An Elegant Wilderness: Great Camps and Grand Lodges of the Adirondacks (The Architecture of Leisure), Hardcover, 1st Edition by Gladys Montgomery

Hardcover: 1st Edition
Brand New
9780926494473
0926494473

Publication Date: 2011-07-11
Hardcover : 272 pages
Edition: 1st Edition
Author: Gladys Montgomery
ISBN-10: 0926494473
ISBN-13: 9780926494473

Product Description The Victorian Society in America Metropolitan Chapter 2011 Award for Publication-Architectural History The Adirondack Center for Writing 2011 Literary Award-Best Book, Nonfiction The first book to place the rustic Adirondack architectural style in the context of the cultural, social, and environmental history, An Elegant Wilderness, showcases the intensely private retreats set into the pine forests on the shores of the region s shimmering lakes. Open earlier to tourism and more accessible than the western United States, the Adirondack region is where many urbanites of the Industrial Age came to experience the wilderness. It was in the Adirondacks that the constricting social proprieties relaxed, that city swells hunted in deer-filled forests and angled in trout-stocked lakes, that women shed their corsets to hike, fish, and play tennis, and that children learned to appreciate the great outdoors. Among the owners of the Great Camps there were the mining magnates Berthold Hochschild, Daniel Guggenheim, and Adolph Lewisohn, financiers J. Pierpont Morgan, Otto Kahn, and Isaac Newton Seligman, New York governor Levi Morton, President Benjamin Harrison, and the prominent philosopher William James and neuroscientist James Jackson Putnam. Women camp owners of note included Lucy Carnegie, Margaret Emerson (Vanderbilt), and Marjorie Merriweather Post. Published by Acanthus Press in collaboration with The Adirondack Museum, An Elegant Wilderness combines architectural, social, and cultural history with biography, and evocative archival black-and-white archival photographs of rustic homes, idyllic lakes, and recreational pastimes, most of which are published for the first time. Review Gladys Montgomery and Acanthus Press make a seminal contribution to the literature on the subject with this book. Drawing on the vast collections of the Adirondack Museum s library and historic photographs, as well as other regional repositories, Ms.Montgomery skillfully depicts the social milieu,architectural precedents, decorative aesthetics, and environmental awareness that stimulated the Adirondack rustic architectural style, along with the individual stories of the people who built the camps and lived the grand life there. --Caroline M. Welsh, Director Emerita, The Adirondack Museum ...the most comprehensive book yet about Adirondack rustic architecture and its origins. --Lake George Mirror, July 21, 2011 ...the most comprehensive book yet about Adirondack rustic architecture and its origins. --Lake George Mirror, July 21, 2011 About the Author Gladys Montgomery is an award-winning writer and editor. The author of five books and the founding editor of Berkshire Living Home + Garden, she has penned more than 200 magazine features about architecture, design, antiques, and historic buildings, which have appeared in regional, national, and international publications. In 2007, she transposed this expertise into a real estate career with The Kinderhook Group. She lives in West Stockbridge, Massachusetts.