Glazing Windows

One of our projects for this summer, and a project that has been ongoing for many summers, is re-glazing the windows in the main lodge artist's studio, and farm here at Santanoni. This summer we are focusing on the windows in the main lodge and the farm.

A window muntin is a piece of wood that separates the panes of glass in a window. In older windows, these muntins are lined with putty in order to hold the glass in place and keep the window weather-tight. The windows in the main lodge were glazed (aka putty was applied to them) when the house was first built in 1893. Since then, the putty has rotted away in some spots.

Our job is to chip out the old putty, sand the windows down, replace the putty, and repaint the windows. This is a relatively slow process that requires lots of time to let the putty dry. It was also a little difficult to learn to glaze (I had never done it before). The putty is a rather fickle material, and it is important to get it to be as thin and smooth as possible so that it matches the original putty that has remained on the windows.

Here is the putty being thinned out on the muntin.

Tours

For the past week now I have been giving tours at Camp Santanoni. I prepared to give tours by reading one book, Santanoni: From Japanese Temple to Life at an Adirondack Great Camp by Robert Engel, Howard Kirschenbaum, and Paul Malo. At other historic sites in which I have worked I have had to read several books, or at least parts of several books, in order to compile the whole story of the place, but at Santanoni it's all kept in one place for the interns. This book began as a Master's thesis. It's full of pictures, well-researched, but it runs a little long on various subjects that don't seem that important to the overall story of the site sometimes.

Giving tours at Santanoni is a much more laid-back experience than at some of my other jobs. At Grey Towers, my superiors broke me of the habit of addressing crowds as "you guys" and they wanted me to arrive for the tour ten minutes early in order to introduce myself and get to know the people on my tour. I have to say that at first I thought that was stupid, but I ended up really appreciating that sort of professionalism, and I think that the visitors to the site did too. Although no one is enforcing such behavior at Santanoni, I find myself still doing things this way. Still, things are much less formal. We have posted tour times, but if people hike or bike up to the main camp and really want a tour at an off time, we will gladly give it to them. Tours are free, and we don't sell any tickets. Many people arrive well before the scheduled tour time and explore the unlocked buildings for themselves (the DEC has found that if they just leave the cabins open people will be less likely to break in) so many of them aren't seeing the inside of the building for the first time when you take them in for a tour like at Grey Towers or Daniel Boone.

And then there is the issue of Santanoni being a "shell" as some people call it. When the house was sold out of the Pruyn family in 1953 and to the Melvins, very little furniture was saved. The buildings at Santanoni are not furnished, and when I take people through on tours I have to get them to try to imagine what the insides of the buildings would have looked like when they were new and furnished. Most of the rooms are also in need of some restoration (the birch bark wall paper is peeling off of the walls and the ceiling in main lodge for example). This leads visitors to asking, "what is your plan for Santanoni?" or "Will they ever restore it to what it was like in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries?" The answer is yes, in the master interpretive plan there are intentions to fully restore and furnish at least one room, and to create museum displays in a few of the others. Uusally when people ask questions like that on tours it gives me a great opportunity to talk to them about the deterioration of Santanoni over the years and Adirondack Architectural Heritage's work to restore it.

Basically, it's the first time I have ever worked at a historic site that was a work in progress. It's challenging, but also a lot of fun, and people are appreciative to get some interpretation of a site that otherwise they would have hiked to and known only as a ruin.

The Creamery

As I prepare to give tours of Camp Satanoni, I have been learning a great deal about Robert Pruyn's farm. Pruyn dreamed of having a farm that would make him something of an American version of an English country gentleman.

Pruyn hired Edward Burnett to design his farm. Burnett was a well-known farm designer at a time when scientific agriculture was burgeoning in the United States. Burnett advocated the use of strong breeding stock and hygenic food handling practices, both of which were rather innovative for the time. Scientists were beginning to understand that Tuberculosis, originally a disease found among cattle, was being passed to humans through unpasteurized dairy products. At Pruyn's farm, Burnett brought Guernsey cows, who could withstand the harsh Adirondack winters. The cows were milked in a separate room from where their stalls were, and the milk was processed in the creamery, not in the barn. Traditionally, people saw nothing wrong with handling milk in the same building in which animals were living and defecating.

Once in the creamery the milk was kept cold by being placed into pans that were submerged in ice cold spring water, which was piped into the building. Cream was skimmed off the top, and skim milk was transported to the pig pen (people didn't drink skim milk back then) through a pipe that ran underground. The Pruyns consumed dairy products from their farm year round. The milk was bottled and stamped "santanoni" and the groundskeeper would drive the produce down to Albany where they lived during the winter. Satanoni. The building was designed by the architects Delano and Aldrich, who also designed the Gate Lodge and the Artist's Studio (pictures of that building to come).

The Main Lodge

As I have already told you in previous posts, Robert Pruyn and his wife Anna set about creating their Adirondack camp in 1893. This was the year that the largest, and by far the most important structure, the Main Lodge, was built. The Pruyns envisioned their lodge to have several purposes. It was above all else a place for them to stay while they vacationed in the Adirondacks. Robert Pruyn also wanted his Adirondack camp to be his country estate, since he lived in Albany the majority of the year - a place that he could go to relax and farm like an English country gentleman.

