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The Magazine of the Mountains since 1969

At Home in the Adirondacks 2018

Saving The Hedges

It’s hard not to be romantic about The Hedges, on Blue Mountain Lake. Some of us first fell in love at the old Great Camp and then with the place itself. It’s a place that’s so part of our identity that, even if we stay just a week or two each summer, it feels the most like home.

The nearly 13 acres comprising The Hedges were once part of several hundred acres owned by Civil War colonel Hiram Duryea, who built a family summer retreat in 1880, when Duryea was president of the National Starch Company. The first structure put up on the property was Main Lodge, with four bedrooms and living space. Some years later, Duryea built Stone Lodge with seven bedrooms, along with a horse barn, carriage house and Upper, the caretaker’s cottage. In the 1920s the Collins family bought the place at auction for $22,000. They renamed the Duryeas’ camp The Hedges, and converted the family’s getaway into a resort, adding the Main Dining Hall, then cabins in the 1940s. Today the property—1,600 feet of waterfront, a private beach, two docks, tennis court, and 21 buildings with 31 bedrooms—is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. This landmark is a sacred place.

The Irondequoit

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

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.

Born Again

Slumping into a pew in mock boredom, Pam Broiles leans onto the armrest, pointing out the patina of a century of elbows propped there. “I can just imagine some farmer saying, ‘When is he going to stop talking?’”

It was details like these—or the wad of fossilized spruce gum stuck under a pew near the back of the church, the yellowed pages of hymnals printed in 1897, the names of long-dead workers scrawled in the belfry—that attracted Broiles and her husband, Lenny, to buy the Wells Baptist Church in 2012 and turn it into a performance venue.

Built in 1845 in the southern Adirondack town of Wells, on Lake Algonquin, the tidy Greek Revival church closed in 1950. The now-defunct Hamilton County Historical Society owned the building for several decades—it was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1986—and had hired Lenny, a restoration carpenter, to do some work on it.

“We both really loved the architecture and history of one of the oldest churches in Hamilton County,” says Pam. “When it went up for sale, we were moved to buy it and bring it back to life.”

Four Peaks

Four Peaks

IN THE FIRST FIVE YEARS after moving my family back to my native New York after a long out-of-state exile, I wandered the Adirondacks searching in vain for the perfect vacation rental. Perhaps my criteria were unrealistic—stunning natural beauty and absolute solitude on a budget, anyone?—but, for whatever reason, nothing I found seemed to deserve a second visit. When I discovered a place with backwoods cabins lacking running water and electricity, I almost didn’t give it another look. My wife and our two teens had never been keen on my backpacking exploits. Could pretty views compensate for a week of latrines and cowboy showers?

Our first visit resolved all doubts. The property’s original camp, one mile off-road near Jay in the northeastern Adirondacks, was built as a World War II combat veteran’s refuge. After the next owners bought it and its 90 acres, they purchased several more adjoining parcels and built six more camps scattered across more than 600 acres of forest and fields. The original structure, which they named the Cabin, occupied one of the prettiest spots. On the fringe of a grove of towering white pines, it overlooked an expansive meadow framed by two of the four mountains that gave the place its name: Four Peaks.

This was love at first sight. Over the years, it would mature into something deeper. This was also the start of a long and complicated relationship with an Adirondack original, the owner Martin Schwalbaum.

The Chaga Hunter

The Chaga Hunter

It’s a bright summer day, but the forest surrounding Tupper Lake is cool and dark. Garrett Kopp, the 20-year-old founder and CEO of Birch Boys—a product line of teas, lotions and body balm—is explaining how different types of mushrooms appear throughout the year, when something catches his eye. He suddenly veers off the path mid-stride and heads directly for a white birch tree, its pale bark popping against the greens and browns of hemlocks and white pines.

A Woman’s Place

A Woman’s Place

My draw to the Adirondacks began 50 years ago while on an Upper Saranac Lake canoe trip, and has continued ever since. In 1974, while living in Central New York, I jumped at the chance for another visit after I saw a letter to the editor in Ms. magazine for a women’s retreat in Paradox, in the eastern Adirondacks. Marie Deyoe, the retreat organizer, wrote, “The women will live in A-frames, domes, and in a beautiful log cabin. They can eat meals communally.”

On Sale Now

April 2026

The Wildlife Issue! A peek inside the secret lives of Adirondack moose by Jeff Nadler, wildlife portraits by Pamela Underhill Karaz, an opossum search party led by best-selling author Kristin Kimball, plus loons, turtles, turkeys, chipmunks, coyotes and more.

 

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