So what was the motivation behind launching the Youth Conservation Corps? As fans of the organization know, Historic Hudson Valley has long been committed to environmental conservation.

Now,  the YCC is a way to use its historic sites as contemporary learning laboratories with an environmental focus. Goals for the project include instilling the values of hard work, responsibility, service, respect for the environment, and education.

In the program two teams of six students, each with their own supervisor - Rebecca Watkins of Nyack and Travis Mockler of Plesantville, each working with the assistance of Elizabeth Wilkins of Red Hook and all under the aegis of Thom Thacker, site director at Philipsburg Manor - are engaged in a curriculum of environmental education, career and leadership training, and recreation activities.

Over the course of seven weeks this summer, the program's students are helping to restore the walking trails at Sunnyside, originally designed and used by author and ambassador Washington Irving in the mid-19^th century. At Philipsburg Manor, they are removing brush and other debris from the bed of the Pocantico River. They are also participating in the annual rye harvest.

Fridays are reserved for field trips to locations such as the Hudson River Museum, Beczak Environmental Education Center, Breakneck Mountain, and Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture, places that help reinforce the lessons learned here.

Big rounds of applause go out to the programs supporters, which are The Thomas and Agnes Carvel Foundation, Entergy's Environmental Stewardship Program, JPMorgan Chase & Co., Congresswoman Nita M. Lowey, and the New York City Environmental Fund.

Want to see the Corps in action? Drop by Sunnyside on a Monday, Wednesday, or Thursday. The program's season ends on Aug. 15.

The Civilian Conservation Corps, one of the best-known "alphabet soup" initiatives created by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt during the Great Depression, was such a popular work relief program that it operated in every state at its prime, and was active here in Westchester during the 1930s.

While the CCC may be a thing of the past, today there are numerous youth conservation corps programs throughout the country. Like the Depression-era Civilian Conservation Corps from which they take their name, they primarily engage in conservation-oriented work in local, state, and national parks.

The one unifying principle that seems to define all existing youth conservation corps programs is that they use conservation and service work as a medium for youth development. The programs' goals include instilling the values of hard work, responsibility, service, respect for the environment, and education. To achieve these goals, the programs are not confined merely to physically challenging work, but also typically involve environmental education, team-building activities, career and leadership training, and recreational activity involving outdoor pursuits and visits to museums and historical sites.

Now, a new youth education and empowerment program dedicated to those principles and modeled on FDR's famed Civilian Conservation Corps is taking place right here in Sleepy Hollow and Tarrytown.

Known as the Historic Hudson Valley Youth Conversation Corps, the Corps -- launched on June 30 -- is a job readiness program that seeks to instill the twin values of a strong work ethic and conservation in area youth.

The students taking part, ages 15-18 from the Boys and Girls Club of Northern Westchester and from a wide range of social, economic, and educational backgrounds, are working on various projects at Washington Irving's Sunnyside and Philipsburg Manor such as grounds and trail work, riverbed cleanup, erosion control, and more.

All of the work has an environmental component, but there's an interesting artistic element to it as well, as you can see from the images here. Besides clearing trails and helping control erosion, the group is creating life-size animals out of fallen twigs and logs, under the direction of Michael Natiello, creative guru behind HHV's Great Jack O'Lantern Blaze. Nice job guys!

More on the YCC later this week...

The weather held and folks came out for a little sunshine and history at Friday's Independence Day celebrations at Van Cortlandt Manor and Sunnyside.

In the top photo are gentlemen from Doughty Artillery Company, military re-enactors who wowed the crowds at Van Cortlandt Manor, and in the bottom photo, some spirited country dancers at Sunnyside.

Hundreds of visitors came out for both events, and the press came, too. Here's a piece from the Journal News.

Were you there? Leave a comment and tell us what you thought!

Yes, HVBlogger acknowledges the 50% chance of  a shower, but c'mon, you can't just sit inside on the start of a long holiday weekend! HHV has two offbeat events today -- Independence Day 1808 (Van Cortlandt Manor) and Independence Day 1858 (Sunnyside). How often do you get to choose your own time period?

