James Memorial Staff Building, Entrance detail 
James Memorial Staff Building Trudeau Sanatorium Historic District, Reference No. 10
Year built: 1929
Architects: Scopes and Feustmann
Undated. Courtesy of Noreen OslanderDescription: James Memorial Staff Building is a two-story five-bay Georgian Revival style residence. The building is of frame construction sheathed in a red-brick veneer. It sits on a foundation of square-cut rubble stone laid without courses and it is surmounted by an asphalt shingled hipped roof broken by two dormers. The building is symmetrical, featuring a projecting central enclosed entrance portico. Constructed of wood, this is a highly decorative feature, with semi-elliptical roof supported by pilasters, an Adamesque fanlight and half-sidelights with decorative tracery. Windows are either individual double-hung sash with six-over-six lights or groups of three, with a standard sized window flanked by two narrower windows with two-over-two sash. Windows have splayed brick lintels with keystones. The second-story center window is framed by elaborate decorative brackets. James Memorial encompasses 6,900 square feet and has three fresh air features: there are two-story banks of semi-octagonal porches at each end of the building and a rectangular stack of porches on the rear, east facade, facing the view of Mount Baker. Named for Walter B. James, Trudeau's successor, this was the last patient housing built in accordance with the cottage plan.
History: James Cottage is one of eight buildings still standing in 1993 that were built after 1915 when Dr. Trudeau died and the institution was renamed in his honor. Though designed by architects Scopes and Feustmann, James shows no exterior sign that it utilizes the cottage plan to segregate patients; it may be that with its unusual capacity of twelve patients on two floors with four porches, it accomplishes the same result in a more unified form.
The building is named for Dr. Walter B. James, who was elected president of the Board of Trustees upon the death of Dr. Trudeau in 1915, and served until his own death in 1927. His wife presented the cottage in his memory, "for members of the staff and visiting doctors and scientists. It is a thoroughly modern, comfortable, well-furnished dormitory, containing an amusement room and many conveniences." 1
James Memorial was a residence for patients who were also doctors; Walker Percy, later to become a prize-winning novelist, was one doctor who lived here. A biography describes his stay: "In the spring of 1943, Percy moved into an "up" cottage [common usage for a cottage for ambulatory patients]. Officially called James but generally referred to as the 'doctors' cottage,' it was home to twelve physicians or medical students, most of whom were in sufficiently good health to assume limited medical responsibilities around the sanitorium [sic]. Typically, the doctors of James went on rounds, worked in the X-ray clinic, assisted with the occasional surgery, or even did clinical or research work in the laboratories. . . . James was considered a choice cottage. It was lively, on occasions even raucous. Talk was often medical—there were weekly discussion groups that focused on cases written up in The New England Journal of Medicine." 2
Source: Mary B. Hotaling, Draft nomination to the National Register of Historic Places, January 1993.
It was said of the James Cottage, "All the doctors went to it."
Comments
Footnotes
1. Fred H. Heise, "Trudeau Sanatorium After 1903," Journal of the Outdoor Life: Saranac Lake Special Number (May 1931), 283.
2. Jay Tolson, Pilgrim in the Ruins: A Life of Walker Percy (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992), 175.
