For twenty-one days and nights six men would take shifts standing watch and making careful notes. They planned to scrutinize every detail of the experiment two at a time to keep each man honest about its results. They were members of a vigilance committee, organized in March 1859 “for the purpose of ascertaining whether Mrs. Hays eats.”
But then the tiny outpost, which is snuggled in the highlands between Port Henry and Crown Point, kept popping up in my research. Given that the topics I favor tend toward the naughtier side of old-timey Adirondack life, I noticed that a good many members of the Coot Hill community—back in the day, anyway—seemed to attract a good bit of trouble.
Think serial killer, and Berkowitz, Bundy or Dahmer come to mind. However, in the 1890s, following Jack the Ripper’s London killing spree, Mudgett, by then sitting in a cell at Philadelphia’s Moyamensing Prison, was the notorious monster.
For 75 years, Jule and Fred Thatcher captured everything from chowder parties to swim marathons and everyone from prize fighters to Roosevelts.
If by chance The Black Woods: Pursuing Racial Justice on the Adirondack Frontier lands in your bookstore this November and you are bold enough to try to lift it without a small crane, you will be amused to know I first envisioned this production as a pamphlet. Maybe 50 pages max.
Last summer, I was delighted to discover an article in this magazine about how the Caroga Arts Collective is bringing a musical revival to long-shuttered Sherman’s Amusement Park in Caroga Lake.
His artwork was called “rough and rugged as hickory stumps,” like the man himself. Friends described her as “soft, gentle, like the moss in the woods.” It was a match made in heaven, or at least the Adirondacks.
When I go to see Mike Pratt at the Olympic Regional Development Authority’s glossy new state-funded headquarters in Lake Placid, the first thing he does is spread out photographs of Olympic sports venues and stadiums in Beijing, Berlin and Sarajevo that lie abandoned and in ruins. His message is plain: This almost happened here.
A Captain Crum, who navigated the lake in 1819, told a tale of an almost 200-foot-long black monster with three teeth and a star on its forehead. Sandra Mansi, the photographer behind a hotly debated 1977 image of “Champy,” compared the creature to a dinosaur.
The humble, plain-living Quakers who lie buried here rejected displays of vanity and so kept death, as they had life, as simple and unemotional as possible.
Spotlighting regional characters—a movie star, an angler, a 46er 25 times over—and the Adirondack landscape at the time of America’s birth. Plus stunning photographs, where to find exceptional BBQ, and more.
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