Autumn Welcome at Danskammer House

The innkeepers are delighted to welcome guests from across America and around the world to the warm hospitality of Danskammer House nestled in a small village perched above the Hudson River.

Our beautiful regional landscapes were carved out eons ago by the majestic Hudson River and are framed by the Catskill Mountains and Shawangunk Ridge to the west and the Taconic Mountains on the east.

Eastern Taconic ranges over the Hudson River

Along with the great river thoroughfare and mountain ridges, the greater Hudson Valley charms visitors with its orchard-dotted hills and cascading kills which still echo the pastoral landscapes that inspired the Hudson River School painters over a century ago. And the luminous qualities of our valley and mountain atmosphere continue to offer spectators magnificent sunrises and sunsets sparkling with the same vibrant colors captured long ago by Thomas Cole, Frederick Church, George Inness, Jasper Cropsey and their fellow landscape artists.

So escape to the Hudson Valley, relax a bit, reconnect with nature, and share the rhythms of each new day at Danskammer House. Climb the stairs to the Frederick Church Sunrise and Sunset Lounge, pour yourself a first cup of coffee or tea, and ponder nature awakening in ever-changing hues on the Hudson River below and the Taconic Mountains on the horizon. After relishing first light flooding through the big east-facing dormer window, descend downstairs to the morning light-flooded Andrew Jackson Downing Garden Room — or to the backyard patio in season — for a hearty breakfast sourced from our gardens and local farms. After a day of outings, return to Danskammer House for late-afternoon refreshment on our west-facing front porch or east-facing terrace with fire pit in fair weather, or, in colder seasons, retreat upstairs to the third floor lounge bathed in the glow of the setting sun, or huddle around a warming fire in the living room’s refurbished fireplace.

Map of Marlboro Village from 1890s

In 1609, Henry Hudson and his crew sailed the Halve Maen (the famous Half Moon) up the Hudson’s broad estuary intent on finding a northwest passage to the Orient and fell instead upon a vast wilderness of unchartered territory. Based upon a point of land along the river hills jutting out into the river some seventy miles north of New York Bay, an enterprising Dutchman, Jasper Danckaerts, would much later record in his 1679 journal the oft retold story that sailors on the river espied a group of individuals—were they native or European?—gathered on a knoll and engaged in ceremonial (or drunken?) dances around a bonfire, all of which appeared to various storytellers as a devil’s dance chamber, hence the Dutch term Teufels Danskammer. Whether the episode of dark figures gesticulating before hell fires borrows more from myth than reality, the place and legend of Danskammer live on in local lore and from this event the naming of Danskammer House is born.

Danskammer House itself began as a handsome 1870 private residence in colonial revival style built by the locally prominent, orchardist and mercantilist, J. S. Carpenter, and was later transformed into the medical clinic and residence of village doctor, J.B. Scott, after the Second World War.

Today, Danskammer House offers bed-and-breakfast style accommodations in five private guest room suites.  The in-residence innkeepers welcome guests into their home and are pleased to make available multiple indoor public rooms, including a panoramic third-floor lounge and first-floor living room, dining room, and garden room for guests’ relaxation, as well as outdoor porches, patios,  and terraces, where guest can stroll through young fruit tree orchards, berry patches, and  kitchen, herb, and cottage flower gardens.