A few weeks ago, I received an email from someone in Vermont whose family had owned the property that was Marcia Noyes' Camp Seyon (Noyes in reverse) on Lake George.
Marcia ran a summer camp for girls for a number of years, finally selling the property in the 1930s. We have old advertisements for the camp, recruiting both counselors and campers.
At first, the only building housed the kitchen with its huge, wood burning, cast iron stove and the great room with floor to ceiling book shelves, used principally as a dining hall for the girl's camp that had existed there since the turn of the century.
From an article about the property I found online:
The girls slept on narrow, World War I army cots in large canvas tents rigged on wooden platforms. Marcia Noyes (Seyon is Noyes spelled backward), who ran the camp, was an internationally known medical librarian at
Johns Hopkins Universitythe Medical & Chirurgical Faculty of Maryland.
Johns HopkinsThe Faculty provided her a penthouse apartment in Maryland and the Medical Librarians Association still gives out a yearly award in her honor. But Miss Noyes' summers were dedicated to the camp and her girls. Marcia had the Main House floated down from an island in the Narrows on a barge as the Camp was, then, a virtual island. A boggy path led across the isthmus to the peninsula but vehicles were left on the mainland.
After she sold the Camp, it seemed to remain in one family for several generations. When they finally sold it in the early 2000s, they kept a lot of things from the property. Among the items were some pieces from the Camp Seyon years.
As one of the descendants was going through the papers, etc. he realized that they should be with Marcia's documents at MedChi, and not with the family, so he kindly sent them to us!
There were numerous ink printings of various ferns from the property, along with the scientific names and descriptions, all in Marcia's handwriting.
Here are some more pieces which were in the box.
Hello Meg, Was there no end to Marcia's talents? Now a summer camp, and with her beautiful drawings and nature prints miraculously surviving. My only reservation is its location on Lake George, as a number of the summer colonies there were restricted (in the bad sense of the word), especially those connected in any way with the horrible Melvin Dewey, whom Marcia might have known through her library work.
ReplyDelete--Jim
Hers was a camp for girls, so in a sense it was restricted! But I get what you mean, and she probably had met the odious Mr. Dewey.
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