Fite, then a professor of
sculpture and
theater at
Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, purchased the disused quarry site in 1938, expecting to use it as a source of raw stone for his representational sculpture. Instead, inspired by a season of work restoring
Mayan ruins in
Honduras, he began creating a space to display the large carved statues he was beginning to create out of native bluestone. Using the rubble that had been left behind as the area was quarried, he built terraces, ramps and walkways to lead to the individual works, doing all the work by hand, and using the traditional
hand tools that had been used by the local quarrymen before him. As the rampwork of his open-air gallery expanded, Fite realized that the 1.5-ton (1.36 metric ton) statue,
Flame, which had occupied the central pedestal, had become too small for the scale to which his work had grown, and he replaced it with a 9.5-ton bluestone pillar he had found in a nearby streambed, intent on carving it in place as his tallest bluestone sculpture to date. Fite erected the focal monolith in 1964, 25 years after he had begun work on his quarry gallery. Though Fite's original plan was to carve the monumental river-stone in place, as his tallest bluestone sculpture to date (he had sculpted
Flame in his indoor studio), once the stone was up, he realized that what he had originally conceived as a setting for sculpture had become a coherent sculpture in its own right, and a new kind of sculpture, in which carved representational work was out of place. Fite removed his other sculptures and relocated them on the surrounding grounds, and continued to work on this new sculptural concept for the remainder of his life. In the early 1970s, after he had retired in 1969 from 35 years as a professor at Bard College, Fite built the '''Quarryman's Museum''' on the grounds, a collection of folk tools and artifacts of the quarrying era. It was around this same time that he finally succumbed to the pressure to give his masterwork a name. Stating tongue-in-cheek that “Classical composers don’t have to name things; they can just number them, Opus One, Opus Two, and so on,” Fite eventually arrived at what he felt was an apropos name. Opus is the Latin word for work, and 40 refers to the number of years he expected he would need to complete the work. Fite died on May 9, 1976, in the 38th year of his creation, in an accidental fall while working on the ongoing project. Work stopped that day, leaving some areas unfinished—but, as his stepson, the writer
Jonathan Richards, has observed, “Opus 40 is as complete as it ever would have been. It was the product of Fite’s ceaseless vision, and could only have been stopped by his death.” The following year, his widow, Barbara Fite, a close aesthetic collaborator with Fite throughout his labors, created a nonprofit group to administer
Opus 40, and opened the grounds to public access to help support its preservation, including maintenance of the framing grounds that her husband had also landscaped. Barbara Fite died on October 22, 1987, and care of Opus 40 was taken over by her son
Tad Richards and his wife Pat over the next several decades. Since their retirement, members of the family continue to advise the Board of Directors of the organization.
Opus 40 remains a popular tourist attraction, as well as a wedding and concert venue. In 2001 it was added to the
National Register of Historic Places. == Impact ==