Woodstock’s Marion Bullard
No parent of a gifted
child could have done more to develop and spread its fame than she did for her
beloved Woodstock. Marion’s was the brain and the heart that led every forward
step the town took. She crusaded, she cajoled, scolded and exposed until she
won for the town what she thought was necessary for its welfare and its growth.
(Rose Oxhandler, Publications of the
Historical Society of Woodstock, 1955)
Marion Bullard was a woman in a town that had never elected a woman to
anything. She was a liberal in a town that once counted Democrats on one hand.
She was an artist in a town that, at the time of her arrival, wasn’t all too
fond of artists. And yet, when she died tragically just before Christmas in
1950, Woodstock was stunned. Writing about Bullard for the Publications of the Historical Society of Woodstock, Rose Oxhandler
summed up the sense of loss that echoed across the slopes of Overlook, “We were shocked and shaken for our village was truly orphaned by her
going. She was one of those men and women of the past who have poured out their
lives for Woodstock.”
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| Marion Bullard (HSW Archives) |
In reality, there were three Marion Bullards – the artist,
the author of children’s books and the woman who, despite never holding office,
rallied Woodstock to be better than it was. More importantly, there was one
heart that drove each stage of her life. Through her art and through her
causes, hers was a rare voice; a voice that drove her own creative self beyond
where she thought she could go and, in doing so, finding the strength to push
the town she came to love to do the same.
Marion Bullard was born in 1878 in Middletown, New York. As
described by her sister, Eva Beard, theirs was an uncomplicated life wrapped
within a small town that “had a pleasant, simple culture of its own,” and where
“to the old Wallkill Academy came scions of the ‘country families,’ many of
them resident in Orange County since before the Revolution.”
It was at the Wallkill Academy that a young Marion began to
pursue her art under the tutelage of a “valiant young” teacher by the name of
Miss Parker. As further described by Bullard’s sister, Parker, was wont to “sally
forth on Saturdays with a sketching class – maidens in straw sailors, ankle
length skirts, stiff collared shirt-waists; boys in striped ‘blazers’ who came
along less for art than to rescue these pretty companions from bulls,
blacksnakes, barbed wire, brooks and like hazards.”
Bullard’s more serious pursuit of art was later undertaken
at the Mechanic’s Institute in Rochester, at Columbia’s Teacher College, and at
Cooper Union.
In 1903, Albert Morrison Bullard, an electrical engineer by
trade and an associate of her brother Malcom, entered Marion’s life. While
theirs would be a short-lived marriage, he would die in only five years later,
their brief years together prepared Marion well for the life she would find ultimately discover in
Woodstock. For it was, shortly after their
marriage, that they took up residence in a rebuilt stable along MacDougal Ally
in New York’s Greenwich Village.
Following the death of her husband, Bullard found her way to
Woodstock by way of the Art Students League. Three summers would pass before
Woodstock called her permanently in 1911, joining with other artists such as
Henry McFee, Eugene Spiecher and John Carlson in the pursuit of painting,
exhibiting and living the life of an artist in converted barns along Rock City
Road.
At the time of Bullard’s arrival in Woodstock, our once sleepy
Catskill Mountain town was in a period of transition. Longtime Woodstockers,
unfamiliar with the ways of artists, met the newcomers with skepticism,
caution, and, in some cases, outright hostility as they saw their town take on
a new and not necessarily welcomed persona. Even Bullard’s own description of
her introduction to Woodstock offers an example of why some “locals” might have
taken issue with their new neighbors, “There I was sitting high up in the horse
drawn stage coach, waiting for Eddie, the driver, to get his weekly haircut,
when out of Beekman’s store came a few artists. Among them (I found out later),
were Allen Cochran, Henry Lee McFee and Walter Goltz. They looked up at the
strange girl and my eyes popped with shocked surprise. They had their hair
shaved in patterns, and to the conventional city girl I was then, it was an
extraordinary sight. One had plaids, one polka dots and the third had on the
back of his head a face – eyes, nose and mouth done in black hair!”
