Beginning with Thomas Cole's first visit during 1825, they became a subject for painters of the Hudson River School, setting the wilderness ideal for American landscape painting.

Prior to that time Americans tended to regard the mountains and valleys of upstate New York as an unsafe region populated by savage natives.

It wasn't until after the War of 1812 when the frontier shifted far to the west, that attitudes changed and people began to regard the lofty heights around the Hudson River valley as something scenic rather than ominous or fearsome.

About the same time the profitability of local farming began to decrease due to cheap grain shipped east by an Erie Canal, usable in stages while under construction.

The rocks presented a high impenetrable wall, over which the torrent came tumbling in a sheet of feathery foam, and fell into a deep broad basin, black from the shadows of the surrounding forest.Pioneering Hudson River School artist Thomas Cole was interested in the story, and took a steamboat ride up the River Hudson, stopping at West Point then going north to Catskill, NY where he ventured into Kaaterskill Clove during October 1825 [3].

The resulting paintings were reproduced on the front page of the New York Evening Post and during an era of Erie Canal wealth made the Hudson River valley, and scenic locations like Kaaterskill Falls, some of the foremost and famous tourist destinations in the rapidly expanding United States.

Cole's influential paintings from that visit inspired the first real generation of truly American artists for whom a journey to the Clove, Kaaterskill Falls and Charles Beach's Catskill Mountain House became something of a pilgrimage.

[4][5] Nearby Palenville, New York is considered to be the first art colony in the United States as a result (noted by Dr. Roland Van Zandt, author of The Catskill Mountain House, pages 175-178).

Other artists who painted images of the falls included Frederic Edwin Church[6], Sanford Gifford[7], Winslow Homer[8], Max Eglau, Richard William Hubbard and John Frederick Kensett.

Prior to the painting's execution, during 1836, Bryant had complemented Cole's visualizations with versification when he wrote "Catterskill Falls", which described a wintertime encounter: Midst greens and shades the Catterskill leaps,From cliffs where the wood-flower clings;All summer he moistens his verdant steeps,With the sweet light spray of the mountain-springs,And he shakes the woods on the mountain-side,When they drip with the rains of autumn-tide.But when, in the forest bare and old,The blast of December calls,He builds, in the starlight clear and cold,A palace of ice where his torrent falls,With turret, and arch, and fretwork fair,And pillars blue as the summer air.The phenomenon he described — the formation of an ice column by the falls during particularly cold stretches of winter — was well known to frequent visitors.

"[4] Local legend suggests that on June 19 of every year, the spaniel haunts the vicinity of the falls and "as the hands of the clock mark the witching hour, a succession of short, sharp barks is heard followed by the flight of the apparition through the air over the falls into the precipice, whence arises a prolonged howl which echoes and re-echoes among the Cimmerian recesses of Sunset Gorge and the forest clad slope of High Peak Mountain"[4] During 1885 New York State established the Forest Preserve.

The Kaaterskill Hotel was never rebuilt after a 1920s fire, and the Catskill Mountain House itself was burned to the ground by the State Conservation Department (the forerunner to DEC) at 6:00am on January 25, 1963, after having become severe disrepaired.

Due to both the rugged surrounding terrain and the limitations placed on Forest Preserve land by the state constitution, New York's Department of Transportation (DOT) has been unable to expand the narrow shoulder on either side of the road, requiring that visitors walk very close to high-speed traffic, including trucks, some of which are in the middle of descending a pronounced grade.

These include a wheelchair accessible gravel path to an overlook platform, a 115-foot hiking bridge over Spruce Creek, and a new foot trail with stone staircase down to the middle pool, creating a link between the top and bottom of the falls.

[15] For those not able to get too close to it, the waterfalls can be seen in their entirety in the distance from the northern approach to the summit of Kaaterskill High Peak, across the clove, and sometimes even from the fire tower on Hunter Mountain.