“The historical sense involves a perception, 
not only of the pastness of the past, 
but of its presence” 
― T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets

Soon we will open a new exhibition at the museum called “Pandemic Perspectives.” The exhibit will highlight different experiences in Saranac Lake during the TB curing years, and visitors will be invited to make connections to life during COVID-19.

Creating an exhibit is a team effort. Each person on our small staff brings a different set of skills from research, to writing, to design. Thanks to the expertise of our archivist and curator, Chessie Monks-Kelly, we draw upon our growing collection of artifacts, images, and documents. With help from trusty volunteers like Marty Rowley and Rob Russell and hardworking local businesses like Compass Printing and Stacked Graphics, it all comes together.

This new exhibit is a simple concept: twelve panels, each labeled with one word like “gratitude” or “fear,” a photo, a short caption, a quote, and a question. Quotes from literature explore real and imaginary pandemics from the past. From The Plague, by Albert Camus, to The Birds, by Daphne du Maurier, literature reminds us that our struggles and triumphs are part of a vast human experience that extends across cultures and generations. Each panel may take no more than a minute to read, but we expect they will conjure up a wealth of reactions and questions.

In May, we hired a new staff person, Mahala Nyberg, and she got right to work on the exhibit. Not knowing a cure chair from a stone pig, she brought fresh eyes to the project. One day, as she sorted through photos documenting the experience of COVID-19 in Saranac Lake, Mahala expressed astonishment at images of handmade signs posted in the windows of local businesses during the lockdown. She lived through the pandemic in her rural hometown, where there is no downtown. People drive to Walmart or Wegmans for what they need, and so, during the long spring of 2020, Mahala never saw a homemade sign in a local business wishing her and her neighbors well.

The simple signs on the doors of friendly local businesses like the Dance Sanctuary, Nori's, the Community Store, and Lakeview Deli speak to a powerful sense of place we sometimes take for granted.

Drawn by Saranac Lake’s strong sense of community, Ernest White II recently visited the village to record an episode for his popular travel show, “Fly Brother.” One rainy day in May, I joined a group of locals to walk around town with Ernest and his film crew.

Ernest’s tour of the Adirondacks will ultimately be condensed down to a thirty-minute episode, so we knew most of what we showed him won’t make the cut. Seeing town from the eyes of a world traveler, it’s easy to notice the rundown side of Saranac Lake. We stood in Berkeley Green, eating soggy s’mores in the rain. There, in the space where the beautiful Berkeley Hotel once stood, it was hard not to think about all that’s been lost. The village doesn’t always look like such a great tourist destination, especially on a cold and rainy day.

Still, Ernest seemed pleased with the spirit of the place. We talked about cure porches, hunting traditions, famous visitors, our museum expansion project, and the restoration of the Hotel Saranac. Mayor Rabideau helped him catch a fish. 

At the end of my interview, Ernest asked me what I have liked the most about living in Saranac Lake. I thought about those signs in the downtown windows in the last year, and I told him the truth, although it was absolutely the wrong answer for a tourism sound bite. Standing there in Berkeley Green in the rain, I answered simply, “Being a mom. Saranac Lake has been a great place to raise a family.” 

My answer I’m sure will hit the cutting room floor with a thud. But I am glad he asked me the question. It helped remind me of what is right here in front of my face, waiting to be seen with fresh eyes.

Dear  Friends,

Separated from loved ones during the pandemic, many of us have been staying in touch with good old fashioned postcards. Americans’ love of postcards dates back to 1893, when the first souvenir postcards were sold at the World Columbian Exposition in Chicago. The postcard craze caught on quickly. By 1915, millions of postcards changed hands. Many were carefully preserved in albums and displayed in homes across America. Before radio and television, postcard collections provided entertainment and a window into the wider world.

Historic Saranac Lake recently acquired a wonderful album of some 80 postcards portraying the daily life of TB patients in Saranac Lake during the early 1900s. Over many years, Florence Wright carefully collected and preserved cards mailed from the booming health resort. One postcard, sent in 1909, summed up Saranac Lake at the time, "We leave here today, had a big time. The Village is just fine, lots of sick people here." 

In the early 1900s, postcards were printed in Germany by highly specialized printers, and the images are startlingly clear. Beautiful buildings appear in now empty lots, a horse pulls a pair of friends in a sleigh down Main Street, a speed skater takes a turn.

