Frederic Edwin Church is best known as a Hudson River School painter, yet he treated the land around his home as a large-scale landscape composition. New York State Parks describes Olana as the 19th-century home, studio, and designed landscape of Hudson River School artist Frederic Edwin Church, his wife Isabel and their four children. The estate sits near Hudson, New York, and the state agency notes that 2026 marks the bicentennial of his birth. Two parts of that landscape are especially striking: a 10-acre lake largely excavated by hand from muck and woodlands of thousands of native trees. The Olana State Historic Site's history of the landscape explains that the lake took about twenty years to form, beginning when Church bought his first parcel of land. The lake and portions of the planted woodland survive, although both have been altered and managed over time. The Olana Partnership works with the state's parks office to care for them.
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