Camp Revivals : The welcome mat is out at some of the Adirondack Mountain retreats built by the country’s richest families

It was the late 1800s and America’s richest and most famous were experiencing an itch to “get away from it all.” They looked from their city homes in New York City and Boston toward the great sprawling wilderness of the Adirondack Mountains in northern New York state, where they began commissioning the more than 100 rustic but lavish summer retreats built in the Adirondacks between the Civil War and the Great Depression. The “Great Camps,” as they are now more appropriately called, are situated in the most scenic spots on lake shores and in the mountains of Adirondack State Park, 6.5 million acres of wilderness including 46 peaks over 5,000 feet--the biggest park in the Lower 48.

These days, forest has grown tall above what remains of many of these elaborate summer homes. Though too many have disappeared altogether, a revival has started up and great camps are being restored--some as inns and hotels, most as private residences--as there’s renewed interest in this chapter of American history.

About a four-hour drive from New York City, two hours from Albany, the Adirondacks are a well-known retreat from the city, and tales of the great camps are legend in the Northeast. What’s less well known is that you can visit many of them, and actually stay in some, enjoying the lifestyle of a bygone era at prices that run the gamut from “affordable” to “probably not unless you have a Great Camp-style pocketbook.” Although bookings are heavy in summer, especially for weekends, there are lodging reservations available midweek--and the Adirondacks are spectacular and less traveled in early fall. Great camps inns generally include meals with accommodations, but for day-trippers there are eateries in small Adirondack towns and a good selection of restaurants in the mountain hub city of Lake Placid.

The most accessible Great Camp for unrehearsed visits is Sagamore Lodge, now run as a nonprofit organization. In the early days of the century, it was the Vanderbilt family compound where Alfred Sr. and Margaret and their children would spend summers and Christmas holidays. Its 29 structures set on 1,500 acres of lakefront land deep in the forest still stand intact, including the exquisite main lodge, a grand log mansion fashioned after a Swiss music box.

While many great camps are private and open only a day or two a year for special occasions, Sagamore offers weekend retreats as well as courses year-round in outdoor education, Adirondack history and culture. Weekend courses, which can be anything from apple-basket weaving workshops to learning how to kayak, start at about $200 per person for the weekend, including accommodations in one of the main or outlying buildings, meals beginning with dinner on Friday night and all activities. When there is space available, guests who haven’t signed up for a course are accommodated for overnight stays with meals at $112 per adult.

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“The Adirondack ‘camps’ were to the mountains what the ‘cottages’ of the ultra-wealthy were to Newport, Rhode Island,” Beverly Bridger, director of Sagamore, explained as we stroll across the sprawling grounds. “Newport was how the Gilded Age went to the beach; the great camps were how they went to the mountains.”

Bridger is taking me on a tour of Sagamore (the camp is known for its excellent tours at $5 per person). The main lodge served as a vast living room with luxurious bedrooms upstairs: some of the camp’s 46 bedrooms, with 23 bathrooms, complete with hot and cold indoor plumbing, sewerage and electricity--unheard of then in most homes in major cities. Separate cottages functioned as extra bedrooms. When the children were 21 years old, each was given his or her own cottage on the lakefront.

The nearest neighbors were families whose camps also nestled deep in the wilderness, and they had names like Morgan, Rockefeller and Marjorie Merriweather Post, the Post cereal heiress. At Topridge, about an hour’s drive north of Sagamore, near Lake Placid, Post made do with 85 servants for the 65 buildings of her camp, which was reached via a trip across Upper St. Regis Lake on a yacht, then a private funicular railway to the main lodge. Post passed away in 1973 and, although Topridge took in paying guests during the 1980 Winter Olympics in Lake Placid, it is no longer open to the public.

At Sagamore, Margaret Vanderbilt was known as “the hostess of the gaming crowd,” and the adventures of the Vanderbilts and their invited guests--and there was room for 100 at a time, each with three servants at their beck and call--were reported regularly in the gossip pages of the New York Times. Guests were assailed with a roll call of activities that included skeet shooting, bowling at the camp’s fully covered two-lane bowling alley, billiards or croquet. And the men could always call on one of the guides to take them hunting or fishing in the Lodge’s beautiful Adirondack guide boats. These were exquisite wood-strip canoes so large and stable they were used to transport supplies as well.

The Vanderbilts and their growing clan of grandchildren used Sagamore until 1954, when Margaret donated the camp to Syracuse University as a conference center. In 1975, the property was purchased by the Sagamore Institute of the Adirondacks, a nonprofit steward whose mission was to “put people back in the woods,” said Bridger.

During a great camps weekend last summer, I spent the two nights of the course in Alfred’s Cottage. The Vanderbilts enjoyed the rustic, and the cottage is just that. Paneled in pine with a pair of sturdy wooden four poster beds, it is woodsy and cozy but very comfortable. Mornings, I sat on the balcony in Alfred’s old rocking chair watching loons on Sagamore Lake as the sun came up. One morning, a deer approached tamely and munched cookies from my hand.

A gem of a collection on the great camps era is laid out at the Adirondack Museum on Blue Mountain Lake, less than half an hour’s drive from Sagamore. Here, some of the rustic yet lavish interiors of the camps have been reconstructed. Best of all, the museum has a remarkable collection of canoes and guide boats from that period, which attracts enthusiasts from around the globe.

