Staff Writer
August 16, 2008 04:57 am
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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.
And on a humid August day, despite the threat of rain, the annual Sekon Steak Roast got under way. Smoke from the grill wafted under white tents, and the 30 or so families gathered.
AUCTION BID
Their stories of revival are pushing four generations here.
It was an auction on July 11, 1964, that put the fate of Fish Rock Camp into many ordinary hands.
A thousand people came to bid or watch the place sell.
Nolan Powell was a schoolteacher in 1964 when he inadvertently bought the former library building.
At 84, he smiles telling the story now.
He had been on vacation with his family and went to the auction with a friend; the first three Sekon buildings had sold for between $10,000 and $15,000 apiece.
Nolan raised his paddle as bids for the library hit $7,900.
It was about one year's salary for a teacher at the time. He thought the price was going up.
"All of a sudden I heard going, going, gone,' and I sort of shook my head."
Meantime, Nolan's wife, also a schoolteacher, pulled up in a station wagon with six children in back, packed up for the ride home to Rochester.
They didn't leave that night.
Scott Powell, one of Nolan's five sons, was 9 and remembers the moment well.
"We saw him walking toward us with a hand full of papers and a smile on his face. I could have sworn I heard her say, What did he do now?'," Scott grinned.
Fish Rock Camp was sold off that day in about 50 pieces, mostly to average, middle-class families, most who had never met before.
They celebrate their unusual place at the annual Steak Roast.
SPECIAL PLACE
"We are just normal families with lots of kids in a special place. How did that happen, I don't know," Scott said, "but I'm glad I'm a part of it."
Dr. William Pettitt, a children's heart surgeon in New Orleans, comes back every summer to a place his grandfather loved.
"My grandfather William George Pettitt was caretaker of Douglas Point; you can see it there, that strip of lawn across the lake," Pettitt said, pointing. "All five of their children were born on that land."
Pettitt bought Sekon lots numbered one and two.
His son Sam and two daughters are the fourth generations to soak up Adirondack summer on these shores.
"All I know is something about this place became a part of my father, and my father somehow turned that affection over to me, and I hope to turn that affection over to my children."
Pettitt calls it magic.
"It's something you're born with, like a life force. We want to be able to somehow turn the property over to the children someday. We want to preserve something sustainable," Pettitt said.
It's a question being asked by many of the families here.
But something unspoken remains the same at Fish Rock Camp.
"You know," Pettitt said pointing to a wooden dock, "that's my daughter out there fishing."
kdedam@pressrepublican.com
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