Adirondack Daily Enterprise, November 4, 1982
Werle Cottages provided fine food and active atmosphere for the sick
By PHIL GALLOS
Miss Werle and Miss Jane: That's the way they were referred to and that's how they are remembered still. Together, these dignified ladies ran a pair of cure cottages at what is now 110 Main Street and 2 Church Street; and those cottages became a mecca for younger, upper-middle class tuberculosis patients who craved good company and loved good food.
The two buildings, one — 110 Main Street — on the northeast corner of Main Street and Church Street Extension, and the other — 2 Church Street — downhill from the first and just above the A & P parking lot 1 — once stood side by side on Main St. When Church St. was extended down the steep hill, the second cottage was moved half-way down hill and made a quarter turn to its present location.
In those days, 110 Main was numbered 112. The Church St. cottage had the number 110, and stood in what is now the middle of the street.
In 1914, 112 Main was owned by Mr. and Mrs. Ed LaBounty, and 110 and 108 Main was owned by Mrs. Jane Conklin. All these houses took patients, but Mr. LaBounty was best known as a livery owner who loved to play the clown. His livery stable stood on the site of the present A & P store, and on quiet evenings Mrs. LaBounty could be heard calling her husband to dinner — a call that apparently carried a considerable distance.
Of the two Conklin buildings, 108 Main is remembered primarily as the offices of Drs. Leach, Mayer, and Wilson.
Shortly after the close of World War I, two friends, Aletta Werle and Jane Schneiderwind, acquired the LaBounty house and the adjacent Conklin property. Thereafter, 110 and 112 Main St. were advertised as the Werle Cottages, although Miss Jane was the businesswoman of the partnership.
Miss Werle's joy was cooking. By all accounts her skill in the kitchen was legendary. Under Miss Werle and Miss Jane the two buildings on Main St. housed a very well organized operation whose table was without peer.
Early on the two Werle cottages had different basic functions. One hundred-twelve Main was a "nursing" cottage. It took in people who were suffering more advanced symptoms of tuberculosis and who were confined to their beds or cure chairs. For them, a walk up a flight of stairs could be an exhausting or even damaging experience. A dumbwaiter, still intact in the building, remains as silent testimony to the fact that at least some patients there had been "on trays."
One hundred-ten Main St. was an "ambulatory" or "up" cottage People curing there were well enough to walk and engage in other forms of mild exercise or entertainment. There were no dining facilities at 110 Main, so its residents would come to 112 Main for their meals.
By the late 1920's, there were apparently a mix of patients in both cottages, neither one then being exclusively "up" or "nursing." Some patients were "on trays" in each house, and, for those at 110 Main, Miss Werle's wonderful meals arrived carefully packed in lovely baskets. The meals were so wonderful, in fact, that the baskets were also carried to 108 Main, 9 Church and other cottages that had no dining facilities.
By the 1930s, the Werle cottages catered primarily to ambulatory patients. But the famous baskets still went out, and many "up" patients walked from elsewhere to eat at 112 Main St.
The treatment of tuberculosis in Saranac Lake was one of providing environmental wholesomeness, rest, proper nourishment, gentle exercise, love and understanding. The importance of food, physiologically and psychologically, can hardly be overstressed.
Saranac Lake was a village of cottage sanatoriums and each cottage had its own special qualities as well as sharing certain qualities with particular groups of cottages.
Every person arriving in Saranac Lake in search of a return to health was thoroughly interviewed, and the physicians here made an effort to place each patient in a cottage that would be compatible with his or her age, temperament, degree of illness, and social, intellectual, and emotional needs.
The Werle cottages were right in the thick of things They were a stone's throw from St. Luke's Church Hall, half a block from the Saranac Lake Free Library, one block from the Hotel Saranac, a block and a half from the very center of the village. Next door, at 116 Main, was the house of Dr. Woods Price, a Virginia gentleman and gracious entertainer. Diagonally across the street was the home of Dr. E.L. Trudeau
All these places of interest and stimulation were not only close at hand, but, as it was termed, "on the level" —no mean consideration for a person with a respiratory disease.
So, the Werle cottages were an ideal location for younger, more socially active, extroverted patients. And, in the later years at least, Miss Werle and Miss Jane provided and presided over a quite proper, fairly expensive, .but very lively and. in the parlance of the times, gay pair of cottages.
Sometime around 1930, Church Street Extension was built. This was a project that some villagers found silly because it seemed like an unnecessary short-cut to Bloomingdale Avenue through a relatively undeveloped part of town. For those same reasons, other villagers, mostly downtown merchants, found the project menacing. Of course, there were those who believed the extension was to the village's overall good, and their view prevailed.
Aside from the obstacles of opinion, though, there were some physical obstacles to the extending of Church Street.
There was, as there still is, a very steep hill and a river. But there was also, right at the beginning, a rather large cure cottage, and a rather well regarded one at that. Such a building was too valuable a resource to lose; so, rather than being demolished, this structure, which now contains seven apartments, was lowered halfway down the hill, turned 90 degrees, and pulled into position behind 112 Main St. 110 Main Street thus became 2 Church St. and 112 Main St. was then renumbered 110 Main St.
Although they have undergone certain renovations and conversions, these two buildings remain mostly intact, their exterior appearance well maintained and basically unchanged for at least the last 30 years
This is our good fortune, because the Werle cottages are among the finest examples of cure cottage architecture in downtown Saranac Lake.
But there is a fineness of more than design here. There is a fineness of spirit with which Miss Werle and Miss Jane infused these houses. It is, among other things, the expression of dignity and taste seen in the accompanying advertisement. It is the ladies' legacy.
Thanks to Esther Mirick and Alice Swain, as well as nearly a dozen others, for providing information for this story.
Excerpt from Saranac by Robert Taylor, 1986. pg. 198.
"The opening of Sunmount and the onset of the Great Depression affected Saranac's cure cottages; nevertheless, on a comparative basis they prospered. Consider 110 and 112 Main Street, the Werle Cottages owned by Aletta Werle and Jane Schneiderwind. Miss Werle's forte--and a compelling talent it proved--was cookery; Miss Schneiderwind was her business partner. The cottages fulfilled separate functions: 112 Main, a "nursing" cottage in which patients were confined to their beds or cure chairs (the dumbwaiter survives as a testament that many patients were "on trays"); 110 Main, an "ambulatory" or "up" cottage where patients indulged in mild exercise (coping, in the village vernacular, with "dandruff." a mild dusting of TB). Like the aristocracy of the ill, the Trudeau patients, who had a limousine-taxi that brought them six at a time into the village, the boarders at one-ten enjoyed activities like shopping or going to the movies. They ate at one-twelve, however, where Miss Werle produced wondrous picnic baskets for those unable to reach the dining room. The baskets, famous in the village, were also distribute to "nursing" cottages or establishments without dining facilities."
Footnotes
1. Now Newman and Holmes, at 56 Woodruff Street
