In 1869, Albert Smiley, a nature-loving Quaker schoolteacher, bought a property at a good price: a few hundred acres surrounding a lake and a tavern in New Paltz, New York, in the Shawangunk Mountains, on a ridge “covered in charred stumps,” Priscilla (Pril) Smiley said the other day. Pril, a retired electronic-music composer who favors phrases like “properly irreverent,” is among the Smileys who now run what replaced the tavern: Mohonk Mountain House, a castlelike lakeside resort hotel of Edwardian and Victorian design, surrounded by bucolic views and very few charred stumps. Mohonk has remained nature-focussed and low-tech; guests hike, do puzzles, exfoliate with Shawangunk Grit, and engage in a practice called “forest bathing.” (Mindful, plein-air, clothes-on.) But, for its sesquicentennial, this year, Mohonk created an app. Its origins are unlike those of other apps.
A few years ago, when Pril and Mohonk’s archivist, Nell Boucher, were going through Pril’s late father’s basement during a black-mold crisis, they discovered a metal cabinet, long ignored, full of film cannisters. “There were about a hundred reels,” Pril said, in a third-floor office at Mohonk. Nell assumed that they were “natural-history things, like films of squirrels and their behavior.” (Pril’s father, Daniel, was a noted ecologist.) But the films weren’t Daniel’s. “There, in my grandfather’s particular blue pencil that he wrote everything in,” Pril said, were intriguing labels: “1929,” “Toscanini.” (The Maestro had spent his seventy-fifth birthday at Mohonk, in 1942.) She wanted the films to be digitized, so she brought them to a film-transfer specialist at a local comic-book shop; the process took a while. (“The shop was going under,” she said.) Finally, she saw the results: films of Mohonk from before her time. They ended in 1945, and the Smileys of today hadn’t known that they existed.
The films are silent and mostly black-and-white. “My grandfather had a good sense of aesthetics, and he was documenting everything—people, projects, family members,” Pril said. She cued up a film on a laptop. “That’s my great-grandfather getting out of a carriage,” she said, pointing to a man in a top hat at Mohonk’s entrance. “This is 1929.” Pril’s great-grandmother Effie welcomed viewers to a garden. A spring sequence contained mountain laurel (“there are many reels of mountain laurel”), a goat in eyeglasses (“this is Professor Goat”), and Pril’s great-grandfather’s famous horse, Sunshine, who appears in portraits around the hotel. Summer revealed woollen tank-style swimwear and lakeside derring-do: balcony dives, greased-pole logrolling (“we don’t allow that anymore”), jousting in rowboats (“another thing we don’t allow”). A heavy-machinery sequence, on the Shawangunk Ridge, evoked Mike Mulligan’s steam shovel, and then some; onscreen, a worker swung on a chain hoist, leisurely smoking a cigarette. (“No OSHA regulations,” Pril said.) Winter unfurled in a flurry of snowshoeing and Yule-log lugging. In one scene, a small airplane on frozen Lake Mohonk prepared for takeoff, assisted by boys with hockey sticks.
The most remarkable footage, perhaps, is of ice harvesting. In a long sequence, teams of workers and horses gather lake ice for use in refrigeration and in guests’ drinks. They harvested a thousand tons a year. Just as Roberto Rossellini’s “Stromboli,” from 1950, functions as both a drama and a record of an unimaginably bounteous tuna mattanza in the Tyrrhenian Sea, the Smiley film depicts bygone and herculean nature-wrangling, on Lake Mohonk. “Here’s a horse-pulled saw, starting to score the ice,” Pril said. “And then this handsaw, which is down in the barn museum, is sawing the scored ice rows, and then blocks. They waited until the ice was around ten inches thick.” Men hauled blocks up a ramp onto a cart; horses pulled the carts—and young Smileys—up a hill to a four-story icehouse, where the blocks awaited a conveyor belt and stacking. “We did this through 1964,” Pril said. Later, the horses rolled around in the snow. “They’re having a ball!”
The horses make an appearance in the app, as do the Smiley elders. The app, Hidden Histories, operates as a sort of scavenger hunt: walk down the hotel’s meandering corridors, point your phone at a piece of art, watch a short film that animates the work’s subjects. A sepia-toned family portrait instigates Smiley footage, including a rare color film: a chamber-music concert, in Mohonk’s parlor, in 1942. In the office, Pril played the video. “There’s my mother, playing for Toscanini,” she said, pointing to a young violinist in a white dress. “He came here for eight days with Madam Toscanini. We have his registration card now, in his famous green ink.” In the film, the Maestro is present but not seen; so is Pril. “My mother was two months pregnant with me,” she said. “When I was born, Toscanini sent us a picture of himself—‘Happy Day for little Priscilla and her lovely mother. Best wishes to both.’ That’s one of my treasures.” ♦
