The Silver Lake Institute Historic District [†], located in the town of Castile in eastern Wyoming County, encompasses the historic core of the Silver Lake Institute, a small, summer resort community on the eastern shore of Silver Lake. The community's physical isolation from large urban areas and its scenic lakeside setting give the Silver Lake Institute a rural and secluded character. The approximately fifty-acre Silver Lake Institute is comprised of several hundred small-scale buildings, predominantly residential in use, on relatively small lots along narrow lanes. The historic and present focal point and geographic core of the community is Burt Park, a 2.03-acre, un-landscaped grassy open area lined with mature trees, shrubbery and rough foot paths. Burt Park is. the site of the original "grove" in which assemblies were held during the nineteenth century. Today, the tree-lined avenues of the community converge upon the park.
The Silver Lake Institute Historic District encompasses Burt Park and 72 additional properties, including 70 cottages (69 of which are contributing), two contributing institutional buildings and four contributing outbuildings, yielding a'total’ of 76 contributing components. (Buildings: 75; structures: 1.) The district was identified by means of a comprehensive survey completed in 1982 by Hershensohn and Reed Associates, a team of preservation planning consultants. Using earlier research by, Betty Craft of the Wyoming County Arts Council and Joan Maddison of the Silver Lake Institute, the consultants and members of the State Historic Preservation Office staff evaluated all resources in the study area against the National Register criteria and concluded that one district and two individual properties were worthy of Inclusion on the State and National Registers of Historic Places. At this time, only the district is being nominated. If and when sufficient documentation becomes available to substantiate the significance of the two individual properties beyond the district boundaries, they will be nominated. They are Epworth Hall, one of three extant institutional buildings associated with Silver Lake Institute, and Building #74, a vernacular. Queen Anne style cottage. (Epworth Hall’ is located on the east side of Perry Avenue, southeast of the historic district, and Building #74 is located at the east end of Hamline Avenue, also southeast of the district.)
The district boundary is drawn to Include sections of Wesley, Embury, Fillmore, Genesee, Lakeview Park, Parker, Lakeside, Carlton, Perry, Ames, Thompson and Janes Avenues which encircle all but the north side of Burt Park. The properties on the south side of Wesley Avenue determine the northern boundary of the district. The properties on the north side of Wesley Avenue have been excluded due to extensive alterations. Properties along the north side of Embury Avenue opposite Burt Park have also been excluded from the district due to extensive alterations. East of Burt Park, a small enclave defined by Janes Avenue and properties on the west side of Thompson Avenue is included in the district; extensively altered older buildings on the east side of Thompson Avenue have been excluded. Opposite Burt Park to the south, a small collection of buildings along Ames, Perry and the east end of Genesee Avenues is included, beyond which are heavily altered older cottages. The southwesternmost section of the district includes properties on the east side of Lakeview Avenue and the west side of Lakeside Avenue. The western boundary is determined by the property lines of the buildings overlooking the lake across Lakeview Avenue. The strip of land between Lakeview Avenue and the lake's edge has been excluded from the district as it contains a variety of modern and extensively altered older boathouses which do not contribute to the significance of the district.
The historic building stock of the district consists of buildings dating from three distinct phases of the Institute's development. Most were built between 1873 and 1930. In general, they are relatively small-scale, modest but finely crafted buildings executed in wood. The buildings of each phase are generally clustered together and are characterized by a variety of distinctive visual qualities, including size, siting and stylistic features. Properties surrounding Burt Park and along the blocks defined by Embury, Fillmore, Genesee, Park and Lakeview Avenues (bounded on the east by Burt Park and on the west by Silver Lake) contain the greatest concentration of cottages built during the first decade of the camp's development, between 1873 and 1885. Diminutive cottages on small, regular lots characterize this neighborhood which was the original fifteen-acre lot of the Institute. Cottages in this enclave are one and one-half to two-story, two- to three-bay frame buildings with rectangular plans and gable ends facing the street. Many are characterized by features of the Gothic Revival style, including exaggerated verticality and picturesque decorative details. Many have one-story kitchen wings extending from their rear elevations. The most prominent feature of these cottages tends to be a one- or two-story front porch, sometimes extending around one side to form a wrap-around verandah. The second-story porches were usually sleeping porches recessed under the projecting gables, although in some instances the porches have flat or shed roofs extending out from under the gable ends. Decorative features found on these cottages typically appear in the gable ends and in the rails and friezes of the porches. These details often include scroll brackets, curvilinear braces, turned posts and spindle friezes, chamfered posts, saw-tooth trim, latticed woodwork. Jig-sawn woodwork and diagonal or vertical flush siding in the gable ends. A common form of siding found on the cottages is flush vertical boarding.
