Eagle Island
In early July 1911, Henry Graves, Jr., arrived in the Adirondacks just as the high season began. Once again the mountains swelled with some of New York City’s wealthiest families as they made the summer pilgrimage, exchanging their brick and marble mansions for the rustic decadence of their Great Camps in the woods. It was a change of place but not of splendor.
In the Gwen, the sleek motorboat named for their only daughter, Henry, Florence, and their four children sliced through a light mist hanging over the tranquil cobalt waters of Upper Saranac Lake heading toward Eagle Island. Their retinue of servants trailed behind in a separate boat carrying the family’s steamer trunks as well as the family’s pets, a Mastiff and a Cavalier King Charles spaniel, and enough supplies to last through the two-month summer season. They were the very same cooks, nannies, and housekeepers who attended to the family’s every need in Irvington and Manhattan. A second set of local caretakers, guides, and woodsmen also tended to them on the island.
Like the chimerical Brigadoon, Eagle Island Camp appeared for a brief period each summer, enchanting its visitors before retreating into the frigid snow drifts of winter. Accessible only by boat, it was inhabitable at the tail end of spring, after the lake had finally thawed, allowing for safe passage. Eagle Island, named for the bald eagles that once nested there, sat on thirty-two forested acres commanding a view that stretched across Upper Saranac Lake to the Narrows and included two smaller islands called Big Watch and Little Watch.
Despite being surrounded by six million acres of unspoiled wilderness on their journey north, the family did not replace their opulent clothing, couture hats, and jewels. Henry traveled in a long coat, starched shirt and tie, and a short-brimmed hat. Florence wore a fashionable hobble skirt and Chantilly lace blouse, her hair swirled into a flattened sundae under a wide plumed hat; and a fur wrap around her shoulders fended off the morning chill. The boys wore Fauntleroy suits, including fourteen-year-old Henry, whom everybody called Harry; little Gwendolen wore a frilled dress with smock skirt and silk ribbons in her hair. As they made the short journey to their camp, great blue herons sailed overhead and loons sang their plaintive wail. The incessant buzzing of the ghastly black flies that made life painfully unpleasant during May and June had mercifully disappeared by the time the Graveses arrived.
William Meagher, Eagle Island’s longtime caretaker and family friend, met the group, offering a firm, warm handshake to Henry, and accompanied them to their private island sanctuary. As usual, the New York newspapers’ social columns announced the arrival of “Mr. and Mrs. Henry Graves, Jr., and their party.”
The papers gave no indication of the anticipation Henry felt for the annual motorboat regatta, a great spectacle that brought the curtain down on the season each summer. This year, determined to win at any cost, he had come armed with a secret weapon, a 200-horsepower engine that he furtively installed in his treasured fifty-foot speedboat, a gloriously agile craft named the Eagle. But first he and his family had several busy weeks to navigate.
Henry pilots his family in the Gwen to Eagle Island, Upper Saranac Lake. Courtesy of Cheryl Graves.
Life at the Great Camp was one of perpetual motion, with games of croquet and tennis, sailing, hunting, and fishing trips. Guests arrived at Eagle Island during carefully timed jaunts. Among the barrage of activities, a raucous costume party at the main lodge was on the social calendar, where, crackling with brio, Henry and Florence dressed as “Orientals” in long silk Chinese tunics. Henry’s dear friend Edwin Gould, the son of Jay Gould, showed up in an impossibly tall makeshift paper hat and a sandwich board that announced, “This Way to Eagle Island, Water Sports, Girls Swimming!!!, No Admittance for the Motley.”
Eagle Island dinners took place in the octagonal dining room, its ceiling designed to resemble the underside of an open umbrella, under which any number of lovely events settled breezily. There was dancing to the Victrola or alongside Florence as she played the ebony upright piano in the great room, the same room where the servants lined up Henry’s issues of Collier’s and Scribner’s in perfectly measured rows on the front table and kept the large Tiffany & Co. clock on the mantel regularly wound. At dusk came the blissful ritual of cocktails served on the veranda as the sun disappeared into the water, cigarettes tipped from long black holders, gossiping over recent events: the recently crowned king of England George V or, say, the end of Ty Cobb’s forty-game winning streak. Among less delicate ears the tittle-tattle about which camp owners might have sneaked off with their lakeside servants traveled across a network of whispers.
