It is said that Henry Barclay named his house Ury, after the ancestral home of his family in Scotland. But the 1834 record of informal villages in New York lists Ury as a separate place from the formal village of Ulster, now the Village of Saugerties. There were marriage, death and society announcements in New York City papers from the 1830's with their location Ury. Ury was a whole community's location, not a single address, and took up the entire part of Barclay Heights that falls within the bounds of the village today.

On a 1825 survey map, what would be Ury was just a winding road and four houses with barns. The earliest public statement of Henry Barclay's intent, in February of 1826, gave the advantages of a “high state of cultivation of the land” when describing the site of his “Woodstock and Saugerties General Manufacturing and Mining Co.”. Given the open field agricultural practices of the time, most of the water rights he purchased were on large areas of farmland. There would have been expansive views for, in the Dutch vernacular, a “streak”. In other words, as far as the eye could see. Imagine looking down 9W today from the turn at the Knights of Columbus hall. That long, level view would have been 360 degrees around. That was the great open space that Ury had in the second quarter of the nineteenth century.

In the first few years the mills were the priority. The old Dutch farmhouses were all that was needed or used in what would be Ury. According to the 1918 reminiscence of a long time resident, Henry Barclay lived in an old farmhouse at the end of Barclay Street and Moses Yale Beach lived in the old farmhouse at the end of Beach Street. The Mansion House (now the K of C Hall) was the first new structure. It was built as a boarding house to accommodate those visiting, becoming involved, or purchasing in the area, and for those setting up the technology in the mills. There were over forty rooms constantly buzzing with the technically skilled, the enthusiastic and the curious.

By the mid-1830's the front line of Ury, occupying the ridge overlooking the Esopus harbor, was filled with the evenly spaced new homes of Barclay and Kearney, the Mansion House, the Trinity Church and the home of Theoredore Barrell. More than the mills themselves, these five large structures, along the edge of their high perch, alerted travelers on the Hudson to investment that was being made in Saugerties. Their position reflected the vision of those doing this investment. The bright white of their painted walls sent the message that there was clarity of thought, unity and success here. (And, of course, that we also made white paint here!)

Ury was Saugerties' cultural center. It looked across at the Village of Ulster, out on the waters and the distant mountains. It oversaw the iron, paper, and other industries built below. It was a special reserve for those who appreciated their achievements together. Ury was the destination for those curious about Saugerties. For three generations, if you thought creatively or drove innovation, Ury was the destination of your pilgrimage. The focus of industry may have been on the waters that visually surrounded this place, but thoughts naturally took in the long view over the horizons. The open fields and high prospect made Ury a place for seeing the present and contemplating the future.

The last great house to be built on nineteenth century Ury was Clovelea. As a landmark of an era; as an icon; as a brand; Clovelea represents the essence of everything that Saugerties ever was or will ever want to be. From the age of five, William R. Sheffield lived in Ury. He had all the advantages of the wide open views of the whole Hudson and the entire Catskill range from his father's house; Brightbank. In 1876 he bought the land in the foreground of that property's shared view of the mountains and then spent years creating the setting where he would eventually put his own house. He first had a fine architect, Joshua Cleveland Cady, create a gatehouse and carriage house design to blend into Ury's environment. Then, after sculpting the embankments and planting the land, he had another architect who also worked in the environmentally considerate theme, Albert H. Thorp, design his house.

So among the homages to classical monuments of a half-century before that echoed Trinity Church's man-over-nature theme that heralded the coming of the industrial age, he built a house meant to echo the flow of the mountains and river and mans work of hands, to honor an appreciation of nature, which would foreshadow, or maybe even inspire, the arts and crafts colonies in Woodstock twenty years in the future.

This began when Thorp and Edward Tuckerman Potter repaired Trinity Church after a fire in 1873. As part of this work, Potter acquired a stained glass window from Arts and Crafts master William Morris which was installed in 1874. An account of Morris showing paintings he had done of the Saugerties landscape that year is published in The Pearl in 1875. No English artist would come to America without experiencing and painting the landscape that inspired the great Hudson River School of painting. This window, and Morris' presence in Saugerties, represented a moment in art history.

Since the time the earliest of the curious arrived to see the industrialization of Saugerties, artists were also attracted. The events of the 1830's in Saugerties coincided with the birth of the Hudson River School of painters. The history of Ury's involvement with the masters of this movement stretches from Thomas Cole, the founder of the movement, to Thomas Cole's son's tenure, to well past the turn of the century as rector of Trinity Church. In the ending decades of the nineteenth century, it was Saugerties' relationship to Trinity Church's masterwork and the majestic views from Ury's tradition-encrusted estates that created the aura of attractiveness that would have the whole town known as a “resort” for decades into the twentieth century.

The romantic spirit of Ury and the picturesque views there of the river and mountains needed a patron like W. R. Sheffield and the architectural design of Albert H. Thorp's Clovelea to punctuate that aspect of Saugerties' identity. It needed a presence not just designed to enhance Ury's environment; it needed one that expressed the joy that comes from appreciating it. This is what the art of the architect was able to create in Clovelea.

