Arden: The Railroad Baron's Mountain Kingdom

Perched on a thirteen-hundred-foot bluff in the Ramapo Mountains stands Arden House, the estate of Edward Henry Harriman, the railroad magnate who controlled the Union Pacific and Southern Pacific at the height of the Gilded Age. Harriman bought the original property at auction in eighteen eighty-six for fifty-two thousand five hundred dollars, then spent years assembling about twenty thousand additional acres, forty miles of bridle paths, and a cog railway to haul materials up the mountain. He hired the architects Carrere and Hastings to design the great house and insisted it be built entirely of American materials by American craftsmen, a deliberate statement in an era when robber barons were building European-style castles.

Harriman lived there only a few months before his death in nineteen oh nine. His widow donated ten thousand acres and one million dollars to New York State, creating Harriman State Park.