Briarcliff Manor and the Girl Scouts Movement, Part 2: Camp Andrée - Notebook 2025-2

 
 

INTRODUCTION

This is the second part of a series of notebooks on “Briarcliff Manor and the Girl Scouts Movement” (For the first part see: “Briarcliff Manor and the Girl Scouts Movement, Part 1: Josephine Dodge Daskam Bacon - Notebook 2024-7”. Published in July, 2024”).  While we had heard about “Camp Andrée” we didn’t really know much about it. 

An early discovery surprised us.  We had always assumed that the better known “Camp Edith Macy” (now the Edith Macy Conference Center) pre-dated Camp Andrée.  It turned out that this was not the case.  Camp Andrée (1920) is five years older than Camp Edith Macy (1925).

After some research the amazing story of William Andrews Clark, his older daughter Andrée, and younger daughter Huguette emerged.

William Andrews Clark

 
 

Willam Clark was born in 1839. He spent a brief period as a rural school teacher and an even briefer period as a soldier in Civil War Missouri (It’s not known for which side he fought).  In the early 1860s he headed west seeking his fortune in gold mining.

He was among the most powerful, influential, and ruthless of the 19th century American robber barons (although he was far from the worst of them). Today, however, he is virtually unknown and there has been no effort to document his life (e.g. no biography seems to exist).

Clark’s peers included John D. Rockefeller, J.P. Morgan, and Andrew Carnegie.  Like them Clark was one of the wealthiest men in the county.  Inevitably, as his wealth and power grew, he made many enemies. Perhaps most famously, Mark Twain, in a 1907 essay described him as follows:

[W]hile I am willing to waive moral rank and associate with the moderately criminal among the Senators,” said Twain, “I have to draw the line at Clark of Montana. He is said to have bought legislatures and judges as other men buy food and raiment. By his example he has so excused and so sweetened corruption that in Montana it no longer has an offensive smell. His history is known to everybody; he is as rotten a human being as can be found anywhere under the flag; he is a shame to the American nation, and no one has helped to send him to the Senate who did not know that his proper place was the penitentiary, with a chain and ball on his legs. 1

It should perhaps be pointed out, however, that Twain was a close friend of Clark's rival, Henry H. Rogers, an organizer of the Amalgamated Copper Mining Company, and may have had ulterior motives for saying what he did.

Clark was certainly incredibly rich. When he died in 1925 his fortune was calculated to be over $200 million (roughly $31 million today). Unlike his contemporaries he never created a corporation and was not a philanthropist. Eventually he built a financial empire that covered the nation and employed thousands.  He was incredibly ambitious, and it seemed that everything he touched succeeded.

Eventually Clark would amass a huge fortune, complete with a priceless European art collection and the most expensive monstrosity of a 5th Avenue Gilded-Age mansion the bluebloods of New York City high society had ever seen. Situated directly across from Central Park, it was demolished in 1927. Still today architectural historians consider the mansion, as the most expensive private home ever constructed in New York City.

 
 

His ambition also led him to seek public office. From 1888 until 1900, he failed in four separate, bitterly contested campaigns to win a US Senate seat from Montana, incurring both the enmity and the weird fascination of an American public who seemed fascinated his actions, many of which were questionable.  

In 1889 he became president of the 1889 Montana constitutional convention where was involved in laying the legal basis for corporate and political abuses (e.g. by the Anaconda Company).  His money and influence made sure that the state capital became Helena.  He built the first railroad from Salt Lake City to Los Angeles and transformed a small watering stop into what eventually became Las Vegas.

However, trouble was brewing.  In 1899 he bribed the entire Montana legislature in order to realize his dream of becoming a US Senator.  The backlash against this contributed much to the passage of the 17th Amendment. After this scandal he was forced, under pressure, to resign, but was subsequently re-elected and served a full term.

At various points in his career Clark was a farmer, a teacher, a soldier, a prospector, a wood-cutter, a teamster, a cattle driver, a grocer, a mining engineer, a banker, a real estate tycoon, a railroad magnate, and the developer of the southern California sugar beet industry and he was successful in all of them.

Clark was married twice. His first marriage was to Katherine Louise "Kate" Stauffer in 1869 until her death in 1893.

Together, they had seven children, including Charles Walker Clark and William Andrews Clark Jr.

After Kate's death in 1893, William married his second wife, a woman who had been his teenage ward, Anna Eugenia La Chapelle (March 10, 1878, Michigan – October 11, 1963, New York). They claimed to have been married in 1901 in France. Anna was 23 and William was 62. They had two children:

Louise Amelia Andrée Clark

So finally, we get to the reason Camp Andrée Clark is so named i.e. after his daughter Louise Amelia Andrée Clark.

But how did this come about?

At age sixteen Andrée had grown moody and tempestuous, which is to say she was a teenager.  She also had a physical ailment, a bad back and was taking exercises at home with a gym teacher, Alma Guy, who saw that the elder daughter needed more physical therapy.  Andrée needed to have some time out of the smothering atmosphere of the Clark home.