On a late spring afternoon at Raquette Lake, a 15-minute drive from Sagamore Lodge, I boarded the elegant turn-of-the-century-style W.W. Durant, a 60-foot double-deck vessel that takes in the beauty of the Adirondacks as it passes along the shorefront, where a number of great camps were built. Although none is open to the public, you can see them from the water from Memorial Day until the Columbus Day weekend in mid-October.

The first camp we passed on that day’s two-hour lunch cruise was also the first built by William West Durant, a wealthy dreamer who helped America’s wealthiest achieve their goal of luxurious retreats in the wilderness. By 1880, Durant had built himself a model home so to speak, elaborate Camp Pine Knot, and invited the wealthy to come have a look.

George Fuge, a caretaker at Pine Knot from 1948 to 1951 and later director of operations, happened to be in the wheelhouse of the W.W. Durant the day I took the cruise. “When I first arrived, the camp had been vacant since 1900,” he told me, “and our first job was to unpack crates of new furniture that were half a century old! Classic Adirondack rustic wicker furniture that had never been sat on.”

During that afternoon ride along the lakefront, we passed by Stott Camp, the former retreat of magazine publisher Robert Collier, with its trophy lodge, elegant boathouse and a gazebo teahouse on a small island reached by a delicate 100-foot-long footbridge. It’s now a private residence. The Carnegies weren’t far away with their complex of Swiss chalet-style buildings. The Inman Camp, on the northern section of Raquette Lake, now belongs to the fifth generation of Inmans, descendants of the original Dutch paper box manufacturer. It features a casino and a charming honeymoon cottage.

A group of young girls waved and shouted from the shore as they readied canoes for a day on the lake. They were staying at Echo Camp, now a private girls’ camp, originally built in 1883 for Gov. Phineas C. Lounsbury of Connecticut.

On Osgood Pond to the north of Raquette Lake, White Pine Camp, built in 1907, was nicknamed “the summer White House,” when it was used by President Calvin Coolidge in 1926. These days it is undergoing restoration, and 18 buildings are open as a walk-through museum.

And in the last few years, some of the great camps have been transformed into hotels and inns. The Hedges, on Blue Mountain Lake, was built by Hiriam B. Duryea in 1880. The former Duryea Great Camp now offers cozy accommodations on the lake shore with a main lodge, cottages and a boathouse.

Also in Lake Placid is the gracious Lake Placid Lodge, built in 1882. It’s now a luxurious 22-room hotel; each room is different and filled with rustic furnishings made by local artists and carpenters. Sticklers for preserving the flavor of Great Camp life, owners David and Christie Garrett have conscripted locally renowned raconteur and bobsled patriarch, Forrest Morgan, to tend bar.E)

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The Garretts have had a long association with great camps. They also own the most famous of the Great Camp hotels, The Point--the last, but definitely not the least, Great Camp to be built. There are no signs leading to this former Rockefeller camp that lies at the end of an obscure dirt road on Upper Saranac Lake west of Lake Placid; directions are given with a confirmed reservation.

Set on a rugged granite peninsula jutting into the lake, it was built for William Avery Rockefeller (a great-nephew of John D.) in 1933, and originally called Camp Wonundra. The nine buildings are now one of the highest-rated resorts in the U.S. with prices to match--all inclusive (jacket-and-tie meals and carte blanche use of the facilities including the 24-hour help-yourself bar) for two people begins at $775; rent the entire property for the night and its yours for $9,750! But then, in the heyday of the great camps no one ever asked the price, as evidenced by the oft-quoted words of former Great Camp owner, J. Pierpont Morgan: “If you have to ask the cost, you can’t afford it. . . .”

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GUIDEBOOK: The High Life in the Adirondacks

Where to stay: The Hedges (on Blue Mountain Lake, NY 12812; tel. [518] 352-7325), opens June 14, closes Columbus Day Weekend; already booking fall weekends; $67-$77 per person including breakfast, dinner and all facilities; children 2-18, $35 per day.

Lake Placid Lodge (Whiteface Inn Road, P.O. Box 550, Lake Placid, NY 12946; tel. [518] 523-2700), $175-$450 per night; busy in summer; open year-round.

The Point (Saranac Lake, NY 12983; tel. [518] 891-5674 or [800] 255-3530), open year-round; even at $825-$1,175 per night, heavily booked weekends.

What to do: Great Camp Sagamore (Raquette Lake, NY 13436-0146; tel. [315] 354-5311).

The Adirondack Museum (Blue Mountain Lake, NY 12812-0099; tel. [518] 352-7311), open seven days a week Memorial Day-Columbus Day; $10 adults, $6 children.

Raquette Lake Navigation Co. (Box 100, Raquette Lake, NY 13436-0100; tel. [315] 354-5532. Three-hour four-course dinner cruise or two-hour Sunday brunch buffet aboard the W.W. Durant, $35; three-course, 1 1/2-hour lunch cruise, $22; sightseeing cruise, $8.50; moonlight cruise, $5.

White Pine Camp, near town of Paul Smiths. Self-guided tours Memorial Day-Columbus Day weekends (in off-season by appointment); tel. (518) 327-3030; $8 adults, $7 seniors, $4 children.

Where to eat: The Lake Placid Lodge, excellent dining room. Dinner for two, without wine, under $100.

The Artist’s Cafe, 1 Main St., Lake Placid waterfront restaurant; dinner for two without wine about $60.

Dakota’s, Main Street, Lake Placid, a casual neighborhood pub.

For more information: Call Lake Placid Tourist Information, tel. (800) 447-5224. Or the New York Division of Tourism, 633 3rd Ave., New York, NY 10017; tel. (800) 225-5697 or (518) 474-4116. --M.P.