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!

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!