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American Museum of Natural History
Seton was closely associated with the American Museum of Natural History at 200 Central Park West in New York City from his earliest days in New York.
He studied and worked alongside AMNH scientists, several of whom he collaborated with and became close friends. Among his AMNH colleagues were Frank Chapman, a leading ornithologist of the day, and later Clyde Fisher, who would ultimately achieve lasting recognition as the first director of the Hayden Planetarium at the Museum, a position now held by Neal deGrasse Tyson.
Clyde Fisher was co-leader of the 1927 Woodcraft Expedition. The expedition began in Bismarck, North Dakota, including a visit to Standing Rock and traveled southwest through South Dakota and Wyoming to Estes Park, Colorado, and Rocky Mountain National Park, and then into New Mexico, where they visited many pueblos in New Mexico and Arizona from a headquarters in Santa Fe. At the time, Fisher was curator of visual instruction at the museum and a pioneer in documentary films. The trip was intended to study Indian dance and Indian Sign Language. He took extensive footage and still photographs on the trip. Fisher produced a film entitled Camping Among the Indians for the museum, which documents Indian dancers at Standing Rock and various pueblos and at the Gallup Intertribal Ceremonial. Unfortunately, another film he created on Indian Sign Talk has been lost for many years.
While there are currently no items on public display, the Museum’s collections include a large amount of Seton-related items, including the originals of his journals, photographs, artwork, and other material.
Black Wolf Chair and Seton Fireplace
Good Will Hinckley of Fairfield, Maine, is a nonprofit organization devoted to the needs of children. Originally founded as a home for troubled and disadvantaged youth by the Rev. George Hinckley in 1889.
Still active today, its programs include the Glenn Stratton Learning Center (GSLC), Roundel Residential, and the College Step-up and Transitions Program. GSLC offers clinical and educational services to students in grades K–12 with social-emotional and behavioral challenges. Roundel Residential is a therapeutic treatment center for adolescent boys and girls. The Good Will Hinckley campus is also the site of the Maine Academy of Natural Sciences, a public charter high school.
George Hinckley was a friend of Ernest Thompson Seton through their mutual involvement in the early days of the Boy Scouts of America. Hinckley invited Seton to visit the campus in 1912. During his visit, Seton built a fireplace (campfire area) and built a large seat made of loose stones for himself, similar to the ones in council rings he built in several summer camps in the 1910s and 1920s. The following year, the stones had fallen down, and the seat was rebuilt by a professional stone mason.
A campus tradition was a Seton Fireplace ceremony to mark the beginning of each school year. The fireplace continues to be a favorite meeting spot in the Good Will Hinckley campus.
The area is known as the Black Wolf Chair and the Seton Fireplace and is accessible from the Good Will Hinckley Trails.
Photos courtesy of the LC Bates Museum on the Good Will Hinckley campus.
Camp Fire Club of America
The Camp Fire Club of America was founded in 1897 by William T. Hornaday, the first director of the Bronx Zoo and noted conservationist widely credited with saving the American bison from extinction. The club was aimed at hunters, anglers, and other outdoor enthusiasts. Ernest Thompson Seton was one of 34 charter members of the Camp Fire Club of America. Seton was an enthusiastic member and served as the club’s third president in 1910.
Seton designed the club’s logo, illustrated below.
Seton often hosted the club at Wyndygoul and was a frequent toastmaster at its well-publicized dinners in New York City.
Seton often hosted the club at Wyndygoul, such as the annual outing for 1912, shown here from the August 1912 edition of Field and Stream, which was then the official organ of the club.
He was also a frequent toastmaster at its well-publicized dinners in New York City.
The Camp Fire Club remains an active organization today and is based in Chappaqua, New York. As a private club, the Camp Fire Club is not open to the public. It pursues its conservation goals through its Camp Fire Conservation Fund, Inc.
When the National Scouting Museum at Philmont in Cimarron, NM, opened in 2018, a plaque commemorating the long relationship of the Club with the Boy Scouts of America was dedicated. This plaque notes Seton’s involvement and Daniel Carter Beard, another BSA founder.