The Journal News saw fit to publish a cover story on today's events, featuring the most clever lede (the opening sentences, for you non-journo types) HVBlogger has seen in quite some time:

Cannnon-wielding soldiers and hotheaded debaters might seem like a dangerous combination. Luckily, they're miles apart.

Oh, and Crotonblog had a few things to say about us, too.

Click here to buy tickets online. (Psst...used discount code USA and your 5-17 year olds get in free.)

The HVBlog has already sung the praises of Brian Jay Jones, author of last year's brilliant and insightful Washington Irving bio, An American Original. Now, on June 23, a big day for any serious Irving aficionado, we're thrilled to have Mr. J on board as a guest blogger writing on a rather timely historical subject...

I yield the balance of my time (err, this post) to the right honorable gentleman from Maryland...Take it away, Brian!

One hundred and eighty-nine years ago today, the American bestseller was born.

On Wednesday, June 23, 1819, bookstalls in New York, Boston, Baltimore, and Philadelphia offered for sale a 93-page volume of five short stories entitled The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gentleman. Nowhere on the title page-nor anywhere inside, for that matter-was the author's real name. But with the help of a well-oiled publicity machine-made up mostly of one close friend with a knack for writing well-placed book reviews-it was made quickly clear that Geoffrey Crayon was actually a 36-year-old New Yorker named Washington Irving.

The Sketch Book wasn't Irving's first book-that distinction falls to A History of New York-but it was the first he had written in nearly ten years, and Irving was nervous about his reappearance before the American public. "The following writings are published on experiment." Irving (as Crayon) wrote in an opening preface. "Should his writings . . . be well received, he cannot conceal that it would be a source of the purest gratification."

Irving had reason to be anxious, for The Sketch Book was a gamble, in more ways than one.

By the time of The Sketch Book's arrival in New York in 1819, Irving had been living in England for nearly four years, self-exiling himself in London following the bankruptcy of the family trading business-a humiliating process that stung Irving for the rest of his life. With little money and few prospects, Irving spent 1817 and 1818 quietly and persistently dabbling at writing, filling notebooks with short stories and observational essays. Meanwhile, Irving's oldest brother William scrambled to secure for Irving a plum political appointment, and in the fall of 1818 urged his brother to return home.

To the surprise and disappointment of his family, Irving refused, choosing to remain in England to take his chances as a writer. "I am determined not to return home," Irving said, "until I have sent some writings before me that shall, if they have merit, make me return to smiles, rather than skulk back to the pity of my friends." On the edge of depression and running out of money, Irving spent the next few months preparing The Sketch Book for publication, finally mailing the five stories that would appear in the first volume of The Sketch Book to his brother in New York on March 1, 1819.

To Irving's relief, The Sketch Book was an immediate hit on its publication in June. Readers responded enthusiastically to the first four stories in the volume: "The Author's Account of Himself," in which Irving introduced Geoffrey Crayon as his narrator; "The Voyage," detailing Crayon's ocean voyage from the United States to England; "Roscoe," a tribute to the English writer and historian William Roscoe, who Irving had befriended in Liverpool; and "The Wife," a sentimental price in which the new wife of an impoverished gentleman teaches her husband that money can't buy happiness. But it was the final tale in the volume, "Rip van Winkle"-a story Irving had written in near-complete form in an all-night writing session- that readers loved best, and kept the volume selling briskly.

The Sketch Book would be published in seven installments, totaling 34 stories and essays, over the next 15 months, each one a bestseller. Copies of the book were so popular in England that Irving put an English edition to press in London-with a critical assist from friend and mentor Walter Scott, who rescued The Sketch Book from a failed British printer-where it also met with immediate success, outselling even the works of Lord Byron ("Crayon is good!" Lord Byron said enthusiastically.)

The Sketch Book made Washington Irving internationally famous, and introduced readers to his three most iconic characters: Rip Van Winkle (whose eponymous story appeared in the first installment) and Ichabod Crane and the Headless Horseman, who