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This article titled “Millionaires at play in upstate New York” was written by Joe Jackson, for The Observer on Saturday 25th June 2011 21.59 UTC

As I drive down the dirt road, the wilderness stretches out before me like a dreamscape – shadowy and silent in the twilight. The five-hour drive from New York City has dulled my senses, but as my old car noisily announces its presence, I notice a dark form ambling along the road. I’m making a pilgrimage to the Adirondack Mountains in upstate New York, bedding down in isolated wood cabins and rooting around in the forests. And that dark profile ahead is a black bear.

The great industrialists of the late-19th century – the Vanderbilts, the Rockefellers and the Guggenheims – set up camps here in the wilds, around 40 in all, to while away long hot summers, hunting, fishing and entertaining guests. But they were no pioneers. Their homesteads were not the rough and ready lean-tos of the frontiersmen. Rather, they were enormous and ostentatiously indulgent estates, usually built on a lakeside. The grand families may have used rustic materials party dresses for juniors , but they built boathouses and gazebos, caretakers’ residences, carpentry and blacksmith shops, and even schools for the staff’s children.

“The idea was to respect the wilderness landscape by using materials – shingle, stone, wood – that seem to grow out of this place,” explains Steven Engelhart, executive director of Adirondack Architectural Heritage, a non-profit organisation that offers tours of the camps. “It was a statement about fitting in with nature. But it was all a conceit – they took their staff and they weren’t roughing it.”

In fact, their lifestyles were bordering on the absurd, according to Gladys Montgomery online formal dresses online formal dresses, author of a new book on the great camps aptly entitled An Elegant Wilderness. She notes that at nearby Pine Tree Point, railway pioneer Frederick Vanderbilt hired artisans from Japan to create Japanese-style cabins and made serving maids wear kimonos. Camps commandeered French chefs from New York’s best restaurants for the summer. And at Prospect Point, mining magnate Adolph Lewisohn would bring a valet, a stenographer, a chess partner and his own barber for the season.

Following the Great Depression and second world war, many of the camps fell into dereliction, however. As recently as 20 years ago, they were considered white elephants. But New York State’s decision to burn Nehasane Camp after acquiring it in 1979 – in keeping with their “forever wild” provision – spurred a preservation movement that is thriving today. It now takes many forms, with individuals, associations of owners, universities and non-profit groups attempting to breathe new life into at least a dozen camps and restore a part of America’s heritage.

On a bluff above a lake at the end of a two-mile dirt road, White Pine Camp is surrounded by water on three sides and towering pine trees on the fourth. The initial sense of isolation is overwhelming. So, too, is the romanticised forest life. Cabins painted green and black blend into the woods, their windows glow welcomingly as I arrive at dusk.

White Pine, in the northern Adirondacks, was commissioned by Archibald White, a New York banker, in 1907. It is the only privately owned camp open to the public – you can stay there relatively affordably with a night starting at $155.

Its elements of modernist design – such as the high slanted roofs and skylights – are unique among the great camps, although it still has a faux rustic charm. My two-room cabin, complete with a small kitchen, has stone fireplaces filled with logs and a moose head straddled by antique fishing nets. Old wooden floors creak underfoot.

White Pine feels preserved in time, like an old English country hotel. There is no main lodge – usually a great camps’ centrepiece – as it burned down in the 1930s. But in one impressive room – which was used as the dining room in the retreat’s heyday – a vintage “Keep Coolidge” sign points to when White Pine was the 1926 summer White House of President Calvin Coolidge.

“He was a bit like Ronald Reagan – he didn’t work too hard,” says co-owner Howard Kirschenbaum, who bought the camp with a group of investors in 1993 after it had changed hands numerous times and was falling to pieces. The new owners have gradually restored 20 buildings at a cost of almost $1m. Open to guests since 1995, it can accommodate 60 people in 13 lodges, including the cabins where the first lady and president stayed.

“There’s something about the great camps that appeals to the American character,” says Kirschenbaum. “It’s a combination of back-to-nature and the simple life, and a fascination with the lifestyles of the rich and famous.”

The region has long been an experiment in living with nature. The Adirondacks is historically the most important but least known park in the US. At 6m acres, it’ summer dresses for girls summer dresses for girlss the biggest in the lower 48 states – larger than Yellowstone, Yosemite, Glacier and Everglades national parks combined. It boasts 2,759 lakes, 30,000 miles of rivers, streams and brooks, and more campsites than its 1 million annual campers could hope to visit.

