History

Sprawl at the Gates

In 1967 Laurance Rockefeller, brother of then-governor Nelson Rockefeller, called for the creation of a 1.7-million-acre Adirondack Mountains National Park—within New York State’s Adirondack Park—to be comprised of existing Forest Preserve plus acquired private lands. Rockefeller’s proposal took New Yorkers by surprise and gave a big nudge to the movement for greater state control in the Adirondacks.

So what would have become of the region had a national park been created? In a word, Gatlinburg. Tennessee’s Gateway to the Smoky Mountains National Park. Home of the Star Cars museum and Elwood Smooch’s Hillbilly Hoedown, not to mention a plethora of wedding chapels performing more ceremonies than any town in the country, Las Vegas included. Lake George inflated with a pump and plugged in to a Surroundsound amp.

Soul of the Summits

When you’ve lived as long as Grace Hudowalski, people are always asking how you’re doing. It’s a hazard faced by ninety-six-year-olds, who also happen to be living legends. This morning, Grace has a chest cough that rattles her narrow frame, but she shrugs and sits upright in her wheelchair and even manages a laugh.

“I’m here, you know,” she says, looking out the sliding-glass door toward Whiteface Mountain. “That’s the main thing.”

March Madness

When I arrived at the Hot Biscuit Diner in Ticonderoga to meet Bob Bearor, he was nowhere to be seen. Then the waitress saw me looking around.

“There’s some guys from the fort in the back room,” she said, which, I found out a moment later, is a pretty cavalier way to describe a man wearing the eighteenth-century uniform of a French-Canadian soldier. Specifically, it was the uniform of French partisan leader Langis, complete with knee-length wool coat, heavy leather moccasin boots, a leather belt with a bayonet and a gold-rimmed tricorne hat.

Bearor’s wife, Holly, was there too, dressed more plainly as a French officer.

Before I could fully take in this anachronism, the waitress came by and—completely ignoring the fact she was about to serve a French commander who had been dead for more than two hundred years—asked what we wanted for breakfast.

Langis, for the record, ordered pancakes.

Shots and Chasers

The headlines of the December 31, 1925, Ticonderoga Sentinel indicated that the war between bootleggers and ordinary citizens on one side and state troopers and federal prohibition agents on the other—waged in the Adirondacks since the Volstead Act had become national law on January 17, 1920—had gotten out of hand. A few evenings before, on the Chestertown-Riverside road, a forry-six-year-old woman named Mrs. Peter Sanders had been shot in the head by police while riding home in a Dodge touring car driven by her son.

“The officers were standing in the highway and as the Sanders car came upon them one of the officers lighted his flashlight and ordered the car to stop,” reported the Sentinel. “Young Sanders claims that the flashlight blinded him and he was able to see the three forms in the road only dimly. Believing them to be highway men he speeded up the car to pass.” The next moment, Sanders heard shots and yelled for the family to duck. “The windshield was broken and Mother said she was shot,” the young man testified. No liquor was found in the auto, and it was later established that the car had only been going twenty-five miles per hour during the alleged getaway. The law-enforcement men claimed they had aimed at the tires of the Sanders car—a common ploy of troopers hot on the chase of a bootlegger’s auto—but that story didn’t jibe with the facts. Trooper J. R. Cannon was convicted of first-degree assault (fortunately, Mrs. Sanders recovered from her injuries) and received a sentence of thirteen months to ten years at the state reformatory in Elmira.

Mrs. Sanders wasn’t the only innocent bystander to catch a bullet. The year before, a state trooper stationed in Malone had shot and killed a Schenectady man during a chase through the mountains near Keene. No liquor was found in that car either. And the November 1922 death of a “good, law abiding citizen” of Plattsburgh, shot by a trooper named Quinn after the man refused to stop at a roadblock, prompted “frequent threats to lynch Quinn,” according to the Ticonderoga paper. The troopers also got into trouble for bumping off bona fide bootleggers. In June 1929 the killing by border patrolmen of a twenty-year-old Plattsburgh youth, who had allegedly just gotten into the business, led to an investigation and a statement from President Hoover condemning the use of arms by border guards. It also prompted citizens to protect themselves: “Dozens of automobile drivers throughout the Adirondack region are now driving with these large signs attached to the rear of their cars: ‘Don’t shoot. We have no liquor,”‘ reported the Sentinel.

Powerless

A January thaw is nothing out of the ordinary here. The very term bespeaks of a well-earned punctuality: a couple months of hard, cold weather, then January shows up, and for a few days the mercury sails to equatorial heights. It’s as if winter has exhaled and is sucking in another huge breath to last until April. No big deal.

And so it was, on January 2, when temperatures in many parts of the North Country completed a nearly sixty-degree upswing in a little over twenty-four hours. With the warmth came rain and fog. And more rain. In Long Lake, town supervisor Thomas Bissell reported that the lake rose four feet in twenty-four hours, something he had never heard of happening before. In Essex County, man-made Minerva Lake was in danger of breaching its dam. Instruments in Newcomb would eventually catch more than four inches of liquid precipitation.

But to the north, the rain was starting to freeze on contact. According to meteorologist Cindy Fitzgibbon, of News Channel 5, in Plattsburgh, what made this winter rain unique was a massive Arctic high-pressure system to our north and east that funneled cold air into the region. At the same time, the jet stream was positioned further north than usual—on a southwest-to-northeast tack-which funneled moisture-laden warm air from the Gulf of Mexico along a stationary front.

