Adirondack Heritage

Adirondack Heritage
Travels through Time in
New York’s North Country

A collection of stories by
Lee Manchester

Adirondack Heritage
Stories about historic
Essex County, New York,
the Adirondack High Peaks
region, and vicinity

By Lee Manchester

OTHER BOOKS BY LEE MANCHESTER

Edited by Lee Manchester
Island in the Valley:
Stories About the History of Lemoore (Ca.)
The Lake Placid Club: 1890 to 2002
Main Street, Lake Placid:
An Architectural and Historic Survey
The Secret Poems of Mary C. Landon
The Plains of Abraham, A History of North Elba and Lake Placid:
Collected Writings of Mary MacKenzie
Tales from the Deserted Village: First-Hand Accounts of
Early Explorations into the Heart of the Adirondacks

Written by Lee Manchester
Adventures in the New Wilderness

Table of contents
THE HISTORIC OLYMPIC REGION
North Elba & Lake Placid
1. Lake Placid’s first hotels................................................................ 1
2. Placid’s Main Street ....................................................................... 5
3. Touring historic Newman ............................................................ 12
4. Historic schoolhouses of North Elba............................................ 19
5. Lake Placid-North Elba History Museum .................................... 24
6. The North Elba Cemetery ............................................................ 28
7. Palace Theater marks 75th anniversary........................................ 34
8. Plans afoot to restore historic 1932 bob run................................. 38
9. Fine art adorns Placid post office................................................. 43
10. Olympic art at 25........................................................................ 47
11. LPN-100: Editors & publishers.................................................. 52
12. A century of the News................................................................ 57
Wilmington
13. Wilmington, plain and simple .................................................... 64
14. Whiteface Veterans Memorial Highway.................................... 68
15. Whiteface Mountain & the 10th Mountain Division................... 74
16. Wilmington’s original town hall ................................................ 79
17. Mountain trails pass remains of Wilmington iron mines ........... 81
18. Santa’s historians ....................................................................... 84
19. Wilmington Camp Meeting marks century of worship .............. 91

HISTORIC ESSEX COUNTY & BEYOND
Tooling around the county
20. Taking a trip up old Route 9 ..................................................... 99
21. Schroon Lake .......................................................................... 102
22. Port Henry............................................................................... 108
23. Westport.................................................................................. 114
24. Essex ....................................................................................... 120
25. New Russia ............................................................................. 125
26. Minerva................................................................................... 130
27. Newcomb ................................................................................ 135
Historic spotlight: Town of Jay
28. The ghost towns among us...................................................... 139
29. The Jay bridge story................................................................ 142
30. The resurrection of Wellscroft ................................................ 150
31. The theater that had nine lives ................................................ 158

32. Hollywood Theater set to re-open ...........................................161
33. The Graves Mansion................................................................163
34. Adirondack mill town looks at historic preservation...............166
Schoolhouses
35. Historic Adirondack schoolhouses ..........................................173
36. The one-room schoolhouses of Lewis .....................................180
Historic & cultural sites
37. Fort Ticonderoga readies for season (2003) ............................185
38. Fort Ticonderoga opens for 2005 season.................................191
39. The Crown Point ruins.............................................................195
40. Awesome Au Sable Chasm .....................................................200
41. Adirondack History Center Museum.......................................205
42. The Penfield Homestead Museum...........................................211
43. Adirondack music camps ........................................................215
44. The Iron Center Museum.........................................................220
45. The Alice T. Miner Museum ...................................................225
46. Six Nations Indian Museum ....................................................230
47. The Akwesasne Museum.........................................................235
48. The Chapman Museum............................................................239
49. Two stops in Malone ...............................................................243

ADIRONDAC
50. Adirondac ghost town awaits its future ...................................249
51. The road to Adirondac.............................................................255
52. Seeing the furnace for the trees ...............................................260
53. Bidding adieu to “the deserted village,” Part 1........................268
54. Bidding adieu to “the deserted village,” Part 2........................276
55. Life at the Upper Works ..........................................................283