In 1864 the New York Times proposed making the Adirondacks “a Central Park for the world”, and 20 years later something like that occurred. In 1885, a new state constitution declared the park must be “forever kept as wild forest lands”. It remains the only constitutionally protected forest in America.

Embracing great-camp tradition, I take a canoe from the old boathouse. Out on the water, I’m gloriously alone, with just a view of distant forests and the occasional sounds of nature for company.

I drive an hour south, along deserted roads with spectacular views of lakes and mountains, to the entrance of the state-owned Camp Santanoni. Depending on the season, it is accessible on foot or bicycle, cross-country skis or horse-drawn wagon. A non-profit organisation has spent $1.7m in grants and private donations restoring buildings at the remote 12,900-acre national historic landmark.

Santanoni remains primitive, the interiors bare. You can’t stay here unless you camp at one of eight designated sites. The main lodge, which finally comes into view after the five-mile slog through the forest, is a spectacularly imposing six-building structure of 1,500 dark spruce logs.

Sitting under the porch is Michael Trenette, a 54-year-old master craftsman who has spent the past 14 summers working and living at the camp, alone except for his two dogs. He seems eager for company and the opportunity to share the story of his mammoth task. It’s clearly a labour of love. “The level of craftsmanship amazes me,” he says. “I’ve been to a bunch of world-heritage woodwork sites, but this place is unique – little summer black dress $1.7m seems like a lot, but there’s probably that much more to do again.”

With biting black flies – common in June – a constant irritation, I head for the Hedges hotel, half an hour to the southwest. Due to its slightly more modest scale, it was not considered a great camp when built in 1880. But it might as well have been. Renovated in 2000, this collection of cabins and lodges sits in an unrivalled spot and exudes charm. After the relative isolation of White Pine, the army of friendly staff in the dining room who serve up breakfast and dinner – as well as stories about the Adirondacks – is welcome. But I struggle to get used to choosing, at 10am, between pork chops or roast turkey for the evening ’s hearty, sauce-laden dinner – or the fact that I’m the only person under the age of 50 staying there.

Camp Sagamore, the estate of Alfred Vanderbilt and then his widow Margaret Emerson, is my final visit. The experience is upscale compared to Santanoni. The non-profit Sagamore Institute has spent up to $3m rebuilding the family quarters to something approximating their former glory after acquiring the site in 1975. Guests can stay in various restored rooms Shop Our Huge designer wedding gown Online Collection of Bridesmaids Gowns. Register Now! , eat in the dining room – with sweeping views of the lake – and sit around campfires.

“We’re a museum with no velvet ropes,” says Dr Jeff Flagg, who leads tours of the 1,526-acre camp. Completed in 1897 for a reputed $250, wedding dress plus size wedding dress plus size000 – about $7.5m in today’s money – the 50-building complex was elaborate even for a great camp. The young Vanderbilt, who died aboard the German-torpedoed Lusitania in 1915, even built himself a bachelor pad out of view from the rest of the camp. Rumour had it he and his friends would bring in local women discreetly for their entertainment. After Emerson inherited the property, it gained the nickname “the playground of the millionaires”, with an invitation to play on the world’s only outdoor bowling alley, croquet lawns and tennis court coveted by aspiring socialites, and guests included Gary Cooper and Howard Hughes.

The impressive three-storey main lodge – a European chalet blended with an American log cabin – features an iron-studded castle door. The implication is clear. “It was essentially a feudal estate,” says Flagg. “This was the Gilded Age and the emergence of a de facto American aristocracy.”

And at no other camp is the comic irony behind all the rustic pretension laid so bare. Flagg holds up a crate of GH Mumm & Co champagne shipped to Sagamore in the late 1890s. “The great camps are an illusion of harmony with nature,” he says. “These industrialists were coming up here to get away from the very things they had helped foster in society.”

Essentials

Self-catering at White Pine Camp (+1 518 327 3030; zoodress.com) from $155-$2, evening cocktail dresses evening cocktail dresses525. Room, with breakfast and dinner, at the Hedges (+1 518 352 7325; zoodress.com) from $180-$330. Great camp tours from Adirondack Architectural Heritage (+1 518 834 9328; zoodress.com)
from $30

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010

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