Such was the Woodstock Marion Bullard found and, to her own
surprise, it would be a town in which the “conventional city girl” would flourish.
Soon, along with other female artists such as Evelyn Jacus and Margaret
Goddard, she was a welcomed member of the Rock City group and her paintings
began to receive notice. Commenting on the uniqueness of her style, Helen
Shotwell, daughter of Woodstock’s most noted citizen at the time, Dr. James
Shotwell, remarked, “The tender haze of apple blossoms against a misty hill;
the dark power of the Catskills before a silver, rain drenched sky; or the
sparkling gaiety of a little French town; all were illuminated with her sense
of singing beauty.”
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| Village in Autumn |
Helen Shotwell wasn’t the only one who noticed. Soon,
Bullard’s works were finding their way to exhibits in prestigious places. Her
work hung in the Pennsylvania Academy, the National Association of Women
Painters and Sculptors, the National Academy, and the Architectural League. She
presented a one-woman show in 1923 at New York’s Ferargil Gallery and, in 1928,
she joined other Woodstock artists at the R.H. Macy Galleries of which, noted
the New York American, “The work of
Marion Bullard is the chief attraction.”
Creativity, however, is not always orderly – nor is it
always content. Such was the case for Bullard who, in the 1920s, began to turn
her imagination to the writing and illustration of children’s books. Published, primarily, by E.P. Dutton, her
stories centered on an imaginative
collection of talkative animals; each with a with a decidedly Woodstock connection. In the Sad
Garden Toad, for example, the plot unfolds in a garden along the side of her
beloved Woodstock home. The Travels of
Sammy the Turtle sees the book’s hero traveling to New York City and
returning to the Ashokan Reservoir, while the action in The Hog Goes Downstream was inspired by a 1930s flood in Woodstock.
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| Travels of Sammy the Turtle by Marion Bullard |
It was also during this period that Bullard’s life began to expand from her art to a larger community purpose; a purpose that would challenge a
town that was not used to being challenged. Beginning in the early 1930s,
Bullard undertook writing a column about Woodstock for the Ulster County News. She saw the column, titled, appropriately
enough, Sparks (column sample below), as a platform through
which she would confront the inertia of the status quo. To that end she wrote,
“We could do with a Jeremiah to stir us out of our indifference in this town, the
Republicans feel so sure of reelection that they don’t lift a finger, and the
Democrats, knowing they have a small chance of getting in do less. Democracy is
hard work and demands of each one something more than a shrug of helplessness.”
While not shy about charging into battle with representatives
of Woodstock’s establishment, Bullard was an equal opportunity chastiser. Early
on, for example, she waged a campaign to open Town Board meetings to the
public. Upon winning that fight, she was, according to Oxhandler, equally
“outraged” when “people didn’t care enough to attend.”
Bullard also battled for fiscal accountability and the
simple premise that the citizens of a town had a right to know what the village
fathers were spending their money on. She won. Along the way, she also was
quick to point out hypocrisy when she saw it raise its ugly head. This was
particularly true, in 1934, when she saw Woodstockers espousing
their support for the constitution on one hand while, at the same time, threatening “to tar
and feather any person daring to bring up the subjects of Socialism and
Communism.”
Though the Town of Woodstock was the primary front for the
battles she waged, Bullard’s concern for the region also drew her focus. Marion
Bullard hated billboards and she wanted them gone from the Catskills. As a
result, she wrote and complained to any elected official she could find.
Failing to achieve their extinction, she proposed that they be taxed,
preferably based on their dimensions. She wrote letters and complained to those
businesses that would dare use a billboard as a means of advertisement and, at
the same time, urged consumers to boycott those same establishments.
As her children’s books might indicate, her concerns were
not always political – neither were they always centered on humans. Bullard
wrote regularly in support of the proper treatment of animals and, in that
regard, let it be known, “If anyone abuses animals in my bailiwick, I can be
about the meanest woman in Ulster County.”