During sun-dappled afternoons, Henry’s full-time guides rowed the family and their friends in long, narrow wooden paddle boats between the lakes and streams, delivering them on quaint shores where their servants laid out lavish picnics served on gold-rimmed china with linens and silver monogrammed with Henry’s initials, HGJR.
Summers at Eagle Island provided the Graves children with a luminous Never Never Land where they shed their white-glove restrictions under a canopy of birch, spruce, and pine trees. Athletic and outdoorsy, they delighted in the months they spent energetically exploring the woodland, swimming, and canoeing. Duncan, known as “Bud,” competed in the annual swimming races. At summer’s end he would take first place in the twenty-yard contest. With his Graflex camera, Henry 3rd, called “Harry,” became a keen photographer, documenting the family’s summers through his accordion lens and pasting the photos in leather albums emblazoned with his initials in gold; his parents and siblings posed rigidly on bark-trimmed benches and at play, canoeing, lying on hammocks, swimming in the cove. Even more than his siblings, George Coe II, whom everybody called “Toot,” took to hunting and exploring the wider Adirondacks, filled with wildlife and enveloped in peaked mountains that revealed lakes, glaciers, marshes, and thickets of woodland in infinite shades of green.
This was the Graveses’ fourth summer at Eagle Island, the second since Henry had bought the Great Camp, which he now officially listed as his summer residence in the Social Register. In 1903 Levi P. Morton, the former vice president of the United States under Benjamin Harrison, and his wife, the inimitable hostess Anna Livingston Street, built the camp as their second Adirondack retreat. Morton erected his first, Camp Pinebrook, on the west side of the lake in 1898. A one-time governor of New York, Morton had also served as the country’s ambassador to France, where he was best remembered as the man who drove the first rivet in the Statue of Liberty (into the big toe of her left foot) when she was under construction in 1881. Outside politics, Morton had made a fortune on Wall Street, but at eighty-six he had decided to slow down. Now residing full time at his gentleman’s farm in Rhinecliff-on-Hudson, he sold his Morton Trust Company to his sometime friend and frequent rival J. P. Morgan (which would later become part of Morgan Guaranty Trust) and leased out Eagle Island for several seasons.
Henry leaped at the opportunity to own this rare jewel, purchasing it in the spring of 1910, the camp and all of its contents, including the Gustav Stickley furniture and its vibrant, worn Oriental rugs. Among the glittering Adirondack trophies, Eagle Island wasn’t the biggest of the Great Camps, but it was an exceptional piece of property.
The architect William Coulter, pioneer of the Adirondack style, designed the sprawling Great Camp as a compound that included several lodges with thirty-foot ceilings made of peeled spruce, stone, and paned windows, all connected by walkways, creating the impression that one was suspended amid the treetops. Not long after the camp was completed, Eagle Island became the fawning subject of a New York Times article describing how the wealthy residents of the Adirondacks continued to incline toward luxurious appointments at their mountain retreats. “Of the many camps clustered about the Wawbeek on Upper Saranac Lake,” the paper observed, “none attracts more favorable comment than the rustic camp built upon Eagle Island.”5
Even in an age of excess, the Great Camps stirred the imagination. Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt’s colossal Camp Sagamore required two hundred men and two years to build. Its massive fieldstone fireplace in the main lodge was so large that the rest of the structure had to be built around it. On Vanderbilt’s instructions, Sagamore featured a large casino and a two-story wigwam where the prince of American aristocracy hung his Renoirs and imported women from New York City to amuse his male guests. On fifty thousand acres, William Avery Rockefeller erected his own private Adirondack reserve, where he also constructed a private railroad station. “The great forest is to him a playground,” quipped the New York Times, “not as a hunter or a fisherman, but a spot where he may forget some of the cares of his strenuous business concerns.”