Mount Thompson-Seton
Mount Thompson-Seton is a summit in the Whitefish Mountain Range in Montana. It is in the Thompson-Seton Roadless Area in the northern part of Flathead National Forest, approximately five miles south of the Canadian border and just west of Glacier National Park. The summit is at 7,815 feet above sea level, with a 1,808-foot rise. Its coordinates are 48.8703°N, 114.6515 °W.
This is in an area that Seton visited. In fact, it is in the area that Krag the Kootenay Ram roamed.
Pueblo of the Seven Fires – Springfield College
Edgar M. Robinson was a close friend of Seton’s who served as a professor at the YMCA College in Springfield, Massachusetts. Robinson and Seton worked together in the early days of the Boy Scouts of America. Robinson was Boy’s Work Secretary of the International Committee of the YMCA. In this role, he led camping and other programs for boys and became familiar with Seton’s work. He was appointed the first managing director of the Boy Scouts of America for a limited assignment to initiate the national organization and recruit key members to the executive board. Following retirement from the YMCA, Robinson served as a professor at the International YMCA College in Springfield, Massachusetts (now known as Springfield College). He also visited Seton in Santa Fe and served as a lecturer at the College of Indian Wisdom in Seton Village.
Robinson conceived of a training facility on the East Campus of Springfield that would train camp leaders, somewhat similar to Seton’s training programs he planned for Seton Village in New Mexico. Robinson consulted Seton for his ideas, and Seton provided initial drawings of a pueblo-style building. John Gaw Meem, the noted Santa Fe architect who was instrumental in the development of the Pueblo Revival style, was engaged to design the actual structure, but his design was deemed too expensive, and another architect completed the project.
The building became known as the Pueblo of the Seven Fires. A noted San Ildefonso painter, Wo Peen, the son of Seton’s San Ildefonso friend Juan Gonzales, painted extensive murals on the walls of the Pueblo of the Seven Fires.
The building continues to serve Springfield College today as the centerpiece of its East campus Outdoor Learning Center.
Seton at Silver Bay
The Boy Scouts of America organizers planned an experimental long-term camp from August 16 to September 1, 1910. This is considered the first BSA summer camp.
115 young men from various groups around the country were invited to participate in an encampment that was officially described by the BSA as America’s First Scout Camp. There were twenty groups of approximately six boys each.
The camp was held at the Silver Bay YMCA facility on Lake George in Silver Bay in the Adirondack region of upstate New York. The Silver Bay YMCA is still known as the Silver Bay YMCA Conference and Family Retreat Center.
William D. Murray served as the camp director, while Ernest Thompson Seton was selected to organize and lead the camp program, assisted by Edgar M. Robinson, a YMCA official instrumental in the launch of the BSA. They led a camp program similar to Seton’s existing Woodcraft camps.
The young men who were invited to participate came from many different groups in different cities—some were Seton Indians, some were involved with Dan Beard’s Sons of Daniel Boone, and others in fledgling Boy Scout troops that had been set up in various locations before the BSA was organized, using the British scouting model.
In a sense, the camp was a demonstration of the various elements and ideas that were melding into the Boy Scouts of America.
Robinson was quoted as describing the camp this way: “In camp at Silver Bay, the pot was boiling, and certain ingredients from the English Scout Movement manual were mixed with the program ideas of the Woodcraft Indians, Sons of Daniel Boone, and Y.M.C.A. groups. A certain “Boy Scouts” flavoring was added to the original plan – but neither Seton nor Beard at that time had anything that could be called troops of the Boy Scouts of America.”
Various dignitaries visited the camp while it was in session. According to some reports, James E. West was a visitor to the camp. A few months later, he became the first Chief Scout Executive and a dominant force in the growth of the BSA for over 30 years.
Dan Beard visited the camp and demonstrated axe-throwing, somewhat to Seton’s chagrin as a result of the damage to trees.
The original campfire site at Silver Bay fell into disuse. In 1947, the Boy Scouts of America constructed a new council ring on the site as a gift to Silver Bay and to commemorate the significance of this first American Boy Scout camp.