HISTORIC PRESERVATION,
ADIRONDACK-STYLE
56. Adirondack Architectural Heritage .........................................291
57. Santanoni .................................................................................298
58. Preserving Santanoni ...............................................................303
59. The AARCH Top Five, Part 1 .................................................309
60. The AARCH Top Five, Part 2 .................................................314
61. The bridges of the Au Sable Valley.........................................319
62. Save our bridges ......................................................................324
63. The Rockwell Kent tour ..........................................................328
64. Trudeauville.............................................................................333
65. Willsboro Point........................................................................339

66. Historic Keeseville.................................................................. 348
67. Historic Adirondack inns ........................................................ 354
68. Valcour Island......................................................................... 362
69. Two camps on Osgood Pond, Part 1 ....................................... 367
70. Two camps on Osgood Pond, Part 2 ....................................... 373

JOHN BROWN’S FARM &
THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD
71. Tour retraces trail taken by John Brown’s body ..................... 381
72. Adirondack Underground Railroad ties .................................. 389
73. John Brown: Revisited & revised ........................................... 397
74. Remembering John Brown ..................................................... 403
75. John Brown’s body: A new guidebook................................... 409

Lake Placid’s first hotels
F IRST PUBLISHED A PRIL 23, 2004

Today Lake Placid is known the world over as a double-
Olympic village, a comfortable base for treks into the Adirondack
High Peaks, and a prime four-season resort.
But in 1871, Lake Placid consisted of just two farmhouses: One
belonged to Joseph Nash; the other, to Benjamin Brewster.
Brewster’s land ran up Signal Hill, between Placid and Mirror
lakes, and all the way around the “Morningside” of Mirror Lake.
Nash owned most of Mirror Lake’s west side.
Nash had bought his tract in 1850, when he was 23.
Brewster, Nash’s brother-in-law, followed a year later. He was
22.
Joe Nash boarded a small but steady stream of travelers in his
home, expanding his “Red House” in 1855 to accommodate the
growing traffic.
It was Ben Brewster, however, who built the first real hotel in
Lake Placid — that is, the first building specifically meant as a
hostelry. In 1871 he erected a big frame structure between the lakes,
with a big front porch. He called it the Lake Placid House, though
most folks knew it simply as Brewster’s.
In his book, “History of the Adirondacks,” Alfred Donaldson
described Brewster’s as “ugly, jerry-built and primitive in the
extreme - unpainted, two-storied, with only 10 rooms, nails for coat
hooks, barrels for tables, doors leading nowhere, and a leaky roof,”
recounted Mary MacKenzie, the Lake Placid historian.
“Unpainted it may have been for a time, but otherwise a
different story is told by Seneca Ray Stoddard’s 1873 photo of the
Lake Placid House,” MacKenzie wrote. “It was, in fact, a
commodious, three-story, sturdy and honest structure, and quite
attractive in a backcountry fashion.”
The Lake Placid House’s could accommodate 60 guests.
Though the railroad wouldn’t arrive until 1894, an ever-
growing flood of tourists came by horse, foot and carriage to Lake
Placid. In 1876, just 5 years after his brother-in-law opened the Lake
Placid House, Joe Nash built the settlement’s second hotel, called
Excelsior House, high on Signal Hill above, directly across from
today’s St. Agnes Catholic Church.

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“It was a pretty little structure,” MacKenzie said, “3½ stories
high, with a broad veranda and an observation outlook. Capacity was
90.”
Nash built the place as an investment, not as a new career. He
leased it for a couple of years to Moses Ferguson, then sold the inn to
John Stevens, a 30-yearold from Plattsburgh. The new owner
promptly renamed it Stevens House.