Proving that it was possible to bring the opulence of their city lives into the forest while conquering this unforgiving topography where the Iroquois and Algonquin had fished and trapped a century earlier, society gilded their camps with bowling alleys, golf courses, game rooms, themed cottages, movie theaters, and Japanese tea pavilions. The historian Maitland De Sormo wrote of the Great Camps, with their stunning array of architectural features and indulgent diversions, “[They] represent the most conspicuous measuring stick in the mountains as well as elsewhere.”
A season staple of Eagle Island, the Graves family and friends swim at their private bathing beach in front of the boathouse. Courtesy of Cheryl Graves.
For Henry Graves, Jr., an oligarch of a less flamboyant temperament although no less expansive tastes, Eagle Island offered seclusion, privacy, and the luxury of home. At a time when many American cities still lacked such amenities, Eagle Island had hot and cold indoor plumbing and telephone lines. A power plant furnished electricity to the entire island. Among the eleven buildings there were seventeen bedrooms and separate servants quarters with a laundry, refrigerated pantries, and entire rooms just for linen, china, and ironing. For amusements, the island had its own bathing beach and sailing cove, a tennis court, guest cottages, and two boathouses. Henry built the second one, a stunner that matched the main lodge, with its own veranda and sleeping quarters for the boatmen who maintained his fleet of four motorboats (including the Gwen and a twenty-seven-foot speedway runabout), four canoes, four guide boats, and several smaller boats set aside for the servants’ use.
The Graveses rubbed elbows with their neighbors on the southern half of Upper Saranac: the beer heiress Isabel Ballantine, who owned Moss Ledge, with its teahouse overlooking the lake, and a group of wealthy German-born Jews who established their private Great Camps here, a move spurred in no small part by the accepted social anti-Semitism of the upper classes that barred them from most private resorts and social clubs. Across from Eagle Island, Adolph Lewisohn, a banker and philanthropist known as “the Copper King,” retreated to Camp Prospect Point, a series of remarkable Swiss-style chalets on a bluff overlooking the northern reaches of Upper Saranac that towered over the shoreline. The Wall Street tycoon and Goldman Sachs scion Henry Goldman owned Bull Point, modeled after English Tudor country mansions and originally built for the investment banker and arts patron Otto Kahn.
• • •
During the previous summer, just a month before the regatta, Henry casually piloted his speedboat, the Eagle, which had earned the moniker “the Queen of the Adirondacks,” on the lake. He had motored up to the Saranac Inn to pick up his guests Edwin Gould, his wife, Sarah, and her mother, Mrs. George F. Schrady, for their stay at Eagle Island. Among the status-conscious camping colony, the appearance of the Eagle was tantamount to revealing a straight flush. This season, however, Henry kept his fastest boat under wraps, refusing to let anyone near it except for his camp mechanic. His main rival, the champion swimmer Charles Daniels, an eight-time Olympic medalist and the inventor of the “American crawl,” had secretly purchased one of the fastest boats in the world the previous summer, the thirty-three-foot, four-cylinder, seventy-five-horsepower Arab III. He redecorated it, renamed it the Ketchup, and quietly shipped it to Upper Saranac. This year Henry was not about to take any chances.
Behind the wheel of the Ketchup Daniels had won the previous regatta by mere seconds. He bested the Perhaps, piloted by Jules Bache, founder of the brokerage firm J. S. Bache & Co., a bon vivant and collector of millions of dollars’ worth of Goyas, Raphaels, Rembrandts, Botticellis, and Vermeers. As September 2, the date of the new season’s race, approached, it became widely known that many had secretly installed new engines in a bid to outdo the competition and win the championship.
On the summer afternoon of the showdown, reporters from all of the major New York City papers descended on the lake to cover the highly anticipated motorboat race in their society pages. Henry finally unveiled his souped-up Eagle, as Bache, Daniels, Lewisohn, and several other representatives of the camping colony also appeared with their supercharged motorboats.
