An Elegant Wilderness: Great Camps and Lodges of the Adirondacks, 1855-1935
Product Description
The first book to place the rustic Adirondack architectural style in the context of the cultural, social, and environmental history, An Elegant Wilderness, Great Camps and Grand Lodges of the Adirondacks, 1855-1935, showcases the intensely private retreats set into the pine forests on the shores of the region’s shimmering lakes.
Open earlier to tourism and more accessible than the western United States, the Adirondack region is where many urbanites of the Industrial Age came to experience the wilderness. It was in the Adirondacks that the constricting social proprieties relaxed, that city swells hunted in deer-filled forests and angled in trout-stocked lakes, that women shed their corsets to hike, fish, and play tennis, and that children learned to appreciate the great outdoors.
For the members of the leisure class, rustic architecture and decoration and the woodland lifestyle were a splendid conceit. Transported in private Pullman cars from New York, they arrived with chefs from the city’s premier restaurants, a retinue of servants who would join those on site, tennis and voice coaches, chauffeurs and secretaries, and a cadre of houseguests who might stay for six days or three months.
The Adirondack “camp” was spoken of with the same faux modesty as the luxurious “cottage” in Newport. But, unlike the flaunting opulence of the Newport mansion, the secluded Adirondack camp whispered of the quiet power associated with unassailable wealth. Those who owned Adirondack camps or lodges included railroad tycoon Collis P. Huntington, mining magnates Berthold Hochschild, Daniel Guggenheim, and Adolph Lewisohn, financiers J. Pierpont Morgan, Otto Kahn, and Isaac Newton Seligman, the surpassingly wealthy Alfred Vanderbilt, New York governor Levi Morton, President Benjamin Harrison, lawyer Louis Marshall as well as the prominent intellectuals: philosopher William James and neuroscientist James Jackson Putnam. Women camp owners of note included Lucy Carnegie, Margaret Emerson (Vanderbilt), and Marjorie Merriweather Post.
Published in collaboration with The Adirondack Museum, An Elegant Wilderness combines architectural, social, and cultural history with biography, and evocative archival black-and-white archival photographs of rustic homes, idyllic lakes, and recreational pastimes, most of which are published here for the first time. Over 300 illustraions in duotone. 272 Pages. Hardcover 2011.
Open earlier to tourism and more accessible than the western United States, the Adirondack region is where many urbanites of the Industrial Age came to experience the wilderness. It was in the Adirondacks that the constricting social proprieties relaxed, that city swells hunted in deer-filled forests and angled in trout-stocked lakes, that women shed their corsets to hike, fish, and play tennis, and that children learned to appreciate the great outdoors.
For the members of the leisure class, rustic architecture and decoration and the woodland lifestyle were a splendid conceit. Transported in private Pullman cars from New York, they arrived with chefs from the city’s premier restaurants, a retinue of servants who would join those on site, tennis and voice coaches, chauffeurs and secretaries, and a cadre of houseguests who might stay for six days or three months.
The Adirondack “camp” was spoken of with the same faux modesty as the luxurious “cottage” in Newport. But, unlike the flaunting opulence of the Newport mansion, the secluded Adirondack camp whispered of the quiet power associated with unassailable wealth. Those who owned Adirondack camps or lodges included railroad tycoon Collis P. Huntington, mining magnates Berthold Hochschild, Daniel Guggenheim, and Adolph Lewisohn, financiers J. Pierpont Morgan, Otto Kahn, and Isaac Newton Seligman, the surpassingly wealthy Alfred Vanderbilt, New York governor Levi Morton, President Benjamin Harrison, lawyer Louis Marshall as well as the prominent intellectuals: philosopher William James and neuroscientist James Jackson Putnam. Women camp owners of note included Lucy Carnegie, Margaret Emerson (Vanderbilt), and Marjorie Merriweather Post.
Published in collaboration with The Adirondack Museum, An Elegant Wilderness combines architectural, social, and cultural history with biography, and evocative archival black-and-white archival photographs of rustic homes, idyllic lakes, and recreational pastimes, most of which are published here for the first time. Over 300 illustraions in duotone. 272 Pages. Hardcover 2011.