BUSINESS GREW, but competition was growing, too, and
quickly. Moses Ferguson left the Excelsior to build his own hotel in
1878, this one on an even higher hill close to the middle of Mirror
Lake’s western shore.
“Only 20 years before,” MacKenzie wrote, “Joe Nash had
trapped a panther on the very spot where Ferguson erected a little
hotel, aptly named the Grand View. A small, plain but tidy building,
it boasted three stories capped with an observation look-out, and an
encircling veranda amply stocked with rocking chairs.”
The Grand View occupied the site where the Lussi family now
operates the Lake Placid Resort Holiday Inn. Within 4 years, two
more hotels were built at the base of the hill below the Grand View.
The first, Allen House, was opened in 1880. The proprietor, Henry
Allen, had managed Brewster’s since 1876. He also ran the
stagecoach line connecting Lake Placid with the railroad depot in Au
Sable Forks.
“Architecturally, Allen House was totally unlike the typical
boxy Adirondack hotel of the period,” Mary MacKenzie wrote, “and
it was big, easily outclassing its three competitors. It could
accommodate 100 guests.” In his Adirondack guidebook, Seneca
Ray Stoddard gave the Allen House top marks.
“A great, roomy, rambling structure,” he wrote.
So successful was Allen House that, after just 1 year’s
operation, Allen was in a position to buy the Grand View above,
operating the two hotels together for several years.
In the meantime, Allen House got a new neighbor: the Mirror
Lake House, opened in 1882 by Joe Nash’s daughter Hattie and her
husband Charlie Green. The graceful little four-story structure, with a
three-story rear wing, could accommodate 75 guests.
The Mirror Lake House (not to be confused with today’s Mirror
Lake Inn, at the northern end of the lake) must have been an instant
success, for after just one summer’s operation it drew a hefty offer
from Silas and Spencer Prime, of Upper Jay, to buy the hotel.
When the Allen House burned in 1886, the Mirror Lake’s only
nearby competition was the Grand View. Ira Isham, of Plattsburgh,

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bought the Mirror Lake in 1888 and immediately set about with a
major improvement program. In 1889 he installed an electric plant,
making the hotel one of the first electrified buildings in the area.
Isham also expanded the building so that, by 1890, “the Mirror
Lake ... was a magnificent, imposing palace of a place, the likes of
which had never before been seen in the North Country,” MacKenzie
wrote.
But in 1894 the Mirror Lake House burned to the ground,
suffering the fate of most of the grand, old, wood-frame hotels of the
early Adirondacks, leaving only the Grand View on the hill that bore
its name.
Under Henry Allen’s leadership, the Grand View grew and
grew, reaching its final proportions by 1900.

TO THE NORTH, the Stevens House was experiencing one
successful season after another.
Then came Christmas Eve 1885. At 8 a.m. that day, an
overheated stovepipe caught the upper rooms afire. Before long, the
entire building was ablaze. John Stevens and his partner, brother
George Stevens, pulled themselves together and, the next spring, set
about rebuilding a bigger, better hotel. Even a microburst that tore
down the nearly finished framework on May 14, 1886, couldn’t stop
them; the new hotel opened that July 4.
It was an amazing place, “a splendid structure, built on lines of
classic simplicity,” wrote MacKenzie. “It was four stories high, with
a wide, encircling piazza [porch] on the ground floor and a central
observation tower. The appointments were lavish.”
The new Stevens House could accommodate 200 guests; a
major expansion 14 years later doubled that. Meanwhile, down the
hill at Brewster’s, things were much more quiet. The Stevens
brothers had bought Ben out 1887, putting the Lake Placid House in
the hands of caretakers. Lake Placid’s original hotel changed hands
two more times before being sold in 1897 to George Cushman, who
immediately began a breathtaking expansion of the property.
“The result was a spacious and imposing four-story structure.
An unnamed architect finished off the facade in a style that might be
called Adirondack Gothic,” wrote MacKenzie.
To modern architectural critics, MacKenzie observed, “the
building comes across as grandiose, even a bit absurd, but it was
greatly admired in its day. Dominating the rise of land between the
two lakes, the new Lake Placid House was quite a sight. Given its
size and location, it shows up in the majority of the early Lake Placid
picture postcards and photos.”

Adirondack Heritage 3

Extraordinary as were the results, the cost of financing the
expansion was too much for the Lake Placid House. It went into
foreclosure just a couple of years later.

