In August, 1858, the landscape painter, William James Stillman, led a camping party of nine Harvard intellectuals to the wilderness of northern New York. Among the distinguished party were the Swiss scientist, Louis Agassiz, and the poet/ philosopher, Ralph Waldo Emerson.

In the mid-nineteenth century, the journey from Boston to Stillman’s chosen campsite at Follensby Pond would have been arduous, requiring multiple days of travel and various modes of transportation–from train, to steamboat, to stagecoach, to horse-drawn cart, to canoe.

For the remote portion of the journey, each man got an Adirondack guide to accomplish the difficulties of navigating, paddling, hunting, etc. Stillman was the exception; he was Agassiz’s guide. In Emerson’s words, Stillman was a “guide’s guide” (“The Adirondacs”). Yet, even according to Stillman, the final approach to Follensby was challenging, for the Pond was divided from the Raquette stream “…by a marsh of several miles of weary navigating…” (“The Philosophers’ Camp,” 598).

In August, ’22, I paddled a small portion of this legendary route.

When the party arrived in Keeseville, their entry into the Adirondacks, the townspeople called the campers “philosophers.” And later, despite the fact that the poet of the party, James Russell Lowell, had named their campsite “Camp Maple,” the local guides called it the “Philosophers’ Camp.” In terms of their professions, however, the party consisted of an artist, poets, scientists, lawyers, and doctors. Emerson was the only one we would call a philosopher. Nonetheless the “Philosophers’ Camp” tradition has endured and done so without resistance from its most celebrated participant. Stillman himself regarded Emerson as the philosopher “…whose genius was fittest to the temple in which we all worshiped…” (599).

These early outdoor recreationalists–artists and scientists alike–shared and popularized a new philosophical perspective on the value and purpose of wild nature. In this respect, perhaps there is no better name for honoring the legacy of the Follensby campsite than “Philosophers’ Camp.”

Upon returning to the campsite twenty-five years later, Stillman remarked that the area had been reduced to “ashes and ruin” (606). Tourists and loggers had utterly disturbed it with fire and axe. Nowadays, however, the Pond is heralded as a relatively undisturbed ecosystem and a rare Adirondack refuge for deep water lake trout. Perhaps Stillman was not fully aware of the resilience of nature.

As present custodians of a regenerated Follensby Pond, The Nature Conservancy faces the difficult question of how to best preserve the historical Philosophers’ Camp and honor the tradition of wilderness recreation without facilitating the degradation of the land.