What is it?
Room adjacent to Sagamore Dining Hall, just prior to restoration, 2018.
And where can we get more?
This rough, gray-brown fabric has been tacked between the rafters in the room attached to the Sagamore Dining Hall since the camp was new. It’s a Native American-made paper or nonwoven fabric that was produced by pounding and scraping the inner bark of cedar trees into a fibrous paste that was flattened and dried.
The fabric was showing its 120 years (don’t we all?) and, in 2018, we had to cut it down. We saved the pieces in hopes of finding matching material and kept a few of the least damaged sections in place. Former Executive Director Garret Livermore searched across America for a new source of this traditional material, but nothing Garret found was quite right.
William West Durant knew Abenaki and Mohawk artisans who made and sold traditional crafts to Adirondack tourists and camp builders. The Chalet building at Pine Knot, his first camp on Raquette Lake, still contains several Native American-made objects.
Photo ca.1935. A ca.1930 camp inventory indicates that the Vanderbilts called this the “Relic Room.”
After twice expanding Durant’s original Dining Hall, the Vanderbilts used this attached space as a screened-in sunroom. They furnished it with a rustic sofa and cozy corduroy cushions and pillows. The photograph shows a twig side table and stuffed hawk. It was a place to snooze with a book on a rainy or buggy afternoon. Now it’s used to expand Sagamore’s busy Dining Hall. A friend of Sagamore helped us restore the room and to buy sturdy wooden dining tables.
The scary hawk must have flown off.
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A recent history-nerd discovery:
L: Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt on the Sagamore Main Lodge porch with the George Wilson settee, 1913
R: Detail of the back of the settee, now in the collection of the Adirondack Experience, 2021
Durant hired local artisan George Wilson to fashion twig furniture pieces for Sagamore. One such piece, a Wilson settee, is pictured above. Adorned with a crescent moon and six-pointed star between an “S” and “L” representing Sagamore Lodge, it sat on the Main Lodge porch for decades. Today, it resides in the Adirondack Experience (AdkX) collection and is considered a masterpiece of rustic design.
Hoping to reproduce the settee for Sagamore’s newly restored Main Lodge porch, Sagamore board member Doug Stinson and I went to the Experience last year to photograph the piece. The description on the AdkX collections database referred to the back of the settee as being “lined with a thin fabric (muslin?).”
Oh, really?
As I left Sagamore to meet with Doug and AdkX Conservator & Collections Manager Doreen Alessi-Holmes, I grabbed a fragment of the cedar paper removed from the Dining Hall to compare it with whatever was lining the back of the settee. Voila` - a perfect match. I handed the fragment to Doreen for the museum’s files. She has since updated the description in their database.
So, did Durant acquire the material for Wilson - or was it the other way around?
History nerds want to know!