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Collectors Issue 2008: The Hedges |
The Hedges
On Blue Mountain Lake
By Jane Mackintosh
Photographs by Richard Walker
www.richardwalkerphoto.com
An ideal summer retreat … is The Hedges, a summer camp, situated on the south shore of Blue Mountain Lake, … [which] has obtained with recent improvements many features usually lacking in the average hotel catering to summer guests. Electricity, wide porches, fireplaces, … are among some of the comforts and attractions offered." So read a Sunday morning Syracuse Herald article in May 1931. Sleeping quarters were large and airy, some had private baths, and "from all rooms the Adirondack forests and mountains are visible," the story continued.
Notice what was missing: the Hedges was not a hotel for a few hundred guests, served by steamboats or stagecoaches that coordinated with train arrivals at nearby towns. The key phrases "summer camp" and "recent improvements" further distanced the place in readers' minds from the image of an Adirondack hotel that, by 1931, was more seedy than grand. It was 50 years since travelers began to bump and jostle their way into the wilds, carrying trunks of clothes to last a whole summer of dressing for dinner, enjoying the delicious contrast of refinement—in food, in furnishings, in group deportment—against a primitive forest backdrop. In the 1930s refinement was passé; cars and cabin colonies were in vogue. Blue Mountain Lake saw its first automobile in 1906, but it took another 18 years for an easy driving road to reach town. It arrived about the same time the Hedges was offering a new vacation for a new age, in 1924.
The Hedges was the Duryea Camp transformed, and the Duryea Camp was the summer home of Hiram Duryea, a minor Civil War hero and the cornstarch king of Long Island. As drillmaster and third commander of "Duryee's Zouaves," the first volunteer Civil War regiment formed (by a distant cousin) in New York State, Lieutenant Colonel Duryea distinguished himself at the Battle of Gaines' Mill, Virginia, by displaying gallantry and demanding fierce discipline among his troops. Honored with the title brevet brigadier general at the war's end, he became General Duryea, president of the Glen Cove Starch Manufacturing Company, makers of the famous Duryea Starch.
Duryea was a driven man. One source refers to him in the war as a "strident martinet," and in the starch business he formed not one but two national monopolies. Hiram was also the son, brother, uncle or father of seven Duryea men who experienced violent injuries, accidents or suicide; he himself was murdered in 1914 by his son Chester, who once explained he received a "spiritual message from George Washington" to kill his father. Two Duryea men, though not Hiram, were abusive husbands. One imagines that, for Hiram, trips to the Adirondacks soothed a savage breast—or allowed him to escape the fray.
When Duryea first arrived at Blue Mountain about 1880—at age 47, he had a younger wife, Laura, plus children Chester, Harry, Anna and Millicent—it's likely he came by a road that followed today's Cascade Pond trail and approached Blue Mountain Lake from the west. The 266 acres he purchased at a cove along the southern shore was the first property travelers from this direction would see for decades to come. Over the course of 20 years he put up an array of buildings that faced this cove, including his Main Lodge and the Stone Lodge that followed.
If William West Durant, the now-famous creator of Adirondack Great Camps, favored the Swiss chalet style, Hiram Duryea favored, perhaps, architecture à la mode, or in the style of the day. His Main Lodge was finished in 1882 when French Second Empire architecture was still popular in America; the building sports a mansard roof with dormer windows typical of the style, though it's far from a typical mansard home (see "That Curious Roof," page 42). His Stone Lodge was built between 1900 and 1903, a time when most of the imported fancies of Victorian architecture had run their course and the Colonial Revival was in full swing—not a New England colonial style in this case, but Dutch Colonial, with a signature gambrel roof, Dutch doors and roots in lower New York, southern Connecticut and Long Island.