At first, postal regulations prohibited writing on the flip side, so senders wrote messages over the image on the front. Eventually, rules changed and allowed for writing on the back, making for longer and more interesting messages. Looking at old postcards, one phrase at a time, human experience comes into focus, from the mundane to the deeply personal.
Many of the cards from Saranac Lake are written by TB patients. They describe intense cold on cure porches and personal health facts like daily temperature readings and weight gain. Messages tend to be short, and many sentences are fragments. Yet there is often an easy familiarity between the sender and receiver. Many of the postcards are clearly written in the context of frequent exchanges of letters and cards.

Just before WWI, the U.S. enacted tariffs that disrupted the postcard industry. Printing moved from specialized German companies to firms here at home that lacked the technology and expertise to create clear images. Inferior, cheap postcards flooded the market, and the postcard craze started to wane. Still, postcards continued to be purchased and shared, documenting daily life in the health resort.
Florence’s postcards show that one hundred years ago, people were coping with the personal and public health threat of tuberculosis in many of the same ways we are responding to the pandemic today, with a mix of worry, fear, and sadness, but also hope, gratitude, and love. Each postcard is a poignant statement of the human need to connect with one another. In 1908, one person wrote to a friend in Cazenovia, “I can't help but be a bit lonesome. Still people are very kind to me. Be sure and write soon."
This summer we will unveil a new exhibit titled, “Pandemic Perspectives,” exploring connections between our experience of the current pandemic and life in Saranac Lake during the TB years. The exhibit will include some of Florence’s postcards, and visitors will be invited to write their own notes describing what they have felt in the past year. We hope you will come drop us a line!

Yours truly,
Amy

Amy Catania
Executive Director

These days it seems like everyone wants to call the Adirondacks home. During the pandemic, closed-in city spaces have lost their allure. It’s a repeat of Saranac Lake’s tuberculosis years, when tens of thousands of people came here from around the world in search of the fresh air cure. When you want to avoid germs, a place with more trees than people is a good bet.
Adirondackers have a long love-hate relationship with outsiders. As the 20th century began and the TB industry picked up speed, strangers poured into the village. As much as TB represented a way to put food on the table, not all locals were thrilled with the changes newcomers brought. Guide and boatbuilder Fred Rice wrote a manuscript in 1952 decrying the development of the village as a health resort. During his father’s lifetime, as logging dried up, the business of wilderness tourism was flourishing. Mr. Rice argued this would have been the preferred pattern of development, “…persons not connected with the health interests have never felt particularly grateful to the doctors for changing the young pleasure resort into a health resort,” he wrote.
Fred Rice’s Saranac Lake of 1952 was coming to look a lot like it does today — a village paved for cars, strung with wires, teeming at times with city people. It’s easy to look back at the quieter times of the 1800s as the beginning of our history. We tend to think of young Fred Rice, his dad, and the tough old Adirondack guides like them, as the original Adirondackers. Such a view ignores the history of people who lived here for thousands of years.

Written accounts by early white settlers document the Adirondacks as a homeland and an important place of resource for many indigenous people. But as white people sank roots and claimed their future here, they re-wrote history to claim the past too. By 1921, historian Alfred Donaldson was writing that Indians just passed through the area. To the present day, a dearth of archeological studies has perpetuated the myth that Native Americans did not consider the Adirondacks home. At Historic Saranac Lake, we have often repeated this mistaken version of history.
Drive 15 minutes outside of the village, and you will find an amazing little museum that presents a much longer, more complete view of the past. Founded in 1954, Six Nations Iroquois Cultural Center has been run by three generations of the Mohawk of Akwesasne Fadden family. There, you will discover that the Adirondacks were home to Algonquian-speaking and Iroquoian-speaking people since before 9000 BCE. The distinct culture of the Haudenosaunee formed within a vast territory that included much of New York State and the Adirondacks. Stories handed down across countless generations document the Adirondacks as a treasured homeland, a place of refuge, and a source of resources from fishing, hunting, trapping, mining, tapping trees, ice fishing, and the harvesting of medicinal plants.