Clovelea is the visible symbol of a social contract. There had been an agreement from the earliest planning of Ury. It may be codified in only one reference that is known and in a single deed restriction but its presence is palpably clear. It only takes verbal form in the early 1870's when the farms that had always kept the fields cultivated south of Trinity cemetery were beginning to break up the large tracts that had not changed since Saugerties was formed. Then the estates joined together and bought the area they called “the meadow”, the land between the cemetery and the land George Barclay had sectioned off as lots but that William Rhinelander Renwick combined back together to keep the space open.

John Simmons had acquired all the land surrounding Trinity Church on its south for a similar purpose. Clovelea is on lots 13 and 14 of the Barclay auction map that John Simmons sold to W. R. Sheffield in 1876. When Anna and Francis Steenken bought the lots 11 and 12 in 1913 from the Simmons family the deed specified that the house be only one story in order not to block the view. The architect, Corse, designed the house to be angled so that the added floor space of a sprawling one story house did not form a wall to this sense of openness.

The Corse design for the Steenken house was the last great house to share the ridge surrounding the open commons of Ury. Meadowside, Brightbank, Clifton, Burtt house, Mansion House, the houses of Corse, Bigelow, Tuckerman, Mulligan, Beach, Battelle, Barrell, and Young's Inglewood, then the Trinity church, and finally the Steenken house and Clovelea all looked out on each other's views across a common meadow. That feeling of civilized sharing is intact even as late as 1955 when the aerial photographs Morris Rosenblum took capture Ury nested on the edge of Barclay Heights.

Clovelea was owned and occupied by Harriet Rising until she died and then her daughter Margaret until she became too old. It was purchased by Rising in 1894 when the Sheffield family began to branch out into other involvements and left Saugerties. This was happening with all of the great estates of Ury at the turn of the century.

The brick and brownstone Brightbank, built by Blase Lorrilard on the site of Henry Barclay's comparatively humble frame 1826 mansion house in 1855 was where the Sheffield family called home until its 1892 sale to Robert Main, an international dealer in brick. In the twentieth century it was one of the houses of the Rev. Edwin Jan Van Etten, DD of Boston who was known for delivering the first religious programming on the first commercial radio station in 1921. He made the house into a sanitorium during WWII and sold it to Ruth Dale in 1943. In 1967 it was made into apartments.

When in 1949 Clovelea became the Stonewall Hotel and later Antons and then the Dragon Inn it had joined Brightbank whose last owner felt its space was better suited during the war as a sanatorium. The fate of all the showcase homes of Ury followed the same trends that justified the displacement of a heritage identity that the urban renewal fever of the time, essentially no different then the commonizing of culture in communist societies of the age, was encouraging.

Meadowside, the summer retreat of the Vanderpoels, who gave the Morris window to Trinity Church in 1873 was the land in Ury that initiated the subdivision trend that eventually crept over all of Barclay Heights. In 1953 it was divided into lots by Northeastern Holdings.

Mansion House, sometimes called Hillcrest, is now occupied by the local Knights of Columbus. The last to use it as a residence was Evelyn Wachter who was the last of the Simmons decent to own it. It had been a boarding house, a school and a residence since it was built possibly as early as 1826.

Of the same vintage is Clifton which, today, as a bed and breakfast, is called the Renwick Clifton house. It alone has bucked the trend in its restoration to close to original condition. It was originally built by John Watts Kearney who arrived with Henry Barclay and made Ury the home where he raised his sixteen children. Kearney's connections were responsible for the long list of historical figures that spent time in Ury over those early decades. Kearney and Barclay were married to sisters. Since the Barclays had no children and the Kearney's had twelve and then John had four more after his first wife died, the neighboring households were always a busy place. Eliza Hammeken, John's second wife occupied the house well into the 1890's after which it was purchased by Edmund Hurry, the son-in-law of Wm. R. Renwick, who occupied it for the next century.

The house that George Hammeken built was replaced by John T. Washburn in the style of the late teens and only a fleeting glance in an old photo shows that house that was the one William Burtt while manager of the iron works and then William Rhinelander Renwick lived in while overseeing the lead mill in Glenerie and the Ansonia for his Saugerties Transportation Company. It is important to recognize that each of these homes was one of many that their owners occupied. Each kept a townhouse in Manhattan or Brooklyn and, in the case of Renwick, homes near the chemical refineries of the company in New Jersey.

Cornelius Battelle had the cottage on the corner where Church street turns into Hill street. He was Wm. R. Renwick's partner. In 1846 Battelle married Catherine Barclay Kearney, one of John Watts Kearney's daughters, at Ury. When she died in childbirth the child was raised by the Kearneys. She later married Judge Vanderpoel and built Meadowside. Battelle could be considered a prototype industry lobbyist and spent most of his time at his home in Washington D. C. Though Saugerties relates Battelle and Renwich to mostly local concerns, divisions of their original chemical company were beginning after the Civil War to be what they remain today; leaders in the fields of research and specialized transport.

