ADIRONDACKS ICON: MARJORIE MERRIWEATHER POST

These days, the Adirondacks are iconic on their own, but that’s likely due to some of the iconic folks who put the region on the map, people like Marjorie Merriweather Post.

“It’s shocking and a shame to me that Marjorie Merriweather Post is not more well-known, not more studied these days,” Cheryl said. “She was an absolute anomaly of the times; she was the owner of a multimillion-dollar corporation at 27, which is mind-blowing even by today’s standards, but in 1914? As a woman? It’s simultaneously fascinating and hard to fathom.”

Marjorie inherited the Postum Cereal Company after her father died and ran it for 44 years, expanding it into the General Foods Corporation, which came to include brands like Hellman’s Mayonnaise, Jell-O, and Maxwell House, and eventually Birdseye Frozen Foods (gotta love those SteamFresh veggies!).

“For me, Marjorie Merriweather Post is to the Adirondacks as Millicent Rogers is to Taos,” Cheryl explained. “She’s who originally drew my attention to the region, her Camp Topridge estate is one of the most iconic Great Camps in the Adirondacks. What she referred to as a ‘rustic retreat’ was this expansive 200-plus acres estate, with nearly 70 different buildings, and I believe each one had its own butler. It was one of the largest of all the Great Camps, and surely the most elaborately furnished.”

In addition to Camp Topridge, Marjorie also developed a few other notable estates in the U.S., including two Hillwood estates (one in D.C. that is now a museum, and one on Long Island that now functions as part of Long Island University) and the well-renowned Mar-a-Lago.

Marjorie Merriweather Post left many legacies – her thriving corporation, her three daughters, a series of endowments, and a collection of rare jewelry and Russian art – but perhaps one of the most unique is her title as “Mother Marjorie”, the honorary House Mother of New York’s Beta chapter of the Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity.