Presenters
Abstract
Spencer Trask, the late-19th century financier of Thomas Edison’s electric light bulb and the savior of the nearly-defunct New York Times, died in 1909 when a speeding freight train crushed his private Pullman car. He was buried at the Trask family’s lot at Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery. All four of his children were already interred there. None of them had lived beyond the age of twelve.
Well before his death, Trask and his wife, Katrina had begun to channel their grief into philanthropy. They set the gears into motion to turn their Saratoga Springs estate, Yaddo, into a place in which painters, sculptors, writers and composers could reside and create. Katrina Trask continued the work, along with a team of friends and colleagues, and Yaddo received its first artists-in-residence soon after her death in 1922.
Instead of joining her husband and children at Green-Wood, Katrina is buried in a small burial space that she selected on the Yaddo property. Her grave is at the center of a circle that is marked by a tall Celtic Cross and five low markers adorned with bronze plaques created by sculptor Alex J. Ettl. Buried with her are the colleagues who helped to make Yaddo a reality—Elizabeth Ames, Allena Gilbert Pardee, Marjorie Peabody Waite, and George Foster Peabody. A cenotaph is dedicated to Spencer Trask.
This paper examines the design and creation of the memorial space that would keep Yaddo’s founders integrally tied to the institution that they brought into being, a space designed to quietly inspire those who come to work and create at the Trasks’ Saratoga Springs estate.