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.