The next year, the city of Poughkeepsie chose another site for the cemetery, ending that possibility. Downing's death in a steamboat boiler explosion the following year did not halt development, as Vassar and Vaux continued along the lines Downing had established. At least two of Downing's planned structures, a barn and a gardeners' cottage, were built, and he eventually invested $100,000 in developing the site. However, the central villa that was to be the main house of the estate, a Gothic Revival work by Downing and Vaux, was abandoned (although artists' renderings survive), since Vassar preferred the cottage as a residence. As Springside continued to grow and develop, Vassar regularly opened the lands to the public until he retired to it full-time in 1867, the year before his death. It became a popular place to visit and inspired poetry and songs. One visitor, Russell Comstock, wrote: After Vassar's death, the lands were divided among several other local families, who continued to work the landscape. Judge Homer Nelson, New York's Secretary of State, bought the southern half of the property and renamed it Hudson Knolls. He lived elsewhere while a boardinghouse operated on the site. The northern half was purchased by local shoe manufacturer John Whitehouse, who merged it with his own adjoining property to the west of the site, retaining the Springside name. It passed to his son-in-law Eugene Howell upon his death, who kept up the landscape, at one point using it as a golf course, despite the failure of the shoe factory in 1891. In 1901, the property was reunified under the ownership of William Nelson, who had previously purchased the southern half when Judge Nelson (to whom he was not related) died in 1881, bought Howells' half following the shoe heir's bankruptcy. Nelson, the founder of the Red Ball Line shipping company, lived in the former boardinghouse with his family. He bequeathed it to his wife, and she in turn passed it on to their children. The two daughters and son kept the property in the family and lived in various of its buildings. Gerald Nelson moved his family into the Hudson Knolls mansion, which Homer Nelson's widow had built anew in 1911 after the former boardinghouse had succumbed to a fire three years previously. Gertrude Nelson Fitzpatrick and her husband lived in the cottage, while her sister Geraldine Acker built Spring Gable for themselves in 1929 on the site where Downing had intended for Springside's main house.