At the pop of the starting pistol, Henry threw the full power of his engines into gear, jolting the Eagle forward, missing the Perhaps by just a foot. Taking control of his craft, Henry straightened and shot down the lake. Together with his competitors, he clipped and charged, turning the waters, as one observer described, into “the fury of a hundred storms.” Covered in foam, he shifted gears and pushed his 200-horsepower engine to its maximum threshold, lifting the Eagle into the lead. By the time he reached the first mile mark at Ward’s Point, he had gained five hundred feet over the Ketchup. Smiling to the roaring crowd, Henry approached the first of many sharp turns, thrusting his engine down to navigate it. He had raced through the first round at thirty-five miles per hour and now sprinted to the finish. He had put a mile between him and the Ketchup. It was over. Stepping from his boat, Henry was received by a standing ovation. He ended the season in first place, just as he had intended.
In business, Henry fared similarly, although he had earned his position by default. Five years earlier, his sixty-seven-year-old father had died while spending the month of August with his wife at their Kineo summer cottage on Moosehead Lake in Maine. Upon his death he left a personal estate worth $5,660,000, “of which only $345,622, was in the State of New York,” reported the New York Times. While this was certainly a fortune (equal to $135.5 million today), it represented only a portion of the considerable web of interests he held in commerce, railroads, and banking through his brokerage firm, Maxwell & Graves, a sum that conservatively elevated his wealth by many times that amount.
Henry’s two brothers played some part, although largely titular, in the Wall Street firm that bore the family name, each reaping generous rewards. The eldest, Edward Hale, appeared the least active in business affairs. He lived with his wife, Jean (née Stevenson), and daughter, splitting their time between mansions in Orange, New Jersey, and Tuxedo Park, New York, engaged in music and the social calendar. The never-married George Coe lived in a villa on the family’s Orange estate, engaged in philanthropy (preferring to donate to a host of organizations anonymously) and travel, exploring exotic ports of call. He filled his summer estate, Sylmaris, in Osterville, Massachusetts, near Cape Cod, with thousands of priceless objects he collected over time: antique bejeweled Indian daggers forged in gold, French Charles-Honoré Lannuier armchairs, English and Irish glass from the eighteenth and nineteenth century, and white jade snuffboxes decorated with emeralds and rubies. George also shared his brother Henry’s taste for rare prints. The youngest, their sister Daisy, married well, twice. With her first husband, Lyman F. Goff, the son of one of the most prominent industrialist families in New England, Daisy had one daughter, Isabella, and after being widowed at age thirty-three, she married Ernest Atherton Smith, a wealthy Orange resident.
Two years before his death on December 20, 1904, Henry Graves, Sr., drew up his will, establishing a trust from the bulk of his estate in order to provide for his descendants for generations to come. He bequeathed his household furniture, personal effects, and works of art equally among his wife and children, providing his widow with an annual income of $20,000 (roughly half a million dollars today). Harriet Isabella Graves also received the family’s mansion in Orange. From the documents filed it seems that Henry Sr. did not leave a nickel to anyone outside of his family, to any charity, or to any institution of art or botany or any church that he had graciously patronized during his lifetime. In death, his sense of noblesse oblige ran inward toward his family and outward to its future generations.
The terms of his will called for the core of his millions to be put in trust and its residual income to be divided equally, a portion paid to every lineal grandchild and great-grandchild, ad infinitum, on an annual basis throughout their lifetime. Henry and his younger brother, George Coe, were assigned as trustees, with Henry given final authority over the legal instrument. Under its terms, if one bloodline died out, the core would be divided among the surviving descendants. Having already guaranteed his children’s fortunes, it appeared that Henry Sr.’s singular desire was to wield financial authority over his family like royalty, ensuring the wealth of his blood heirs in perpetuity. His will stated, “Inasmuch as my sons have already received from me sufficient capital to make them independent during their lifetime, it is my wish that the principal of my estate should remain intact, without depletion or distribution for the benefit of my grand children and their families.”