Andrée was “shy and timid and afraid to call here her soul her own,” Miss Guy recalled.  “Her parents were so occupied with other things that they really did not know what was happening to their daughter in the hands of maids and governesses.  Andrée was never allowed to do anything for herself”.

Miss Guy pressed for Andrée to be allowed to join some activity outside the home, an outlet for self-expression.  She suggested the Girl Scouts, a group that had formed in 1912 and was flourishing during World War I.  At first Anna wasn’t sure this was a proper activity, saying that it sounded “too democratic for the daughter of a Senator”, but finally she relented.

And so, in the winter of 1918-19, after the armistice was signed, Andrée joined Sun Flower Troop, which drew its recruits from the wealthy homes of Manhattan

But tragedy was to follow.

The summer before Andrée’s seventeenth birthday, in July and August 1919, she and Huguette took an outdoors trip with their mother, travelling north to a fishing Club in Quebec, not far from the hometown of Anna’s parents, and then to a resort area in the Maine woods near the Canadian border.  Hotels and primitive camps lined Maine’s Rangely Lakes, below Saddleback Mountain, a few years before the area became well known to hikers on the new Appalachian Trail.

On the trip, Andrée fell ill, first with a simple fever, which quickly grew worse and was accompanied by a severe headache.  Anna and the girls were two days’ travel from home, far from the quarantine suite in the tower at 962 Fifth Avenue.  Their father’s personal physician, William Gordo Lyle, rushed up from New York to assist the local doctor.  For four days, Andrée lay ill at a house on Rangely Plantation, on the south side of the lake, with Anna and Huguette by her side.

The doctor found that Andrée’s ailment was “probably tubercula meningitis,” a devastating inflammation of the membranes covering the brain and spinal cord.  It would be twenty years before penicillin would be reported as effective in treating meningitis. On August 7, 1919. Louise Amelia Andrée Clarke, the firstborn child of Anna and W.A., and the older sister of Huguette died a week before her seventeenth birthday.

The connection with the Girls Scouts movement came about because of what the Clark’s found after Andrées death:

After the funeral, W.A. and Anna discovered Andrée’s diary, which revealed that their older daughter had had an unhappy childhood, more desperately unhappy than they had suspected. She’d had great difficulty making the transition from France to America.  Her father told a friend how devastated he was by reading it. 

The diary brightened, however, when Andrée wrote about the Tuesday Girl Scout meetings.  She told of the camaraderie of hiking with the girls and of the uplifting effect of being allowed to do a task however she decided to be best. She included a folded manuscript of a story she had written, “The Four Little Flowers,” with characters from Sun Flower Troop.

“Scouting has been a hand in the dark to me,” she wrote, “It has changed me from a moody, thoughtless girl, and has shown me what life may be. 2.

Her family sought solace in making a contribution to the Girl Scouts.  The Clarks knew an area around Scarsdale, north of the city, where they often spent weekends with W. A’s daughter Katherine in her twenty-one-room manor house.  Looking for a proper memorial, Anna and W.A. helped to scour the countryside for just the right spot.  In 1919, they donated 135 acres in the village of Briarcliff Manor, where primitive land with a brook and small lake became the first national Girl Scout Camp, called camp Andrée Clark.

W.A Clark died March 2, 1925 aged 86, his wife Anna on October 11, 1963.  The entire family is buried in the family mausoleum in Woodlawn Cemetery, Bronx, NY.

Huguette Marcelle Clark

You might, perhaps, be wondering what happened to Andrée’s younger sister, Huguette. Well, her story is even more incredible than either her father’s or her sister’s.  But it’s far too long to get into here.  Books could be written about it and, indeed, one very good one has been: Empty Mansions. The Mysterious Life of Huguette Clark and the Spending of a Great American Fortune by Pulitzer Prize winning author Willam Deadman and Paul Clark Newell (a relative of William, Andrée and Huguette Clark). This book also contains a lot of information about her father, W.A. Clark.

If you don’t feel like wading through the book, the author has an excellent website with lots of information and many pictures.  Not surprisingly it’s called Empty Mansions.

Camp Andrée Today

 
 

Camp Andrée Clark still exists. It is operated by the Girl Scouts Council of Greater New York, and has 140 acres (0.57 km2) used by 1,000 Girl Scouts each year.  It’s now part of the Edith Macy Conference Center.  Facilities at Camp Andrée Clark are for use by Girl Scout groups only, unlike the other facilities at the Macy complex. There are two winterized cabins, The Lin House and The Friedsam House for groups to stay in. There is a picnic area, hiking trails and a small lake called Kinderaugen (German: children's eyes), which was named for the laughing blue eyes of children.

The BMSHS visited Camp Andrée in November 2023.  For pictures showing how the camp looks today see below (click on a thumbnail to see a larger image):

Karen Smith