Saranac Lake 1939 - 1990

The Seeley Cottage The Pomeroy Cottage The cure for tuberculosis, like the cure cottage, was constantly evolving as doctors sought new means for conquering the White Plague. During the 1920s, doctors in Saranac Lake began to try a variety of surgical techniques to help the lungs rest and thereby speed up the recovery from pulmonary tuberculosis. In 1944, the drug streptomycin was discovered to be effective against TB. By 1946 doctors had learned to combine another drug, PAS, with it in order to reduce the side effects. Patients recovered in half the time, and porches were no longer essential to the process of curing. By 1952, Isoniazid was introduced, displacing streptomycin as the drug of choice for treatment.

The final blow for the cure cottage and the end of the curing era, then, was this bittersweet discovery of antibiotics that were effective against tuberculosis bacilli. The triumph of medicine, aided by doctors and researchers in Saranac Lake, also meant the end of the Adirondack rest cure. With a dwindling number of patients, the Trudeau Sanatorium closed in 1954. Its buildings remained empty for years until the American Management Association acquired the complex in the 1970s. Many of the cure cottages in the village were converted to multi-unit residential use. Others were lost over the decades due to neglect and fires.

The Trudeau Institute, a biomedical research institution specializing in immunology, was established in 1964 to continue the work of the Saranac Laboratory. Tourism and recreation continue to be the most important sources of revenue for the local residents.

The extraordinary number of structures related to the curing industry which remain, and the integrity of their cure porches and other curing details, form an unique and important architectural record of an era, and a disease, that is now unfamiliar to most Americans. The identification and preservation of these structures is invaluable for the documentation and future interpretation of the impact of tuberculosis on this nation, its people and its architectural heritage.

Note: This article originally appeared here as part of a submission to the United States Department of the Interior, National Register of Historic Places Nomination Form