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).