An architectural study of the large Adirondack hotels that focuses on the cultural history of travel and tourism.

From 1859 to the present, the name Paul Smiths has meant different things to visitors and residents of the Adirondack Mountains of northern New York. In the 19th century, the name was synonymous with a grand hotel on the shores of Lower St. Regis Lake and the wilderness guide who was its founder. In the early 20th century, the hotel business expanded to include land sales, a railroad, a telephone company, and the Paul Smiths Electric Power and Light Company, which became the first electric provider in the region. After World War II, Paul Smiths College was founded to provide quality liberal arts and technical associate-level degrees to returning veterans and recent high school graduates. Today Paul Smiths College attracts students from across America to the only baccalaureate-degree-granting institution in the six-million-acre Adirondack Park.

This carefully researched, profusely illustrated volume identifies and explores some thirty outstanding resort complexes, explaining their architectural details, their social histories, and the often surprising stories behind their lovely wooden facades.

A sweeping, richly illustrated architectural study of the large, historic New England coastal resort hotels

Big Moose Lake in the Adirondacks is the lively and well documented story of the growth of the lake side community made famous by the incident that inspired Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy. The rich history of the lake unfolds with stories of its early residents, hunters, and guides—Jim Higby, Billy Dutton, Henry Covey, and Bill Dartin—the late 1870s, of the lake's ownership by William Seward Webb, of the construction of the first private camp—Club Camp—in 1878, and the coming of hotels and resorts beginning in 1880 with the construction of Camp Crag. From a time when a telephone number was a simple "8F6" and the "pickle boat" brought supplies to camp, to more recent stories of exuberant waterskiing and motorboat regattas, the book includes a detailed history and descriptions of the camps and resorts on the lake, persons and celebrities who made the lake their year-round or seasonal home—including actress Minnie Maddern Fiske and artist David Milne—natural disasters and political events, recreation, and the work of the Big Moose Property Owners Association. This is the story of Big Moose Lake brought to life by more than 275 family photographs, antique postcards, and previously unpublished memoirs, oral histories, diary entries, and the personal correspondence of the men and women who settled the area and of those who call it home.

The author does a thorough job in explaining the beginnings of rustic architecture and why it has a permanent place in the culture. The mix of social background and the history of the early Adirondack camps provides a designers guidebook.

The author follows a trip through the Adirondack Park taken a century earlier by George Washington Sears.