![]() The Beacon-based mental health facility has been abandoned since 2003, falling in disrepair. In 1935, Fortune magazine rated Craig House as one of the best sanitariums in America for treating nervous disorders. ![]() The property sat uninhabited until just before Eliza Howland died in 1917, when she sold the main house and its 200-plus acres to a local psychiatrist, Dr. Illness was constant, and following his death in 1886 in France, his wife never returned to Tioronda. Howland dedicated his post-war life to the construction of the Hudson River State Hospital for the Insane, while also starting Beacon’s Howland Library (now the Howland Cultural Center) and serving as New York State’s Treasurer from 1866 to 1867. When he returned, his experiences in the battlefield left him with PTSD, accelerating a lifelong interest in mental health care. Howland, it turns out, didn’t get to enjoy his country estate for very long, leaving Beacon in 1861 to fight in the Civil War. Tioronda has this presence about it,” he says.ĭesigned by notable architect Frederick Clarke Withers, Tioronda is surrounded by lush landscaping, which was the work of Henry Winthrop Sargent and a reflection of Howland’s deep interest in horticulture. “No matter how many pictures you look at, they just don’t do it justice. “When you walk around the place, you’re just struck by this landscaping, this architecture that’s totally eccentric,” recalls Delaney, who has spent many hours traipsing through the property. The location was attractive to shipping magnate Joseph Howland, who, with his wife Eliza, in 1859 began transforming what was a humble country farm into one of the Hudson Valley’s most memorable estates, built in a dramatic Gothic style. Located where Fishkill Creek meets the banks of the Hudson River, Tioronda earned its name from a Native American word meaning meeting of the waters. Jackie Gleason, Zelda Fitzgerald and JFK’s sister all stayed at Craig House for treatment and to rest when the facility was in its heyday decades ago. “I mean it looks like Bela Lugosi should live there.”ĭelaney, who has spent years digging through records at the Beacon Historical Society to piece together the history of Tioronda and Craig House, says that observation’s not too far off the mark.įrom its beginnings as the estate of a Civil War general to its role as the nation’s first private residential mental health facility, the property’s fascinating history is one populated with boldface names, like Rosemary Kennedy and Jackie Gleason, and reports of the paranormal. “It looks like something straight out of a Hollywood movie from the 1930s,” says Tim Delaney, a long-time Beacon resident and amateur historian who lectures on the property’s wild and dark past. Although it’s been abandoned for more than two decades, the mansion hasn’t been forgotten by the many generations who lived and worked there - nor by a new wave of curiosity seekers intrigued by its roadside grandeur and past.
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