INSIDE CLARENCE THOMAS'S SECRET ADIRONDACK SUMMERS WITH A REPUBLICAN MEGA-DONOR BILLIONAIRE
THE FREE LANCE ASKED LOCAL ADIRONDACK RESIDENTS WHAT THEY KNEW ABOUT SUPREME COURT JUSTICE CLARENCE THOMAS’S SUMMER VACATIONS WITH REPUBLICAN ACTIVIST AND MEGA-DONOR HARLAN CROW AT CROW’S SECRET MULTI-MILLION DOLLAR WILDERNESS RESORT. WHAT THEY SAID OFFERS A WINDOW INTO A CENTURY-OLD BUT LITTLE KNOWN HIDEAWAY OF THE SUPER-WEALTHY
Gated entrance to Topridge, multi-million dollar Adirondack “Great Camp” where Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas has spent more than 20 summers without reporting it as a gift under federal judicial ethics rules. Photo Credit: JB Nicholas.
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Clarence Thomas once portrayed himself a "regular" American whose idea of a good vacation was camping in RV parks. The lonest-serving, Conservative Supreme Court justice also spent his vacations sailing on a superyacht belonging to billionaire Republican political activist and donor Harlan Crow, jetting around the world on Crow's private Bombardier Global 5000 long-range plane and more than 20 summers "keeping company with Crow's powerful friends at the billionaire's private resort," according to ProPublica.
“I prefer the RV parks. I prefer the Walmart parking lots to the beaches and things like that. There’s something normal to me about it,” Thomas said. “I come from regular stock. And I prefer that-I prefer being around that.”
But there's nothing "regular" about the elite resort where Thomas spent more than 20 summers. It's called Topridge and it rises beside Upper St. Regis Lake in the Adirondack mountains of upstate New York. Topridge is a classic Adirondack "Great Camp." It's equipped with more than 25 fireplaces, three boathouses, guest houses and an assortment of other outbuildings and recreation facilities including a clay tennis court and batting cage.
Great Camps like Topridge were first built in the Adirondacks by Gilded Age Robber Barons. J.P. Morgan, “the Webbs, Hookers, Vanderbilts, Whitneys, Rockefellors, Harrimans, Lewisohns, and Seligmans built camps in isolated locales surrounded by hundreds of acres. Owners would visit for a few months, weeks, or sometimes only a few days,” writes Harvey H. Kaiser in Great Camps of the Adirondacks, 1982.
Sigmund Freud, Father of Psychoanalysis, visited a Great Camp owned by James Jackson Putnam, a Harvard University neurologist. Freud wrote a breathless letter to his family reporting “Of all the things I have experienced in America, this is by far the most amazing,” September 16, 1909. It was not “only the ‘utter wildness of the American landscape’ that impressed Freud, but the architecture of the camp,” Clive Aslet observed in The American Country House, 2004.
Freud detailed what he saw in another letter to his family.
Imagine a camp in a forest wilderness .... Stones, moss, groups of trees, uneven ground which, on three sides, runs into thickly wooded hills. On this land, a group of roughly hewn small log cabins, each one, as we discover, with a name. One of them is called the Stoop and is the parlor, where there is a library, a piano, writing desks and cardtables. Another, the ‘Hall of Knights,’ with amusing old objects, has a fireplace in the center and benches along the walls, like a peasant dining room; the others are living quarters. Ours with only three rooms is called Chatterbox. Everything is left very rough and primitive but it comes off.
Today, 35 Great Camps survive, according to the Adirondack Architectural Heritage, a nonprofit historic preservation organization formed in 1990.
Topridge is one of them.
Signage for the small airport where Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas flew on Conservative activism and megadonor Harlan Crow’s jet to stay at Crow’s secret luxury resort in the Adirondack mountains. Photo Credit: JB Nicholas.
Thomas' trips there started with a flight on Crow's jet to the Adirondack Regional Airport. There, he would have been met by a luxury vehicle-likely a black SUV-and chauffeured the 15-or-so miles to the private, gated resort.
Denis Jacobs, former Staten Islander, lives along the road between the airport and Topridge.
"They fly in," Jacobs said. "You can't see them. You see black SUVs or half-million dollar cars. These guys going to their 'camps.’” The Point, a nearby lakeside resort where rooms start at $2,250 per night, uses "a fleet of Mercedes SUVs" to transport patrons there from the airport.
The super-wealthy start flying in when schools get out for summer. While they're there, they don't leave their compounds even "to go the stores. They use Instacart,” Jacobs added.
Jodie Wells, 41, is one of the locals who makes money on Instacart delivering things to wealthy camps in the summer. She says that, usually, "you can't get anywhere near their property. You can't see their places.”
She's lived in the Adirondacks her entire life and never seen the inside of a Great Camp like the one Thomas stays in at Topridge. Her life, and her childrens' lives, are "much different" from Thomas's.
