Queen's Castle, also known as Camp Fossenvue or simply Fossenvue (an anagram for "seven of us")), is the remnant of a historic camp located at Lodi in

Seneca County, New York Seneca County is a county in the U.S. state of New York. As of the 2020 census, the population was 33,814. The primary county seat is Waterloo, moved there from the original county seat of Ovid in 1819. It became a two-shire county in 1822 ...

. It is a rustic, lakeside camp structure built about 1881 on the shore of Seneca Lake.

Background

It is a one-story, roughly square, 17 feet, 6 inches by 18 feet, structure surmounted by a steeply pitched wood shingled hipped roof. It is the sole surviving component of Camp Fossenvue, established in 1875 as an informal, lakeside summer retreat where liberally minded young women could indulge in a variety of radical, even scandalous, intellectual, physical, and recreational activities.''See also:'' Its last year of operation as a women's camp was in 1901. In 1924, the site was sold to the Elmira Council of Boy Scouts for Camp Seneca, which continued to operate until 1989. The

United States Department of Agriculture The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) is an executive department of the United States federal government that aims to meet the needs of commercial farming and livestock food production, promotes agricultural trade and producti ...

purchased the property in 1996, adding it to the

Finger Lakes National Forest The Finger Lakes National Forest is a United States National Forest that encompasses of Seneca and Schuyler counties, nestled between Seneca Lake and Cayuga Lake in the Finger Lakes Region of the State of New York. It has over 30 miles (50 ...

. It was designed by "locally prominent" Arthur Nash, who appears to be North Carolina architect Arthur C. Nash, was born in Geneva, New York.) It was listed on the

National Register of Historic Places The National Register of Historic Places (NRHP) is the Federal government of the United States, United States federal government's official United States National Register of Historic Places listings, list of sites, buildings, structures, Hist ...

in 1999.

References

External links

Fossenvue description

Embers from Fossenvue backlogs, 1875-1900.
From the Rare Book and Special Collections Division at the

Library of Congress The Library of Congress (LOC) is a research library in Washington, D.C., serving as the library and research service for the United States Congress and the ''de facto'' national library of the United States. It also administers Copyright law o ...

Houses on the National Register of Historic Places in New York (state) History of women's rights in the United States History of women in New York (state) Houses in Seneca County, New York National Register of Historic Places in Seneca County, New York {{SenecaCountyNY-NRHP-stub