Seton Exhibit at the Summit Bechtel Reserve
There is an exhibit on Ernest Thompson Seton at the Summit Bechtel Reserve, the Boy Scouts of America’s facility in West Virginia, adjacent to the New River Gorge National River. The exhibit, located in the Hunter’s Hall Interpretive Center in the Joe Crafton Sportsman’s Complex, features a life-like cast figure of Seton.
While the Seton cast figure is shown holding a vintage shotgun, it also includes a copy of Seton’s classic book, Wild Animals I Have Known, which features the story of “Lobo, the King of Currumpaw.” This story tells of Seton’s experience with Lobo that forever changed his attitude toward hunting and is considered a catalyst for the conservation movement.
Seton Homes in Greenwich, Connecticut
Ernest Thompson Seton made Greenwich, Connecticut, his home for approximately thirty years until he relocated to Santa Fe.
He called his first home in the Cos Cob area of Greenwich Wyndygoul. It was on this estate that the concept of the Woodcraft Indians took shape.
Wyndygoul is now a part of Pomerance Park. You can walk the grounds of the home. The home is not still standing, but its walls have been preserved as a memorial to Seton. There is a plaque commemorating Wyndygoul and Seton in the park. You can also see several features prominent in some of Seton’s writings about his home, including the lake and Medicine Rock.
Click here for historic photos of Wyndygoul from the time he lived there.
Seton sold the property in 1913. The new owner was financier Maurice Wertheim, who was the father of writer Barbara Tuchman who is said to have written her classic work about World War I, The Winds of August, at Wyndygoul.
Seton began piecing together several properties for his new estate. The Setons initially lived in a historic home on one of the tracts he bought on Round Hill Road. Seton christened it The Fincherie. The Setons maintained their residence there from 1913 to 1918. Unfortunately, the Fincherie, built in 1763, was demolished by a developer in 1990.
Seton built a new and even more grand home on Lake Avenue in Greenwich. He called this one DeWinton. DeWinton still stands as a part of a remarkable estate and is a private residence. The Setons did not live in DeWinton long. This was a time in which Ernest and Grace were both traveling extensively in connection with their writing careers, and the house proved too large for them.
Seton expanded a studio building on the edge of the property known as Little Peequo, and the Setons moved into it, although they are said to have rarely been home at the same time. This was to be Seton’s official residence until he relocated to Santa Fe. Grace lived there for many years after. Both DeWinton and Little Peequo still stand and are private residences.
In Greenwich today, you can visit Pomerance Park and see Wyndygoul, Medicine Rock, and several plaques commemorating Seton’s life and work. You can look at the lake that Seton built. The remaining walls of Wyndygoul have been preserved as a memorial – eerily similar to the Seton Castle walls in Santa Fe.
Seton Memorial Library and the National Scouting Museum
Philmont Scout Ranch – Cimarron, New Mexico
In 1967, Julia M. Seton, Ernest Thompson Seton’s widow, donated the vast majority of Seton’s personal library, his art, and his natural history and Native American collections to the Boy Scouts of America.
The BSA established the Ernest Thompson Seton Memorial Library at Philmont Scout Ranch in Cimarron, New Mexico, which was initially housed in a free-standing building, financed with a leading contribution from L.O. Crosby of Picayune, Mississippi.
In 2018, the Boy Scouts of America relocated the National Scouting Museum to Philmont. A large, state-of-the-art facility was built to accommodate the National Scouting Museum. The Seton Memorial Library is now housed as a distinct part of the National Scouting Museum.
On display at the museum are two of Seton’s masterpieces, The Triumph of the Wolves and The Pursuit. The museum houses many Seton artifacts, including a complete copy of Seton’s extensive journals. The originals of those journals are in the American Museum of Natural History in New York City.
As a part of the launch of the National Scouting Museum, two Seton-related outdoor monument statues were commissioned from Susan Norris, one of the BSA’s official artists. The Wonder of Discovery and Lobo, the King of Currumpaw, are those two.
