Families continue to enjoy a banker's expansive escape

By KIM SMITH DEDAM

UPPER SARANAC LAKE -- A pile of children hunkered over a collection of pails on a sandy hill of a beach.

Their prattle lapsed into concentration.

In front of them, parents and cousins and uncles waged a rowdy jousting match in canoes on the lake.

An impromptu set of lances, made with rubber balls wrapped in fabric, waggled uncertainly from the side of the boats.

"Whoa!" A shout from the water, and a splash met a howl, and a ripple of laughter spread over the shore.

The damp summer air hung in a mist around the palatial expanse of camp buildings built by Isaac Newton Seligman, a banker from Manhattan, at the end of the 19th century.

Seligman's lavish camp had nearly 24 cottages, with a main lodge, guide houses, library and sleeping quarters.

SEKON MEANS WELCOME

The Great Camp on 42 acres once called Fish Rock Camp exists today, nearly intact, as a summer colony of families knitted together by chance, a little luck and good will.

After the Seligmans sold it, the place operated for a few years as a hotel and took the name Sekon for an inn that once stood in the pines nearby. The word purportedly has Indian origins meaning: Welcome.

The Sekon Association maintains the historic buildings perched on the southwestern edge of Upper Saranac Lake as a collective of family-owned camps.

The antique architecture is still striking against the close-cut slope of green lawn.

The flat stone surface of fish rock still presides over the waterfront.