The Archive

The closing-day group portrait of the International Assembly of Women on the front lawn of Ashridge. Roughly seventy delegates in their national dress are arrayed in front of the south facade of the mansion, with the pediment's carved cartouche visible above the entablature. The photograph was made by Bob Wyer, a Delaware County photographer whose archive of the estate is held by the Delaware County Historical Association.

This is the most-reproduced photograph of the Assembly and the image that anchors the present project.

The earliest surviving image of Ashridge. Painted in the summer of 1915, within months of the mansion's completion, by the Salon-trained American landscape painter Louis Aston Knight. The vantage is the southern edge of the lake James McLean had built; the mansion sits on its rise, white-walled and column-fronted, with the copper roof still in its first season. Knight's title preserves the name James McLean used for the river-meadow acreage — Riverside Farm — before his daughter Alice extended Ashridge to the whole estate.

Knight is known to have painted at least two works at South Kortright during his 1915 visit. The second, a view of the West Branch of the Delaware River, was exhibited in New York in 1918 and is currently lost to the public record.

An aerial view of the McLean estate and the hamlet of South Kortright from the southwest, dated by its archival caption to about 1946. The mansion is at center-right above its lake, with formal gardens to the south. The hamlet of South Kortright lies to the upper-left with its small white church visible. The Catskill hills recede to the horizon.

The photograph is the only known image that conveys the estate's full geography in the Assembly era. It shows what the delegates saw from the air when they came in, and what they would have walked across in the ten days of the conference.

A primary document. Alice Throckmorton McLean's application to extend a U.S. passport originally issued in April 1921. She was thirty-five years old, five feet three and three-quarters inches tall, brown of hair and eye, fair of complexion. She was at this date known as Alice Tinker by marriage, with her McLean name parenthesized. Her witness was her private secretary, Gertrude H. Oakley, employed by the estate of James McLean at 99 John Street, New York.

The document places Alice in the eight years between her father's death and the period of her own consequential work. She would found the American Women's Voluntary Services eighteen years after signing this form. The small affixed photograph is the most clearly dated portrait of her we have so far recovered.

A numbered commercial postcard (#31 in a Catskill series) showing the mansion in three-quarter view from the southeast, with a striped awning over the side porch and the young trees of the new estate still in their first decade. Postcards of this kind were widely circulated through the Catskill summer trade between 1910 and 1925.

The card is evidence that Ashridge was, within a few years of its completion, a regional landmark known by name. The McLeans were neither anonymous nor reclusive.

A hand-tinted postcard of the stone arched bridge built by James McLean over the West Branch of the Delaware River at South Kortright in 1900, in concert with the Andrews estate on the far bank. The double Roman arches and coursed local stone are characteristic of upstate New York Gilded Age civic building. The bridge stands — adjacent to the present estate, now public infrastructure, not part of Ashridge.

The card is evidence of an earlier McLean presence in the valley — at least twelve years before the mansion went up — and of the family's pattern of patronage of public infrastructure. The river under the bridge is the same river that runs through the present estate.

A Bob Wyer photograph from the closing afternoon of the International Assembly. Alice McLean stands at a steel microphone on the front steps of the mansion in her American Women's Voluntary Services uniform — the gray-green field jacket and pleated skirt, belted, with insignia at the shoulder, shoulder strap, and field bag at her hip. Eleanor Roosevelt stands beside her in a pale long coat, head scarf, hands clasped, listening. The brick of the mansion's south facade fills the background; iron railings and empty folding chairs are visible at left.

The photograph is the only known image of Alice McLean in her AWVS uniform. It is also, more quietly, an image of who was speaking and who was listening at the close of the gathering. She speaks; Eleanor Roosevelt listens.

The Mirror-Recorder's full-front-page story on the opening of Alice McLean's International Valley cultural program at South Kortright. The article names the Valley Writers' Center under Vieva Dawley Smith, the music center under Elizabeth Alexander Major with Professor Herman Kaplan of Columbia University on staff, the painting program under LaMont Warner and Newton Mettill, and a Contemporary Chinese Paintings exhibition of seventy works by thirty artists opening July 18, 1948 and going on that autumn to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

The Mirror-Recorder describes the estate as a 7,000-acre holding — a figure significantly larger than the consolidated estate as later reduced. The document is the strongest single-page summary of the International Valley program's first season and the most reliable correction to the standard biographical claim that McLean "left" South Kortright in 1948. She did not. She was, in 1948, launching the most ambitious cultural project of her life from her own drawing room.

A newspaper advertisement for the pre-Broadway premiere of Harvest Festival, an evening of Americana presented by Alice McLean at the Carriage House at South Kortright on a Saturday, October 16. Will Geer and Ellen Lowe headline a full Broadway cast; The Balladiers perform folk songs and spirituals from Mark Twain's Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn, and Life on the Mississippi. Tickets at $1.50 plus tax through Mrs. Arthur W. MacLeod at 174 Main Street, Delhi, New York. A square dance to close.

The dating is most consistent with 1948, when October 16 fell on a Saturday and when Will Geer was at the height of his pre-blacklist career — Broadway in the 1940s, films with Anthony Mann the following year. Three years later, he would refuse to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee and would be blacklisted for the better part of a decade. That McLean was producing him at South Kortright is a piece of evidence about the company she kept and the politics that ran beneath the philanthropy.

James McLean's passport application of early 1902, filed in advance of an extended family trip abroad. The document records the McLean family in their winter Manhattan residence at 16 West 55th Street, James at fifty-five and a New York metals merchant, his wife Sara T. McLean at fifty-five, and their three daughters: Helen, age twenty-eight; Ethel Louise, age twenty-three; and Alice, age sixteen. A maid accompanies them.

The application places Alice McLean at the threshold of her adolescence and at the geographical center of the world the McLean fortune had bought — a Manhattan townhouse, a transatlantic crossing, the standard equipment of the American haute-bourgeoisie at the turn of the twentieth century. The witness, John T. Lockman of 88 Nassau Street, was the same Lockman who had witnessed James and Sara McLean's marriage in 1872. The two families were close for at least thirty years.

The marriage certificate of Alice McLean's parents — James McLean, a twenty-six-year-old New York broker, son of Edward W. McLean and Margaret McFarland, and Sarah Throckmorton, also twenty-six, daughter of William S. Throckmorton and Mary Sexton. They were married on June 12, 1872, in New York City, attested by W. T. Egbert, a P.E. Clergyman. The witnesses were John T. and Kate A. Lockman of 86 East 21st Street.

The certificate is the document from which Alice McLean inherits her middle name. It also establishes, in passing, the family's Scottish ancestry through her father's father, and her mother's lineage through the Throckmortons and Sextons of New York.

The mansion photographed during its long mid-twentieth-century interval, with the front lawn overgrown and a small service entrance visible at center. The columned portico, balustrade with finials, and pediment with cartouche are intact — the Gilded Age frame survived through the decades. The image is captioned in a later hand as "10566 County Highway 18 / Back River Rd., South Kortright" — the mansion's current address.

The photograph is part of the institutional-period record we are working to establish more completely. The mansion's survival through the long American mid-century — through the years between the International Valley Foundation and the Phoenix House era — almost certainly depended on its continued public use. The image is evidence of that survival and a quiet correction to anyone who imagines the building stood empty.