The Pruyns, especially Anna, were avid outdoors people who enjoyed fishing, hunting, canoeing, and hiking a great deal. Anna Williams Pruyn was the descendant of an old Yankee family from Connecticut, who family lore describes as also being part Native American. She purportedly encouraged her husband to purchase land for the camp because she wanted to live in the wilderness (and Santanoni's location proves that she got her way. In the 1890s the camp was extremely remote.)

So then, in 1893 work began on the main lodge of the Pruyn's summer estate. The lodge consists of seven log cabins that are connected under one roof. This design was implemented by architect Robert H. Robertson in part because it is difficult to attach logs end to end and make a wall that is longer than the length of one lodge. So the lodge was created by joining six log cabins, all with walls only as long as one log, under one roof. The roof was intended to resemble as bird in flight, because Robert Pruyn had lived in Japan as a child when his father served as the U.S. minister to that country. Although not a practicing Buddhist, Pruyn, as well as other Americans were influence by Buddhist beliefs about nature. The Romantic movement in art and literature, as well as transcendentalists like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, also encouraged a spiritual veneration of nature. As Emerson once wrote, "Behind nature, throughout nature, spirit is present."

There is more to this spiritual connection with nature than just the Main Lodge's shape. The porch's floor plan allows visitors to experience nature wherever they are. The numerous angles that make up the porch give a variety of different views of the scenery around the lodge, including Newcomb Lake, which the Lodge overlooks. As Engel, Kirschenbaum, and Malo write in their book on Santanoni, "The Santanoni Villa becomes a veritable wilderness museum, a shrine to nature."

Here is one shot of the porch, which, because of the layout of the building into seven cabins, is broken up into eight different sections. Overall the porch is 265 feet long.



Here is one of the doors to the Main Lodge. The Pruyns wanted their lodge to be rustic, but still keep the form of traditional western building.



This part of the house where the kitchen was located was collapsing and so there is construction on that part of the building right now. As you can see the building is extremely hard to photograph in its entirety because of its shape.



Here is a close up of the support work they are doing on the kitchen.

Just pictures

Here are some pictures I took of the forest and natural area in and surrounding Camp Santanoni. Enjoy!

The Gate Lodge

For the past two days my fellow interns and I have been repainting the Gate Lodge, which is the building that we live in and doubles as a visitors' center for Camp Santanoni. The Gate Lodge was constructed in 1905. Robert Pruyn wanted an imposing structure that would greet visitors and set the tone for the rest of his estate. William Adams Delano and Chester Holmes Aldrich who designed buildings for many illustrious clients of the day like, John D. Rockefeller. Delano and Aldrich were not known for their rustic architecture, but they were very adept at adapting their buildings to pre-existing site conditions, and this is undoubtedly part of the reason Pruyn hired them. As you will see throughout the summer, Pruyn wanted the structures he built at Santanoni to mesh with the Adirondack landscape. The stone arch of the Gate House also matched the stone arches of two other structures on the preserve.



We spent yesterday scraping and sanding off the old paint in the gate house. The color scheme in some of the rooms is a little curious, like blue and orange for example. My bedroom is white with lime green trim. Here is a picture of the living room before we had gotten a chance to do much to it.



Today we washed the walls, because they are full of mildew, and applied primer. It's going to be a slow process, but once it gets done the gate house will be looking much better.

Opening up Camp

Since no one but one New York Forest Ranger and one New York Department of Environmental Conservation employee are working anywhere near Santanoni all winter, it is pretty much up to the interns to open up the buildings, clean things out, and get them ready for visitors to tour in the fall. This post will show you some exciting pictures of the buildings and work that we have been doing.

The Gate House is where us interns live for the summer, and consequently it was the place where we first did any work for Santanoni; mostly cleaning the house which is vacant each winter. Everything had accumulated a sizable layer of dust. We swept, mopped, and sucked up a lot of scary spiders and cobwebs with the vacuum cleaner.



On Monday we rode our bikes out to main camp. We like to say that the road is 5 miles up hill both ways, because there are sizable inclines in both directions. It's a good workout, and on days that have not had the opportunity to bike out to main camp I have actually found myself missing the ride.



The main lodge was the most important building to get cleaned up. I will write another post that describes the lodge in detail because it is a very unique building. When we swept the porches we found that an owl had decided to make the lodge his home for the winter and had left presents for us all over the porch.





Here is the same spot after we cleaned it.



Hopefully I can post some more interesting things soon. Stay tuned!

Camp Santanoni

This summer I am serving an internship at camp Santanoni, a 12,900 acre preserve located in the Adirondack Park of New York. Santanoni was founded in 1893 by Robert Pruyn and his family. Pruyn was a banker who made his fortune as the president of the National Commercial Bank. A resident of Albany, Pruyn conceived of Santanoni as a country estate similar to those that English nobility resided on during the summer. Santanoni, however, became much more than an estate for a landed gentleman. Pruyn pioneered what came to be known as the Adirondack great camp, massive preserves with numerous buildings, that would be copied by other elite New Yorkers like the Vanderbilts.

Today Santanoni is run jointly by Adirondack Architectural Heritage, the town of Newcomb New York, and the New York Department of Conservation. At Santanoni this summer I will be working with two other interns, giving tours, working on interpretive projects, and doing preservation work on some of the site's many buildings. By blogging about my experience over the summer I hope to relay to my readers some of the information that I learn about the camp and its history, give a sense of the day-to-day operations that me and my fellow interns will be undertaking at the camp, and share photos of the natural beauty of the area as well as the buildings.