Eagle Island Camp was a Great Camp built beginning about 1902 by Levi Parsons Morton, a former US Congressman, Ambassador to France, US Vice President (1889-1893), and the 31st New York Governor. Had he accepted the offer from James A. Garfield to be his Vice President in 1880, and had history continued on the same course, Morton would have become the 21st President, instead of Chester Arthur, after Garfield’s assassination. Mr. Morton became a real estate investor after his public career and donated his property in Newport, Rhode Island to that city and land he owned in Hanover, New Hampshire to Dartmouth College.
Eagle Island was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1986 and was designated a National Historic Landmark in 2004. By virtue especially of its Lodge, Dining Hall, and other historic buildings, Eagle Island Camp earned these designations because it possesses “exceptional value or quality in illustrating or interpreting the heritage of the United States.” The Historic Landmark designation reads:
Eagle Island Camp
This site possesses national significance in commemorating the history of the United States of America. Constructed in 1903, this is an extraordinarily well preserved, highly sophisticated example of the Adirondack camp property type. Individual buildings are artfully arranged to blend with the rugged waterfront setting as well as take advantage of the surrounding views.
National Park Service
United States Department of the Interior
Eagle Island Camp is one of the Great Camps in the Adirondack region. A “Great Camp” is a large complex of camp buildings designed and built using native materials, usually located on a large piece of lakeside property, and often having some degree of self-sufficiency. Great Camps were built between 1875 and 1950 for some of America’s most successful entrepreneurs and their families and represent what was an emerging romantic relationship between man and nature.
This rustic architecture influenced the design of many National Park Service buildings across the west and has become one of the most widely recognized and celebrated regional styles in the country. Of the 35 true Great Camps in the Adirondack region, five of these (Santanoni, Sagamore, Uncas, Pine Knot, and Eagle Island) have been designated as National Historic Landmarks, the highest federal historic site designation.
Preservationists and historians consistently write that Eagle Island Camp is the best surviving work of William L. Coulter, one of the six major architects working in Great Camp design (another was John Russell Pope, the architect of the Jefferson Memorial in Washington D.C.). Apart from its operation as a Girl Scout Camp for the 70 years between 1938 and 2008, Eagle Island Camp is recognized as having independent cultural, historic, and aesthetic significance.
The Camp is set on a 32-acre island named for Iroquois Chief Eagle, is about a mile in circumference, and is located about 7 minutes by boat from the Gilpin Bay shore of Upper Saranac Lake in the High Peaks Region of the Adirondacks. The historic buildings are clustered in a small area that enjoys particularly beautiful and advantageous views over the lake and mountains beyond. Most of the rest of the island is wooded except for the cleared areas where groups of girls live and play, primarily in platform tents, with closed common buildings. There is a wide sandy beach in the waterfront area and a sheltered cove near the Boathouse where the Camp sailboats are moored.
Henry Graves, an industrialist born in Orange, New Jersey, bought Eagle Island Camp in 1910 from Levi Morton’s widow. In 1937, Mr. and Mrs. Graves gave the Camp to the Girl Scouts of the Oranges, and Maplewood New Jersey, who were attempting to buy it when it was put up for sale, in order to keep the spirit of childhood alive after the tragic deaths of their own sons. In 1938, Eagle Island Girl Scout Camp began operation as a Girl Scout Councils of the Oranges and Maplewood camp. The Camp was in continuous operation through World War II, the Council of the Oranges’ merger with Maplewood, followed by the merger with Hudson and the rest of Essex County, and finally the merger in 2008 with Washington Rock and Rolling Hills Girl Scout Councils in 2008 which produced the Girl Scouts Heart of New Jersey Council. The summer of 2009 was the first time in 71 years that Eagle Island Camp did not open.
In October 2010, the Board of Directors of Girl Scouts Heart of NJ voted to sell Eagle Island despite a three year effort by the alumnae, campers and friends to prevent this unfortunate course of action. Friends of Eagle Island, Inc. officially formed in January 2011, became incorporated in March 2011 as a not for profit in NY State and received its 501(c)(3) designation in May 2011 thus launching its plan to acquire, restore and reopen the island.