The Silver Lake Institute Historic District is historically significant for its association with the Silver Lake Institute, a Methodist affiliated camp facility, established in 1873, as well as for distinctive design qualities reflecting late nineteenth and early twentieth century seasonal homes for middle class Americans. Together these properties reflect the development of Silver Lake Institute from a Methodist Revivalist summer camp in the 1870s and 1880s, to a cultural, educational and religious summer institute in the Chautauqua Institution tradition during the late 1880s and the 1890s, and finally to a secular summer cottage community of the early twentieth century.
Silver Lake Institute, called Camp Wesley when it was founded, was one of the only four permanently established Methodist campgrounds in upstate New York, the others being Round Lake in Saratoga County, established in 1869, Chautauqua Institution in Chautauqua County, established in 1874, and Thousand Island Park in Jefferson County, established in 1875. Silver Lake Institute is also historically significant for the role it played in the Chautauqua movement during the late nineteenth century. At the height of its activity in the 1890s, Silver Lake Institute's Chautauqua program was said to be second only to that of the Chautauqua Institute itself. Architecturally, the residential structures included in the historic district are representative of rather modest and inexpensive middle-class seasonal homes, built during a period of time coinciding approximately with Silver Lake Institute's first fifty years of growth and development. Residences built during the camp's first ten to fifteen years are significant as examples of seasonal residences desii^ned in the Picturesque" Gothic Revival and Carpenter Gothic style Some of these early cottages recall designs by Andrew Jackson Downing and other popularizers of the Picturesque Gothic style. Although similar in design, plan, and scale to earlier cottages, those built during the late 1880s and the 1890s in Silver Lake Institute are distinguished by their use of Queen Anne and Eastlake style decorative motifs. The most prominent features of a majority of these summer cottages built between 1873 and 1900 are their vertical orientation, picturesque massing, one or two-story porches, and their decorative embellishment on principal facades. A few cottages also reflect the influence of the Colonial Revival style in massing, use of materials, and detailing. A number of cottages dating from the early twentieth century reflect the influence of bungalow-type designs on seasonal residences of the period, displaying the characteristic broad gable roofs with ridges parallel to the street, shed roof dormers, and recessed porches.
Burt Park was the original "grove” in which camp meetings were held during the nineteenth century. Today, the park continues to provide both a visual and social focus for the community. Two buildings included in the district represent major institutional structures built at the institute during its height of prosperity in the 1890s. These are two of the three surviving institutional structures of Silver Lake Institute. They are: John H. Stoody Memorial Hall (1892) and the Hoag Memorial Art Gallery (1895) . (Epworth Hall (1892), lies outside of the district boundaries; when sufficient information substantiating its significance becomes available, it will be nominated to the National Register.) Stoody Hall and the Hoag Memorial Gallery, both prominent local landmarks, were the common areas where residents gathered for a variety of social, educational and religious activities which drew the community together for self betterment and spiritual uplifting.
Silver Lake Institute is historically significant as a representative example of a permanent, annual camp meeting in the evangelical Protestant tradition. The history of Methodist-affiliated camp meetings in New York in the late nineteenth century begins with the "Great Awakening" a religious movement in the 1760s and 1770s during which Protestant churches in America were experiencing an unprecedented period of spiritual revivalism. The Great Awakening marked the beginning of a one-hundred-year period during which evangelical revivalism, in a variety of forms and intensity in all regions of the country, would determine the development of Protestantism, particularly Methodism, in America.
The Great Awakening affected all denominations in most areas of post-Revolutionary War America, but nowhere was it so evident as in the south, particularly Maryland and Virginia, among members of the Methodist denomination. Methodism, introduced in America in 1767 by the followers of John Wesley was, from its beginning in England in the 1720s, a revivalistic religion popular among common, working and middle-class people. As in England, Methodism in America was characterized by open-air gatherings, or "revivals," featuring revivalistic preaching and prayer meetings as a means of converting sinners.
† Claire Ross. Field Representative, New York Division for Historic Preservation, Silver Lake Institute Historic District, nomination document, 1985, National Register of Historic Places, Washington, D.C.
Street Names
Hamline Avenue • Main Street North • Perry Avenue