Efforts to preserve artist Henry Varnum Poor's house stall

Clarkstown, New York

THE rambling stone cottage here where the artist Henry Varnum Poor created his ceramics and his paintings and other artworks now held at major museums around the country is called Crow House, perhaps because that may have been the type of bird that circled overhead when Poor designed and built it, by hand, nearly 100 years ago.

Seven years ago, town leaders in nearby Ramapo decided to pay US$1.3 million for the property, with plans to create a cultu…