it provided electricity not just for the estate but for all Annandale. The Delafields frequently hiked in the woods, and boated and swam in the lakes. Violetta Delafield, a botanist, continued the earlier conservation traditions by documenting the mushroom species she found in the woods. In addition to her text notes, she painted watercolors of them. In 1951 the Blithewood estate north of the Saw Kill's lower stretch across from Montgomery Place was donated to Bard College, which continued to keep it predominantly natural. Annandale and Montgomery Place were connected to local power in 1965, although the Delafields' generating station remained online as backup through 1983. In 1985 the Delafields sold the estate to the Westchester County-based preservation organization Historic Hudson Valley, which opened it to the public for tours, and continued to maintain the trails along the Saw Kill. Between 1975 and 1982 two local conservation groups, in conjunction with Bard, regularly tested the stream's water quality at 14 locations from the mouth to Rock City, including the Lakes Kill and some other unnamed tributaries, as well as effluent from wastewater treatment plants at Bard and Camp Rising Sun and the Orchard Hill chicken pie factory in the village of Red Hook (since closed). According to a 1977 article in a local newspaper, the Saw Kill was in good shape. "There is little in the way of man-made pollution", said a member. He particularly praised Orchard Hill for installing a new treatment system and eliminating most of the harmful waste it was discharging into a nearby tributary. 21st century Bard, which both taps the Saw Kill for drinking water and, further downstream, discharges its treated wastewater into it, began monitoring the stream's health in the early 2000s. In 2006 it built an eel ladder below one of the surviving dams in cooperation with the state Department of Environmental Conservation's Hudson Estuary Program to allow American eels to reach their mating grounds upstream. Later in the decade, after winning a state grant, the college began exploring the possibility of generating power at the dams, if not elsewhere in the state, to offset greenhouse gas production. In 2009 Historic Hudson Valley considered selling Montgomery Place, which it said it had bought without realizing how much it would cost to maintain, much less renovate. After criticism from the Delafields, who had similarly found the property too expensive to keep, the organization abandoned