Most patients saw their stay in Saranac as temporary, hoping to get well and return to their lives as they were before being interrupted by tuberculosis. For those who brought their families and could afford homes of their own, house rentals were quite common. Rentals were also an easy way for local investors to quickly pay for the cost of construction. As one visitor noted, "The rent for two years' occupancy of a cottage pays for building it." 1 Throughout the village, developers and contractors worked quickly to build new houses, not only because of the short Adirondack building season, but also because of the potentially short life span of their tuberculosis tenants.
Other contractors known to have worked in the area were J.J. O'Connell and George L. Starks, who also ran the Adirondack Hardware Company. William Edgar Trombley and John (Jack) Carrier" were both architects as well as manufacturers of building parts. Around 1898, Trombley & Carrier's "sash, door & trim establishment" was recorded in local papers as being badly damaged by fire.Branch & Callanan was a major local contracting firm, active in Saranac Lake's first building boom. Originally from the Keeseville area, they had a mill in Saranac Lake by 1896 which manufactured doors, sash, and blinds used locally and shipped elsewhere. By 1902, they had two mills as well as contracting services, and were advertising:
We can build your house from the ground and furnish everything. We have the facilities for building a cottage in two weeks as we have more than five hundred men in our employ. Don't wait to see us. Write, wire or telephone. 2
As contractors, Branch and Callanan built sixty buildings in 1908 alone, mostly in Saranac Lake and the vicinity. Many of the finest buildings in Saranac Lake were their work, as well as elegant Adirondack camps and homes elsewhere in the region. William Callanan, cofounder of the company, lived with his family at 19 Academy Street (nominated to the National Register).
Christy Mathewson Cottage
The Village of Saranac Lake became incorporated in 1892, the first community in the Adirondacks to do so. Dr. E. L. Trudeau was named president and Milo Miller, trustee. The village was extremely conscious of the health of its citizens and was quick to provide funding for an unusually advanced infrastructure. A gravity system of waterworks was installed in 1893, soon followed by the construction of a full sewer system (1893-1912). In subsequent years they installed a fire alarm system and fire station, an incinerator for burning "garbage, swill, and refuse," and paved streets. Orlando Blood and others established Saranac Lake's first electric company in 1894, later selling it to the Saranac Lake Electric Company. Coal gas, produced at a plant on Payeville Road, was available for those who preferred it for light or heat.
In addition to paying for all sorts of projects which provided better health conditions, the Village Board of Health and local health code were among the best in the state. Ordinances against spitting, a major source of tuberculosis infection, were instituted. In fact, by 1920 village publicists were still able to claim "No known case of tuberculosis infection has ever occurred in the village." 3
The spiritual needs of local residents and visiting patients were served by four denominations. The Episcopal Church of St. Luke the Beloved Physician was one of the earliest examples of the impact of the new visitors in the village. The Reverend John P. Lundy, D.D., an Episcopal priest from Philadelphia, conducted services at the Berkeley Hotel in the winter of 1877 for fellow patients and others. He and the guests began a subscription for the construction of a church building on the comer of Church Street and Main Street, and local residents joined in. Dr. Trudeau completed fundraising for the project in 1879, and the nationally known New York church architect, Richard M. Upjohn, donated the plans for a simple wooden church in his well-known Gothic Revival style.
The First Methodist Episcopal Church of Saranac Lake, incorporated in 1878, held services in the schoolhouse and private homes before completing their sanctuary on Main Street in 1886. Their current building on Church Street was completed in 1927. Roman Catholics, incorporated in 1888, built the first St. Bernard's Church just off Church Street in 1892; the building on that site today is their third sanctuary. The First Presbyterian Church began as a mission church in 1890, but the congregation was able to dedicate its own building by 1891; it still stands in somewhat altered form at 23 Church Street. Three of these denominations are represented in the Church Street Historic District nomination.
