4918 Highway 82

Mills have stood on this bend of the East Branch of Wappinger Creek since at least 1749, when a deed for a neighboring tract fixed its location by the kill that Isaac Filkins's gristmill sat on. Isaac Bloom, a militia veteran who became town clerk, county judge, state senator and congressman-elect, bought the mill after the Revolution and gave the hamlet its name. By 1850 the site had been rebuilt as a cotton mill, and the 1870 census recorded Rosencranz and Pond's Bloomvale Factory running sixty hands and 208,000 pounds of yarn a year. Then it burned. In 1913 Edward C. Swezey, a civil engineer from Brooklyn, hired the mason Frank Vitale to lay a forty-foot-square cider mill out of the fallen cotton mill's stone, walls two and a half feet thick, stiffened with steel and reinforced concrete. That building is the house.

An architect fresh out of school and an interior designer bought the shell in 1966, when steel beams and stone walls were all that was left inside, and moved the family in by 1971. Their daughter, the prop stylist Ariana Salvato, has held it since, hanging her father's paintings through the rooms and renting the mill as a location to Elle and W. The great room rises under cathedral ceilings to a fireplace and a wood stove, with two more stoves beyond. Three bedrooms and two and a half baths sit in the mill, with a caretaker's cottage, a studio, a walled courtyard, tiered decks and a swimming hole below the falls, on grounds assembled from four parcels into just over twelve acres. In 1991 the family pushed for recognition, and the nomination Neil Larson filed that September put the dam, the mill ruins and the surrounding houses on the National Register as the Bloomvale Historic District.

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