Imagine a journey into the wilderness just as Thomas Durant had envisioned ticketholders doing back in the day as they paid to step onto his train in Saratoga for an “Adirondack Experience.”

But the ever-ambitious and wealth-ravenous Durant was not done. After completion of his 60 miles of tracks from Saratoga Springs, he purchased “The Gables” mansion in North Creek along the Hudson River and took up residence there, lavishly furnishing it. He became one of the most notable citizens north of Saratoga and heard of a local man, a Mr. Holland, who had built a handsome hotel deep in the forests to welcome people into the Adirondacks for “sport, recreation and relaxation.” John Holland, born in Ireland, was working in a North Creek general store where he listened to stories from lumberjacks about a beautiful wilderness lake deep in the Adirondacks. Over two years, Irishman Holland hired help who toiled hauling building materials across a rough winter lumbering road, then wilderness paths and frozen waters to build a hotel on the lake. He changed the lake’s name from the somewhat unappealing “Tallow Lake” to the more inviting “Blue Mountain Lake” for a nearby summit and, more importantly, for publicity purposes, capitalizing on what he called the peak’s “blue hue.” After Holland opened his rustic log Blue Mountain Lake House, according to Alfred Donaldson’s A History of the Adirondacks, “People fairly rushed in from the start.” Durant, the relentless speculator, learned of Holland’s success and enviously eyed the commercial potential of Holland’s hotel and the hospitality potential of the Adirondacks. With thoughts of making money dancing in his head, he enlisted his son, William West Durant, to help establish a stagecoach line on an almost 40-mile hard-packed road they built from Durant’s Adirondack Company Rail Road North Creek terminus to deliver travelers to Holland’s Lake House coming from Saratoga Springs and beyond on his railroad. Holland’s original Blue Mountain venture, later transformed into a grand hotel, welcomed thousands of guests until it burned to the ground in 1904, never to be rebuilt.

Thomas Durant's beloved "The Gables" Grandiose Mansion, North Creek, by Seneca Ray Stoddard. Photo courtesy of the Adirondack Experience.

The greatly expanded Holland Lake House,
by Seneca Ray Stoddard. 
Photo courtesy of the Long Lake Archives.

William West Durant at Great Camp Pine Knot, by Seneca Ray Stoddard. Photo courtesy of the Adirondack Experience.

In “six degrees of separation from... well, you know from whom,” it can be said that Saratoga Springs opened the door to “The Era of the Great Camps.” As a result of the Durants’ interest in connecting the wealth in, and coming to, Saratoga to Irishman John Holland’s Blue Mountain Lake House through their rail line to North Creek and then their new road, Durant and his son, William West, built Camp Pine Knot, their own retreat near Blue Mountain, on Raquette Lake, launching the architectural “Great Camp Rustic Style” of expansive lodging compounds that were designed to blend into the wilderness. At their Great Camp Pine Knot, the Durants, energic son and aging father, together entertained wealthy friends who traveled by rail through Saratoga Springs and onto North Creek and then on Durant’s stagecoach line into the Adirondack wilderness. Opportunistic father and son used the gatherings to solicit financial interest in building Great Camps like their Pine Knot retreat to help create high-class destination sanctuaries for “Wilderness Experiences.” Indeed William would later replicate the “Great Camp” style by building Great Camps Uncas and Sagamore. All three camps would eventually be purchased by wealthy “Gilded Notables,” Collis P. Huntington, J.P. Morgan and Alfred Vanderbilt, respectively. The “Age of the Great Camps” was born!

On the far more modest slopes, creases and lakes of the Adirondacks, John Holland and a number of other Irish entrepreneurs offered “Céad míle fáilte!” – “A Hundred Thousand Welcomes!” – to wilderness adventurers in the grand Irish spirit of “oigidecht” – the “Gaeilge” (Irish language) for “hospitality,” the Celtic cultural tradition of “welcoming” travelers, which actually was required of the Irish as written into their ancient Celtic Brehon Law. These Irish innkeepers inspired a keen pace for hostelry commerce and, consequently, promoted road and railroad building in the Adirondacks. As the “Wilderness Experience” began taking off in the years following Durant’s Saratoga-to-North Creek line, Irish muscle helped build roads and short lines of track among villages and towns within the Adirondacks. Dr. Durant would die without realizing his dream of expanding his railroad through the majestic mountains all the way to the Canadian border and Montreal. In fact, no railroad would traverse the region entirely until 1892 when the final spike was driven of William Seward Webb’s St. Lawrence and Adirondack Railroad. Hundreds of Irishmen were recorded on Webb’s employment logbooks among the many immigrants recruited to clear terrain and lay tracks for the 191 miles of that railroad in a grueling 18 months of hard labor.

In the late 19th century, news of Adirondack adventures and the railroad, road, and hotel building activities in the mountains reached the affluent in eastern cities. Great numbers of well-to-do city dwellers began “vacating” their homes in the heat of summer to enjoy the “Adirondack Experience” of the cool mountains and, by serendipity, created the very American notion of “summer vacation” that lives to this day. These Adirondack vacationers initially took advantage of trains from New York City with scores of stops to pick up wealthy city-dwellers along the way to Saratoga Springs and then on Durant’s Adirondack Company Rail Road to North Creek, although new routes were opened eventually from other directions. Just as the earlier Irishman John Holland had at Blue Mountain Lake, scores of Irish eyes saw opportunity in these wealthy visitors and hung out their own “Fáilte” – “Welcome” – signs.

Read Simply Saratoga H&G, due out in May for more of this great tale!

Fáilte Sign. Photo by Ed Collins