Reveries of Camp Deerlands

As you drive north on Route 30, between Long and Tupper lakes, you enter a tract of vast private woodlands extending all the way to the Adirondack Park Blue Line on the west. With the road stretching through dark boreal forests on either side, it looks like you could be driving through northern Ontario or Quebec. Here and there a tannin-stained creek or glacial pond bordered by cranberry and Labrador Tea. It is the land of the last moose and panther shot in New York State, of the old canoe routes made famous by George Washington Sears—Nessmuk—and now it is largely the land of Whitney Park, 51,000 acres of managed forest and 38 ponds and lakes. After the leaves fall, the signs of well-conducted timber harvesting are visible behind a wall of protected trees.

At Whitney Park’s southern extremity, 12 miles from the village of Long Lake, is Camp Deerlands, originally built and established by a cousin of William West Durant, and for 90 years the summer hideaway of one of the United States’ most revered and influential patrician dynasties. You might have seen Cornelius Vanderbilt (Sonny) Whitney and his wife Marylou on Life Styles of the Rich and Famous, or in the Clubhouse at the Saratoga Racetrack. Last summer Marylou was profiled for her reputation as a hostess in Vanity Fair and she was highly visible from Albany to Long Lake in her role as a sort of minister without portfolio for charities, benefits, balles des nuits, and as symbol and mascot of everything that summer in Saratoga Springs stands for—especially everything rich.

One Simple Life

Oct. 21, 1933. Twenty one years old. Received for my birthday one pair leather gloves, one dollar, one cake and five bananas, also one pair of shoe insoles. Helped to dig Hilda’s grave. I had my birthday dinner at grandfathers. I have this date nine dollars and seventy-four cents. Beginning reading the Bible through, also to write it through. Saw the airplane … both ways.

So begin the chronicles of Frank Lillibridge, the last master of Maple Grove Farm in Thurman. The third generation of his family to reside there, this unassuming man documented events from 1933 to 1978 in diaries that serve as a time capsule of a simple, quiet life on a southern Adirondack farm.

When the News Was New

n’t move; it doesn’t have to. What changes is the world around it: Hemlines, buildings, entire civilizations rise and fall with the seeming speed of light while the time machine itself sits there like a bump on a pickle, and the Time Traveler gets to watch war and apocalypse pound his beloved garden into rubble.

Now, I’m not saying reading microfilms of old Adirondack small-town newspapers turns me into Rod Taylor on a joyride through history. First, when he made time, he booked. For my part, no matter how cleverly I work the knobs, I can’t do better than reverse, and then only lurch as far back as the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Second, the Time Traveler rode in high style, his cockpit a cross between a chariot and a lavishly upholstered English club chair. Me, I use a straight-back pull-up chair in the drab cubby of a library, and the only music is a thin fluorescent buzz.

Still, I figure I’m entitled to a pinch of kinship. We’re both trailblazers, a couple of armchair explorers. He finds a lost world and a cute, if addlepated, girl, to boot. My idea of gainful plunder is more modest: a few good headlines—”Catholic Church Opposes Tango” or “Another Italian Ever-Ready Knife Fight”—and the delicacy of some antique obituary that describes a hapless home handyman as “an upright Christian, a good citizen and an ardent patriot, but with limited information with regard to circular saws.” Even material that falls under the rubric of There’s Nothing New Under the Sun is gold dust of a kind, like the case of teacher harassment circa 1878, in which a schoolmaster, fed up with boys playing catch in class, confiscates his students’ baseballs, including one that had been pitched into the wood stove and which, on hasty retrieval, turned out to be packed with enough gunpowder to blow the school to smithereens.

March Past

Decades after I last played John Philip Sousa’s “Stars and Stripes Forever” on a trumpet, with its thrilling strains still echoing in my head, I was hungry for a good Sousa story. I found one in Alfred Donaldson’s two-volume A History of the Adirondacks, originally published by the Century Company in New York City in 1921.

In two sentences, Donaldson delivers a tale widely repeated by historians, guides and yarn-spinners ever since. Of the maiden voyage of the steamboat Water Lily, based at Martin’s Hotel on Lower Saranac Lake, he wrote, “The first official trip of the Water Lily was made on July 4, 1878. She had on board Sousa’s Band—which was playing at ‘Martin’s’ that summer—and people came from miles around ….”

Icing the cake, Donaldson adds, “On pleasant evenings … [the Water Lily] was frequently chartered, with the band, for excursions on the lake.”

Rise and Fall of a Company Town

Standing on Main Street of Au Sable Forks today it is almost impossible to imagine the town as it looked and was lived in forty years ago, near the end of the reign of the Rogers family. The local equivalent of royalty, the Rogerses came to Au Sable Forks in the 1830s, built not one but two major industries there (the first in iron, the second in paper), sold out in the 1950s and finally left in the 1970s, when the last of their mills closed for good. In between, they made a great many things happen in the town, took credit for even more and were blamed for everything else.

Growing up there, as I did, during the slow death of the J. & J. Rogers Company—after the family had lost control but before the final locking of the doors—one could feel a sense of loss everywhere but could hardly make out what exactly was being lost. Jobs, of course, but more than that. Every once in a while you’d hear a sweet and nostalgic story about a long-ago Rogers social event, or a flash of anger at a costly and, in retrospect, pivotal mistake at the mill, ordered by a Rogers son who “didn’t know paper”—the ultimate insult.

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