BY THE TURN of the 20th century, the Stevens House, Lake
Placid House and Grand View were no longer alone on the Lake
Placid hospitality scene. Ever since he built the Excelsior, Joe Nash
had been engaging in a brisk real estate trade, selling off the lots that
quickly became the homes, shops and small hotels of early Lake
Placid’s Main Street.
When the railroad finally made it to Lake Placid in 1894, access
to the area was made relatively easy, and tourism grew
exponentially.
In 1900, the village of Lake Placid incorporated. By the end of
the 20th century’s first decade, the village had paved streets.
It all started with two young pioneers, Joe Nash and Ben
Brewster, and their pioneering Lake Placid hotels: Nash’s “Red
House,” Brewster’s Lake Placid House, and the Excelsior.

The fate of the big three
The Grand View, in 1922, became Lake Placid’s first Jewish-
owned hotel, breaking the Adirondacks’ notorious ethnic barrier. A
refuge for refugees of Hitler’s Third Reich during World War II, the
Grand View closed in 1956. It was razed in 1961, making way for
the Holiday Inn.
Stevens House was financially crippled by the stock market
crash of 1929. Auctioned off in 1933, the hotel was taken over for
taxes by Essex County a decade later. It was bought in 1947 for the
express purpose of demolishing what had become a notorious
eyesore.
Lake Placid House operated successfully until 1920, when a
pair of fires finished off the inn that contained at its core the village’s
original hotel.

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Placid’s Main Street:
A Walking Tour

When you think of historic buildings in Lake Placid, several
structures probably leap to mind: Melvil Dewey’s Lake Placid Club
complex, now just a landscaped hillside; the John Brown farm in the
North Elba settlement, south of town; the 1932 Olympic Arena, on
Main Street.
Placid’s Main Street, however, is richer in local architectural
history than you probably imagine. In some cases the buildings tell
their own tales, just as they stand. In other cases, however, you have
to know what’s hidden inside Main Street’s buildings to appreciate
their stories.
This article tells the stories of some of the most important
buildings still standing on Lake Placid’s Main Street. We’ve
designed it as a walking-tour guide, so that you can see the historic
village structures for yourself and develop your own sense of how
Lake Placid was built, brick by brick.

THE FIRST settlement in North Elba township was on the
Plains of Abraham, south of Lake Placid village toward the Cascade
Lakes. While the North Elba settlement was begun around 1800, it
was not until the 1870s that Main Street was first developed along
Mirror Lake. In the 130-or-so years since the first structure was built
on Main Street, there have been three architectural periods: the
Victorian, from the 1880s into the 1920s; the Neo-Classical, from
about 1912 until the mid-1930s; and everything thereafter.
Architect and historic preservationist Janet Null, of Troy,
compiled a historic survey of Lake Placid’s Main Street architecture
nearly two decades ago. Null’s study, published in 1990, and the
historic files compiled by the late Mary MacKenzie, former Lake
Placid and North Elba historian, were the primary sources for this
article.
“The first impression of Main Street,” Null wrote in 1990, “is
of an aggressive commercial strip, lacking a clear identity, beset by
an almost overwhelming visual clutter, and consisting of a diverse
range of architectural quality.
“The crisis in identity is between being a quaint historical
village street or being a modern commercial strip development.

5

“The irony is that Main Street has a genuine identity under the
distractions, in its historic buildings which have not been generally
appreciated for their inherent values and character,” Null wrote.
“It is paramount to recognize ... that the vast majority of the
original and historic structures on the street remain standing today,
even if disguised.”

1. North Elba Town Hall (1916)
The first stop on our walking tour of historic Main Street
buildings is the North Elba Town Hall. Like many of the important
buildings of the day, it was designed by architect Floyd Brewster,
scion of a Lake Placid pioneer family, in the restrained Neo-Classical
style.
The first Town Hall, built on the same site in 1903, was called
“The Tin Playhouse” for its tin sheathing. That building burned in
1915.
The interior of today’s Town Hall was completely gutted and
rebuilt in 1977-78 in the runup to the 1980 Olympics. The clock
tower was rebuilt in 1986.

