Admission:
Event: $10 (free for members)
Event & Dinner*: $39.95 ($29.95 for members)
*Extend your time with us and enjoy a meal in our historic, lakeside Dining Hall. Click below to register for this event and see the option to add a meal reservation. Subject to availability.
The Great Camps had great furniture. It came from nature, was built by necessity, and remains exceptional to this day.
Between the 1880s and the 1920s, “Great Camps” like Sagamore transformed the Adirondack wilderness. Unsurpassed in their acreage and ambition, these massive complexes attracted Vanderbilts, Carnegies, Morgans, Rockefellers, Whitneys, Webbs and hosts of other, only-slightly-less-wealthy Gilded Age millionaires and their descendants.
Fleeing congested cities of steel, smoke, and sickness, each summer they sought refuge in these mountains from the ill-effects of the industrial society that had made their fortunes. These bark-clad buildings provided the perfect retreat: rustic on the outside and surrounded by rugged wilderness, yet surprisingly comfortable, ordered and refined on the inside. “Roughing it,” in practice, was seldom that.
But how to refine the interiors? What items might make these sitting-rooms, studies, dining halls, hunting lodges, and bedrooms mirror their exteriors in simplistic, natural style, but still match the complexity, rarity and luxury their owners expected?
The answer to those questions came from men like George Wilson. During the 1900s and 1910s, Wilson worked at Sagamore as a gardener, nursing the crops of vegetables and flowers through the harsh extremes of the Adirondack seasons. But off the clock, he worked on his art—ornately ordered twig-work and tree root tables, bookcases and writing desks that were highly sought in his day and have become practically priceless in our present.
Due the generous loan of a private collector and in celebration of the 50th anniversary of the Sagamore Institute of the Adirondacks, almost a dozen will spend the summer on display at the site that created them, more than a hundred years ago--Great Camp Sagamore.
Join Sagamore's Staff Historian Connor Williams for dinner, an exclusive viewing of the pieces, and a lecture that explores the context, craftsmanship, manufacture, and meaning of these exceptional artifacts that were born from nature, and built at Sagamore.
Connor Williams - Sagamore Historian
Connor Williams is a 19th Century Historian, trained at Middlebury College (B.A), Dartmouth College (M.A.), and Yale University (Ph.D, soon forthcoming).
A native New Yorker and aspiring maritime mountaineer, Connor currently lives with his family along Lake Champlain in the Adirondack Park. He serves as the Historian for Great Camp Sagamore, where he directs all history programming for several thousand visitors each summer. Most broadly, and via a variety of formats, Connor uses this role to conceive and execute innovative ways to teach environmental history, Gilded Age history, and the history of class, capitalism and inequality to diverse public history audiences.
His quest to summit the 46 ADK High Peaks ...continues.