Preservation Milestone: Part 4
“2011: Reconnecting the Great Camps and Their Wilderness”
By Connor Williams, Staff Historian
By the early 2010s, Sagamore had achieved more than most had imagined back in 1975. What started as an opportunity for a progressive educational institute to expand its physical space into a few historic buildings and acres in the mountains had grown into an Adirondack institution that was a hallmark for preservation in general, and the Adirondacks in particular. Thirty-five years of leaders, donors and volunteers had repaired roofs, shored up foundations, improved facilities and infrastructure, and reunited upper and lower camps into one. All the while, they paid tribute to the exceptional architectural aesthetics William West Durant created in 1897. Collectively, they made Sagamore into a National Historic Landmark truly worthy of the name.
It was one of the reasons why Sagamore had featured in many nationwide print and media outlets, and hosted hundreds of thousands of visitors. The community had grown such that the second – and in some cases, the third – generations of families had taken up traditions of volunteerism, leadership, and service to the camp. Sagamore‘s program offerings had continued growing as well, now including everything from wellness to stargazing to Granparent-Grandchild camps. By that point, the name Great Camp Sagamore referred to not only the historic class of Gilded Age properties it belonged to, but to the breadth, depth and reach of its programming as well.
As the camp had grown, the Adirondacks had grown too. Both better marketing campaigns and a rediscovery of wilderness had many more visitors – ten million each year – coming to the Park, bringing in ever-increasing numbers of hobbies, pastimes, and vehicles. One of them – the popular winter activity of snowmobiling – was in need of expanding. The annual snowfall in the Raquette Lake region and already established trail and road systems ensured that the area would become a popular spot for snowmobilers.
This especially became an issue as the state wisely moved the motorsports enthusiasts off the Fulton and Eckford chains of lakes. Those routes had proven hazardous, and sometimes tragically turned lethal as riders and their machines went through the ice. One proposed plan was to route the snowmobilers of the 21st Century along the paths and carriageways once built for the magnates of the 19th Century, running through the largely deserted areas in and around the Great Camps above Raquette Lake
Certainly, Sagamore had no desire to quash outdoor enjoyment of any kind. Like any area in Hamilton County or the greater Adirondacks, its leadership well understood how essential all kinds of tourism and activity are to the economy. At the same time, they worried about the impact that motorized sports – and any other new and novel activities that might emerge years, or decades down the road – might have on preserving the character of the historic great camps. It would be hard to reflect on horses, carriages, sleighs, snowshoes, and nordic skis with the four stroke engines of four wheelers or snowmobiles moving past. Certainly the Adirondack Park was big enough to accommodate both interests. But accomplishing that feat would take energy and innovation that just did not naturally occur in routine park management. So Sagamore‘s team of administrators and dedicated volunteers went to work once again.
Their plan was to earn designation of the areas around Great Camp Uncas and Great Camp Sagamore as a special management area – a region of the Adirondacks that had its own regulations and plan. Under a special management area status, protections would preserve the several thousand acres surrounding Sagamore in as pristine and natural a state as possible. The status could also symbolically “reunite” the woods and lake back into a better form of their original relationship with the Great Camp, both for Sagamore’s guests and the visitors to the state lands just beyond its bridges and gates alike.
But that process was far from simple. And accomplishing it would take time, energy, and expertise.
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The difficulties arose from the same issue that makes the Adirondacks so unique: its massive size. Bigger than the Grand Canyon, Glacier, Great Smoky Mountains, Yellowstone, and Yosemite National Parks combined, the six million acres of public and private lands in the Adirondack Park has always presented a monumental management task. And, there has always been a monumental document to guide it – the State Land Master Plan, which outlines the kinds of use and restrictions regarding more than 4.8 million acres of public land in New York State, including 3 million in the Adirondacks.
It manages these lands by dividing them into seven categories, each with their own levels of restrictions on land use. These include “intensive use” areas that contain campgrounds and day-use areas and “wild forests” which – despite their names – allow for more intrusive and motorized enjoyment. By contrast, “wilderness” tracts are the most remote and protected; the Department of Environmental Conservation defines them as “an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man – where man himself is a visitor who does not remain.”
Within these classifications, Sagamore presented an improbably unique case. Although privately owned as a non-profit and therefore exempt from the DEC classifications, Sagamore’s small tract of land itself would clearly qualify as “intensive use.” Moreover, owing in part to the historic property divisions dating to times when Alfred Vanderbilt and Margaret Emerson owned not only Sagamore but several thousand acres of nearby lands as well–Sagamore’s 17 acres fell directly along the border of two land management areas–the Moose River Plains Wild Forest, and the Blue Ridge Wilderness, each with different priorities, practices, and opportunities. How could one appropriately thread a needle to unite all three?
A compelling precedent lay in the Adirondacks’ Great Camp Santanoni, which had previously been designated as a special “historic land management area” carved out of its surrounding High Peaks Wilderness. It allowed New York State to be able to conduct much needed preservation on the vacant great camp and expand its ability to host visitors to the site, while also rigorously retaining the wilderness character of the site.