2. Lake Placid High School (1922; 1934-35; 2001-02)
Across Main Street from the Town Hall stands the impressive
“new” Lake Placid High School, looking down on the site where the
village’s first high school was built in 1901. Another Neo- Classical
structure, the central and southern portions of the building seen from
the road were added in 1934 to a much smaller structure erected in
1922. It’s hard to tell where the original structure ends and the newer
portion begins because the designs are so completely in sync. A
major addition, not visible from Main Street, was built in the first
years of the new century, behind the older building.

3. Olympic Center (1932; 1977; 1984)
Immediately north of the high school is the Lake Placid
Olympic Center, built in three stages. The historic core of the
building is the Neo-Classical brickfaced, steel-arched Olympic
Arena, built in 1932 by distinguished Adirondack architect William
Distin, protege of Great Camp designer William Coulter, of Saranac
Lake.
Three attachments have been added to the dignified 1932
Arena, none very gracefully. To the north a low-lying, utilitarian box
of a building contains the Lussi Rink and the Lake Placid-North Elba
Visitors Bureau. To the south and west rises the 1980 Olympic
Arena, a very modern structure, attractive in its own way but

6 Olympic Region

architecturally incompatible with the 1932 Arena. Connecting the
1932 and 1980 buildings is a small “link building,” constructed in the
mid-1980s.

4. Lake Placid fire house (1912)
Look at the red brick building that stands across Main Street
from the Olympic Center. In your mind’s eye, take away the signs
for Cunningham’s Ski Barn, erected after the village sold the
building in the 1980s; take away the 1-story, concrete block addition
to the south, built after 1945; replace the storefront with two, big
doors, and there you will have Lake Placid’s early firehouse. The
tall, brick tower rising at the rear was for hanging hoses to dry after a
fire.

5. Adirondack Community Church (1923; 1958)
This is the second Methodist church built on this lakeside site.
The first building was bought whole in 1923, when construction of
the new building began, and moved a couple of blocks down Main
Street next to the Speedskating Oval. It’s been used ever since as a
restaurant or nightclub. In the former church’s latest incarnation, it’s
known as “Wiseguys.”
The stone of the Neo-Gothic main building of the Adirondack
Community Church was drawn from a granite quarry in Au Sable
Forks. An addition, Erdman Hall, was built in 1958 on the north side
of the building.

6. WWI Memorial (mid-1920s)
A small stone memorial to the eight Lake Placid boys who died
in World War I stands in a quiet, dignified garden overlooking
Mirror Lake, just below the Adirondack Community Church. The
date of the memorial is uncertain.

7. Northwoods Inn/Hotel Marcy (1897; 1927; 1967)
The building that now bears the name “Northwoods Inn,” at the
south end of the central stretch of Main Street, is actually the Hotel
Marcy, Lake Placid’s first fireproof hotel, opened in 1927. The real
Northwoods Inn, opened in 1897, a hostel adjacent to and south of
the Marcy, ironically burned to the ground in December 1966. The
concrete-block structure now standing on that site was hurriedly
erected the year following the fire.
The Marcy and the Northwoods Inn were simple, elegant
structures, in sharp contrast to the buildings now standing in their
place.


8. Lamoy House/Alford Inn/Peacock Building
(1880; later additions)
Nestled within the structure of the bizarre, warehouse-like,
rustic Tudor-industrial gift store on the lot north of the Marcy is the
oldest extant edifice on Main Street. In the fall of 1880 Marshall
Lamoy, a Wilmington immigrant, built a large, handsome house on
the hillside here. After running it as a boarding house for some years,
the Lamoys sold it in 1900 to the Rev. William Moir, rector of St.
Eustace-by-the-Lakes, the new Episcopal church in town. After
Moir’s death, it passed to North Elba farmer Harvey Alford in 1919.
Six years later he made a large addition to the south end of the house,
calling it the Alford Inn. In 1937 the name was changed again, to the
Lake Placid Inn, after the famous lakeside hotel that had burned in
1920. The “LPI” operated until the 1970s, when it was sold to
Eastern Mountain Sports and became a retail store. What is now the
first floor was excavated out of the hillside beneath the Alford
Inn/LPI in the 1990s by new owner Greg Peacock.

