2000: Making Great Camp Sagamore Nationally Historic

As it turns out, “having a history” and “being historic” are two different things. Especially when it comes to federal purposes.

Sagamore, of course, has always had a history. Twelve thousand years ago, a mile and a half of ice covered its spaces, carving the point, lake, and the five-million-year-old mountains around it. For millennia afterwards, Native Americans navigated the Adirondack elements with great dexterity, equilibrium, and natural know-how. About two hundred years ago — a moment of time in the full story — white settlers came trapping, timbering, hunting, and harvesting for sustenance and stability.

That history carries Sagamore through many other moments to follow, including in 1897, when William West Durant built Sagamore Lodge as a masterpiece of his Adirondack architecture, artfully “reassembling” the natural bounty of the surrounding lands into exceptional bark-clad buildings. An adjacent workers’ camp let Sagamore entirely self-sustain. Durant could live year-round in his mountain manor, marketing the region to America’s wealthiest families.

Its history also enlightens many other moments to follow, starting with Sagamore’s 1901 sale to Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt, “The Richest Young Man in America” and the decade and more of gatherings, wilderness adventures, and parties he hosted here. 

The history continues moving through Alfred’s untimely death in the sinking of the RMS Lusitania in 1915, and Sagamore’s transition to his widow Margaret Emerson. It grows even more during Margaret Emerson’s reimagining of the camp as a gathering place for various celebrities, artists, magnates, leaders, and other “interesting people” for almost forty years to come, until she donated Sagamore to Syracuse University in 1954.

It keeps going through the era in which Syracuse stewarded Sagamore, educating twenty years of college-bound youths and lifetime leaders alike, while hosting major midcentury corporations and organizations like General Electric, General Motors, Boeing, and the United States Army as well.  For two decades, Sagamore taught students for tomorrow and connected people in the present.

And as the previous installments in this series have shown, that history absolutely carried on with the 1975 purchase of Sagamore’s most historic buildings and their 1983 reunification with the worker’s complex by Sagamore Institute of the Adirondacks.  

Indeed, by the time 1997 arrived, and Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt III and Margeret Collins Cunningham walked arm-in-arm to the iconic Main Lodge in order to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the Great Camp’s existence, Sagamore Institute had no shortage of its own history to share. Having the grandson of an iconic owner and the daughter of the camp’s longest-serving superintendent commemorate the occasion was the perfect way to encapsulate the spirit of Sagamore. It marked the centennial of a place where generations of guests and workers have always come together to find and facilitate rejuvenation, leisure, education and exploration in the Adirondack wilderness.  

But even that memorable occasion fell amongst many other moments being made each day at Sagamore. Year after year for two decades, Sagamore Institute’s leadership and staff had continued to increase its programming and patrons, blending a community of long-time supporters and first time patrons that grew each year. Each season began and ended with an incredible assemblage of volunteers; without their labors of love, opening and closing camp each year would have been impossible.  Joining Barbara Glaser and Howard Kirschenbaum came other committed Sagamore leaders, like John “Boo” Frihauf, Beverly Bridger, and Michael Wilson. Meanwhile, a core group of engaged families and individuals emerged as the trustees and supporters that could keep Sagamore steadied against any number of potential problems.  

Under these successive generations of leadership, Great Camp Sagamore started still more signature programs. A twice-daily history tour welcomed guests onto the grounds and into the spaces; featuring “no velvet ropes” and equal parts interpretive and informative, it was highly popular from the start.  A first-of-its-kind grandparents and grandchildren gathering called “Grands Camp” connected young and older family members during a week spent together, sans-parents, in the resplendent energy of an Adirondack July. Adirondack legend Anne LaBastille started leading women’s writing workshops, which have continued today even after her passing, along with many other exercises in creativity and the arts. Simultaneously, programs in traditional industries helped hundreds of visitors each year learn blacksmithing, boat-building, pack-basket making, and more. Adirondack music was a typical part every week at Sagamore. And any number of outdoor exploration opportunities always also occurred each season, from multi-day wilderness adventures to guided paddles and walks. 

With core programs (and core supporters) like these, by the later 1990s Great Camp Sagamore had once again reinvented itself into an Adirondack institution all its own – connected to its history, but also looking towards the future. As the new millennium approached, its leadership sought to transform it once again – this time into a National Landmark.  

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The National Historic Landmark designation is a hard feat to achieve. For federal status, titles really matter. The National Register of Historic Places, on which Sagamore had stood since 1978, encourages the exploration of all sorts of history, in all sorts of places, at all sorts of levels, and is, as the numbers suggest, somewhat easy to access. Its point is to be plentiful, in order to have that plenty become a bounty to us all.

But although more than 99,000 properties currently grace the National Register of Historic Places, our nation has certified only around 2,500 National Historic Landmarks. That approximate 40 to 1 ratio arises from two competing facts. The first is the extensive nature of the application process; Sagmore’s document itself came in at approximately 50 pages of close writing, marked by both its technical specificity and scholarly expertise. A supporting theme study was no less detailed nor impressive. The second is the rigorous review that each application then undergoes, both by the National Parks Service and a committee of eminent, expert historians – the kind of folks who star in Ken Burns documentaries. If either panel disagrees, the nomination goes down to defeat.