The 1885 Main Lodge held various common rooms on the first floor. The west side of its flared-roof porches had a covered boat launch jutting out to the cove. Second-story bedrooms completed the layout; there were no bathrooms. Duryea said that if he couldn't live for a summer without indoor toilets it was time for him to die, according to Steven Engelhart, of Adirondack Architectural Heritage, who recently completed a National Register of Historic Places nomination for the property. A rustic gazebo sat nearby, as did a separate building for dining, with an attached kitchen and tiny living quarters for a cook and caretaker. These and other structures remain from the 1880s; the former dining room is a jewel of a rustic space, with walls papered in birch bark and decorated with twigs throughout. At some point in the 1890s the Main Lodge was linked to the dining building by a covered walk, and the lodge's master bedroom (facing page) was extended over a corner of the porch. That decade also saw the construction of a caretaker's house, lean-to and carriage barn.
The 1903 Stone Lodge, with its exterior of local granite and wood shingles set in decorative patterns, remains virtually as built. Its interior spaces are rich with golden oak, from patterned flooring to wainscoting, beams and panels, plus diamond-leaded windows. It once sat beside the road, separated only by a decorative rustic fence. In a period postcard the place appears like a home out of Country Life in America, the 1901–1924 magazine "for city people who dreamed of suburban homes but were reluctant to forego the comforts of the city." One wonders if the Duryea daughters-in-law—Chester's and Harry's wives who joined the family in 1898 and '99—weren't pleased by the look of the older camp and required something more sophisticated for their vacances.
Ten years following Hiram's death, with Chester in Matteawan State Hospital for the criminally insane at Beacon, New York, and Harry Duryea dead by suicide, Richard J. (or RJ) and Margaret Collins moved into the caretaker's house at Duryea's, which they bought in 1921, and began a 50-year relationship between a family and a special place now called the Hedges. The Collinses had been superintendents of Alfred Vanderbilt's Camp Sagamore for 18 years and had four boys and one girl. Margaret and her daughter, Margaret, age 16, staffed the kitchen, while RJ and the boys, John, Richard, Patrick and Thomas, made improvements (such as indoor plumbing) and began expanding. Through the 1920s and '30s they added three waterside cabins, a large dining building, an icehouse, stable and animal quarters (for a workhorse, chickens, pigs and dairy cows), vegetable garden and fields of corn and potatoes. In a few years, when the Collins children began marrying and having children, the place was among the most successful resorts in the region; it offered both an old-style camp (with old-style attention to detail) and new-style cabins and activities. "The Hedges … [has] scheduled programs which include practically every recreational feature to be enjoyed indoors and out," reported the Syracuse Herald in June 1936.
John Collins Jr., grandson of RJ and Margaret, isn't sure how the Syracuse connection came to exist, but there was a strong link over the years. A number of the 17 Collins grandchildren went to either Syracuse University or Le Moyne College; summer staff was recruited from those schools to supplement the cousins—15 of whom worked at the Hedges over many seasons. Miss Syracuse of 1956 was a Le Moyne student, for example, when she waitressed at the Hedges that summer, in the year the elder Margaret passed away.
It was about that summer that John Jr. remembers getting involved in the food end of the business, driving to Old Forge on Fridays to pick up barrels of fresh lake trout on ice, shipped by train from Lake Ontario. And he remembers Freddy Karam, the Syrian produce dealer who drove up from Utica once a week with vegetables during the 1950s. "RJ, who died in '43, loved tending gardens, but my dad was not a gardener, he was a banker, an accountant. My parents kept the gardens going through the war, but not after. And my grandfather was hardly buried before the cow and pig disappeared," says John Jr. Though all the first-generation Collins children shared ownership, it was John Sr. and his wife, Helen, who ran the place, catering to more and more guests as five new cabins were built, and eventually overseeing a staff of about 20.
Early in the 1960s Route 28, which ran alongside Stone Lodge for more than 40 years, was moved to its present location and the Hedges was no longer a roadside resort. But with a good reputation and many repeat vacationers, losing road frontage was not as severe a blow as it might have been. The original lodges still faced the small cove; the eight cabins of the Collins era faced the lake. The old road became the Hedges Road, which now leads visitors to an office and gift shop at the entrance to the complex.
