lady of the Catskills,” as the New York Herald Tribune dubbed her in 1940. Smith later wrote the town’s first official history, WOODSTOCK HISTORY AND HEARSAY, published in 1959. In AS TRUE AS THE BARNACLE TREE, (1939) Smith celebrated the lore of the Catskill range, once known as the Blue Mountains to natives who believed strange spirits “clung to the blue stone ledges.”

An herbalist over the course of her long life, Smith tended her principle garden in a smallish plot in front of the main house known as Stonecrop. An additional keystone garden, in a blue stone pattern suggestive of an angel, occupied a side yard next to a small orchard, with other beds and plantings clustered around the outbuildings. Her still viable chapter from Barnacle Tree, “Suggested Plan for an Herb Garden,” along with its simple culinary recipes, present a picture of the flowers and plants the Catskill herbalist grew for “flavor and perfume,” such as mints planted beneath a bench, “grateful for shade” and “refreshing to smell.”

Born in Philadelphia to Quakers and accepted into debutante society there, Smith was challenged in upstate New York to learn the ways of “mountain people” and earn acceptance into their “exclusive society” of quilting parties and the like. Encountering her at her Stonecrop Garden (named for soil riddled with rocks and thus adaptable principally for herbs) visitors met a “sunny” woman who, according to one Poughkeepsie newspaper, had a “la-de-da voice, faultless vocabulary and gracious manners.”

Weston Blelock and his sister Julia Blelock are caretakers of Smith’s legendary Stonecrop on Rock City Road and they keep her legend alive. The Blelocks’ placement in these annals begins at their birthplace in Canada, where their mother, Nelle Thornton Jones Blelock grew weary of her role as an executive’s wife.

“She dreamed she was summoned to a house made of books by a wise woman, an elder to whom she could apprentice her mind and spirit,” relates Julia. So the family came to Woodstock, where Nelle rented a studio on Stonecrop from Smith, who encouraged her to become a writer. (She wrote several works, including a play, Interim of the Unicorn in an Electronic Gown, and in 1972, Julia helped her mother produce a chronicle titled IT HAPPENED IN WOODSTOCK. The book was ground-breaking in color, design and layout, and attributed authorship only to Stonecrop Press.) Nelle later inherited Stonecrop along with Smith’s writings and artwork, which passed to Weston and Julia in 1999.

Weston, who graduated from Gordonstoun School in Scotland (alma mater of Prince Charles), and Julia, who finished Miss Porter’s School for young women in Connecticut, mimicked Smith’s impeccable manners, adding dashes of their own whimsy. The siblings are American “Cultural Creatives,” a pool of 44 million “leading edge” thinkers and creators identified by a landmark study that Paul Ray and Sherry Anderson conducted over thirteen years and published in 1999. Cultural Creatives tend to be upper-middle class and mainly women. Julia stands at the crossroads of creative powers, descended from a female lineage stretching from Woodstocker Rosie Magee, who owned and tilled the Stonecrop parcel prior to Smith; the Catskill Herb Lady herself and the Blelocks’ mother Nelle. Smith in her earliest Woodstock incarnation remembers discussing over and over at meetings, “What is art?”

Weston expresses the Cultural Creatives’ chief value in terms of ecological sustainability. As a nascent projection of this model, Smith learned the folkways and creative economies of mountain people, who converted their labor “after the first trees were mercilessly felled for the tanneries and the second growth of saplings where cut for barrel hoops,” profiting on wintergreen gathered then processed at a distillery near Phoenicia as well as on the more lucrative ginseng crop. In like manner, Weston Blelock envisions importing low-cost algae to clean and restore the Hudson River from the ravages of PCBs as an alternate to million-dollar dredging, which would further generate the need to transport and dump contaminated waste.

The keepers of Stonecrop recently have reprinted Anita Smith’s books, as well as IT HAPPENED IN WOODSTOCK and are developing other new projects. The re-release of AS TRUE AS THE BARNACLE TREE is currently available at the Golden Notebook. You may visit the Blelocks’ websites at www.WoodstockArts.com, and www.StonecropPress.com.++

—Pauline Uchmanowicz / Recipe for Living

Herb Sandwich
Source: Anita Miller Smith, AS TRUE AS THE BARNACLE TREE, 1939
Chop fresh sprigs of chives, tarragon, parsley, fennel, marjoram and rosemary into a bowl with several radishes. Mix in a tablespoon of mayonnaise dressing, salt, pepper and a few drops of herb vinegar. This is a very refreshing summer sandwich filling.