The Saranac Laboratory
Late in 1893, Dr. Trudeau’s house on Main Street with its small laboratory addition burned to the ground while the family was in New York City. The house was rebuilt and Trudeau’s friend and patient George Cooper paid for the construction of a new "fireproof" stone laboratory in a separate building behind the house, the first facility in the United States designed for and devoted to tuberculosis research. Both Trudeau's new Colonial Revival house and the Saranac Laboratory were designed by his cousin, J. Lawrence Aspinwall, a partner of the architect James Renwick. The Saranac Laboratory for the Study of Tuberculosis became nationally noted for its bacteriological work with tuberculosis. Using chemical tests as well as animal experimentation, researchers here made significant advances in the study of tuberculosis as well as other lung diseases such as silicosis.
As the curing industry continued to grow, it stimulated the entire economy of Saranac Lake. Soon it supplanted the guide and tourist business as a major source of income for local residents. In the ten years between 1892-1902, ten blocks of commercial structures were built in the downtown business district, in an urban scale and sophisticated styles for what was still a remote area. Many of the commercial structures are included in the Berkeley Square Historic District.
Main Street, looking North, 1908
Nine of these commercial blocks are modest examples of popular nineteenth century commercial vernacular architectural styles. The early buildings reflect their remote location through their builders' use of local materials and modest detailing. They also reflect the conservative approach of their builders to the onset of an unprecedented prosperity; three of them were built in two parts, expanding onto an adjacent site as business warranted or funds allowed. The cautiousness of this approach reflected the unanticipated and incremental growth of the village as a health resort.
From 1902-1920 existing buildings in the commercial district were expanded and new ones added to the streetscape. Often the upper floors were used for rental apartments, with large cure porches incorporated into the architecture to the front and rear. The Leis Block and other such structures throughout the Berkeley Square Historic District are fine examples of this.
By 1903 Saranac Lake was "a town of four thousand inhabitants... known both here and abroad as a health resort." 4 It continued to grow as tuberculosis patients flocked to the area to regain their health. Local stores catered to all the needs of their customers, including some peculiar to this community. Many were groceries and pharmacies, providing imported delicacies, painkillers, and other nostrums. Others advertised sputum cups, chair robes and fur coat rentals for patients curing outdoors.
A Cure Chair Beginning at the turn of the century, five local firms manufactured another essential piece of equipment: the cure chair. This customized chaise lounge made the patient's long hours outdoors more comfortable. George L. Starks and Company at 29-33 Broadway was the most successful manufacturer, selling the Mission-style "Rondack Combination Couch and Chair" throughout the United States and Europe. 5
Two national banks served local financial needs. The first of them, the Adirondack National Bank, was founded in 1897 by three recovering tuberculosis patients, William Minshull, John F. Neilson, and Alfred L. Donaldson (who later would write the first comprehensive history of the Adirondacks). Its 1906 headquarters at 70 Main Street still stands within the Berkeley Square Historic District, its facade obliterated by 1962 alterations.
A Winter Carnival was first sponsored by the Pontiac Club in 1898 and attracted thousands of onlookers for four or five days of parades and public events, including fireworks over a spectacular ice palace on the shore of Lake Flower. The tradition has continued almost without interruption to the present day. A free public library, founded in 1880, was established in its own permanent building by 1918, built largely with private donations.
A Village Board of Trade, precursor to the Chamber of Commerce, was established in 1905. Under its auspices, the landscape design firm of Olmsted Brothers was retained to prepare a master plan for improving the village. Their recommendations included the creation of a village park system encompassing the shores of Lake Flower and the Saranac River. In response, the Village Improvement Society was founded in 1910. They cleaned and beautified the lake and have continued to this day to work on the full implementation of the Olmsted Brothers plan.
The village's first train station burned in the 1890s and was replaced in 1904 by the Union Depot, uniting the New York Central and the Delaware & Hudson Railroads after the D&H was converted to standard gauge railroad tracks. The large size of the station and its six-hundred-foot platform reflected the volume of business at that time. New tuberculosis patients and supplies arrived daily, and every night the coffins of the dead departed on their final journey home.
