From the all-woman staff of Historic Saranac Lake, we want to give a huge thank you to all of you for enthusiastically following along as we shared the stories of women in Saranac Lake for Women’s History Month. We appreciate your support, your stories, and your requests and hope you’ll continue to follow along with us on Facebook and Instagram all year long! And if you have a story you’d like to share, or know a great woman in the Saranac Lake area whose story we didn’t cover this month, let us know and we’ll share it!

Did you know that Historic Saranac Lake was started by a group of eight women (and one man!)? Betsy Minehan, Dot Fobare, Jeanne DeMattos, Janet Decker, Mary Hotaling, Helen Todd, Barbara Parnass, Nadia Slack, and Phil Gallos officially incorporated HSL on September 25, 1980. That's almost 40 years of HSL history!

As always, you can learn more about Saranac Lake area history by visiting our wiki!

Our final Fan Friday request for Women’s History Month comes from Jean, who shared the story of her mother, Mary Seney, with us in February. We are happy to share it with you today!

Mary Catherine Blakeley Margiotta Seney came to Saranac Lake for tuberculosis treatment in 1928. She left her husband Frederick and one year old son Nicholas to come to Saranac Lake for treatment accompanied by her mother, Catherine. Mary's condition was very dire, and her survival was uncertain.

Today is Tuberculosis Thursday, so our Women’s History Month feature is Elizabeth Newcomb! Newcomb founded Stony Wold Sanatorium in 1901 on 1800 acres of a hillside overlooking Lake Kushaqua, just north of Brighton in the Town of Franklin. Her idea was to create a charitable sanatorium for the treatment of underprivileged young women suffering from TB. She was encouraged by her husband, Dr. James Edward Newcomb and by Dr. E.L. Trudeau, and received support from many prominent people of New York City as well as from AT&T, DuPont, Gould, Biggs, Potter, Pond, Morgan, and Rockefeller. Elizabeth Newcomb herself succumbed to TB in 1938 and was buried between Stony Wold Hall and the lake, at her request, where she “could look out over the waters of the quiet lake” Kushaqua (Algonquin for “beautiful resting place”).

Stony Wold closed in 1955 with the advent of new drugs and was sold to the White Fathers Catholic Order, missionaries to Africa. It then became St. Joseph’s Seminary until 1972. By 1974 the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation became owner of most of the property and the buildings were torn down. Stony Wold Hall and two cottages remain in private ownership.

Sherwood Davies, who grew up at Stony Wold, remembered that Newcomb “spent her summers at a camp on the Lake and the winters in New York City. She was transported in a straight eight Packard car and chauffeured between Lake Kushaqua and New York New York Central every spring and fall.”

To learn more about Elizabeth Newcomb and Stony Wold, visit our wiki!

Today’s Wednesday Writer for Women’s History Month is Mildred Evelyn Phelps Stokes Hooker. Hooker wrote “Camp Chronicles,” a recollection of life at the family camp on Birch Island on Upper St. Regis Lake. The book, originally sent out as a Christmas greeting to 95 people in 1952 and published in 1964, features photographs and memories of camp life.

Hooker’s father was Anson Phelps Stokes, who was a merchant, banker, publicist, philanthropist, and became a multimillionaire. The Stokes family was the first to build a summer camp on Upper St. Regis Lake, bought from Paul Smith in 1876.

An excerpt from “Camp Chronicles” reads, “it will be seventy years this summer since I first came to camp as a little girl of two, so I think I can fairly claim to be the longest, if not the oldest, inhabitant. In 1876, five years before I was born, father brought his family to Paul Smiths’ and went into rough camp with them on what we later called ‘Birch Island.’ … Father was so charmed by the beauty and peace of the Upper Lake, there were no camps at all on it then, that he bought the island from a Mr. Norton for $200.”

The family eventually returned to spend the summer at the camp, based on a recommendation from Dr. Loomis, and built a more permanent camp in 1876. It was the first of what would become a small colony of summer camps of the wealthy and powerful, who had been drawn to the area by Paul Smith's Hotel.

To learn more about Hooker, and follow links to see the manuscript and photographs from “Camp Chronicles” in the Adirondack Experience’s collection, visit our wiki!

For Museum Monday we want to share this nurse's cape from our collection to highlight the work for nurses in Saranac Lake for Women's History Month! This particular cape belonged to Juanita "Nita" Hayman Worthington, who trained at Bellevue School of Nursing and came to Trudeau Sanatorium for her health. Following her cure, she began a nursing career in the area that saw her serve first at the Trudeau Sanatorium, where she met her husband-to-be Ed when he arrived as a new patient. Later she worked as doctor's nurse for Drs. Woodruff, Merkel, and Decker.

Worthington was one of many hundreds of nurses who worked in the TB industry in Saranac Lake. Many of these nurses were patients who stayed to care for patients following their own treatment for TB. To read more about the fascinating and inspiring stories of Worthington and many other nurses, as well as about the history of the D. Ogden Mills Training School for Nurses at Trudeau Sanatorium, visit our wiki!

[Historic Saranac Lake collection, courtesy of Jan Worthington Dudones.]