Henry’s personal portfolio resembled an alphabet of American industry. On paper he owned millions in stocks, bonds, and, later, U.S. Treasury bills. Following his father’s death, he was entrusted to manage 9,100 shares of the Delaware & Western Lackawanna Railroad worth $455,000 (some $10.4 million today), making him the eleventh largest shareholder in the company, behind George Baker and William K. Vanderbilt. He also managed 1,975 shares of the Lackawanna Coal Co., worth $98,750 (about $2.3 million today). This was in addition to his own 1,850 shares in the two entities, worth $92,500 ($2.1 million today). This placed Henry in a golden circle of twenty-five men with controlling ownership of both the coal company and the railroad that it serviced. The money rained down on Henry Graves, Jr.
By the time Henry Sr. died, the chasm between Old Money and New Money had practically disappeared. There was just money. And a great deal of it at that. Marriages took place between America’s haute bourgeoisie and the established line of blue bloods. Old Money families rubbed up against the self-made, reshaping the contours of class and society. These mergers helped balance snobbery and cash but did little to recast the broader inequities. Between 1870 and 1900 the country’s wealth quadrupled. But the swell of riches did not spread very far, as 80 percent of Americans earned less than $500 a year, leaving the remainder of the country’s considerable wealth lining the very large pockets of a very small minority.
In New York City arrivistes stormed the gates of the upper echelons. Wealthy self-made midwesterners and highly successful immigrants arrived and multiplied, and just behind them a new middle class stirred. At the bottom of the pile, a great mass of humanity lived in the margins; poor immigrants who lived in fetid tenements and commuted uptown to serve the wealthy, the workers who labored on railroads and in coal mines, factories, and sweatshops, all for low wages and punishing hours, grew increasingly agitated.
Not that society noticed. The Diamond Horseshoe set demonstrated few reservations about their affluence amid the growing swells of want. The party glittered on. One sumptuous affair followed another, each requiring copious reserves of money. The same could not be said for taste. Mamie Fish, the infamous wife of the Illinois Central Railroad magnate Stuyvesant Fish, once threw a dinner party in honor of her dog; the canine arrived wearing a $15,000 diamond collar. The Chicago tycoon Cornelius Kingsley Garrison Billings put on a notorious dinner to celebrate the completion of his 25,000-square-foot stables. At forty years old the shameless eccentric had just retired and moved to Manhattan. For his soiree, held at Sherry’s on Fifth Avenue and Forty-fourth Street, imitation grass and dirt covered the ballroom floor and Billings’s thirty-six guests were served food and drink while mounted atop horses rented specifically for the event, by waiters dressed as hunting grooms. The celebrants ate from trays fastened to their saddles and drank champagne from special tubes attached to their saddlebags. The old guard was aghast at the display of unfettered vulgarity, while everybody else was just aghast.
Four months before their father’s death, Edward Hale Graves and his wife threw an “intimate” St. Valentine’s Day bal poudré for seventy in the ballroom of their Orange mansion on Scotland Road, decorated to resemble Louis XVI’s court at Versailles. The guests summoned their tailors and seamstresses to conjure up ornately adorned eighteenth-century costumes with white powdered wigs for thousands of dollars. Jean Graves wore a pale blue brocade gown with a white, flowered petticoat, blue ribbons suggestively braided into her full white wig. Edward wore an extravagant court costume in plum. When the clock struck half-past ten, Edward and Jean and seven other couples performed a choreographed minuet.
The public grew more resentful, troubled by the moguls’ wealth and power and by the duplicitous means by which many of these fortunes had been made. Many leaders also began to question the industrial order of America and its monopolistic practices, whereby the companies’ founders and top executives continued to enrich themselves while everybody else got poorer. Attempting to corral support for a political offensive to break the financial stranglehold of the few on the many, the lawyer and future Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis wrote in 1913, “They control the people through the people’s own money.”
Four months after the death of Henry Graves, Sr., President Theodore Roosevelt gave his State of the Union Address to Congress on December 3, 1906, and proposed the introduction of a federal inheritance tax. “The man of great wealth,” he asserted, “owes a peculiar obligation to the State because he derives special advantages from the mere existence of government.” Roosevelt reasoned that the government should “put a constantly increasing burden on the inheritance of those swollen fortunes which it is certainly of no benefit to this country to perpetuate.”