Those newest additions are the work of Pat and Rip Benton, who purchased the resort in 2000 after a chance visit to Blue Mountain Lake in 1999. The owner at the time was Richard Van Yperen, who acquired the Hedges from the Collins family in 1972 and ran the place for 27 years—and toward a state of disrepair. "When we bought it, the Main Lodge had slipped off her footings," says Pat Benton in her gracious and understated way. In other words, the building was sliding into the lake. "We rebuilt the foundation and porches over the first winter, which was a nightmare. Seems like those salamander heaters were going night and day for months trying to keep the work from freezing."
Near Stone Lodge a large piece of landscape had sunk into the ground when the old septic system imploded. "If you want to know anything about leach fields and waste disposal, just ask. I'm now an authority," says Pat. Rip passed away just a few years into their ownership; Pat soldiers on, backed by years of experience running and renovating three historic inns in Georgia and North Carolina, and by a lot of goodwill and help from neighbors.
If the Collins era was marked by expansion, longevity and good service ("Grandfather was a perfect servant," says John Jr. "He could anticipate people's needs. And be discreet."), the Benton era seems to focus on doing things well and on preservation: of buildings, of comfortable surroundings, of an Adirondack vacation with countless pleasures and few worries. "You won't believe how many people come back after some years and say, 'Thank goodness you haven't changed a thing!' They don't even want us to move furniture around," says Pat. Conversely, an occasional visitor is distressed by the lack of televisions and phones, though even the traditionalists appreciate wireless Internet.
Pat still oversees a staff of about 20 each season, hiring local people if she can and supplementing, as many businesses do, with students from Eastern Europe. She speaks proudly of Eric Rusch, of Indian Lake, who started in the Hedges kitchen in high school. He is getting a master's degree in culinary arts at Johnson & Wales in Rhode Island and is now one of the Hedges's chefs. "Was that your trout served on Sunday?" a guest asks him in the dining lodge. "That was delicious." Rusch smiles and chats for a bit, friendly and modest.
Gathered around the stone fireplace in June, guests are happy and staff seem cool, calm and collected. The dining hall is a picture into the past with its pressed tin, varnished wood, antique details. Tables are set for dinner: one imagines the banquet served here in 1936 when nearby Lake Durant, an impoundment of the Rock River, was christened. Everything shipshape but relaxed, not overdone—in the Hedges tradition.
That Curious Roof
Look around at the architecture of enough 19th-century Adirondack camps—or farm and village houses, for that matter—and you'll wonder about Hiram Duryea's Main Lodge: Where did that roof design come from? You must admit, among all the chalet-style gable roofs favored by William West Durant, or steeper-pitched gables typical of Adirondack farmhouses, or simple hip roofs seen on countless garages, outbuildings and many homes, the Duryea roof is unusual. In fact, it might be unique if it weren't for a similar roofline on one of the buildings at Camp Inman on nearby Raquette Lake, built about the same time as the Duryea retreat.
Camp Inman was a collection of buildings, no two in the same style. Its Japanese pagoda–roof boathouse was among the most conspicuous, and some see a Japanese influence in a few of the Duryea Camp's sweeping rooflines. But could the roof on the Main Lodge and at Inman's be French Canadian? In rural-Quebec architecture there is a tendency to vary both aspects of the mansard pitch, creating roofs quite different from those usually associated with Victorian mansards in the U.S. Where many mansards are virtually flat on top, those in Quebec have a gently sloping pitch to the upper portion. Where many have a steep secondary pitch punctuated by dormer windows, the French-Canadian mansard has a secondary pitch that can be much less vertical.
In some examples this secondary pitch is gently curved through its full height; in other examples the pitch flares out at the bottom; and in still others this flare is not a continuous curve but a break in the angle referred to in one instance as a "bended drip mould [sic]" or overhang. The use of dormers seems equally varied and eccentric in the Quebec countryside.
Who built the Duryea houses? In the 1880 census, Long Lake, Indian Lake and Lake Pleasant were one district with 68 households and 327 people, among whom were four carpenters (one from French Canada) and numerous day laborers. In the 1900 census Blue Mountain Lake was its own district within Indian Lake. There were 51 households with 220 people; an additional 186 people were boarders. Among these were 30 carpenters, nine house painters, six stone masons, one plasterer, one brick worker and numerous day laborers—all in Blue Mountain when the Stone Lodge was built.
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