Early spring sunlight dances off Lake Mohonk on a March morning. It filters through pitch pine trees to warm a simple cedar structure that shelters two massage tables.

“Being out in nature taps into all the senses,” explains a staff member. As if summoned, a bald eagle swoops overhead.

This gazebo-like structure, or summerhouse, is one of the newest spa accoutrements at Mohonk Mountain House, a historic inn atop the Shawangunk Mountains in the scenic Hudson Valley, about 90 miles from New York City. Celebrating its 155th anniversary this year, the property is a place of architectural and natural splendor. It is a National Historic Landmark and a member of Historic Hotels of America, a program of the National Trust for Historic Preservation. In 1994, the United Nations recognized it as a treasure of conservation.

The open-air massage summerhouse opened in 2023 as an extension of the 2005 Spa Wing, which is new by Mohonk standards. When built, the horseshoe-shaped Spa Wing—housing quiet massage rooms; a spacious indoor pool; a solarium; and airy, tea-scented verandas—marked the first addition to Mohonk Mountain House in more than a century. Not that anyone would guess.

“It was built to look historic the day it opened,” says the resort’s general manager, Barbara Stirewalt, noting that stone for the structure was quarried on site.

Five generations of one family have worked to keep Mohonk Mountain House going. That process has required constant, careful adaptation, including managing an influx of hikers during the COVID-19 pandemic and retaining the attentive staff needed for a luxe visitor experience in a region where housing costs have surged. Not only has Mohonk Mountain House endured, it has outlasted every other nearby grand resort from its era. The key to saving the House, paradoxically, has been keeping the land and water around it in timeless condition.

“It’s simple but super hard,” says Eric Gullickson, Mohonk’s president, whose great-great-grandfather was part of the founding generation.

Mohonk Mountain House stretches along an eighth of a mile of lakeshore and presents an arresting blend of architectural styles: A wooden Late-Victorian Eastlake-style building with a flagpole-topped tower, an Edwardian stone structure with a crenellated roof, a stained-wood chalet with a grand lakeshore porch reminiscent of a National Park lodge. Writers have variously compared Mohonk to a fairy-tale castle, a Bavarian fantasy, and Harry Potter’s Hogwarts.

“Physically, it’s fabulous,” says Marisa Manley of Fairfield County, Connecticut, a regular with her two children for more than three decades. “We always talked about [the building] as a family: ‘What are the different elements?’”

This spring, Mohonk opened a via ferrata, a hybrid hiking trail and rock-climbing route. In the mid-20th century, the growth of climbing helped explode the popularity of the Shawangunk (pronounced “SHON-gum” by longtime residents) Mountains. The via ferrata is a current example of the strategy that has kept Mohonk Mountain House thriving in three different centuries: respectfully utilizing resources, making common-sense adaptations to modernity, and always keeping the focus on nature’s beauty.

“It’s all about the aesthetic of being one with the land,” says the inn’s in-house historian, Nell Boucher, “the ‘parlor in the wilderness.’”

The Mohonk story began a dozen millennia ago, after Ice Age glaciers gouged a serpentine, 17-acre lake atop a mountain range of quartz conglomerate. Munsee-speaking Lenape peoples (whose descendants now reside in Canada, Wisconsin, and Oklahoma) traversed the lush, mixed-hardwood forests that covered its slopes. A legend circulated that Mohonk meant “lake in the sky,” but Lenape linguists say it more likely refers to the white rocks in the area.

Sometime in or before 1859, with Americans coursing toward civil war, entrepreneur John Stokes bought a plot of lakeshore, where he built a rustic tavern and a dance floor of rough-hewn logs. Rowdy patrons ate juicy huckleberry pies washed down with apple whiskey. Regular fistfights likely punctuated the revelry, and according to local legend, Stokes’ peacekeeping innovation was lashing belligerents to trees until they sobered up. This was one way of doing business at Lake Mohonk.