In the early years before Barclay the only house occupying this high point was the old Schoonmaker farm house. Beside this Moses Yale Beach built a stylish brick house with a Greek columned porch that overlooked the Esopus outlet and the river. Beach is one of three, with George Hammeken and John Kearney, credited with operating the first Fourdrinier machine for making paper to America. Beach was an early village director and founded the first fire department. In 1836 he took over the N. Y. Sun newspaper from his brother-in-law, Benjamin Day, and in 1848 founded the Associated Press. His son, who grew up in Ury, ran the Sun after his father retired, founded Scientific American, and engineered the first experimental subway, the pneumatic subway, in New York.

Moses Yale Beach came to Saugerties around 1828 in his late 20's to apply a process using a pulp making machine he'd invented by involving it with Barclay's machinery from England to make the first machine-made paper in America. He'd run into financial trouble pioneering a steamboat route to supply rag for papermaking from the textile mills of New England and came to Saugerties for a second chance at making a business from his invention.

When Beach left Saugerties he famously retained a connection between the mills and The Sun by using its offices as a discount center in New York City for redeeming Saugerties bank notes (shin plaster) during the free banking era from 1838 to 1848. Curiously, most of the information on this activity and the early exploits of Moses Yale Beach comes from the incessant belittlements of his character published by his rival newspapermen James Gordon Bennett of the Herald and Horace Greeley of the Tribune who painted Beach's life as an inventor and entrepreneur as failures in an effort to destroy his credibility with the working class readership they all sought. Their strongest jabs were directed against the Sun as a redemption place for the shin plaster of Jeremiah and William F. Russell's banking interests in Saugerties.

It is interesting to note from these accounts that the discount on redemption of Saugerties shin plaster was one of the lowest of the period. This meant there was greater faith in the currency of the banks of this thriving industrial center then in centers of more populist forms of economic development such as mines and agriculture. It may be said that it was the consistent high exchange rate of Saugerties bucks before mid century and the savvy of smart people like Moses Yale Beach that turned the tide toward industrialization for the rest of the country at the beginning of the next half of the 19th century.

Between Battelle's and Beach's were the matching houses of the iron works owners Tuckerman and Mulligan and farther toward the Trinity church was the house of William Young, the first manager of the iron works. In 1831 Young had built his house on the heights overlooking the pond to set himself above, so to speak, the manager's stately stone house with its columned portico Henry Barclay had built as the centerpiece of the mill-side community of stone row houses he had designed to emulate a model European village plan of the period. Burtt made the same decision in the 1840's and Tuckerman, then Mulligan followed suit in the 50's and 60's. The desire to have the Biblical house on the hill was a strong element in the identity of Ury. Mulligan, the last owner of the Ulster Iron Works occupied Brightbank at the time he sold the iron works to the Sheffields.

The longest living resident along this ridge in 1917 was Margaret Winslow in the house her grandfather, Theodore Barrell, built three years before Trinity church was built. He and his Italian son-in-law, Ferdinand Messa, along with James Morgan Ashley, used a booming Saugerties to test out retailing schemes. Barrell was settling into a retirement after a long career in trade in South America. He was an old friend and associate of Henry Barclay from Barclay's earlier career in the merchant assurance business.

Of the three townhouses fronting on Barclay street the oldest is Ralph Bigelow's. He designed and built the Trinity church in 1831 and the Burr arch covered bridge in 1840 and this house is from that period. He came from Chatham where they celebrate him for the design and building of the church there when he was a teenage prodigy. That community published an account of his career as one of the most prominent builders in New York City for his obituary at the turn of the century. The house he built in Ury is the middle one of the three townhouses that once lined this stretch of Barclay street. The Simmons house that was on the corner of Valley street was destroyed sometime in the 1970's. The house beside the Mansion house was part of this property when it was built by G. K. Snyder, the owner of the Saugerties and New York Steamship Line.

The Steenkens lived in Ury in the house built by Henry Barclay in a Spanish style for Mrs. Deas in the 1830's. Deas was the heiress to a large plantation in Virginia and settled in Ury after divesting herself of its slave holdings. Her husband was a sea captain and he was part of a long list of visitors, relatives and residents of Ury who were all acclaimed for their exploits in military actions and foreign relations during before mid-century. The contacts between Ury and Texas, Mexico, California and the border states were especially strong. Stephen Kearney, John's younger brother, was the first governor of California and George Hammeken, John Kearney's father-in-law, built the earliest railroads in Mexico and Texas. Moses Yale Beach used these early Ury connections for his logistics when he established the Associated Press during the Mexican War.

John G. Steenken ran the Glenerie Lead Works for Renwick and Battelle and owned it when it was merged into the lead trust. When he died his daughters built the house that is between Trinity church and Clovelea. It was designed by Corse whose family's house, the Ralph Bigelow house, overlooked the always open meadow where the house was being planned. He traveled to England to study examples of the picturesque style practiced there to make the house blend into the landscape. In the 1920's this estate became occupied by the inventor of dental surgical devices.