Seton’s New Mexico Homes
When Seton acquired a 2,500-acre tract near Santa Fe and relocated to the area in 1930, he called his new project Seton Village. One of the first buildings in Seton Village was his temporary home Lagunita on present-day Seton Plaza.
In 1930 Seton acquired a 2,500-acre tract of land seven miles south of the Santa Fe Plaza. He described the site as “the last rampart of the Rockies.” He envisioned creating a conference facility he called the College of Indian Wisdom, which would ultimately include many structures.
The first structure built was Yek Yek, a small adobe house that would be Seton’s temporary home. Seton then built a somewhat larger house in what is now Seton Plaza he called Lagunita, which would be his home until 1932.
Seton began designing and constructing his final grand home, Seton Castle. Seton moved into Seton Castle in 1933. It was a large, eclectic adobe house with 32 rooms and 6,900 square feet. It sat near the property’s highest point and provided panoramic views of the plateau and the Jemez mountains in the distance.
Seton Castle was the centerpiece of a utopian community, including his extensive library and museum of his specimens and collections, a zoo, quarters for staff and participants, a print shop, a zoo, a tea house, a hogan, and a kiva.
The Setons hosted many guests from the Santa Fe community, including artists, writers, Native American leaders, anthropologists, and archeologists. He also hosted visitors from his enormous group of friends from all over the U.S. and around the world. As a part of the summer training programs, Seton hosted a Chatauque-type series of lectures and performances in a wide range to which members of the Santa Fe community were invited. Seton held court in a large hall adjacent to his extensive personal library.
After Seton’s death in 1946, Julia Seton continued to live in the house and actually expanded it. She later gave the property to her daughter Dee and her husband Dale Barber, where they raised their family.
Due to Dee’s poor health, the Barbers left the Castle and sold the property, including its contents, to the Academy for the Love of Learning, a nonprofit educational organization that planned to use the Castle as its headquarters following a planned extensive renovation. The Academy also agreed to preserve the Seton legacy as part of the sale agreement.
Unfortunately, as the complicated renovations were nearing completion, Seton Castle was destroyed by fire on November 15, 2005. After much deliberation, the Academy decided to build their new building nearby and maintain the Castle footprint and its remaining stone walls as a monument, outdoor meeting space, and meditation garden.
The Academy also maintains the Seton Gallery in its headquarters building, where Seton’s works are stored and displayed. The highlight of the gallery is Seton’s masterpiece, The Sleeping Wolf.
The Castle site is eerily similar to the walls of Wyndygoul in Pomerance Park in Greenwich, Connecticut.
Seton’s New York Homes
The Seton’s first home after their marriage was a property called Sloat Hall, near Tappan, New Jersey, which Seton acquired with the help of Grace Seton’s mother. It was a large, rambling home with lots of outdoor space as well. It proved to be unsatisfactory (and possibly haunted). After about a year, the Setons moved to an apartment in New York City. They rented Sloat Hall to a tenant and sold it about a year later. Shortly after the sale, the house burned to the ground.
Their first New York apartment was at 144 Fifth Avenue. This was a large apartment on an upper floor above the interior decorating and art gallery firm Cottier & Co. The Setons decorated this apartment with many pieces of furniture, books, and items from Seton’s rapidly growing collections. This building still stands.
Seton’s friend, fellow painter, and a fellow charter member of the Camp-Fire Club of America, A.A. Anderson, developed a studio-apartment building specifically designed for artists. The building was at 80 West 40th Street, directly across from Bryant Park, adjacent to the New York Public Library. The studio-apartment building became known as Bryant Park Studios (sometimes referred to as the Beaux Arts Building). Seton’s path would cross many times with Anderson. Anderson’s western home was the Palette Ranch, near Yellowstone National Park. A real bear named Wahb inhabited the Palette Ranch and inspired Seton’s book, The Biography of a Grizzly.
Many artists made Bryant Park Studios their New York home and base. The studios had high ceilings, large windows, and many had excellent views of Bryant Park. It was in this apartment that Seton’s daughter, Anya Seton, was born.
