History Tours & Hikes
History Tours & Hikes are concluded for the 2024 Season.
Please join us in June - October 2025 when we resume this “Guest Favorite” day visit experience.
History Tours & Hikes are made possible through a generous donation from David and Janet Griffith.
Great Camp Sagamore History Tour
History Tours will be available for booking in early 2025.
Come experience a masterpiece of Adirondack architecture, a place where America’s most influential people came to take a break from the clamor of their “modern” life. The 27-building Great Camp stands alone on a remote lakeside. Sagamore’s builders gathered the colors, scents, and textures of the wild forest and reassembled them indoors in a style that is now imitated nationwide. This family-friendly historic tour of the buildings & grounds takes about two hours.
Upgrade your Tour…Add on a buffet Lunch in our Historic Dining Hall overlooking Sagamore Lake! Advanced reservations for lunch are required.
Great Camp Sagamore History Hike:
Engineering the Wilderness
History Hikes will be available for booking in early 2025.
Explore Sagamore’s natural history and its ingenious engineering innovations on the Engineering the Wilderness History Hike.
When William West Durant built Sagamore in 1897 and Alfred Vanderbilt enlarged it in 1902 and 1914, they committed to providing cutting edge luxuries of the day—central heating, hot and cold running water, flush toilets, on-demand gas lamps fed by self-sustaining systems and, eventually, full-fledged electricity. But they also faced a challenge—they were miles from the nearest railroad, and dozens of miles away from anything like a municipal works or utility department. They simply had no electrical grid or waterworks to tap into. So instead, they engineered those luxuries from nature itself.
During this 5.5 hour experience, guests walk around Sagamore and on trails through the surrounding woods to see the sites and discuss the scientific principles that made it all possible. From a series of spring houses, cisterns, and waterways to a hydro-electric power plant to a self-regulating machine that turned gasoline into naphtha lighting to massive cast iron wood burning boilers, Sagamore had all the engineering and technological triumphs the turn of the 20th Century provided.
This tour also provides opportunities to think about the extraordinary vision and labor required to create, operate, and maintain these engineering feats, and how they both altered and maintained the experience of “being in nature.”
This tour takes approximately 5.5 hours from 10 AM to 3:30 PM, with an hour to enjoy lunch in our historic dining hall included.
Please Note: The day includes approximately 4.5 miles of guided hikes. Because these sites are only accessible by walking through state forests, this experience is for individuals who have no mobility concerns, and who have experience walking through the woods.
Our pace is leisurely and measured, and you do not need to be an advanced mountaineer. Still, if you do not often walk in the woods, this may not be the best “first” experience doing so. Feel free to consult with Sagamore staff on questions—we’re happy to discuss more and find the right balance between caution and adventure!
