For half a century, arguably New Paltz’s most indefatigable volunteer was the tiny dynamo Sally Rhoads. She spent decades on the New Paltz Central School District’s Board of Education, much of that time as president. In that capacity she oversaw the building of Lenape Elementary School and nixed the Marriott Corporation’s demand for a ten-year school tax abatement on the former Lake Minnewaska resort, ensuring that it would end up a glorious state park rather than a condominium development. Later, she served for years on the Village Board and helped found the Lifelong Learning Institute.
But most of all, Rhoads made her mark as a longtime trustee of the Elting Memorial Library. She spearheaded the $2.5 million capital campaign that doubled the size of the Library building in 2006. And for 35 years she was the driving force behind the Library Fair, that institution’s biggest annual fundraiser and community-building event. When Sally Rhoads asked people to lend a hand, they were too intimidated to say no. She was a force of nature.
Rhoads died in 2020, and to honor her memory, the Elting Library has instituted an annual Speaker Series named after her. Its maiden voyage will set sail on Tuesday, October 24 – leaving only ten days for staff and volunteers to recuperate after the massive effort of this year’s Library Fair on the weekend of the 14th and 15th, but Sally wouldn’t have wanted to waste any time if she were still in charge.
The inaugural speaker for the Sally Rhoads Speaker Series will be Lee Glazer, former curator for the Smithsonian Institution’s Freer Gallery of Art and present director of the National Archives & Records Administrations Programs Division. If the surname Freer rings a bell, it’s probably because Hugo Freer was one of the Duzine: the 12 original Huguenot patentees who founded New Paltz in the 1670s.
A couple of centuries on, one of Hugo’s direct descendants, Charles Lang Freer (1854-1919), worked his way up from poverty to great wealth and became an astute art collector, befriending a number of leading American artists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Born in Kingston as one of six siblings of a financially distressed family, Charles dropped out of school in seventh grade to work in a cement factory. But he was smart, organized and enterprising, and while working as a clerk in a general store, made a good impression on Frank J. Hecker, the general superintendent of the New York, Kingston & Syracuse Railroad. Hecker hired him away at age 20 to serve as the railroad’s paymaster and accountant. When a group of entrepreneurs wanting to start their own railroad enlisted Hecker as project manager, he brought young Freer with him.
Freer and Hecker moved to Detroit, founding the Peninsular Car Company in 1885, which became Detroit’s second-largest railcar manufacturer. A series of mergers and acquisitions later, Freer was one of the wealthiest men in America. But by the century’s end, stress had taken its toll. Charles Lang Freer was diagnosed with “neurasthenia” and advised to take up gentler pursuits than being a ruthless railroad magnate. So, he began to travel widely and spend his fortune on expanding his art collection. By the time of his death, Freer had amassed almost 10,000 art objects and manuscripts, including the largest collection of works by the artist James McNeill Whistler and works by several American artists such as Winslow Homer and John Singer Sargent, not to mention many Chinese, Japanese, Egyptian, Near Eastern and Indian objects.
Freer died childless, and arranged to leave more than half of his collection to the US government – the first such large bequest of art ever – as well as enough of a cash endowment to build a splendid building in Washington to display them. That structure is now known as the Freer Gallery of Art, and was the foundation of the art holdings of the Smithsonian.
Freer’s enormous collection of Whistler paintings is the crown jewel of the gallery, and among its most splendid treasures is the Peacock Room, an entire room designed by the artist in Anglo-Japanese style to display a painting titled Rose and Silver: The Princess from the Land of Porcelain. Lee Glazer, the speaker for the first Sally Rhoads lecture, won a major award from the Smithsonian for “Peacock Room REMIX: Darren Waterston’s Filthy Lucre,” an exhibition she organized that reinterpreted the Peacock Room as a “decadent ruin.” It was one of more than 20 exhibitions that she curated at the Freer Gallery of Art.
To mark the reopening of the Gallery after a yearlong renovation, Glazer set out to write a biography of Charles Lang Freer: A Cosmopolitan Life. Her research on Freer’s early years for that book led her to Carol Johnson and the Haviland-Heidgerd Historical Collection at the Elting Memorial Library. That connection is now paying off with a public presentation about a scion of the settlers of New Paltz who went on to shape America’s cultural heritage in a big way.
The Sally Rhoads Memorial Lecture: “Charles Lang Freer and the Power to See Beauty” by Lee Glazer will run from 7 to 8:30 p.m. on Tuesday, October 24 in the Steinberg Reading Room at the Elting Memorial Library, located at 93 Main Street in New Paltz. Admission is free.
Join the family! 