The current owners of 80 West 40th Street are preservation enthusiasts and have done a great job of keeping it an elegant building.
Although Seton began assembling Wyndygoul in 1900, the Setons maintained a city apartment until at least the mid-1920s. Originally, the homes in Greenwich were summer homes, but as they became grander, the Greenwich homes became their home base, and the New York apartments were essentially city apartments for when they had business or social functions to attend to in the city.
Sometime in the teens, the Setons moved to their last New York City apartment at 562 Fifth Avenue. That building was torn down at the corner of Fifth Avenue and 46th Street in 2016.
Seton Village
After searching for a suitable tract for two and a half years, Ernest Thompson Seton acquired a 2,500-acre tract of land southeast of Santa Fe, New Mexico, in February 1930. He called the place “Seton Village.”
He and Julie Buttree, who would later become his second wife, laid out the village to provide for what he called the College of Indian Wisdom, which would be a school for camp directors and other interested people similar to the ones he had conducted at his Connecticut estates. In addition to the site for their ultimate home, Seton Castle, there were campgrounds and a variety of necessary buildings, including a library and museum, meeting spaces, a small zoo, a tea shop, and a print shop. There were guest houses and home sites for his devotees that wanted to join him. There would be a building designed like a Navajo hogan which would serve as an auditorium and a building patterned after a pueblo kiva which would be used for more ceremonial occasions.
The College of Indian Wisdom had its first summer session in 1932 and attracted participants from across the country. In addition to the Setons, they had a number of instructors and guest speakers at the College, which acted in many ways like a Chautauqua program for the local Santa Fe residents.
In 1935, the Setons’ final “dream home” was completed, which they called “Seton Castle.” Here they entertained guests from around the world. Ultimately the College of Indian Wisdom, which had been renamed Seton Institute a few years earlier, had to close as it became impractical due to World War II. Seton died at Seton Castle in 1946.
Seton Village was named a National Historic Landmark in 1965.
Seton Castle and the immediately surrounding grounds were acquired by a nonprofit organization called the Academy for the Love of Learning, which planned to renovate Seton Castle and use it for its headquarters. Unfortunately, the Castle caught fire and burned when the renovations were nearly complete. The Academy preserved the footprint of the Castle and many of its stone walls of the Castle as a historical and meditation garden. The site is open to the public.
Fortunately, the contents of the Castle, which included a large amount of art and other items, had been cataloged, removed, and stored off-site for the renovation process, so they were not damaged in the fire. The Academy built its headquarters nearby on the site and included a Seton Gallery where Seton art and other related items are on display. Access to the Gallery is currently by appointment only.
Click here to read about the Academy’s Seton Legacy Project on the web.
The Bronx Zoo
The Bronx Zoo was originally known as the New York Zoological Park. The Zoo was developed and is managed by the Wildlife Conservation Society (originally known as the New York Zoological Society).
Seton was involved with the Bronx Zoo even before it opened in 1899. He petitioned the society to provide facilities for artists in the Zoo. The idea took hold, and the Society built an artist’s studio inside the Lion House. The studio included two rooms, including an artists’ studio, plus a large cage into which animals were transferred using a unique cage system that ran in tracks under the building. Unfortunately, the studio did not attract a great deal of usage, and in the 1940s, the space was converted into an animal nursery.
The founding director of the Bronx Zoo was William T. Hornaday, Seton’s friend and the first president of the Camp-Fire Club of America. Seton was also a founding member of the Camp-Fire Club and would later serve as its president. In the early days, he hosted many club events at his home, Wyndygoul.
The WCS archives include a significant amount of Seton material, including correspondence, records related to the Camp-Fire Club, and several art pieces.
Hornaday was an avid conservationist. He took a special interest in the American bison and played a significant role in saving the bison from near extinction. The society sponsored the American Bison Association, of which Seton was a member in connection with his bison conservation activities.
Ernest Thompson Seton Scout Reservation
Scouting America Greenwich Council, Greenwich CT
