If the average Eastern Shore resident has only one memory of the Wye Woods Conference Center these days, and that’s a big “if,” it would be October of 1998 when Bill Clinton, Benjamin Netanyahu, and Yasser Arafat spent four days there to produce the “Wye River Memorandum” on West Bank and the Gaza Strip settlement issues. While that international moment was a remarkable high point for its current owner, the Aspen Institute, it was not the first time Wye Woods has made history.
In fact, since 1965, when Arthur Houghton, chairman of the Wye Institute, commissioned Edward Larrabee Barnes to design Wye Woods, the conference center has not only hosted presidents and foreign heads of state, but Supreme Court justices, congressmen, countless numbers of CEOs. as well as Nobel prize-winning writers, philosophers, poets, and public policy experts of all kinds.
But it was also a base camp for university and college faculty, public school teachers, and nonprofit organizations for intellectual and strategic planning retreats during its almost fifty year run as one of the East Coast’s most important meeting venues.
But perhaps the lesser known of these remarkable moments was in its first role, which was the first fully integrated camp for the Eastern Shore’s most gifted and talented young people which opened in 1966. As Houghton envisioned it, the camp allowed boys, (later to be co-ed) aged 13 to 15, to be on an “voyage of discovery… accompanied by enthusiastic, articulate, experienced guides who themselves have made the journey.”
The results of that work can still be seen in some of the Eastern Shore’s most distinguished alumni, including well-known local leaders as Scott Beatty, CEO of Shore Bancshares, John R. Valliant with the Grayce B. Kerr Fund, Barry Griffith at Lane Engineering, as well as Dr. Ludwig Eglseder and his brother, Easton attorney Matt Eglseder. The list is extensive.
But the goals of the camp can also be found in the buildings themselves. Edward Larrabee Barnes’ campus gets well deserved credit for brilliantly encapsulating Houghton’s efforts to start integrating the Shore with the leaders of the future, not only racially but intellectually.
Barnes’ architectural handy work is a remarkable example of a postmodern return to nature, to natural materials. Its brilliance found in the gentle minimalism which forced human convergence and collaboration while at the same time opened visitors eyes to the role of nature and habitat.
With the help of local architects Jeff Halpern (Halpern Architects), and Peter Newlin (Chesapeake Architects), The Spy looks closely at Barnes’ attempt to build a rural village on 86 acres overlooking the Wye River. They highlight the architect’s masterful manipulation of space that represented a transformational moment in American design history, similar to those found in Charles Moore’s Sea Ranch in California or with Barnes’ own breakout design at the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, Maine in the 1950s, but our commentators cannot hide their shock and delight in finding such a rare example in the deep woods of Queen Anne’s County.
And that discovery may indeed be a very temporary one. The Aspen Institute, suffering like many other conference centers after the great recession, has Wye Woods on the market. While a new buyer can not build beyond the current footprint of the campus, they do however have the right to modify, or even tear down, the existing buildings.
This video is approximately eight minutes in length. A full version of the interview can be viewed here.
Correction of July 21, 2015: In the original story, the Barnes campus was incorrectly cited as being on the National Register of Historic Places. This was not an accurate statement and has been removed.
Todd Brace says
I attended the Wye Institute Camp in the summer of 1968. I have many, many fond memories of that 30 day experience. I actually still have the group photo taken with all the campers lined up on the steps and deck outside the main meeting building.
It’s unfortunate the camp was short lived. It wasn’t about kids coming from wealthy families, many of the campers came from families who never could’ve afforded such an experience. We all had experiences as young people that we otherwise might never have had. Along with having attended Boys’ State, it remains one my more memorable learning experiences as a youngster growing up on the eastern shore.
MARY WOOD says
Edward Barnes buildings at Wye Woods must be saved. They stand as a tribute to Arthur Houghton’s vision of what could be done to inspire the youth of a sleepy rural area. I knew boys who attended his first camps. Later Washington College had Board of Visitor and Governor retreats there, and of course many important people who played important parts in the troubled history of recent years. Thanks to the Spy for bringing this to our attention.
Jared Ingersoll says
I count myself fortunate to have been invited to their summer camp in 1967. Ironic, though, that nobody gave us a presentation on the outstanding architecture. I still have my “class” picture and remember classes in naval history and how to use a slide rule 🙂
Kathleen James-Chakraborty says
I, too, went to the Wye Institute, in my case in the summer of 1974, which may have been its last year. The girls stayed at Gunston but came down several times a week to the main Wye campus. A group came from the area around Ithaca and Corning, New York, which had suffered from Hurricane Agnes. It was an amazing intellectual experience, even if we girls had less than equal access to the Wye campus. This was not any ordinary summer camp. We watched “On the Waterfront,” read Plato, and performed Oscar Wilde’s “The Importance of Being Earnest”! Not only was the camp racially integrated, but there were also diplomat’s kids over from Washington. Many of us kept in touch for months or years afterwards.
Barnes had studied at Harvard with Gropius, and would become very well known in the years that followed, especially for his IBM building in New York. One of the clear influences here is Vincent Scully’s book on the Shingle Style. He was probably the most celebrated architect to have worked in Queen Anne’s County in the twentieth century. I have always wondered about what influence these buildings may have had on Louis Kahn’s dining hall at Exeter, which was designed only a few years later. There may have been someone from Barnes’s office who went over to Kahn’s. In 1974 the Wye buildings were certainly the most modern of which I had any day-to-day experience, but they were also very fitting for their place. They deserve protection!