Abstract: Test excavations have revealed the first Gothic Revival Cottage in America, the gate house at the pastoral estate of Robert Donaldson. The Romantic style of country architecture and landscape gardening had its prototypic expression at his Blithewood, in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York. A. J. Davis, the estate's designer & the foremost domestic architect of the mid-19th century, published a lithograph with coloration of a plan and elevation of this Gardener's Lodge in his 1837 Rural Residences. In 1841 A. J. Downing featured a steel engraving of Blithewood in his Treatise on the Theory and Practice of Landscape Gardening. Both texts were highly influential across the U.S. as pattern books. How did this earliest artistic cottage for a working class family reflect new democratic ideals by visual reference to medieval beauty and allusion to wilderness conditions, amidst experimentation with scientific agriculture? Around 1900, a newly built neoclassical stable occasioned the burial of this structure. The yard of the Gardener's Lodge contained a pendant of a liberty cent with perforation and high status basalt ware ceramics. Across Blithewood Avenue, a deposit of fill covers a wet area that was possibly once a spring. The ca. 1840 deposit includes coal ash that suggests the begining of domestic use of this fuel. The thick fill has preserved an underlying concentration of flint debris from 5 to 7000 years ago. A nearby cobblestone carriage path, now beneath the forest floor, led from the Blithewood villa to the picturesque cataract of Sawkill Creek as it plunges into Tivoli South Bay.