Still, navigating the state bureaucracy to partially re-connect Sagamore to the surrounding lands that had been sold to New York State and joined to the Adirondack Park in 1975 would prove a major challenge. Thankfully, major supporters of Sagamore were up to the task.
Their aim was not to reacquire the state land–which would have taken another constitutional amendment, with all its attendant legislative maneuvers and voter referendums. Instead, they appealed to the Department of Environmental Conservation and the Adirondack Park Agency to redesignate the land as only the second-ever historic use property in the park. The solution would keep the lands under state control, but outline and specify their use so as to best preserve the imprints and footsteps that 100 years of visitors had left in the woods surrounding Sagamore.
The benefits were clear: a special management area status would not only preserve the several thousand acres surrounding Sagamore in their most pristine, historic and natural states, but it would also push Sagamore’s woods, lake, and buildings a little bit closer back to their original relationship. To do so, however, Sagamore’s team would need to simultaneously achieve identical designations as the same Historic Special Management Area in two separate Adirondack land management areas, each with its own different priorities, possibilities, and potential pitfalls.
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In 2011, they succeeded. Here’s how:
In making their case, Sagamore‘s advocates pointed to the unique relationship between the buildings of Sagamore and the surrounding woods and waters. For decades, spring houses set into the surrounding hillsides by the grit and strength of the men and horses building them had used gravity and ingenuity to pipe pure mountain spring water through buried pipes, down steep slopes, and directly into the taps of every Sagamore faucet. They remained on the hillsides, allowing for tour and reflection.
The land had history, too: the farm meadows across the lake had once fed generations of cows and horses – – each eating between 40 and 60 pounds of dry food each day. That meant that workers also needed to grow, harvest and store an equal amount for use during the winter time. About three acres of Adirondack forest needed clearing for each and every paddock they made. The farm meadows and sugar shack also remained, slowly returning to nature while also preserving their past. Adjacently, the Vanderbilt children and guests had also taken daily carriage rides around the lake–the Lake Trail traces their path, and the original clearances, grading and wagon wheel ruts can still be seen today.
Sagamore Lake itself had also played host to a century of use and events, and its outlet river (ironically called South Inlet) fed the weir, spillway, gatehouse, raceway, turbines, magnetos, and transformer station that Alfred Vanderbilt and J.P. Morgan Jr. commissioned in 1914 to provide electricity directly to their camps, decades before anywhere else in the region. That same river had also historically carried guests towards Sagamore, until a series of cascades caused them to dock the boat and proceed by carriage.
The movement to redesignate all these acres found a major ally in Bernard Melewski, an attorney with great experience advocating for and about the Adirondacks, both in Albany and throughout the park. Under Melewski‘s expert guidance, and with tremendous contributions by Sagamore’s Associate Director Michael Wilson to provide environmental and historical context and wisdom, the Sagamore team prepared for meeting after meeting. These included discussions with the Deputy Commissioner of the Forest Preserve, and then more than one audience with the Commissioner of the entire Department of Environmental Conservation to convince them of the benefits the special designation would bring. Then they needed to liaise with the Adirondack Park Agency, the directors of the two different Blue Ridge and Moose River Plains Unit Management Plans–each then serendipitously undergoing review–and even the Governor’s office. All would need to sign off on the proposed changes and the creation of a new special management area.
“Nobody said no,” Melewski remembered, reflecting on the process. “And as the meetings kept happening, most folks got really quite excited about what we were proposing.” It represented a prime example of the kind of work that moves the needle – – careful preparation, repeated communications, clear messaging, and making every meeting count towards achieving a compelling goal. It proved incredibly successful, and started under the Historic Great Camps Special Management Area in 2013. “I always thought the sign should be a little bigger,” Melewski good-naturedly joked, reflecting on the amount of effort that went into the achievement.
Under the special management area, the lands surrounding Sagamore will remain forever wild, free from almost any further man-made impact. It even limits chainsaw use for trail clearing to just a few weeks each spring and fall. The stringent restrictions will ensure that nature continues to thrive, unimpeded and uninterrupted, throughout the area. They will also ensure the land remains available for guests to experience it in keeping with its history. They can reflect on the work it took to hew a series of spring houses from the rocks and roots of an Adirondack hillside, the labor of 50 Italian American workers to construct a hydroelectric facility over a single summer in 1915, and trace the ruts from decades of carriages as they went around the lake, carrying people with hopes, dreams, fears, and desires not dissimilar to our own.
In this sense, perhaps, Sagamore’s Special Management area may prove a slight exception to the wilderness definition of man being a visitor. In the lands surrounding Sagamore, man is still a visitor – but a fascinatingly repetitive one. People of the present literally follow in a century and a quarter’s worth of footsteps, made by both past Adirondackers and visitors, who engineered and enjoyed the wilderness to make a home in nature. The Historic Great Camps Special Management Area symbolically reunites Sagamore Lodge with the surrounding nature that always did so much to define it, and it keeps that nature available for generations more to walk where they walked, see what they saw, and witness what they built.
And a snowmobile trail also got built too, just a few miles further away. So it really was win-win-win.
Thank you for your consideration of this series! It has been a pleasure to write them, and we’re looking forward to welcoming you at our Gala this Saturday, August 2!