A decade later a traveler from Poughkeepsie, New York, arrived with a different vision. Alfred Smiley, a devout Quaker, wore a Shenandoah beard and had an identical twin brother, Albert Smiley, in Providence, Rhode Island. Alfred came to Lake Mohonk on a picnic, and when he later heard that Stokes wanted to sell the property, he thought it would make a good summer home for Albert, a frugal educator. With a bank loan equaling his $14,000 in savings, Albert bought the tavern and 280 surrounding acres. The brothers with the friendly surname entered the hospitality industry, though Albert initially had “no more thought of it than going to the moon.” To manage business affairs, he eventually welcomed in their younger half-brother, Daniel. In contrast to Lake Mohonk’s bloody antebellum bacchanals, Albert suggested catering to “cultivated … classes.”

The Smileys saw that the whole landscape of the area was extraordinary, and they held faith that it could inspire visitors to the nation’s highest Reconstruction-era ideals. There were ripples of Walden Pond in Lake Mohonk. The 1872 creation of the country’s first national park, Yellowstone, focused attention on the importance of natural scenery. From 1,500-foot-high Paltz Point above Lake Mohonk, the brothers could see New York, New Jersey, Vermont, Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Pennsylvania. They also had awesome views of nearby 250-foot cliffs called the trapps, the word for “steps” in Dutch. The founders beheld a landscape to fill the heart, ennoble the soul, and elevate the mind. Albert called the feeling it instilled “the Mohonk spirit.”

Construction of the 253-room resort spanned 31 years, beginning around 1869. South of the former rough tavern, the Smileys built a five-story Eastlake-style lodge with balconies for each room and a flag tower. Though built of wood, this oldest extant section of Mohonk Mountain House is known as Rock Building for the lakeside cliff on which it stands.

The opposite end of the complex was built next, in 1893. Somewhat similar in style to Rock Building, Grove Building now contains guest rooms and administrative offices. Connected to it is Dining Room Building, designed by the firm of Napoleon LeBrun, which also designed the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company Tower in Manhattan. Dining Room Building holds, among other rooms, the 9,300-square-foot Main Dining Room, which seats hundreds for three meals daily. Each ivory tablecloth is topped with a vase of fresh flowers. Large, sunset-facing windows look out at the blue Catskill Mountains in the distance.

In 1899, construction began on Stone Building, the castle-like portion of Mohonk Mountain House. It and the formal porte-cochere are the work of New York City architect James E. Ware. Stone Building linked to other buildings via hallways laid with custom red-and-blue diamond-patterned carpet from Europe. Known as “Mohonk Jewel,” the design is replicated in the inn’s carpets today.

Carved settees, velvet divans, and potted plants are arranged in comfortable seating areas. More than 800 framed pieces of art, including oils from Hudson River School painters, line the halls. In the past decade Mohonk has turned its hallways into galleries for its extensive in-house image archive, including hand-painted lantern slides and candid photos of guests. Director of Art Pril Smiley, 81, a pioneering composer of electronic music and fourth-generation descendant of the founding generation, says the artwork expresses “the aura, the essence, the meaning of what Mohonk is.”

Another of Mohonk Mountain House’s architectural styles also came from Ware. Parlor Wing, built in 1899 in the Swiss Chalet style, extends on giant trusses over Lake Mohonk. Its expansive porch contains rocking chairs and balustrades of Douglas fir. Under its shingled roof is a birch-paneled theater with a beamed ceiling, balcony seats, carved friezes, and a stage with a grand piano. Oil portraits of the Smileys flank ample picture windows topped with textured leaded glass.

Often misidentified as gazebos, summerhouses unobtrusively decorate the Mohonk landscape. Some of the most visible stand on the lakeshore. Others fly precipitously over cliffs. Today there are around 120 summerhouses, and the resort may someday return to the early 1900s high of nearly 200. Mostly built of native eastern red cedar logs, the summerhouses look as naturally sprouted from the land as ferns.

