An Elegant Wilderness: Great Camps and Grand Lodges of the Adirondacks (The Architecture of Leisure)

The Victorian Society in America Metropolitan Chapter 2011 Award for Publication-Architectural HistoryThe Adirondack Center for Writing 2011 Literary Award-Best Book NonfictionThe 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