Resort hotel · Bolton Landing (Bolton), New York · Built 1922–1930 (third hotel on the site; first opened 1883)
The Sagamore
Listed on the National Register as Sagamore Hotel Complex
A rambling white Colonial Revival hotel on Green Island in Lake George, the third Sagamore on the site, begun in 1922 and enlarged in 1930, amid cottages of the 1880s summer colony that founded it.
History
When the Delaware & Hudson Railroad reached the head of Lake George in the early 1880s, a group of wealthy summer visitors to Bolton Landing, among them E. Burgess Warren, William Bement and George Burnham of Philadelphia and J.B. Simpson of New York, formed the Green Island Improvement Company in 1882 and bought most of Green Island. Their plan joined a profit-making hotel to a private colony: the company would run the hotel and sell shore lots to members, whose cottage designs it approved and who agreed to dine and entertain at the hotel. The Philadelphia firm of Wilson Brothers designed the first Sagamore, a 200-room Queen Anne hotel that opened in July 1883, named for a character in Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans. Wilson Brothers also designed the Warren and Simpson cottages of 1886, which still stand.
Fire destroyed the hotel in 1893. Its successor, with electric light, steam elevators and private baths, opened in 1896 and burned in 1914. For years the company made do with an annex and two interim cottages, until a reorganized company opened the central block of a new hotel in 1922. Boston hotel man Karl Abbott later took on an expansion to designs by Harold Field Kellogg, and when the 1929 crash threatened it, summer resident William H. Bixby of St. Louis underwrote completion in 1930. A Donald Ross golf course followed on Federal Hill in 1927. The National Governors' Conference met here in 1954. Code violations closed the hotel in 1980; Philadelphia developer Norman Wolgin bought and restored it from 1983.
“The dramatically sited Sagamore has long been a conspicuous architectural landmark on Lake George”
Architecture
The 1930 hotel is a three-story steel and wood-frame building sheathed in clapboard, with paired shuttered windows and six-over-six sash. A central lobby block is flanked by pairs of wings reaching out at each end, each broken by projecting three-bay pavilions with steep cross gables. On the land side, a tower with Colonial Revival trim and an octagonal cupola with a bell-cast roof marks the entrance; on the lake side, a semicircular two-story portico faces down a broad lawn to the water. Nearby, the 1886 Warren cottage, Wapanak, mixes half-timbering with a crenellated stone tower, and the Simpson cottage, Nirvana, keeps its Queen Anne chimneys and porches. The 1927 Tudor Revival golf clubhouse has fieldstone chimneys and a round stone tower.
What to look for
- Octagonal cupola over the entrance tower
- Semicircular portico on the lake front
- Wapanak's crenellated stone tower and half-timbering
- Corbeled brick chimneys of the Simpson cottage
- Tudor Revival clubhouse on Federal Hill
Setting
Green Island lies about 300 feet off the west shore of Lake George at Bolton Landing, reached by a short bridge from the village. The hotel stands on the high southern end of the island, its lawn sloping forty feet to the water with wide views of the lake and the steep mountains on the eastern shore. Wooded lanes lead past the older summer cottages on the southwest shore; the golf course is about a mile and a half away on Federal Hill.
Timeline
- 1882Green Island Improvement Company formed
- 1883First Sagamore opens in July
- 1893First hotel burns; second opens in 1896
- 1914Second hotel burns
- 1922Central block of the present hotel opens
- 1930Hotel enlarged to its present size
- 1980Hotel closes; restoration begins after 1983 sale
Where sources differ
- Wikipedia names Myron Brown as the hotel's main financier and Robert Rheinlander as the 1920s architect; the nomination names other founders and credits the 1930 design to Harold Field Kellogg.
- Closure date: the nomination says 1980, Wikipedia 1981.
