A Not Too Greatly Changed Eden

In August 1858, William James Stillman, a painter and founding editor of the acclaimed but short-lived art journal The Crayon , organized a camping expedition for some of America's preeminent intellectuals to Follensby Pond in the Adirondacks . Dubbed the "Philosophers' Camp," the trip included the Swiss American scientist and Harvard College professor Jean Louis Rodolphe Agassiz, the Republican lawyer and future U.S. attorney general Ebenezer Rockwood Hoar, the Cambridge poet James Russell Lowe