SARANAC LAKE - A friends group is looking to purchase Eagle Island Camp, a Girl Scout summer camp on an Upper Saranac Lake island, and continue its operation as an adventure camp for girls.
Friends of Eagle Island Camp claims to consist of more than 1,000 members, including several generations of alumnae, former staff and supporters of the original camp. It has been in existence for decades as a much smaller entity and has been involved with operating the camp in the past. It wants to take over the camp because the current owner, Girl Scouts Heart of New Jersey Council, wants to sell it. The camp has been closed since the summer of 2009, when it was shuttered for repairs.
"We will no longer be affiliated with the Girl Scouts if we are able to purchase it," Friends of Eagle Island spokeswoman Chris Hildebrand said. "They want to get rid of it. They really don't want it anymore."
The 32-acre estate on Eagle Island was built in 1903 for former U.S. Vice President Levi P. Morton. The complex consists of 11 buildings, designed by Adirondack architect William Coulter.
It became a Girl Scout camp in 1938, when the Henry Graves family of Orange, N.J. gave the island to the Maplewood-South Orange, New Jersey Girl Scout Council. That branch eventually became the Girl Scout Council of Greater Essex County, New Jersey, which merged with a Hudson County council in the late 1990s. Girl Scouts Heart of New Jersey took it over in recent years.
The camp was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1986, and in 2004 the property was named a National Historic Landmark.
"The reason we want to continue it is because of the history, because of the fact that so many thousands and thousands of women today look to their years spent there in the summers in their youth as totally life-changing summers," Hildebrand said. "They want this to continue for their own daughters, for their own granddaughters and for other young girls."
The Friends of Eagle Island Camp are applying for status as a nonprofit group and are still in the process of raising funds.
"The new leadership of Girl Scouting is much less interested in camping and the out of doors than they used to be in the past," said Hildebrand, who attended camp on Eagle Island as a child in the 1950s. "They are much more oriented toward the cooperate world, in our opinion, and places like Eagle Island, they don't seem to have any connection to or feeling for how valuable it is in the development of young women to have those opportunities."
Officials from the Girl Scouts Heart of New Jersey Council did not return phone calls for this article.
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Contact Mike Lynch at 518-891-2600 ext. 28 or mlynch@adirondackdailyenterprise.com.
