History of the Great Camps of the Adirondacks

The Adirondack Mountains in New York are an environmental treasure. Located a short distance from New York City, they afford the population a healthy, recreational retreat. The Adirondack Park was begun as a forest preserve. Its purpose was to protect the head waters of the Hudson River from erosion and to maintain a steady water supply which was needed for New York City's industry. Adirondack Park now encompasses approximately 6 million acres and encloses a complete ecosystem. It still protects the water supply of the Hudson River and supplies a wilderness area for recreational use by the people of the east coast. It is often referred to as Yosemite East. The Adirondacks and their great camps are not a facsimile of Yosemite, but are instead the inspiration for the lodges found throughout the National Park system. This paper will discuss the unique contributions made by the State of New York, to American society, in the 1890's, when the legislation to set aside the wilderness area was passed. The local citizens and the great land barons of the late nineteenth century opened the wilderness to civilization, created a uniquely American form of architecture and the design of the great camps. The local citizens and environmental groups are now involved in the preservation of the environment and the lifestyle of the area which includes some of the camps and the activities they represented. These activities are

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he extensive logging in the area. Most important for the leading industrialists the flow of the Hudson River was decreasing in the summer months due to destruction of the watershed and the erosion being caused by the over logging of the area. At the same time this destruction of the environment was beginning to be felt by powerful citizens, a book was written and well received by the population in the New England states. George Perkins Marsh, a former politician and diplomatic envoy to Turkey who had seen the destruction which could be caused by over logging of hillsides, wrote Man and Nature; or, Physical Geography as Modified by Human Action. This treatise was the start of the conservation movement. A second man, Verplanck Colvin took the book's warning seriously and applied then to the Hudson River's watershed which was the Adirondack region. This region was already being affected by the state's logging policies. He shouted the warning in a way which business and government could understand that in one environmental disaster, the unregulated logging of the Adirondack region, the state was going to lose two very valuable resources--the watershed which controlled the flow of water in vital commercial waterways and the for
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Approximate Word count = 5047
Approximate Pages = 20 (250 words per page)