Just outside the village, large new sanatoria were built by private foundations or government entities to be close to the medical resources and other facilities of Saranac Lake. In December 1894, only ten years after Trudeau established his sanatorium, the Sisters of Mercy established Sanatorium Gabriels for patients with incipient tuberculosis, about eight miles north of Saranac Lake in the Town of Brighton. Stony Wold Sanatorium, devoted particularly to the care of working women suffering from tuberculosis, opened in 1902 in the Town of Franklin, Franklin County, with the support of the Newcomb, Gould, Potter and Morgan families, the New York Telephone Company, and the E.I. DuPont de Nemours Company. About four miles southeast of Saranac Lake, in Ray Brook, N.Y., the "State Sanitarium" began in 1900 as a summer tent sanatorium. In 1904, the Ray Brook State Hospital opened a beautiful year-round facility. It is one of the few that still stand, now a medium security state prison. Because a patient's care at Ray Brook was totally subsidized by the state, it was often the last stop for those who could no longer afford private quarters or the semi-charitable institutions.
State Sanatorium at Ray Brook, under constructionBy 1907, four hundred Americans were dying of tuberculosis every day and hundreds of infected patients flocked to Saranac Lake in hopes of getting into the Adirondack Cottage Sanitarium. Many had made no advance arrangements for housing, and as their numbers multiplied, the Saranac Lake Society for the Control of Tuberculosis (the TB Society) was founded to help control the chaos. Acting as a central clearinghouse for information, the TB Society maintained a registry of local cure cottages and regularly inspected them to assure certain basic standards of quality and care. Unregistered cure cottages provided additional beds for the overflow of patients. Almost every local family took in a boarder at least once, providing rooms when personal finances or interests and the market required them.
In addition to the cure cottages on Helen Hill and French Hill, patients were soon able to find lodging in a new neighborhood almost exclusively dedicated to commercial private sanatoria. Developed by Julia Miller on a narrow plateau of Mount Baker overlooking her lots on Margaret and Catherine Streets, the new lots averaged about 1/3 acre in size. The section numbered 28-96 Park Avenue, where almost every building was a commercial private sanatorium, came to be called Cottage Row. It became one of the most densely built-up and best known concentrations of cure cottages in the village. Twenty structures designed and originally built as cure cottages are included in the Cottage Row Historic District.
The influx of tuberculosis patients included many wealthy individuals who came to Saranac Lake in search of the most advanced methods of treating tuberculosis. The real estate agency of Duryee & Co., founded in 1909 by George V.W. Duryee, Walter Cluett, and Eddy Whitby, specialized in renting properties to prominent or prosperous health seekers and summer vacationers. Many houses in Highland Park were thus leased out over the next few decades.
The Clark-Peyton Cottage in Rockledge
Also in 1909, the same three men organized the Rockledge Company to build Saranac Lake's second exclusive subdivision. Walter Cluett had been instrumental in hiring the Olmsted Brothers firm to prepare the village improvement plan, and the same firm was retained the following year to lay out a subdivision plan. Located on 73 acres of Col. Milote Baker's farm, Rockledge included almost all the land between East Pine Street and the Saranac River, in addition to a quarter of Moody Pond. It was laid out in fifty lots ranging from 1/3 acre to three acres in size. Physically separated from the village center by Helen Hill — although no farther than Highland Park — the area seemed remote and was slow to develop. Only six houses had been built on Rockledge Road by World War II.
The last of Saranac Lake's three upper class neighborhoods, the Glenwood Estates Colony, was quicker to develop. It was established just one year later than Rockledge, in 1911, by a local partnership of Dr. Lawrason Brown, banker William Minshull, and merchant William C. Leonard on 120 acres of Dewey Mountain's lower slopes above Riverside Drive. Like Highland Park, the lots in Glenwood had explicit deed restrictions to protect property values and attract the most discriminating buyers, the regulations were the most restrictive in the village and included regulations that the dwelling house must cost at least $5,000 and could stand no closer than 25 feet from the property lines. Of the twenty-six building within the area, about eighteen were built in the curing era, most by 1930. Residents and tenants included members of the Wrigley and Edison families, Dr. Francis B. Trudeau, architect William G. Distin, Sr., and a vacationing Albert Einstein.
Footnotes
1. Thomas Bailey Aldrich, 1903, in Robert Taylor, America's Magic Mountain (New York: Paragon House Publishers, 1986), p. 107.
2. Adirondack Daily Enterprise July 3, 1902.
3. Donaldson, p. 242.
4. Gallos, p. 16
5. Gallos, p.14
