More than a century ago Ralph Benedict, a Brooklyn College professor and founder of the American Fern Society, broke ground along Lake George’s Kattskill Bay, building a cabin and cultivating his favorite plants on the property. For decades and decades Benedict’s Fern Acres was a beloved summertime family retreat.
Such a place was exactly what Anne Franzen was looking for back in the late 1990s. She and her husband, Dick Allington, had five children between them and, as time rushed by, the kids were graduating from high school and college, moving away, starting their adult lives. Franzen, at the time a SUNY Albany professor, recalls sitting beneath a tree at YMCA Camp Chingachgook, on Lake George, waiting for her daughter Maggie and son Mike, who were there for the summer.…
