John Burroughs
Neighbor
There is a long history in Dutchess County of having famous people as neighbors. But few have shared this experience as charmingly as writer Leonora Sill Ashton. In 1951, at the age of 73, Ashton wrote the following recollection of her girlhood years spent studying the natural world alongside her neighbor, the celebrated naturalist John Burroughs (1837-1921). By the time Ashton met Burroughs, his rustic West Park retreat "Slabsides" had already become a pilgrimage destination for nature lovers from around the world. But as the daughter of the Rector of St. James Church in Hyde Park, Ashton knew Burroughs as a neighbor from across the river who travelled via the local steamship line just like everyone else. Her desire to capture and publish her own personal history with Burroughs reflects her awareness of the unique contribution her first person account would make to our understanding of Burroughs' life. Leonora Sill Ashton: "Much has been written about John Burroughs by those who traveled to visit him at Slabsides and Riverby, near West Park, New York. They have given us interesting memories of this famous man, but to my family, who lived at Hyde Park directly across the Hudson River from West Park, John Burroughs was known as one of the friendly neighbors of everyday life, and that is the way we like best to remember him. My first sight of Mr. Burroughs was on board the Robert Main, a small steamboat which made two trips each day up and down the Hudson River between Rondout, New York and Poughkeepsie. Standing with my father on the Hyde Park dock, I had watched the puffing little craft stop at the West Park landing across the river, then turn to plow its way across the stream to where we were waiting to climb aboard. Once on the boat, my father without delay entered into conversation with an old man who was sitting on the deck. I wish I knew what the two men talked about that afternoon, but I was a child at the time, and I was absorbed by the face of this stranger with the snowy beard. That face was shadowed by an old felt hat pulled forward above the brow, but not far enough to hide a pair of keen, squinting eyes. 72
