A Secret History: The Cayuga Nature Center, Then and Now

Now: Close to 25,000 adults and children visit the Cayuga Nature Center each year for hands-on lessons in wildlife and environmental studies. They participate in Critter Camps; play in Treetops, the multistory tree house; and frolic with butterflies. The Cayuga Nature Center just celebrated its 30th anniversary.

Photos Courtesy of Cayuga Nature Center.

Then: Built through the Works Progress Administration and completed in 1939, the second home of the Cayuga Preventorium served as a camp for poor children to build up strength through better nourishment, hygiene, and plenty of scheduled activities outside.

Mrs. Rodger Williams, president of the original camp (on Esty’s Point on the east side of the lake), reported in 1916 that the preventorium was “doing more towards stamping out tuberculosis than any other tuberculosis work undertaken.” (In 1900, TB was killing one in four Americans.) On average, children gained six pounds and returned home with “the roses of health in their cheeks,” Williams wrote, noting that weight gain became a kind of competition— the higher the better.

The new facility administered health programs, TB vaccinations, cardiac clinics, and other non-TB-related services to poor and malnourished children for only a few years— it was forced to close during World War II.

Underutilized in the postwar years, the building was briefly leased by Cornell University for student housing, and it also functioned as a camp for children of working mothers before being repurposed as a nature center in the mid-’70s.

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