Saving The Hedges

The Irondequoit

The Irondequoit Inn sits on a small rise at Piseco Lake’s northern end. Eight wooden steps lead from hillside to front porch. When I arrive for my first visit on a fall afternoon, I’m behind schedule. I hit the stairs at speed, my footfalls staccato on wooden planks.

Halfway up, a broad panorama registers in my peripheral vision, and I halt mid-step. The porch overlooks the 2,873-acre lake, carved and filled by receding glaciers more than 15,000 years ago, today set beneath a humble coronet of Adirondack foothills. This wild landscape is found within Hamilton County, the least populated county in New York State, with 4,700 residents dispersed over 1,808 square miles. A breeze rises off the lake, crosses a sandy beach and sloping lawn, and ripples through scarlet maples, bronze oaks and golden aspens. I promptly forget the Gregorian calendar and give myself over to geologic time.

Otter Space

My story begins like many others found in the pages of Adirondack Life, of summer—and some winter—holidays spent at a beloved camp. My grandfather Floyd Betters bought Camp Hohoiken on Upper Saranac Lake in 1964 from the Colgate family, of the toothpaste fortune. The story my grandfather told is that Mr. and Mrs. Colgate were at a party on one of the islands and someone slighted Mrs. Colgate, who turned to her husband and informed him that they were leaving, immediately. Mr. Colgate assumed this meant that he was taking his wife home for the evening, but what she actually meant was that they would be leaving Saranac Lake that night, never to return.

Saving Account

Every old house has a story or two. You might read it in the architecture, how native and exotic materials were combined; how tastes, tools and technologies evolved; how growing families were accommodated, how rising or falling fortunes were reflected in the facades we see from the road. Sometimes scraps of past lives linger, giving a glimpse of just who sat in a porch rocker or peered out of an attic window.

At an age when many people are looking for an oceanfront condo to escape harsh weather and home upkeep, Bruce and Darcey Hale chose to move to Willsboro full time and begin an epic historic preservation adventure involving dozens of acres and many structures. Bruce, 76, has been connected with this Willsboro Point property—once the domain of the Clark family, some of the area’s earliest settlers—since before he was born, when his 14-year-old father drove his mother, Elizabeth, and Mary Hope Cooley, a Clark descendant, to a cottage here named Cedar Lodge. Bruce’s parents bought Cedar Lodge from Mary Cooley in 1949 and Scragwood in 1958, using them as summer getaways. Darcey, who grew up in rural Virginia, first set foot on this land in 1994, and it was “love at first sight.” The fields, forests, old buildings, stone fences and pervasive peace resonated, a welcome change from Boston, where she was director of the French-American School. Bruce, an electrical engineer, was living in Natick, Massachusetts.

For this couple, these buildings—Cedar Lodge, Scragwood and Old Elm—are encyclopedic, not just as structural narratives but as deep repositories of material culture. The Clarks, who owned hundreds of acres here for more than a century, arrived from Connecticut in 1801. Succeeding generations became farmers, dairymen, quarrymen, boatbuilders, travelers and above all, assiduous savers. They kept letters, ledgers and diaries; clipped newspaper articles; filed away seed catalogs, religious tracts and hymnals; mapped their orchards and gardens; and carefully retained everything from knitting patterns (and the socks made from them) to quilts stitched with the signatures of the makers.