Woodstock’s Supervisor at the time, Albert Cashdollar – a man who,
himself, brooked no quarter – was on the other end of Bullard’s passion one day
when, after learning of the successful development of a new vaccine against
rabies, Bullard secured from the foremost symbol of Woodstock power an
agreement that every dog in Woodstock would be inoculated.
As further testament to her love of animals – and the
influence of her newspaper column – Bullard was contacted one day by the owner
of the Woodstock Inn, Earl Snyder, reporting that the Snyder family cat had
gone missing. The next day she ran the story with the headline “Come Home
Tippy. All is forgiven.” Tippy did come home, escorted by a reader from
Kingston.
It was the same power structure as represented by
Cashdollar that would be the recipient of one of the more important civic
improvements pushed by Bullard. Fearing disease and even “epidemics,” from
polluted wells, Bullard undertook a campaign for the construction of a proper
water system for Woodstock. Underscoring her tenacity, Bullard worked
tirelessly for four years before the Town Board finally voted to construct such
a system.
In 1947, the “gospel according to Marion” entered yet
another dimension when, on June 22, Bullard took to the airwaves with a new
radio program on Kingston’s WKNY. Wasting little time opening another front, she
began to push Woodstock’s Town Board to return the names of Woodstock’s main
arteries to their previous status. At the time and not unlike many other towns in
America, Woodstock’s primary road was simply called Main Street. That wasn’t good
enough for Bullard and she urged a return to the names that that had once
served Woodstockers just fine. So it was, recalls Rose Oxhandler, that “the
Town Board…voted to stop calling the principle road Main Street, and restored
the old name of Tinker Street. It was also agreed that the road going from the
village green to Saugerties should be known as Mill Hill Road.”
One of the final battles that would engage Marion Bullard’s passion
was on behalf of Woodstock’s children. As late as 1949, she continued to urge
the building of a new elementary school in Woodstock – making obsolete the
scattered system of one room school houses still in place at the time. It was a
crusade she had undertaken six years earlier during the height of World War II
when she wrote, “Five years from now the babies of 1943 will be ready to attend
school. We should have ready for them a school built on the foundations their
fathers are now even making sacrifices for, freedom and peace. A new school for
Woodstock should be a memorial honoring all those in the township who have
fought for freedom. This building could stand with a sculptured facade with
freedom as its theme, facing Overlook Mountain.”
In 1949, a majority of Woodstock voters agreed with Bullard
and a $220,000 bond was approved for the construction of a new elementary
school. It was a victory, however, that Marion Bullard would not see to
completion.
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| Construction of the Woodstock Elementary School (HSW Archives) |
On Monday evening, December 19, 1950, after noticing
Bullard’s Sunday papers were still on her porch, Louise Linden summoned friends
and neighbors Fred Mower, Kathryn Mower and Charles Rapp to help investigate. Upon
entering Bullard’s home, they found a shocking scene. In a report later issued
by the State Police, Marion Bullard’s body was found, fully clothed, partially
submerged in 12 inches of bath water. According to police, and as reported in
the pages of the Kingston Daily Freeman,
there was “no evidence of foul play,” and that it appeared Bullard “had drawn a
tub of hot water preparatory to a bath when she fell into the tub after being
seized with an attack of some kind.”
The crusades had ended. The colors on her canvases were
without their guiding hand. The animals in her stories would know no further
Woodstock adventures.
No one loved Woodstock more than Marion Bullard. Following
an early personal tragedy, she arrived in Woodstock as a young woman determined to make something
of her life as an artist. Along the way she discovered that she could apply
that same determination to bettering the town she cared so deeply for - a town
seemingly wrapped in the need to maintain the status quo. That wasn’t good
enough for Marion Bullard. And, while she would never hold elected office, her
“cajoling” and her “scolding” moved Woodstock forward in ways that demonstrated
the power of one woman’s voice. While art had originally given purpose to her life,
Woodstock, ultimately, became the motivation that drove that life.
Marion Bullard's SPARKS column - 1945
Richard Heppner, Woodstock Town Historian