The plutocracy did not share this perspective and had little interest in parting with their vast fortunes, viewing any shift of the economic scales as an attack not just on their money but on the system they profited from greatly. Established plutocrats and those of more recent vintage were as ruthless in quelling dissent as they had been in amassing their riches. On September 17, 1913, nine thousand workers went on strike at John D. Rockefeller’s Colorado Fuel and Iron Company, sparking one of the most severe clashes between labor and capital in American history. The miners and their families had moved into a tent colony after being evicted from their company-owned houses. On April 20, 1914, state militia, company thugs, and guards opened fire on the camp during a fourteen-hour standoff that left nineteen people dead.
The tide of revulsion at America’s wealthy classes and their excesses reached a tipping point. In 1909 Congress passed the Sixteenth Amendment to the Constitution, allowing for the taxation of individual incomes; the states ratified it four years later, levying taxes on personal income above $3,000 (about $72,000 today). The public outrage directed at the “squillionaires,” the term that the art consultant and Renaissance historian Bernard Berenson coined somewhat derisively for the American industrial barons whose castles he helped hang with priceless Old Masters, won a battle if not the war on May 15, 1911. That was the day the Supreme Court upheld a lower court’s ruling that Standard Oil was an “unreasonable monopoly” under the Sherman Anti-trust Act and ordered its dissolution. The inheritance tax that Roosevelt had fought for, however, would not be enacted until 1916, eight years after he left office.
The hue and cry against the plutocrats helped spur an elitist drift to good works, unveiling an era when massive acts of wealthy exhibitionism turned to great philanthropic spectacles. The public face of conspicuous consumption became swept up in a tidal wave of conspicuous philanthropy. Parthenons of music, medicine, and literature were erected. John D. Rockefeller helped found the University of Chicago and the Rockefeller Foundation. Andrew Carnegie spent millions during the last years of his life establishing libraries and funding academia and the arts and sciences. In California, Henry E. Huntington announced the creation of a trust to make public his colossal private library, which held some of the finest precious manuscripts and first editions in the world along with his vast art collection. It also contained one of the most distinguished assemblies of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century British paintings outside of the United Kingdom, including Thomas Gainsborough’s Blue Boy.
Among the Graves brothers, it was George Coe who wore the title of philanthropist and made numerous significant gifts during his lifetime. He would donate the sixth largest organ in the world to the Grace Episcopal Church in Orange, New Jersey. After giving the Metropolitan Museum of Art thirty rare Old Master prints, including several by Rembrandt and Van Dyck, he was named one of the Museum’s benefactors. Later he emptied almost the entire contents of his Osterville estate into the Museum. His collection of furniture helped establish the Met’s American Wing.
Henry’s philanthropic dabbling equaled perhaps less than a year’s expenditures on his shaves. He gave unremarkable donations in the hundreds of dollars to organizations such as the American Red Cross. When a group of Irvington locals led by the composer Jennie Prince Black, the wife of the printing magnate Harry Van Deventer Black, attempted to erect a memorial for Washington Irving and was beset by delays and financial troubles, Henry did step up, donating a triangular wedge of land on his Irvington property for the effort. Eventually a bronze bust of Irving flanked by two of his most famous literary characters, Rip Van Winkle and King Boabdil, was constructed on a six-foot marble pedestal. Outside these rather small gestures Henry did not engage in the erection of grand institutions or the willing of personal artworks to them. He demonstrated little desire to see his private tastes become public property.
Four months after his father died, Henry dissolved Maxwell & Graves, which had propelled the family’s enormous fortune over the previous four decades. (Henry W. Maxwell had died in 1903.) Rather than take up his father’s seat on the New York Stock Exchange, he “transferred” it to America’s top-ranked male tennis champion, William A. Larned, for $80,000 (about $1.9 million today). The family kept the expansive Maxwell & Graves offices that managed a host of businesses in which they maintained a foothold. From 30 Broad Street Henry administered his father’s trust, running the family’s extensive network of assets, but mostly he occupied his time with collecting.