The Legacy of Maple Grove In 1982, Scenic Hudson's Ken Toole conducted an oral history interview of 88-year-old Miss Elise Kinkead, owner of the Maple Grove and Southwood estates located along Poughkeepsie's South Road (Route 9). By the early 1980s, increasing pressure from strip mall commercial development along with Miss Kinkead's advanced age and lack of direct descendants, presented the urgent need to capture the history of this threatened landscape and way of life.
Maple Grove. Rendes Collection, Maple Grove Archive.
Much of Maple Grove's history is really the story of two brothers from Kentucky, John and Henry Kinkead, who fell in love with and married two elegant and spirited sisters from Poughkeepsie, Elise and Edith Hamilton of Maple Grove. The lives of these two couples, along with their parents, children and step children, were intertwined even by geography as they settled side by side along the then stately South Road at the neighboring estates of Maple Grove and Southwood. Their family history presents a remarkable picture of three generations of devotion to a landscape and way of life that is now all but forgotten. In this interview, Miss Kinkead describes the acquisition and occupancy of Maple Grove by her grandparents during the period from 1870 to 1891 followed by the tenure at Maple Grove of her aunt and uncle, Dr. John and Elise S. H. Kinkead who particularly cherished and enjoyed 26
