the Saw Kill increased in the mid-1800s. Some residents, like Louise Livingston of Montgomery Place, built in 1803 on a bluff south of its mouth, saw this as a threat to the peacefulness and natural beauty of the stream. Her sister-in-law, Janet Livingston Montgomery, widow of Revolutionary War general Richard Montgomery, had bought the on which the estate was built shortly after her husband's death in the Battle of Quebec, building the house and establishing an ornamental farm on the property. 19th century: Conservation In the 1820s, the Saw Kill's lower gorge was the subject of some works by notable artists. Jacques-Gérard Milbert produced a lithograph, and Alexander Jackson Davis painted Janet Livingston enjoying the scene while he was in the process of designing the Montgomery Place house. The Marquis de Lafayette made a point of visiting it when he stopped to see Janet Montgomery on his return to America in 1825. Louise Livingston, along with Robert Donaldson, whose neighboring Blithewood estate later became the campus of Bard College, purchased land on the Saw Kill in 1841 to prevent extraction and factory development (an existing mill at the creek's mouth was demolished; some of it remains extant). They feared losing the pristine quality of the river to noise, loss of natural landscape, and factory worker intrusion. Hunting was also considered a disruption of peace and safety to the quality of living by wealthy landowners. Nevertheless, the practice remained commonplace into the 20th century. Livingston and Donaldson connected their properties with trails and footbridges over the stream. Small wooden pavilions were also built to allow visitors to take in the beauty of the stream. The legal agreement between them is one of the earliest such land-conservation covenants in American history. In the 1860s Theodore Roosevelt's family rented a small estate near Montgomery Place for several years, spending summers there. He often explored the lower Saw Kill, at one point canoeing around its mouth and adjacent bay, finding it fascinating both aesthetically and scientifically, according to letters he wrote to his nanny back in New York. Some of his biographers credit the experience with his lifelong interest in conservation and land preservation. 20th century In 1921 Livingston descendants the Delafields moved in to Montgomery Place. They put the Saw Kill to industrial use again, building a power station on one of the lakes created by the earlier mills. Completed two years later,