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In 1906 Spencer Trask, Wall Street financier, spent the summer on Clay Island on Lake George in a small, newly constructed cottage to escape the round of house parties and entertaining that had become a part of life at his Saratoga estate, Yaddo. Mr. Trask did not want to develop another estate, and was looking around the lake for a small piece of land where he could build a modest home. He wanted an island location because of its isolation. Immediately south of Clay Island were three small, rocky islands grouped together, and designated on old maps as the Three Brothers Islands, after their owners.
He had never given these islands any consideration because of their small size and rocky wilderness, but his wife saw possibilities of building bridges between the islands in Venetian style. She planned to have the north island devoted to the service part of the household, a Gothic arch and belfry setting it off from the rest of the property. Beyond the arch was a long vista and promenade under two colonnaded bridges that stretched across the middle island to the south island. Above the bridges were sleeping apartments for the household and guests. On the south island was their own residence.
During the following winter, as soon as the lake froze, tons and tons of rock and fieldstone were brought down from the hills and piled between the islands. Mr. Trask bought scores of old rock fences from adjacent farms for this purpose, to the amazement and gratification of the farmers who claimed that the rocks brought a larger income than their year’s crops. The following spring, when the ice melted, this foundation for the bridges was dropped in place. The bridges and their covering superstructures were stained a wood brown, as well as the other buildings of Norman-Gothic architecture. A soft, chiming bell was placed in the belfry.
In 1912 through an employee’s carelessness, most of the north island was reduced to ashes and charred and blackened trees. Mr. Trask had died a few years previously, and Mrs. Trask, seriously ill at the time, was carried away from the island in a rescue boat. She supervised the rebuilding of the island from Yaddo, and although she lived ten more years, she never left the boundaries of her Saratoga home.
George Foster Peabody, who lived on a Bolton Road estate that later became the home of Adolph S. Ochs of the New York Times, married Mrs. Trask in 1921. She died 11 months later. Mr. Peabody carried out the Trasks’ lifelong desire to have both their Saratoga mansion and Lake George estate incorporated in an endowed institution that would provide a Summer vacation for noted musicians, writers, and artists, who would be selected by a committee.
This plan went into effect in 1926 at Yaddo with Mr. Peabody as resident director. The same year, some artists were invited to Triuna Island, but this entertainment was discontinued the next year because of lack of funds. A few years later the island was again open to certain writers and painters and their families to live there on a community basis, however a hostess and planned entertainment were not provided.
A few years later the island was sold to William Speed of Louisville, Kentucky. The Speeds owned a number of homes and usually spent only one month out of the year at Triuna Island. During the second World War they did not come up at all, and in 1950 the island was sold at an auction to seven Swire brothers and their two sisters. They divided the studios, houses and caretakers’ cottages on the islands among them, along with the two archway apartments, so that each of the nine families had their own separate living quarters.
The Swire families and their descendants, now numbering well over 100, still own the island today, operating as a family timeshare run as a Corporation. The island name has reverted back to the original Three Brothers Islands (or, alternatively, Three Brother Islands).
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