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.
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