At Historic Saranac Lake, we talk a lot about the last 150 years, but the human history of the Saranac Lake region goes back some 80 times farther! A fluted arrowhead found recently on St. Regis Lake is estimated to be some 13 thousand years old. At the top of the high peaks, Potsdam University Archaeologist Tim Messner found a piece of worked flint to make stone tools. People were here, calling this place home, hunting caribou across glaciers, before there were trees. It turns out, Fred Rice and his father were also interlopers, just a skip away in time from today’s city people looking for parking by Mount Baker.
Not only have we dismissed thousands of years of Native American history, we have ignored or diminished the presence of Native Americans in recent history to the present day. As the Adirondacks developed, Native Americans were forced to adapt as old livelihoods were no longer sustainable. Lumber operations, land takeovers by private owners and the state, and hunting for sport, all made for less game. Some Indians turned to guiding. They imparted their deep knowledge of the woods and waters to white settlers, making their survival possible. Native peoples survived as entrepreneurs, and in the towns and hamlets of the Adirondack Park, they have continued to maintain their cultural traditions. 
As the weather warms, and local trails and lakes fill up with out-of-towners, we should keep in mind that few of us are rightful owners of these mountains. Native American people would wisely say that no one owns the land; at best we are merely stewards of this place we call home.

MODERATOR: What do you think about the state of the public health system today?

DOCTOR 3: Under-resourced systems are straining to care for the sick, administer the vaccines, and prepare for the next disease. The lack of attention to public health is not new. In my time, as we came to rely more on pharmaceuticals, the holistic sanatorium model — buttressing the immune system with a long-term approach to wellness — fell by the wayside.

DOCTOR 2: I remember when the last patient left the sanatorium in 1954. It was a sad day for Saranac Lake, but a hopeful day for humanity. We thought then that the magic bullet of pharmaceuticals would simplify patient care and ultimately take the place of many prevention measures. It hasn’t been that easy. 

DOCTOR 1: It’s been true for a long time — more lives are saved by public health measures than by medical care. Population density, poor sanitation, unventilated spaces, poverty, stress … all of these ills of the modern world contribute to infectious disease. (Yes, the late 1800s were “modern” to us then!) Addressing those conditions was (and is!) essential to improving human health. The world has taken shortcuts around simple public health measures. Coronavirus proves the danger of that approach.

DOCTOR 2: With each returning disease, like plague and Cholera, to new ones like HIV, Ebola, SARS, and COVID-19, public funding for emergency response and prevention surges, but then it declines again. 

MODERATOR: Today's virus isn’t just hitting poor countries hard. Wealthy countries like the U.S. are struggling too. What’s going on?

DOCTOR 1: COVID-19 reveals that the same deep inequalities that bred the rise of TB in the 1800s are still with us.

DOCTOR 2: It’s a terrible tragedy. I read that on average, each victim of COVID-19 has lost 13 years of life. Blacks and Hispanics are more than twice as likely to die of the disease. But many turn a blind eye. Many people doubt science and medicine and distrust their fellow citizens. Political divisions, exacerbated by the pandemic, are threatening our democratic system. 

DOCTOR 3: Disease doesn’t have to sow division. There is another path. Look how Saranac Lake came together as a community that cared for the sick with compassion.

DOCTOR 1: Empathy was at the heart of our work at Saranac, and the world needs more of it now. I never hired a nurse, orderly, or doctor who did not have that essential quality. I am proud of today’s heroes in medicine and science. Their courageous work during this difficult time reminds me of a favorite phrase, “To cure sometimes, to relieve often, to comfort always.”

Sources and Acknowledgements
- Epidemics and Society by Frank Snowden, Yale University Press, 2019.
- Covid-19 age expectancy statistic: January 2021 "Harper’s Index," Harper's Magazine, Stephen Elledge, Harvard Medical School.
- Special thanks for input from Laura Ettinger, Ph.D., Associate Professor of History at Clarkson University and Dr. Tony Holtzman, Emeritus Professor of Pediatrics, Johns Hopkins University.

While the coronavirus pandemic rages like a figurative wildfire all over the world in 2020, actual wildfires are setting horrific records out west this year. The combined acreage of burned area surpasses the size of the state of New Jersey. The loss is not just to forest land, but to homes and businesses, and in some cases whole communities have been apocalyptically reduced to ash.