“We’re building history and preserving it, all simultaneously,” explains Jesse Patterson, a member of Mohonk’s rustic carpentry crew, as he points out the intricacies of a lakeside summerhouse. The rustic style showcases rough logs, often with the bark still on, and perfectly smooth fitting of the wood to the contours of the rocks, boulders, and cliffs.

The full-time rustic carpentry crew is responsible for building and rebuilding not only the summerhouses—which last around 30 years in the elements—but also footpaths, stairs, and 2,200 sections of wood railing. Comfort with heights is a prerequisite to be a Mohonk rustic carpenter. One characteristic that defines rustic carpentry, crewmembers explain with lumberjack swagger, is the fact that the primary tool is a chainsaw.

Though whimsical in appearance, every element of each summerhouse is deeply considered. All are located in places offering unique and often overlooked views. The cedar posts and rails— even the positioning of every sanded bench—frame these views like works of fine art.

One summerhouse, atop Paltz Point for sunrise watching, has a sunburst-shaped gable. A spiraling roof tops another, at the south end of the lake. Near the rose garden is a two-story summerhouse, first built in 1898 from an Andrew Jackson Downing blueprint. In recognition of the summerhouses’ significance, Mohonk’s official emblem is not the grand main house; it is a summerhouse.

“What’s so beautiful is, this really slows you down, and you notice new things,” says Terese, a visitor from upstate New York who doesn’t want her full name used. She is at Mohonk with her partner, Steve, visiting as many summerhouses as they can.

“It’s a real little adventure trail,” Steve adds.

Senior Rustic Carpenter Cody Claussen has noticed that the summerhouses provide comfort to visitors who don’t feel at home in deep woods.

“If you see a summerhouse,” Claussen says, “it draws you farther into nature than you ever knew.”

Which is where Mohonk’s greatest worldwide legacy lives.

In the early 1960s, Mabel C. Smiley, daughter-in-law of Daniel Smiley, donated funds from her personal resources to form a nonprofit called Mohonk Trust, one of the country’s early land trusts. Over the previous century, the Smiley family had acquired nearly 8,000 acres of land, including Shawangunk peaks, forests, and farms. Mabel’s foundational donation ensured that land would never be exploited or developed—even by her family. It turned private land into public land.

In the following decades, the Smileys transferred three quarters of their land to Mohonk Trust. Today that land is called Mohonk Preserve, and it is the largest nonprofit nature preserve in New York. The land is visited annually by more than 200,000 outdoor lovers, including hikers, birders, skiers, swimmers, cyclists, and climbers. (There is a fee to use the trails, but resort guests get free access.)

“That’s one of our biggest legacies,” Mohonk Mountain House president Eric Gullickson says, “as a natural preserve.”

Gullickson, 54, returned prodigally to Mohonk after careers in competitive cycling, journalism, and university administration. His teenage daughter and a few of her cousins now work there seasonally. Nationally, fewer than 3 percent of family businesses have fourth-generation involvement. Mohonk counts five generations and could one day include six.

Looking forward to Mohonk’s 200th anniversary in 2069, Gullickson says more development may take place in the still privately owned “core area” near the main building. In 2016 Mohonk opened Grove Lodge, a detached guest house with six bedrooms and a great room, ideal for families or groups. The resort constructed an ice-skating pavilion in 2000 to extend a cherished winter activity into a warming century when Lake Mohonk might no longer freeze. In 1990 Mohonk built Conference House for group meetings. It serves as a gathering place for Mohonk Consultations, a nonprofit organization that promotes sustainability and connection, furthering the aims of early Mohonk’s annual meetings on civil rights and world peace.

Through the decades Mohonk slowly shed its traditional Quaker prohibitions. A cocktail lounge opened in 2005. Through the 1960s and ’70s, a dancing ban was shelved to allow square and ballroom dances. (Today all types of dancing are permitted.) Each casting-off of an older century’s social vestiges was sincerely questioned by traditionalists and adopted only after careful deliberation of its effect on “the Mohonk spirit.”

“We were able to find this balance,” Gullickson says. “That was the intention of my ancestors, the founders.”