The estate was purchased in 1881 by the financier
Spencer Trask and his wife, the writer
Katrina Trask. The first mansion on the property burned down in 1891, and the Trasks then built the current house. Yaddo is a
neologism invented by one of the Trask children and was meant to rhyme with "shadow".
Artists' colony In 1900, after the premature deaths of the Trasks' four children, At least in its early years, Yaddo was funded by profits from the
Bowling Green Offices Building in Manhattan, in which Spencer Trask was extensively involved. In 1949 during the
McCarthy Era, a news story accurately accused writer
Agnes Smedley of spying for the
Soviet Union. Smedley had traveled with
Mao Zedong to report on the Chinese Communist Revolution and, beginning in 1943, had spent five years at Yaddo. Poet
Robert Lowell pushed the Board of Directors to oust Yaddo's director, Elizabeth Ames, who was being questioned by the
FBI. Ames was eventually exonerated of all charges but learned from the investigation that her assistant Mary Townsend was an FBI informant. Ames remained director until her retirement in 1969, having overseen the Yaddo community from its creation in 1924. Ames was succeeded by Newman E. Waite who served as president from 1969 until 1977 when Curtis Harnack assumed the position. Literary critic and eventual Yaddo board member
Louis Kronenberger wrote in his memoir that to call Yaddo "a mixture of some of the most attractive, enjoyable, generous-minded people and of others who were weird, megalomaniac, intransigent, pugnacious is only to say that it has housed and nourished most of the finest talents in the arts of the past forty-odd years—the immensely fruitful years of Elizabeth Ames's directorship."
Recent years In May 2005, vandals, using
paintball guns, damaged two of the Four Seasons statues, the Poet's Bench, a fountain, and pathways with blue paint. Repairs cost $1,400. In 2018, Yaddo elected photographer
Peter Kayafas and novelist
Janice Y. K. Lee as co-chairs of its board of directors. Yaddo has received large contributions from
Spencer Trask & Company and
Kevin Kimberlin, the firm's current chairman. Novelist
Patricia Highsmith bequeathed her estate, valued at $3 million, to the community. == Facilities and gardens ==