CORPORATION OF YADDO

Yaddo is the leading nonprofit retreat for artists and writers, who come from all nations and backgrounds to live and work in our supportive community.

Yaddo was the country estate of financier Spencer Trask and his wife Katrina, a writer and poet. The name “Yaddo” is attributed to their daughter Christina. The first settler on the property was Jacobus Barhyte, a Revolutionary War veteran, who operated a tavern and gristmill. The Algonquian-speaking Mahican were among the first people who lived in the Saratoga region.

The Trasks arrived in 1881. Ten years later, their house burned, and the Trasks hired architect William Halsey Wood to build anew. Left without immediate heirs, they bequeathed their fortune and estate to the establishment of a residency program for artists.

In 1900, the Trasks founded the Corporation of Yaddo with a clear and simple mission—to give uninterrupted time and space to artists. More importantly, they had a profound understanding of why Yaddo was urgent and necessary. They shared with others of their time and class a deep anxiety about social conditions, about the rise of fascism and concomitant wars, about what Katrina referred to as the “hardening of man’s soul and a growing deafness to the cries of the many and wisdom of the artist.” Yaddo was to be the antidote. It was to offer working writers and artists sanctuary—a respite from urbanization, income inequality, the demands of the marketplace, noise, political and economic upheaval.

In the century since the Trasks inaugurated Yaddo, these factors have only intensified, and the need for artists to have a place of retreat to dive deeply into their work is more necessary now than ever before.