Adirondack Museum: Mountain Wilderness Brought to Life Outside Albany
About two hours north of Albany, in the heart of the Adriondacks, lies the Adirondack Museum, dedicated to the history, wildlife and people of the only mountain range solely in New York. The aptly named Adirondack Museum, which was granted accreditation by the American Association of Museums for the fourth time in 2010, has, since 1957, preserved the historical and material culture of the Adirondacks for visitors to explore.
The history of the museum begins in the 1880s with William West Durant, son of a vice president of the Union Pacific Railroad, who moved to the Adirondacks to manage his family’s holdings there. In the process of building his developments modeled after European hunting estates, Durant unintentionally created the architectural style for Adirondack Great Camps. Durant built the Eagle’s Nest Country Club in 1899 despite mounting financial problems, and a mere 5 years later would find himself awash in a sea of lawsuits.
Three New York City businessmen, Ernst Ehrman, Henry Morgenthau Sr., and Berthold Hochschild, purchased the Eagle’s Nest land from Durant’s creditors. Berthold’s son Herman would write a 1952 book, Township 34, that became instrumental in the creation of the Adirondack Museum in 1957. Herman Hochshield spent years collecting Photostats, filling notebooks and interviewing as many “old timers” as possible to eventually create the 7-pound book filled with more than 600 quarto-sized pages, more than 400 illustrations, 39 maps and 24 appendices. The exhaustive history of the region coincided with a plan by William Wessels to convert the Blue Mountain House into the Adirondack Museum.
The museum today includes 22 exhibit spaces on 32 acres of land overlooking Blue Mountain Lake, and includes buildings constructed in the late 1800s and early 1900s alongside exhibits on Adirondack boating, railroads, outdoor recreation, wilderness hotels and artifacts collected since 1957. One of the major showpieces is the H.K. Porter Locomotive in the Marion River Carry Pavilion, which was the first large artifact gifted to and restored by the museum. The locomotive is displayed with a passenger car and alongside the steamboat Osprey that helped transport vacationers to the mountains. The most recent addition to the museum's collection is a pair of ladder-back side chairs manufactured between 1900 and 1910 by Union Chair Works in Mottville, N.Y.; a maker's mark of "F.A. Sinclair/Mottville, N.Y." is stamped on the top slat.
The museum also boasts the Lake View Cafe for visitors’ dining pleasure among breathtaking views of Blue Mountain Lake and the mountain wilderness of the Adirondacks that surrounds the museum complex. Blue Mountain Lake isn't only used as scenry though -- during the summer the museum holds daily programs out on the lake. The program schedule for both daily and special events is available at the musem's website.
Group rates are available for groups of 15 or more adults, and include complimentary admission for the group leader and the bus driver. There are wheelchairs, wheeled walkers and electric scooters available for rent at the visitor’s center on a first-come, first-served basis. Family programs and school tours are available, with full details online.
HelloAlbany Tip: The museum occasionally adjusts its hours for special reasons. Check out the website for complete information.
Posted on Mar 13, 2011 by Matt Delman
