as reviewed by Tim Holmes
By placing the history of Great Camps in the context of conservation, Craig Gilborn is able to use his historical and architectural expertise to explore and illuminate the pivotal role that the Great Camp estates played in conserving the Adirondack landscape that we appreciate today. When he began his study of Great Camps in 1972 “…the particulars about them and their importance in the aggregate were not understood.” Thanks to his work and this delightful essay, that is no longer the case.
Using available history, first-person reports and data from public records Gilborn relates anecdotes about particular camps and families, while filling in details about why the Great Camps are so relevant – if not instrumental – to conservation in the Adirondack Park. Who owned the camps, how they came to be, and how some persisted while others did not, all are addressed by the pen of Gilborn in this surprisingly informative essay of only 11 pages.
It is tempting to quote any number of passages that demand re-reading. The following example illuminates how anecdotal reports provide texture to Gilborn’s tale:
“For the late Anthony N. B. Garvan, whose mother delivered him at Kamp Kill Kare, the charm of the Great Camps was that they made difficult things look easy in an unbroken forest. Silver and crystal at dinner, commonplace at his mother’s other homes in Manhattan and Millbrook, were magical in the Adirondacks. Diversions like those were indulgences, but then so were the preserves surrounding the camps.”
Gilborn paints a picture of the Great Camps and their surrounding estates as islands of consistency in the swirling cultural and economic currents relentlessly seeking to put “waste” land to productive use. As he points out, the period after the Civil War was one of the most tenuous for the uninterrupted forests in the Adirondacks. In Gilborn’s hands, in becomes clear that the divisive issues of those periods and many others continue in the present and on into the foreseeable future. From an historical perspective, there is no end to divisiveness or controversy when in comes to conservation. What is of more concern is the quality of the decisions that are made during the more divisive periods, and how those decisions eventually effect the ecology, culture and history of the Adirondack Park.
Or, as Gilborn delights at pointing out, it could be that indecision is the best decision for the benefit of conservation. As when the legislature in Albany – through their indecision – postponed the date of destruction of the Santanoni Great Camp near Newcomb, now considered one of the most interesting and unique of the Great Camp compounds. As he points out, “It was an instance of good coming out of foot-dragging by a bureaucracy.” Fortunately for us, Craig Gilborn did not drag his feet when the editors called and the result is a most informative essay on the history of conservation in the Adirondack Park.
* Pp. 145-156 in The Great Experiment in Conservation, Voices from the Adirondack Park, edited by William Porter, Jon Erickson and Ross Whaley. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2009.
