Each year, Historic Hudson Valley honors individuals who have made outstanding contributions to the preservation and conservation of the Hudson Valley. Tonight, at a gala event at Washington Irving's Sunnyside, the organization is bestowing its Hudson Valley Hero award on Joseph Cotter, President of National RE/sources, which was established in 1996 as the first institutionally funded Brownfields developer. HHV is saluting Mr. Cotter and NRE for working closely with civic organizations along the Hudson, where it owns more than one-and-a-half miles of shoreline, making it the largest private owner of riverfront land.

Under Mr. Cotter's leadership, NRE has transformed outmoded industrial sites to vibrant use, employing "green" practices that respect both the environment and the character of Hudson River communities. The company has earned Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) certification for environmental stewardship, including the use of sustainable materials and siting near public transportation.

Congrats to Mr. Cotter and the entire team at NRE!

It's the sum, sum, summertime. And living is definitely easy in the 21^st century...certainly if you go by 18^th and 19^th century standards. Now, nine- to eleven-year-old history buffs can spend some 21^st century days unplugged and outdoors courtesy of Historic Hudson Valley's Summerweek Day Camp.

This is a terrific program for those young'ns who like the past, who like learnin' and havin' fun, or who just plain like being outside on a nice summer day.

Don't believe me, well then let me turn this blog entry over to our summer camp administrator, Danielle Fontaine. Sure, she may be a touch biased, but I can vouch that her enthusiasm is real. She loves this program! Truly, truly! Stay tuned for more from her later this week...

***As the weather warms and school days draw to an end, I'm getting psyched up for the start of Historic Hudson Valley's Summerweek and Riverweek day camps!

Have you ever been on a school field trip you wished wouldn't end? Ever fantasized about being a kid in the time before America was a country, or what a day with Washington Irving's nieces would be like, or what it's like to apprentice with a blacksmith?

How about traveling back in time this summer? Put down the Wii and jump into history - Summerweek camps are the perfect way to see what it was like to be a kid in the 18^th and 19^th centuries.

Prepare to teleport to the year 1750... you arrive in a market port on the Pocantico River - the Upper Mills belonging to the Philipse family (they own almost all of Westchester County!). The Upper Mills are bustling with tenant farmers bringing their wheat to the mill to pay their rent; oxen pull carts loaded with goods that arrived from ships pulling into port; barrels are being prepared for voyage across the Atlantic, and you help make it all happen! Philipsburg Manor's camp is so good, we have to run it twice. The first week is July 7 through July 11 and the second is July 28 through August 1.

Campers become history detectives working to find out how we know so much about the past. Plus, you get to work on our farm, assist the miller with grinding corn, play games, and go fishing in the river just like kids did when George Washington was a mere stripling!

A field trip to the Old Dutch Church (the Philipse family is buried under the church... spooky!) and a tour of the burying grounds (where you'll see the names of the real people who became the characters in The Legend of Sleepy Hollow inscribed on the gravestones) make this a really cool way to spend a warm week. Want to know more about The Legend of Sleepy Hollow? Set your teleport to the year 1848...and...check back on the blog Thursday...***

Ready to sign up or at least get sign up info? Click here.

Got a question for Danielle? E-mail her.

Nothing's happening at Montogomery Place since it's closed, right? Well, first off, it's not closed, it's open. The site's lush grounds, 434 acres of waterfront serenity in Annandale-on-Hudson, are blooming and welcoming visitors every Saturday and Sunday from 10-5 through October.

As HHV buffs know, the mansion at Montgomery Place is off-limits while it continues to undergo renovations in preparation for a significant reinterpretation, but that doesn't mean you can't take a stroll through the (blooming) peonies like those here.

And getting ready for the relaunch, HHV has brought aboard a new Montgomery Place site director, Ray Armater, who previously was site director at Philisburg Manor and Locust Grove. Welcome, Ray!

Ray joins Landscape Director Sarah Price, who has devoted the past several years to an ambitious project of meticulously restoring the Montgomery Place gardens. Her staff and volunteers have planted, divided, weeded, and mulched to bring the borders back to their glory from their 1920s and 1930s heyday. (More garden bloggin' to come...)

And what about the reinterpretation? Launching in 2010, "American Arcadia: People, Landscape, and Nature at Montgomery Place" will refocus the site to explore man's relationship to nature, landscape, and the environment. The project will use the experiences of people who lived and worked on this model country estate during its 200-year history to illustrate important turning points in American attitudes towards nature and landscape.

HVBlogger loved Freakonomics, as apparently do many others. The book that turns the dismal science on its head remains a best-seller some 18 months after its release.

Freakonomics co-author Stephen J. Dubner blogs on NYTimes.com. Yesterday he wrote about the troubles the Mark Twain house in Hartford, Conn., is experiencing. (Sad and scary, indeed). While doing so, he mentions Washington Irving's Sunnyside, stating:

I also love visiting the old homes of interesting people, like Washington Irving. There's nothing like being able to literally walk in the footsteps of someone else from long ago - seeing where they worked, slept, ate, and maybe cheated at cards.

We could not agree more.

Back when New York was a mere colony of Britain, Philipsburg Manor was the seat of a commercial empire founded by one of the most powerful men in the territory, Frederick Philipse. He created Philipsburg Manor to serve as a provisioning plantation for the Atlantic sea trade and as a headquarters for a worldwide shipping operation. At about the same time, he also became involved in another aspect of the Atlantic economy - the slave trade.

Prior to 2001, visitors to Philipsburg Manor (which is on Route 9 in Sleepy Hollow) learned primarily about the Philipse family and the European tenant farmers who worked the land there. But after years of planning, Historic Hudson Valley launched a new interpretative program, focusing on the story of slavery in the colonial north from the perspective of the enslaved Africans who toiled for the Philipses at the manor. This powerful, unusual - indeed, radical - approach to museum education will be part of a panel discussion and paper presentation at next year's Organization of American Historians conference, taking place March 26-29 in Seattle. The panel will examine how enslavement is (or is not) told at a variety of American museums.

Founded in 1907, the Organization of American Historians is the largest professional society dedicated to the teaching and study of American history and encourages wide discussion of historical questions and equitable treatment of all practitioners of history. The organization has a membership of more than 11,000 academic and public historians and publishes the award-winning quarterly "Journal of American History." Check them out at www.oah.org.

Kudos to the Philipsburg Manor community for being deemed panel-worthy.