9. Happy Hour Theatre/Wanda Building
(1911; additions, 1920s)
At 117 Main stands another “building within a building.” As
you face it, imagine a building about half the size, three stories high,
simple, elegant, with a hipped roof. That building, the 1911 Happy
Hour Theatre, Lake Placid’s first cinema house, stands as the core of
the Wanda Building. The Happy Hour was bought by the company
that built the larger, more modern Palace Theatre, a few blocks up
Main Street, in 1926. Converted into an apartment building with
storefronts, it was substantially expanded in the 1920s.

10. Former St. Eustace Parish Hall (1901)
The building that currently houses the Imagination Station
store, at 107 Main Street, was originally built as a “parish hall” or
community center for the St. Eustace Episcopal congregation. It
housed a gymnasium, a lecture and dance hall, bowling alleys, game
rooms and a boat house. In 1915 the building was sold to George
Stevens, of Stevens House fame, who converted it for commercial
use.

11. Masonic Temple (1916)
Next door to the former parish hall, local architect Floyd
Brewster designed the Neo-Classical Masonic Temple, built in 1916
and substantially unaltered today.

8 Olympic Region

12. St. Agnes No. 1/Ben & Jerry’s
(1896; addition between 1908 and 1917)
Take a look at the building at 83 Main St. while you still can.
The owners of the building where Ben & Jerry currently has its store
have big redevelopment plans that will leave the structure’s historic
origins utterly unrecognizable.
What you’re looking at, believe it or not, is the original St.
Agnes Catholic Church, built in 1896. The congregation grew so
quickly that, by 1906, a new church had been erected on Saranac
Avenue, the predecessor of the current church building.
The old Main Street building was sold to Frank Walton, who
removed the steeple before moving in the stock and fixtures from his
Mill Hill hardware store. A major addition to the building was
erected sometime between 1908 and 1917.
When the Lake Placid Hardware Store went out of business in
1990, the old church windows from St. Agnes No. 1 were still stored
in the basement.

13. Bank of Lake Placid (1915-16; rear addition 1930)
The building that houses the Main Street branch of NBT Bank
was originally the Bank of Lake Placid, as the name engraved at the
top of the building attests. Designed by Floyd Brewster. the village’s
first bank building “is an example of the Renaissance palazzo revival
of the early 20th century, most often found in in a more urban
context,” according to Janet Null.
“The bank has been a mainstay commercial institution in the
community,” wrote Null in 1990, “and the architecture of the
building is highly valued by the community as a whole. In short, it is
a local landmark.”

14. Lake Placid Public Library (1886; later additions)
One of the oldest buildings on Main Street, as well as one of the
most attractive, the Lake Placid Public Library was built for just
$1,200. Even adjusted for inflation, that’s still less than $25,000 in
modern money — quite a bargain. The shinglestyle cottage has been
refurbished and added to several times, but it has retained its original
character very well. For a special treat, visit the quiet lakeside garden
on the rear of the library lot, overlooking Mirror Lake.

15. St. Eustace Episcopal Church (1900; moved 1926)
St. Eustace-by-the-Lakes, one of Lake Placid’s two turn-ofthe-
20th-century Episcopal churches, was originally built on the corner
of Lake Street and Victor Herbert Road, between Mirror and Placid


lakes. The building was designed by renowned Great Camp architect
William Coulter.
After maintaining two churches for more than 20 years,
however, the congregation sold its St. Hubert’s Church (since
destroyed by fire) in the Newman neighborhood south of Lake
Placid, and decided to move St. Eustace to a church-owned lot on
Main Street. Coulter protege William Distin supervised the
dismantling of the church, the numbering of its component parts, and
the reconstruction of the church. The original wood tower was
replaced with a taller stone tower on the opposite front corner of the
building, possibly to visually anchor the building on its new corner
lot.
Inside, an authentic Tiffany stained-glass window depicts
Whiteface Mountain and Lake Placid, figuratively depicting “an
experience of spiritual redemption in the wilderness,” according to
Null.
“With its dark-stained siding, random stone tower and simple
detailing, the church is a fine example of almost-rustic Gothic
Revival,” wrote Null. “Its siting overlooking the village park and
lake, and conversely its high visibility, make it a focal point of the
center of the village. Its excellent state of preservation enhances its
value. ... St. Eustace must be ranked as one of the most important
buildings on Main Street.”