It’s Fan Friday, and we received a request to share the story of Mary Prescott for Women’s History Month! Mary R. Prescott was a young heiress from New Bedford, Massachusetts, who came to Saranac Lake to cure in 1895. At Dr. Edward L. Trudeau's urging, she made it her mission to help patients too poor to afford a cure cottage. In 1901, Prescott rented a cottage at 12 Shepard Avenue, where, along with a tent pitched in the yard, she housed four patients, a nurse and two maids.

In 1905, she opened the twenty-bed Reception Hospital at the end of nearby Franklin Avenue; in 1925, it handled nearly a hundred patients, with Mary Prescott covering the annual deficit. It was designed by the new architectural firm of Scopes and Feustmann, who entered and won a competition to design it. Prescott would personally visit every patient every Sunday evening.

Today’s Tuberculosis Thursday Women’s History Month feature is Mildred Blanchet! Blanchet was an artist and craftswoman who met her future husband, Dr. Sidney Blanchet, when they were both tuberculous patients at Trudeau Sanatorium.

After her recovery from tuberculosis, the death of her father, and marriage to Dr. Blanchet she moved to 27 Church Street (now 49 Church Street). In the first years much of her time was spent taking care of her invalid mother. She also worked both in the Workshop at Trudeau Sanatorium and also at the Saranac Lake Study and Craft Guild. She apparently created the harlequin girl logo for an early Winter Carnival sometime in about 1913. Blanchet was a talented painter and she worked in a variety of mediums from watercolors, bas relief, pencil and oils to painting furniture.

After her husband’s death she went to work and live at the Trudeau Sanatorium with her youngest son Jeremy and worked as an occupational therapist in the crafts program. She encouraged people to use their leisure to do things with their hands. She got men knitting. She made designs for hooked rugs and did crewel work or hand embroidery. She was one of the judges for a Craft Guild art contest in September 1941.
To learn more about Blanchet and see examples of her work, visit our wiki!

Our next Women’s History Month Wednesday Writer is Martha Reben! Reben (born Rebentisch) was an author who wrote The Healing Woods (1952), The Way of the Wilderness (1954), and A Sharing of Joy (1963). These were all memoirs of her experiences camping on the shore of Weller Pond in 1931 in an attempt to cure herself of tuberculosis.

Reben grew up in New York City; when she was six her mother died of tuberculosis. When she, too, became ill she was sent to cure in Pennsylvania, the Catskills and finally, in 1927, to Saranac Lake. However, after curing at Trudeau Sanatorium for three and a half years, and after three operations failed to cure her, she decided to follow her own desires, and hired a guide to take her camping in the wilderness.

Reben spotted an ad for a different type of cure in the local newspaper. Local boat builder and guide Fred Rice placed an advertisement seeking a patient to help guide into the woods for the fresh air cure. Rice was a firm believer in the curative powers of the Adirondack woods. He argued that TB patients who were spending their days in the village of Saranac Lake resting on cure porches would be better served by getting out in the woods.

Fred Rice did not expect such a young and frail woman to answer his ad, but he and his wife Kate agreed that five months of steady work was worth taking. Together Reben and Rice traveled eleven miles to Weller Pond to camp.

Convinced of the health benefits of the outdoor life, Reben never returned to the city. Her disease slowly improved, and she lived to age 58.
Reben is pictured here with her pet duck, Mr. Dooley. To learn more about Reben’s time curing in the woods, and her writings, visit our wiki!

Today's Women's History Month feature is Rosalind Russell! After graduating from the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in 1929, Russell had high hopes of becoming an actress. She heard that a Broadway producer on Long Island, Ed Casey, was casting for a summer theater in the Adirondacks. Casey had cured in Saranac Lake and believed the cosmopolitan town in the fresh air to be the perfect place for – as the program cover advertised – “A Bit of Broadway in the Mountains.” Russell opened the phone book and called Casey at home. Without a shred of acting experience, Russell got him to meet her. She charmed Mr. Casey, signing a contract on the spot for $150 a week.

And so in June of 1929, Russell, age 22, stepped off the train at the Union Depot in Saranac Lake. Casey’s partner, Dick Bartell, met her at the station and was dismayed to realize that Casey had hired for $150 a week the same inexperienced actress that he had spotted at her drama school and said he could get for $30 a week.

That summer, Russell earned every penny of her high salary, acting in 26 plays in 13 weeks. The theater was a tent behind the buildings on Main Street (where the Dorsey Street Lot is now), and the stage was made of birch bark. It was no easy enterprise. Owners Casey and Bartel acted in every performance, and local Saranac Lakers pitched in to help the theater.

Russell came back briefly the next summer of 1930 to open the tent theater for the summer, but then she moved on to join the Copley Players in Boston. Already, her career was taking off. In the 1930s she began working for MGM, making comedies such as Four’s a Crowd and dramas like The Citadel. In 1953, she returned to Broadway for the huge Tony Award-winning hit, Wonderful Town. She is well remembered for her title role in the long-running Broadway production of Auntie Mame.

Pictured here is Russell in 1956, and a program from the inaugural summer of her acting career from our collection. To learn more about Russell's time in Saranac Lake, and her career on and off the Broadway stage, visit our wiki!