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It Happened in Woodstock / Legendary artifacts get set
for re-publication

Woodstock Times, August 16, 2001

Weston and Julia Blelock have a grand plan in mind. Under their new WoodstockArts company, they’re bringing back into print three renowned local histories by Anita Smith under the Stonecrop moniker started with their late mother, Nelle Thornton Jones Blelock, in the early 1970s. Stonecrop is also the name of the home the Blelocks inherited from Miss Smith, along with her writings and art work.

“We look on it as the town’s other history franchise,” says Weston, who previously made his home in Quebec’s Eastern Provinces, subtly referring to the hold Alf Evers has long held on Woodstock’s ideas of its past.

Smith’s WOODSTOCK HISTORY & HEARSAY, first published in 1959, served as the town’s first official history and served as something of a model for Evers’ more exhaustive work of the late 1980s, presented in serial form in these pages. Told by local painter and herbalist Anita Miller Smith, who reportedly used family money given her to buy a ball gown to make the move from Twilight Park to Woodstock in 1913, the book uses a mixture of local records and straight interviews to present the town’s history in a jovial, fun fashion. Smith’s mixture of tall tales and remembrances, actual facts and communal fabrications, gives her writing a liveliness reflective of the town she covers.

Also planned for a second printing will be Smith’s AS TRUE AS THE BARNACLE TREE, originally published in 1939 as one of the final press runs at Hervey White’s legendary Maverick Press. This quaint, 47 page illustrated book relates Native American, Quaker and Shaker usages of beneficial plants found in the area, as well as a brief herb lore of the Catskills.

Both books are gems, imperfect but beautiful as much in the presentation of a heralded Woodstock uniqueness as for the information passed on in each. But neither matches the true treasure of the Blelock’s new “franchise,” the 1972 publishing anomaly, IT HAPPENED IN WOODSTOCK.

Drawn largely from Woodstock History and Hearsay, this 165-page book was published by Stonecrop in reverse white print on cobalt blue backgrounds. The cover is a bright red with special screw bindings and an evocative blue and white back cover photo of White in his most Pan-like glory. Text fills only the book’s right-hand pages. On the left are late 60’s pop art turtle images. Over 70 illustrations, from woodcuts to theatrical flyers, from scenic paintings to group photos, grace every other page.

Contextually, IT HAPPENED IN WOODSTOCK moves from a witty, highly personalized “Fourth Dimensional View” chronology, complete with “Piscean Apology”—a final, truly time-capsuled “Psychic Portrait” of the 1969 Festival it followed onto the scene by a couple of short years. The result is the sort of artifact-book that charms because of its sincerity, its capturing of younger, more idealistic days.

“In metaphysical circles the fourth dimension is generally agreed to embody ‘crystallized time sequences’ or photographically preserved events. In other words, it is perfectly possible to ‘travel back’ and re-witness history as it actually occurred,” reads a parenthetical statement in the book’s 1972 introduction.

Or as found in its closing essay on the heralded festival of mid-August, 1969: “But more—the event was a breaking out—an expression of the elements of nature: Color, Smell and Sound were there. And when Color, Smell and Sound are allowed to combine with a highly motivated energy moving toward a goal adamantly desired by all, a final expression will not be denied.”

Those lines were written by Weston, at the age of 22 from London in June of 1971. He was a new graduate of the heralded Gordonstoun School in Scotland, which he had attended with Prince Charles. He was about to move on to a career working with New York’s 21 Club, Hilton Corporation and a book show of his own making—and he was full of the era’s spirit.

Sister Julia was then in her teens, going to stalwart Miss Porter’s School for young women in Connecticut. She was about to move on to a career in marketing that ended up seeing her ride the recent dot-com roller coaster to early retirement.

“For both of us, this house was everything,” Julia says of the Stonecrop her mother moved into after befriending the spinster Anita Smith in the mid-1950s. After Miss Smith died in 1968, all three decided to produce IT HAPPENED IN WOODSTOCK in a large run of 20,000 copies to honor their departed friend. Later marketing savvy got the book into foreign exchange programs, Bard classes and in-school programs around the state. Even then, the thing—because of its innate style, as well as this community’s special aura of the day—was seen as something special and apart from everything else in publishing.

“Mother had a dream, when we were young in Quebec, of meeting a woman who lived in a house made of books,” Weston says of the premonition he believes eventually led his family to where they are now.

Both surviving Blelocks (their mother, a noted local writer, passed away in 1999) are finding their return to the beloved town of their mid-childhood invigorating but somewhat strange. “Many people turned out to be casualties of the drug era,” Julia says, referring to a host of friends whose constant pot use has eventually caught up with them. “When you go abroad, everything changes,” adds Weston, speaking of the “different perspective” that’s destined his life.

“The town has changed enormously…” starts Julia.

“And yet not at all. Not at all,” adds Weston.++

—Paul Smart

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