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Philosophers Camp at Follensbee Pond - Adirondacks
Ralph Waldo Emerson, in the summer of 1858, would venture into the great wilderness of upstate New York.

Joining him were nine of the most illustrious intellectuals ever to camp out in the Adirondacks to connect with nature.

The party consisted of Louis Agassiz, James Russell Lowell, John Holmes, Horatio Woodman, Ebenezer Rockwell Hoar, Jeffries Wyman, Estes Howe, Amos Binney, William James Stillman and Emerson. Invited, but unable to make the trip for diverse reasons, were: Oliver Wendell Holmes, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Charles Eliot Norton, all members of the Saturday Club (Boston, Massachusetts).

This social club was mostly a literary membership that met the last Saturday of the month at the Boston Parker House Hotel (Omni Parker House). William James Stillman was a painter and founding editor of an art journal called the Crayon. Stillman was born and grew up in Schenectady which was just south of the Adirondack mountains. He would later travel there to paint the wildness landscape and to fish and hunt. He would share his experiences in this wilderness to the members of the Saturday Club, raising their interest in this unknown region.

Robert Lowell and William Stillman would lead the effort to organize a trip to the Adirondacks. They would begin their journey on August 2, 1858, traveling by train, steam boat, stagecoach and canoe guide boats. News that these cultured men were living like “Sacs and Sioux” in the wilderness appeared in newspapers across the nation. This would become known as the "Philosophers Camp "

This event was a landmark in the 19th-century intellectual movement, linking nature with art and literature.

Curiously, it has been largely ignored by scholars. Ralph Waldo Emerson’s most quoted sentence of all his monumental corpus was “In the wilderness, I find something more dear and connate than in streets and villages”. This camping trip in the Adirondacks brought him face to face with genuinely raw, uncultivated wilderness. This event barely appears in the many books and articles about his life. Yet his epic poem “Adirondac “ reads like a journal of his day to day detailed description of his adventures in the wilderness with his fellow members of the Saturday Club.