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!

For this Women's History Month Museum Monday, we want to share this pen and ink drawing from our collection. This image, titled "Adirondack Arrival," was created by Amy Jones. Jones was an accomplished artist who accompanied her ailing husband, David Blair Jones, who came to Saranac Lake for the cure in 1930.

While her husband cured, Jones taught watercolor painting at the Saranac Lake Study and Craft Guild and was a founding member of the Saranac Lake Art League. While living in Saranac Lake, she became one of the first artists to work for the Section of Fine Arts established by the United States Treasury Department as part of the New Deal. As a part of this project, she painted murals in post offices in Painted Post and Scotia, both in New York, and Winsted, Connecticut.

Throughout her career, Jones also contributed to magazines such as Women's Day, provided art work for advertising and illustrated books for World Publishing, Thomas Y. Crowell, and Random House. Although she moved to Mt. Kisco, New York in 1943, she maintained ties with the village. In 1946, she illustrated A Child’s Garden of Verse by Robert Louis Stevenson, another famous health seeker. In 1969, she returned to Saranac Lake to give a demonstration at the opening day of the village's annual Paint and Palette Festival.

"Adirondack Arrival" was created around 1940 as an illustration for an unpublished children's book by Louise Leser. The illustration depicts passengers arriving at Saranac Lake's Union Depot, and the caption underneath reads "Down the street came a dog team at full gallop." The drawing was donated to Historic Saranac Lake by her daughter Lucy Jones Berk in 1996.

To learn more about Jones' career, and see more of her work, click the button at right to visit our wiki!

It's both Women's History Month and Tuberculosis Thursday, so we're sharing the story of Christine Burdick today. Burdick was employed by the First Presbyterian Church of Saranac Lake from 1928 to 1933 as the "Parish Visitor"— she visited tubercular patients who were on bed rest in local sanatoria, cure cottages, and private homes, providing for the spiritual care of those living with tuberculosis. In 1928 alone, she made two thousand visits! At the church, she led the youth group and assisted with prayer services.

To learn more about Burdick's life and work, visit our wiki!