It’s hard to imagine that similar widespread forest fires once burned the Adirondacks around the turn of the twentieth century. Flames spread throughout the Park, and ash from Adirondack fires fell as far away as Albany, and smoke was reported in New York City. Fires in 1903 and 1908 were particularly widespread in the North Country.

1903 was a dry year for the entire Northeast. In the Adirondacks, snowfall was less than average, and from April to June that year, only 0.2 in. of rain was recorded. In 1904, W. F. Fox wrote in “Forest Fires of 1903,” a bulletin of the NYS Forest, Fish, and Game Commission:

The line of the New York Central from Fulton Chain to Mountain View was bordered with smoke and flames, except on the eight-mile stretch through the private preserve of Dr. William Seward Webb, where a large number of patrols were employed at his expense to follow each train, night or day, and extinguish the locomotive sparks that fell along the road.

Many Adirondack fires were caused by live coals that escaped from unscreened locomotive stacks and fell on dry, vertical slash in the heavily logged forests along railroad lines, though Professor Emeritus of Paul Smith’s College, Dr. Michael Kudish, estimates that only about eleven percent of fires were caused by trains. More commonly, forest fires were caused by escaped campfires and brush-clearing fires, and the furnaces associated with mining operations in the Park. With the exception of mining furnaces, campfires and burning brush piles remain the top threat for wildfire in the Adirondacks today.

One of the largest acreages burned during the 1903 fire season was around Lake Placid in a fire started by high winds fueling a burning brush pile. That fire spread into the High Peaks and is the one that burned down Henry Van Hoevenburg’s Adirondack Lodge.

Mt. Baker in Saranac Lake burned in 1903 and again in 1908 when dry conditions and logging slash once again proliferated throughout the region. The 1908 fire spread east to McKenzie Mountain and threatened the village of Saranac Lake, as well, but it ultimately remained contained to the wilderness. In 1914, the Saranac Lake Fish and Game Club ordered 15,000 Scots pine (also called Scotch pine) grown at the State Nursery at Saranac Inn, at a price of just $60 for the whole load, and the trees were planted by a volunteer force of local men and Saranac Lake High School boys.

A May 15, 1914 article in the Lake Placid News states, “It is not expected that the 15,000 trees will make much of an impression on the stony sides and summit of Baker...” The prediction was wrong! Those Scots pines are still very visible as a dark green patch in all seasons up on Baker Mountain today.

After fires burned over 400,000 acres in the Forest Preserve in 1903, and nearly 300,000 acres in 1908, strict laws were enacted that set up a patrol of railroad properties, forced railroads to use petroleum for steam locomotive fuel instead of coal or wood, punished those responsible for escaped fires, enabled the building of fire towers (the first fire tower built in the Adirondacks was on Mt. Morris in Tupper Lake in 1909), and gave executive power to the Governor to close the Forest Preserve to recreationists in times of high fire risk.

The widespread Adirondack fires in the early part of the twentieth century were an anomaly due to the convergence of several factors including climate and fuel loads. Fire in northeastern forests has been historically absent, as shown by fossil pollen and charcoal records which estimate a fire return frequency of many hundreds to thousands of years, due to swift leaf litter decomposition, low wind risk, widely and rapidly varying topography, and the fire-resistant nature of northern hardwoods. This doesn’t mean, however, that fires can’t happen here today. We must remain vigilant and follow local regulations about campfires, burning brush, proper disposal of cigarette butts, and so forth.

The first time I ever visited Vermontville it was to research the site of the 1991 fire near Kate Mountain Park that burned 300 acres. I was a graduate teaching assistant for an ecology course at Cornell University and, of all the places we could have visited in the state, we went to Vermontville because it was such an excellent opportunity to observe post-fire vegetation recovery. Now I live in Saranac Lake and coach our homeschool soccer team at Kate Mountain Park each fall, so I am watching the forest there grow a little taller each year and seeing the plants in the understory get a little more shaded out.

But like we are seeing out west, slight changes in climate, exacerbated by careless actions of humans, can have drastic damaging ripple effects that will be felt for decades.

Images:
-Ampersand Mountain fire tower, c. 1960. Photograph by Donald Gunn Ross, courtesy of Julie Ross.
-Mount Baker, undated. Library of Congress photo.