At last, through the thick foliage, I caught sight of two sturdy stone gate posts, and, with a cry of delight, I realized we were there. Beyond the gate posts ran a very narrow road, almost a path. The branches of the trees brushed the roof of the car. Only spots of sunlight penetrated through the trees; all was dim, and the air smelt of the damp woodland, smelt of rotting wood and cool swampy places covered with moss and inhabited by frogs and polliwogs. This thick growth lasted for only a few turns, and then suddenly a meadow burst into sight, and, beyond the meadow, clear blue sparkling water — the lake.
When Mary Griggs Burke died near the end of 2012, the bequest of her vast collection of Japanese art to the Minneapolis Institute of Art and New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art sparked considerable excitement. Less well-publicized was her gift of Forest Lodge, an 872-acre estate on the shores of Lake Namakagon in northern Wisconsin, to the Chequamegon-Nicolet National Forest.
Although Burke actually arranged the transfer several years earlier, she had retained a life estate to her family’s compound at the heart of the property. This summer, after painstaking restoration, the historic lakeshore retreat finds new life as an environmental and cultural center, with Northland College offering programs for high schoolers and adults. It will also serve as a research station and conference facility for the institution’s new Mary Griggs Burke Center for Freshwater Innovation, established last year with an endowment from the Burke estate’s foundation. “This is going to be one of the places where human beings come to terms with how they’re going to live together on the face of the earth,” says Jason Maloney, who has managed the ongoing restoration for the U.S. Forest Service.
Occupying the site of a former logging camp, Forest Lodge started humbly as a two-room log cabin on a 100-acre parcel that Burke’s grandfather, Crawford Livingston, bought from the North Wisconsin Lumber Company in 1902. The successful St. Paul businessman, who made his fortune in railroads and other ventures, rebuilt and expanded the structure before giving it to his daughter, Mary, in 1916 following her marriage to Theodore W. Griggs, the scion of another prominent St. Paul family.
That same year, the Griggs’ own daughter, also named Mary, was born prematurely. As a young girl, she was carried up and down the stairs of the family’s imposing Italianate villa on Summit Avenue per her mother’s request. An only child who was tutored at home by her mother’s secretary until finally enrolling at the Summit School for third grade, she spent a lot of time alone. But what Mary lacked in companionship she made up for with imagination. And Forest Lodge, which she “loved more than any other place on earth,” she would later write, proved to be fertile ground for her flights of fancy.
“The forest offered the most wonderful places to play that any child could possibly imagine,” Burke wrote. “The games which could be invented were unending. Old rotting logs, lying end to end as they had been left from the lumber camp, might be anything from a train of railway cars to the rooms of an enormous fairy palace. One tree, burned by a forest fire so that it resembled the grim gray walls of a medieval tower, was a particularly good setting for a fairy princess shut up by a cruel giant, or even for the balcony scene from Romeo and Juliet. Another tree, still standing but hollow inside, was known to me as the secret tower, for when I was hidden inside, my nurse could never find me, and when I leaped out at her with an awful roar, she was always tremendously frightened.”
One summer, Burke’s mother invited Girl Scouts from the nearby town of Cable to Forest Lodge to take part in an outdoor staging of Hansel and Gretel. She created sets for the production and filmed it with her movie camera. “I was the old witch,” she later recounted.
Burke’s father, who helped run his family’s food processing and distribution business, would join the family at Forest Lodge on weekends when he could, traveling by train to Cable, where a caretaker would pick him up in a Model T Ford. Burke relished the precious time her father spent with her, clearing trails through the woods, and later with school friends she brought to the cabin. “My father was wonderful with them,” she noted.
Water Works
Creating a Camp David for the environment.
Last year, Northland College announced it had received a $10-million endowment from Mary Griggs Burke’s family foundation to create a freshwater center that would have two homes: the college’s campus near Lake Superior in Ashland, Wisconsin, and Forest Lodge, the family’s historic retreat on Lake Namakagon. The Mary Griggs Burke Center for Freshwater Innovation is unusual not only for having footprints in two of the continent’s major watersheds — the Great Lakes and Mississippi River basins — but also for combining scientific research with a communications and public-policy focus.
Randy Lehr, the center’s co-director in charge of its research initiatives, says that scientists often fail to consider how their findings will be communicated to an audience outside the walls of their institutions. That’s a big question that the center will address, he explains: “How do you meaningfully take science and integrate it into our lives — the way we make decisions politically and the way individuals make decisions?”
“As we leave the century of oil and enter the century of water, water literacy among the general public and policymakers needs to increase,” says Peter Annin, the center’s other co-director and a former environmental journalist. “By marrying science and communications, we can help increase that water literacy, whether it’s about climate-change issues, water-quality issues or water-quantity issues.”
One way that the center plans to shape public policy is to use Forest Lodge as “a Camp David–like retreat for people who have expertise in water issues,” says Annin. This fall, the center will host the first of what is hoped to be an annual event: a weekend-long summit that will, after an opening-night panel discussion at the college, bring leading water experts together for an overnight retreat at Forest Lodge.
Annin hopes the gathering facilitates a conversation “that helps forward the ball” on water issues. “Forest Lodge is a really great place for those kinds of conversations,” he says. “It’s an inspirational place.”
“He was very amusing and knew how to entertain children. He was full of jokes and funny songs.”
Summer days were spent playing tennis and badminton, swimming and sailing, and canoeing down the Namekagon River. When Burke and her friends were old enough to drive, they tooled around in a small Austin, tipping it a couple times and even driving it into the lake. For dinner, usually served at a long dining table set for 12, everyone would change into their evening finery. Afterward, family and friends would gather in the living room for charades and other games.
In the late 1920s, Burke’s parents built most of the charmingly rustic vertical log structures still standing today at Forest Lodge, including a guesthouse with a soaring great room; a sizable boathouse, which later acquired an upper level offering a panoramic view of the lake; and the Cow Palace, which eventually served as a dairy barn for a small herd of Brown Swiss cows that supplied the family with fresh milk. They also acquired considerably more land, including the point across the water from the original property.
Burke inherited Forest Lodge from her mother in 1943. Although she and her husband, Jackson Burke, resided mostly in New York City, where they bought an apartment next to their own to display her expansive art collection, she made yearly trips back to her favorite place on the planet for the rest of her life.
