National Park Service U.S. Department of the Interior

The Gilded Age and Country Places
Hudson house and the Newport cottage are rather distinct in their use and happily different
in their characteristics. 157
But they soon tired of the vigorous social demands, and spent increasingly less time at Rough
Point until they sold it in 1906.
Vacation Houses
The Adirondacks were another place that the Vanderbilts congregated at various times.
Lila and William Seward Webb went to the Adirondacks for real leisure, traveling across Lake
Champlain. Their camp, Nehasane, was the largest land-holding estate in America. 158 It was
designed by Robert Henderson Robertson. The main house was called Forest Lodge and was
built on Lake Lila in the early 1890s. It was a large shingled house with a prominent sloping roof
with overhanging porches. The interiors were decorated in the Adirondack style with massive
stone fireplaces and numerous mounted animal heads. 159
After the turn of the century Frederick and Louise began to go to the Adirondacks,
probably lured there by the Webbs and the Twomblys. In 1902 Frederick bought Pine Tree
Point on Upper St. Regis Lake and rebuilt it with the help of Japanese craftsmen who had
worked on the Japanese Pavilion at the 1901 Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo. The Japanese
Camp, as it was known, is somewhat of an enigma. While William H. Vanderbilt had a Japanese
room at 640 Fifth Avenue in New York, it seems quite exotic for Frederick's taste and for the
standards of the Adirondacks as well. An article published in the New York Daily Tribune,
explained:
Mr. Vanderbilt, long a lover of Japanese art was determined that there should be in this camp
of his nothing that was not really Japanese. At much expense he procured the services of
Japanese architects and then imported workmen directly from Japan that the plans might be
worked out accurately in every detail. "Queer little jiggers," the Adirondack guides called
the painstaking Japanese who a little while ago finished their work . . . It is hard to describe
the charm that Mr. Vanderbilt has succeeded in producing by combining Japanese
architecture with the rugged beauty of the Adirondacks . . . Japanese furniture, Japanese
ware, Japanese tapestries and mosaics, all serve to convey the impression that with one step
one has left the Adirondacks . . . and by some magician's trick landed in a quiet corner of old
Nippon. 160
One is struck by the authenticity that apparently extended to making the servants wear
kimonos. 161 The approach at the Japanese Camp seems to be in stark contrast to the mixing of
styles and the lack of concern for the true age of the antiques or reproductions at Hyde Park. By
1913, Frederick and Louise tired of the Adirondacks and sold their camp to Herbert L. Pratt of
157
"Changing Customs."
158
King, 114.
159
For more on Nehasane see Harvey Kaiser, Great Camps of the Adirondacks (Boston: David Godine,
1982), 183-187.
160
The New-York Daily Tribune, August 27, 1905, 3.
161
Mildred Phelps Stokes Hooker, Camp Chronicles (Blue Mountain Lake, NY: Adirondack Museum,
1964), 26. Mrs. Hooker goes on to say "They not only had the cabins Japanized, they dressed all their
maids in kimonos! They had taken over a stout English maid of Mother's, and she nearly died of
embarrassment when she had to appear before us in this odd new uniform."
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