Reflections on the Adirondack Great Camps

Thanks to a tour organized by Adirondack Architectural Heritage [AARCH] this past July my wife and I were able to visit the original “great camp,” Camp Pine Knot on Raquette Lake. The camp was designed and built by William West Durant between 1876 and 1882. W. W. Durant was an heir to a railroad fortune who devoted much of his adult life to creating buildings of a distinctly Adirondack architectural style. After completing Camp Pine Knot, Durant went on to design a series of other similar vacation compounds including Camp Uncas, the Sagamore, and Camp Kill Kare. Each of these camps has its own distinctive features. What they share is Durant’s artful melding of natural materials with sophisticated amenities that catered to the tastes of the ultra-wealthy who could afford to spend the summer season in the Adirondacks relaxing with their family and friends. 

Camp Pine Knot is located on a point of land adjacent to where the Marion River flows into Raquette Lake. St. Williams Church, also built by Durant, and Echo Camp, a later great camp that shares features first introduced by Durant are both located nearby. Camp Pine Knot was used by the Durant family until 1895 when it was sold to railroad magnate Collis P. Huntington. Huntington used it until his death at the camp in 1900. It sat vacant until it was acquired by SUNY Cortland in 1949 for use as an outdoor education center.

 

W. W. Durant on the steps

Over the years SUNY Cortland has carefully restored and renovated the buildings into what is now known as the Huntington Memorial Camp. The camp serves as SUNY Cortland’s Center for Environmental and Outdoor Education. Up to 70 students at a time take courses at the Center year-round. They study and live at the camp in various dorm-style and historic buildings. The Center also includes the historic Antlers Hotel property across the lake with road access just outside of Raquette Lake village. The only access to Camp Pine Knot is by boat, or by ice road in the coldest months.

 

Our tour guide for the day was the Center’s director, Rhonda Pitoniak. Rhonda is a SUNY Cortland graduate who lives full-time on the premises. Her knowledge of the camps is encyclopedic. She carefully described each building in detail and directed our attention to even the smallest features such as natural shelf brackets, birch ceiling panels and a curious stand made from a twisty branch possibly used as a drying rack. 

 

As we moved from building to building admiring the craftsmanship and overawed at the scale, I couldn’t help but think, “How did the original owners pay for all this?”

 

The standard answer to that question is that the builders and successive owners of the great camps were incredibly wealthy. W. W. Durant inherited his wealth. Collis Huntington grew wealthy on his railroad investments. The owners of other great camps such as the Vanderbilts, Rockefellers, Webbs and so on all had immense wealth. 

 

Wealth does not exist in a vacuum. To better understand the wealth that allowed for the creation of the great camps, we need to remember that the accumulation of so much wealth was the result of the utterly unregulated capitalism of the late 19^th century. The industrialists who owned the early great camps, especially those built before 1910, were America’s robber barons. 

 

The exploitative practices typically employed by the robber barons included ruthlessly gaining control over the country’s natural resources, routinely paying off government officials and creating monopolies in order to artificially raise prices. They conspired to keep wages of those who worked for them so low that millions lived in abject poverty. There were no labor laws to keep their avarice in check. Workplace safety had not been invented. Child labor was legal. The work day extended into the night and the work week was seven days long. To top it off, there was no federal income tax before 1913.

 

The harsh economic reality underlying the great camps is not much highlighted during tours of the camps or in the books that describe them. This is understandable. Standing in an incredibly beautiful building in a scenic location in the Adirondacks hardly seems like the time or place to discuss how the owner acquired their wealth. Nonetheless, by not including such an explanation, the existence of the camp becomes abstract, cut off from the realities of its history.

 

A similar problem of interpretation faces the surviving southern plantations. In many of these historic places, visitors are shown through the grand buildings and the beautiful restored gardens without mention of the fact that the plantation could not have been created without the institution of slavery. In recent years, however, at a growing number of plantations open to visitation, interpretation has been modified to focus as much on the roles of the enslaved people who built and maintained the planation as on the lives and artifacts of the rich slave-owners. A few years ago, we visited the McLeod Plantation just outside of Charleston, SC where interpretation of the site focuses squarely on the lives of the enslaved people. This focus did not dull our appreciation of the beauty of the place, far from it. Instead, we were left with a deeper and truer sense of what we saw.

 

I see no reason why a similar shift in interpretation could not be accomplished on tours of Adirondack great camps. Historic interpretation that includes the economic context within which the great camps are situated would allow visitors to understand and appreciate the working people who created the wealth, built the camps and maintained them. Of course, this would necessarily reveal the wealthy owners as the ruthless industrialists that they were, but it would also serve to situate the beautiful architecture in the context of the time in which it was created.

 

It strikes me that such a shift in focus is especially important at the great camps that attract a large number of visitors such as Camp Santanoni and Great Camp Sagamore. In both these cases some steps in this direction have already been taken, but more can be done to deepen the public’s understanding of the economic and human context. Visitors’ appreciation of the wonder of the great camps will be enhanced if they know the whole story of how the camps came to be.

 

Sources:

 

Harvey Kaiser, Great Camps of the Adirondacks, Godine, first ed. 1982, revised edition 2020 with new introduction by Steven Englehart.

 

Craig Gilborn, Durant: Fortunes and Woodland Camps of a Family in the Adirondacks, North Country Books, 1981.

 

Craig Gilborn, Adirondack Camps: Home Away from Home, Syracuse University Press, 2000.

 

Gladys Montgomery, An Elegant Wilderness: Great Camps and Grand Lodges of the Adirondacks, 1855 – 1935, Arcanthus Press, 2011.