That rigor is because National Historic Landmarks are reserved for the few sites that can be said to “illustrate the heritage of the United States,” writ large. They cannot merely be interesting or noteworthy, but instead must clearly represent “an outstanding aspect of American history and culture.” Most are iconic; in 2000, Sagamore sought to join a group of National Historic Landmarks that included The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Ellis Island, and the Brooklyn Bridge. And that was just in New York State. Further afield, one could add sites of triumph and tragedy like Boston’s “Old Ironsides” warship, Selma’s Edmund Pettus Bridge, the Alamo, Mount Rushmore, and many more landmarks of similar significance and stature.

Moreover, Sagamore’s leadership knew that the National Historic Landmark status might well prove essential to Sagamore’s success, even generations in the future. Many Adirondackers had watched with sadness in 1979 as the state burned the Webb family’s Nehasane Lodge on Lake Lila, after the property had become unmanageable by its heirs and was sold to join the Adirondack Park. “Forever wild” meant the buildings needed to go, lest they fall into ruin and perhaps cause catastrophe down the road. Destroying them was, perhaps, the only safe and realistic option in that case. But it also showed that not even the Vanderbilt name carried guarantees for preservation – Nehasane had belonged to Alfred Vanderbilt’s aunt.

So it caused worry for other great camps. Sagamore had nothing to worry about in its present non-profit status, of course. Yet the property had fallen on hard times before, and who knew what future decades might hold? Achieving National Historic Landmark status would go a far way towards preventing a similar outcome, saving Sagamore for generations to come, and giving it a claim to prominence and permanence few other sites could match.

It was an ambitious undertaking, to say the least. To achieve the status, Sagamore needed to convince both high ranking federal civil servants and top university historians that these bark clad buildings on a plateau above Raquette Lake truly were outstanding. Of course, that was easy enough to do for anyone who had walked the grounds, whether on a guided tour or as an overnight guest. Sagamore inspires its visitors in ways few sites do. But how to make that personal experience national? That challenge necessitated equal parts nuance and inspiration. 

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Interestingly, the final National Historic Landmark status did not revolve around Sagamore’s past as a former Vanderbilt estate and gathering point of the rich, famous and influential. Not even the 1952 meeting at Sagamore between General George Marshall and Madam Chiang Kai-Shek seemed enough to make a productive go along that route. A nation as large and storied as the United States has no shortage of historic homes, and by 2000 the National Park Service was reluctant to mint many more as National Historic Landmarks, simply because prominent people had visited there.

Ironically, Alfred Vanderbilt’s parents had also just simply outdone him: The Breakers, their unsurpassable 87 room “cottage” in Newport, Rhode Island had joined the list in 1994. Only a limited number of sites could be connected to “the lives of persons nationally significant in the history of the United States” before “nationally significant” lost a little of its luster.

But that hardly hurt Sagamore’s chances. Early in the application process, supported by Barbara Glaser and led by Wesley (Wes) Haynes – a tremendous preservationist of New England and New York – a far more important theme emerged. Sagamore, they realized mattered less for how it had hosted any particular group of unique, famous people. Instead, it mattered because of how it hosted all people equally, in a uniquely famous style.  

In other words, it was the spaces of Sagamore themselves that made this place prominent: the buildings made from native materials, designed to offer rugged refinement, and perfectly placed on the landscape to invoke an intimate and inspiring connection with nature, that made the site so nationally historic. Sagamore influenced our national history because it preserved one of America’s oldest and most clarion examples of a desire to live amongst nature.  

By building Sagamore subordinate to the wilderness surrounding it, and designing the camp to connect visitors to nature, William West Durant – and all the owners and stewards to follow him – created an experience that has remained remarkably similar for all visitors ever since. Regardless of their background, age, or income, generations of visitors have been inspired by the sight of the Main Lodge, the grandeur of the Playhouse, the delights of the Dining Hall, the intimacy of the Wigwam, and the resolute red-and-green structures of upper camp. Visitors to Sagamore today walk amongst the very buildings and see the very landscapes that helped inspire the great lodges of the National Parks. They reflect on life amongst architecture that has not changed for more than a hundred years, inspired by a view that has existed for more than 10,000. Whether Durants, Vanderbilts, Margaret Emerson and her “interesting” guests, Syracuse students and conference attendees, or the generations that have shared in Sagarmore’s splendours for the last half century of Sagamore Institute’s stewardship, all have encountered a space that fits perfectly with its surroundings. It has encouraged and inspired its visitors to reflect on their own connections to history, nature, and community, and to forge new ones as well. 

More than that, both the ethos and architecture that started at Sagamore have since spread.  The review committees understood that the Adirondacks had started a movement of people vacating the cities, at least for a while, and finding relaxation and restoration in a wilderness setting. 

As one of the grandest, most complete and most preserved of the Great Camps, with all its attendant stories and architecture, Sagamore offers an unequaled glimpse into the creation of the American vacation — a historic development that combined recreation and rejuvenation that Great Camp Sagamore still offers today. Sagamore’s history was historic, all by itself.

And so they applied the approval stamp with energy. By happenstance, the formal approval happened in 2000, exactly 25 years after the National Humanistic Education Center first purchased Sagamore Lodge, and became Sagamore Institute, meaning the anniversaries will always be linked. We are so grateful you can join us for the anniversaries of both during our 2025 Gala Weekend!