Two women paddle on Little Tupper Lake in 2005, which New York State acquired from the Whitney family in 1997 as part of a 15,000-acre land deal. One of the Whitneys’ former homes can be seen on the opposite shore. (Enterprise archive photo)
LONG LAKE — John Hendrickson, a philanthropist and major landowner in the Adirondacks, died Aug. 19 at Saratoga Hospital in Saratoga Springs. With his death, the fate of a large tract of land he owned in the Adirondacks is now unclear.
Hendrickson owned a 36,202-acre property in Long Lake known as Whitney Park. Since 2020, he had been trying to sell the entire land. He originally wanted to sell the property in one piece for $180 million. According to an August 2020 interview with the Adirondack Explorer, Hendrickson said at the time that he did not want to sell the land to the state to protect it, nor did he want to sell it to private buyers who wanted to develop the land. Hendrickson appraised and listed the property through his company, Whitney Industries, LLC, rather than through a separate real estate brokerage firm. No purchase agreement was finalized before Hendrickson’s death.
Hendrickson was the husband of the late Marylou Whitney, a prominent socialite and philanthropist. Before marrying Hendrickson, she was married to Cornelius Vanderbilt. “Sonnie” Whitney. Sonny Whitney inherited vast tracts of land between Long Lake and Tupper Lake from his grandfather William C. Whitney, who consolidated and purchased 80,000 acres of land in the area in 1897. He paid $1.50 per acre at the time.
Parts of the original property were sold to the International Paper Company over time, leaving about 48,000 acres remaining at the time of Sonny Whitney’s death in 1992. These were passed on in their entirety to Marylou Whitney.
In 1997, shortly after marrying Hendrickson, the couple sold about 15,000 acres of the property to New York State for $17.1 million. The state designated the area as a wilderness area, the strictest level of land protection, and named it in honor of William C. Whitney.
While Hendrickson’s main involvement was with thoroughbred horse racing in the Saratoga Springs area, he was known locally as a generous supporter of the Long Lake community and a good steward of Whitney Park. The couple gave $250,000 to the Long Lake Library in 2007. The donation was the largest in its history and the library’s board voted to rename it the Cornelius Vanderbilt Whitney Library in honor of the family, according to Long Lake historian Hallie Bond. The Whitney family also donated to the city’s medical center and provided a World War I memorial statue for Long Lake, Bond said.
Bond said that after the deaths of Sonny and Marylou Whitney, family members visited Whitney Park and Long Lake less frequently, but Whitney Industries continued to employ some Long Lake residents to handle land management and maintenance of the historic buildings throughout the property.
After Marylou’s death, Hendrickson told the Adirondack Explorer that he had felt increasingly lonely without her and no longer wanted to own most of the land in the Adirondacks that they once shared. Hendrickson put Whitney Park’s entire 36,000-acre property up for sale in 2020 for $180 million. He absolutely did not want to sell it to the state because he had reservations about the conservation practices there and did not want the historic buildings on the property removed because it was classified as a forest preserve. Camp Deerlands, located on the east shore of Little Forked Lake, is widely considered the most significant building in Whitney Park. It has 17 bedrooms and 11 bathrooms in the main camp and adjacent guest and staff quarters.
However, Hendrickson made it equally clear that he would not sell the land for development. In an interview with the Adirondack Explorer, he claimed to have turned down six offers, including one at the full list price of $180 million, because the potential buyers wanted to develop the land.
Hendrickson told the Albany Times Union in 2021 that he was considering dividing Whitney Park into 11 lots to make it easier to find suitable buyers, as he was having difficulty finding a buyer for the entire property. Permits for the subdivision would have had to be reviewed and approved by the Adirondack Park Agency. Benjamin Brosseau, a press secretary for the APA, confirmed Monday that no applications for subdivision permits for Whitney Park have been submitted to date.
Environmentalists have long pushed for Whitney Park to be turned into a nature preserve, citing its vast wetlands, including more than 100 miles of shoreline stretching across 22 lakes.
“It is an important part of the landscape in the Adirondacks. Its wetlands serve so many ecological functions. It was recognized early on as a very important zone for resource management,” said David Gibson, managing partner of Adirondack Wild, an advocacy group that works to preserve wilderness throughout New York state.
Gibson believes that Whitney and Hendrickson were good stewards of the land when they owned it, but he rejects the claim that New York State lacked the resources to properly protect and manage the land.
“If (Hendrickson’s) heirs do not want to keep the land, the state of New York should always be considered as a partner,” he said. In addition to the possibility of the state managing the land itself, Gibson pointed to the possibility that third-party nonprofit groups could also manage portions of the land under a conservation easement and be compensated by the state for doing so. He said funding sources exist through New York State’s Environmental Bond Act, which passed in 2022.
Gibson said extensive research has been conducted over the years on the ecology and historic land management of Whitney Park by groups such as the Nature Conservancy and the Adirondack Park Agency. He said this data provides a deep understanding of best practices for conservation specifically in Whitney Park that the state or third-party groups would implement if they were allowed to conserve the land.
“There is a lot of data from Whitney Park that would form the basis for a smart conservation proposal,” he said.
Gibson also mentioned the tax benefits that would accrue to Hamilton County, the City of Long Lake and the Long Lake Central School District if the land, or portions of it, were declared a conservation area.
Whitney Park is currently exempt from property taxes under sections 480 and 480a of the New York Forestry Tax Law. Although Whitney Park is not fully exempt, its property value is assessed for tax purposes at the 1926 value, the year the law was originally enacted. This allows the property to avoid nearly a century of inflation.
The law was passed to encourage landowners to manage their land sustainably. These exemptions only apply to private landowners. If the state were to acquire the land, it would not be entitled to the tax relief, even if the land became a nature reserve.
“The city, the schools, the county; taxes for all purposes are paid (by the State of New York) on all forest preserves,” Said Gibson.
John Sheehan, communications director for the Adirondack Council, a conservation group, also spoke positively about the potential tax revenue. He said that if Whitney Park became state land, Long Lake could use the influx of money to lower property tax rates for other taxpayers, provided that tax revenue – the total amount that must be collected in taxes by the county, city or school – is not increased to finance the land acquisition.
However, government or nonprofit preservation of the land could result in a loss of the current jobs associated with maintaining Whitney Park. Although he was unavailable for comment by press time, Long Lake Assessor Jim Bateman noted in a 2020 interview with the Times Union that some would like to see economic development on the land, which would be prevented by establishing a forest preserve.
“Some people would like to see more economic development than just hikers and canoeists,” he told the Times Union at the time.
It is currently not publicly known who will succeed Hendrickson as President and CEO of Whitney Industries or what their plans will be for the land and the future of the company. Hendrickson’s property on Little Tupper Lake, Camp-On-A-Point, hit the market in 2023 and is still listed as for sale.
Hendrickson reported feeling unwell just before lunch on August 19. He was 59 years old and is survived by his mother, brother Edward and two nephews.
