Camp Eagle Cove Memory

Another View of the Old Eagle Cove Dining Pavillion

Cabins at Eagle Cove

More Camp Eagle Cove Memories

Camp Eagle Cove Dining and Recreation Hall, Yesterday and Today

A Day at Camp Eagle Cove

Vanishing Adirondack Children's Camps

There is something paricularly special about having a children's summer camp in your town. In the summer, you see the canoe convoys pass by the dock, and hear the distant shouts and laughter of kids enjoying the Adirondacks.  You see the ski boat drive by, circling with the latest kid trying to get up for the first time.  We used to see these things and more when Camp Eagle Cove was operating in Inlet.  My mother worked as a lifeguard there many years ago and I once thought of attending camp there for a summer. After Eagle Cove closed, it became a camp for sick children, then an Adirondack campus of the Florida college, Lynn University.  After Lynn University closed the Adirondack Center, the property was sold to Dawn Timm and her husband, local realtors, for development.  Years later, not a single home has been built. The little cabins are rotting away and the massive dining hall is sagging; the whole place looks sad and depressed.  I wish that property could become a haven for artists, writers, musicians, students, like Yaddo, who need a place to work and to be inspired.  I wish we still had those kids sitting around the campfires telling stories and waterskiing by the dock.  In addition to the vanishing summer camps, I see over and over again the dreamers who come with their dream of owning a little Adirondack shop, their own business, and making it work.  It could be a good life and it is for some. But in Old Forge, I see these places open with all the excitement and optimistic verve in the world only to appear on the real estate website a year later -- for sale, motivated seller.  It is so difficult to run a business in the Adirondack Park, whether a summer camp or a gift shop, and I don't know what the right equation is to make a business succeed there. Few people seem to have figured it out.

Mother on Red Boat, Fourth Lake

After seeing the picture of me on the red boat I had to respond! That particular picture was taken by the professional photographer at Camp Eagle Cove. Al Edison was his name and he was a staff photographer at the Syracuse Herald Journal and Post Standard, and made extra money by freelance commissions. For years he was hired by Fayetteville-Manlius High School to take some of the group pictures for the yearbook, and I was one of the students assigned to work with him when I was in "Yearbook Club" at F-M. This particular picture was taken in either 1960 or 1961 the two years I worked at Eagle Cove. Because he knew Al and Dorothea, he would stop at Penwood for a drink and conversation as part of his photo shoot at Camp Eagle Cove. -- Margery Gordon Burstein