For example, home heating fuel was too expensive to buy this winter so instead of ordering a delivery from a fuel company she went to a gas station, filled a fuel can with diesel fuel, and used that to heat her home. Still she was lucky this past winter because it was minus-20 degrees for only a couple weeks. Last year it was minus-20 for two months, she said.
Last summer, Wells delivered groceries and she was asked to help carry them inside a private boat house belonging to one of her wealthy clients who lived on an island in the middle of a remote lake. The only way to the compound was by boat. That's how groceries were delivered. The boathouse was constructed in the same Great Camp style as the main compound.
"For the first time in my life, I got let in a private boat dock," Wells said. "I thought it was so cool."
Still, she said, generally speaking, "You do get that vibe that they think they're better than you. It's also a surprise how little these people tip.”
When it came to Thomas and the allegations of ethical impropriety, "obviously there's something going on with that."
"We'll never get a vacation like he goes on," Wells said.
Her youngest daughter looked and listened to our conversation. She understood what we were talking about. She looked me directly in the eyes and said "We go camping. In a tent."
Paul Smith’s college is between the airport and Crow’s resort. One student says there’s “no interaction at all” between the area’s wealthy summer residents and locals. Photo Credit: JB Nicholas.
Michael Soto is from Miami but studies at and plays basketball for Paul Smith's college, also on the road to Crow's log cabin mega-mansion. The 22-year-old said there appeared to be little if any interaction between the area's well-heeled visitors and locals.
"As far as I can tell, there's no give back to the community. There's no interaction at all. It would be nice to get some help for athletic programs."
Thomas isn't the only political powerbroker to treat the Adirondacks like a playground, then ignore it.
Judy, 50, lives in the Birch Park trailer park next to the airport. She never saw Justice Thomas but remembers seeing former President Barack Obama's motorcade when he flew in to fish for two days in 2018.
"When the president came here we saw so many black SUVs you know something was up," Judy said. "You couldn't see him because they tarped the fencing" surrounding the airport.
Obama stayed at what the Albany Times Union said was "his friend's spot in the North Country." The report did not name the friend, but Obama's fishing guide said Obama didn't stay with him because "He definitely had a nicer place to stay."
Besides Justice Thomas, former president Bill Clinton also visited the Adirondacks, repeatedly. He even visited Topridge, before it was owned by Crow. When Clinton visited Topridge, it was owned by a hotdog kingpin from New Jersey. Crow, Thomas's benefactor, purchased it in 1994.
"Clinton and his whole family showed up here one summer," Anita Stemp, 73, said. "Them and all their limos.”
Stemp is a lifelong resident who lives on a different lake in the area.
"Caretakers and hired hands" are the only locals who get to see the billionaire's compounds. "We resent the summer people, frankly, as residents here. We wish they would leave."
The area around Topridge is wildly beautiful wilderness. Here St. Regis mountain. Photo Credit: JB Nicholas.
Despite its wild setting, one hiker just returned to a trailhead after sumitting nearby St. Regis mountain on Sunday questioned whether Topridge's well-heeled visitors really appreciated nature or whether they were just posing.
"I wonder how into nature they are," Mary Kimmel, 64, said. "Pretend you're Roosevelt for a week?"
Kimmel was referring to Theodore Roosevelt. The 26th president and founder of the National Park System visited the Adirondacks frequently. Famously , he was summoned to the presidency from there after President William McKinney's assassination in 1901.
But another local resident, Andrew Debuque, 62, said the original owner of Topridge, the founder of General Foods, Marjorie Merriweather Post, took care of local residents with well-paying jobs and housing.
"Lady Post treated people good," he said.
Debuque also pointed to multiple Grammy-award winning singer-songwriter country music legend Shania Twain. She owned a Great Camp but regularly partied at a local bar in St. Regis Falls.
"Shania was in Riverside all the time," Dubuque recalled.
Twain donated to the local school, the volunteer fire department, invited neighbors to hang out with her while she rehearsed for concerts and tours and gave away free passes to her show at the Olympic Center in Lake Placid, the Adirondack Explorer reported. Twain put the place up for sale in 1998 and moved to Switerland-for even more privacy.
When it came to the allegations of ethical violations against Thomas, Debuque, the 62-year-old life-long Adirondacker, said "They should put them all in jail because they all do it."
The Supreme Court's Public Information Office released a statement from Justice Thomas responding to the allegations on Friday.
Thomas admitted the Crows "are among our dearest friends, and we have been friends for over twenty-five years. As friends do, we have joined them on a number of family trips during the more than quarter century we have known them."
Going forward, "it is, of course, my intent to follow this guidance in the future."
ADK Riverside bar in St. Regis Falls, New York. Home away from home for country music legend Shania Twain when she stayed at her Adirondack great camp. Photo Credit: JB Nicholas.
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