16. Palace Theatre (1926)
Lake Placid’s second — and only surviving — movie house is
the Palace Theatre. Outside, the building retains its Neo- Classical
cast-stone detailing, including the large central window, lotus-capital
pilasters and pediment. Inside, through several subdivisions of the
theater space to increase the number of viewing rooms, the interior
design has preserved the late Art Nouveau stenciling and other
details on the walls, even going so far as to reproduce them on the
new interior walls. The main theater, on the ground floor, is graced
by the Palace’s original Robert Morton pipe organ, restored in 1998
and played for the Palace’s annual silent-film festival each October.

17. Pioneers monument
In the park at the head of Main Street, overlooking Mirror Lake,
is a small stone with a memorial legend carved in its face. The
memorial honors the two men who, with their families, pioneered the
settlement along the lake shore: Joe Nash and Benjamin Brewster.
Main Street itself was created by carving up Nash’s farm in the late
19th century and selling it piecemeal to the homebuilders, hoteliers

10 Olympic Region

and entrepreneurs who were creating the first version of modern-day
Lake Placid village.
If it’s not too chilly or too wet, sit down in this little green park,
look out over the stillness of Mirror Lake, and contemplate the
century-and-a-quarter of Lake Placid history through which you have
just walked. You have been given a glimpse into a side of the
Olympic Village rarely afforded to anyone, neither visitors nor
residents. Maybe, now that you know a little about the avenue’s
origins and development, your next shopping trip down Main Street
will be a little more meaningful for you.


Touring historic Newman
F IRST PUBLISHED O CTOBER 22, 2004

Newman?
Where the heck is Newman?
Surprise, surprise: Newman is right here.
For many years, Newman was the name used for the lower
section of Lake Placid — the section where the Lake Placid News
currently makes its home.
Centered around Mill Pond, Newman and its early industries
were crucial to the development of the village that came to be known
as Lake Placid, and before that to the settlement of North Elba.
Mary MacKenzie, the late local historian, did the
groundbreaking research that unearthed the complete story of
Newman, from the first decade of North Elba’s settlement at the
beginning of the 19th century, through the demise of the Newman
Post Office in December 1936.
Using MacKenzie’s research, we’ve put together a historic
walking-and-driving tour of Newman that may lend a new
perspective to your understanding of Lake Placid.

The ‘Newman’ name
The very first homestead of the First Colony established at
North Elba was located in Newman. The town’s original settler,
Elijah Bennet, built his home near Mill Pond in 1800.
The area did not come to be called Newman, however, until
1891.
A post office for the growing village of Lake Placid was
established at a site on Mirror Lake in 1883, but it was quite a walk
for the daily mail from there to the lower village. Residents of the
lower village put together a petition to the U.S. Postmaster General,
asking that a second post office be established.
Fortunately for them, gentlewoman farmer Anna Newman had
grown up with the Postmaster General. Newman, who came to
Heaven Hill Farm in 1872 from Philadelphia, penned a note of
support for the new post office that was included with the petition.
“The response was immediate,” MacKenzie wrote. “By 1891,
the lower end of the village had its own post office, bearing the name
‘Newman’ in honor of Anna.
“It was only a matter of time before the entire area came to be
called Newman, as though it were a separate village.”

12

1) Power Pond dam
The first stop on our tour of Newman is at the Power Pond dam,
just above the village’s electric plant.
To get there, drive 1.5 miles down Sentinel Road from the
traffic light at Main Street. Turn left on Power House Lane. Cross the
bridge at the bottom, and park at the pulloff on the right.
Standing at the bridge, looking upstream on the Chubb River,
you will see the Power Pond dam from which the village Electric
Department gets its power. That dam was built at the same site as the
very first dam built in North Elba, in 1809.
That first dam provided mechanical power for the small
industrial complex associated with the Elba Iron Works, located
below the dam and just across the bridge from where you’ve parked.
Two forges, a sawmill and a grist mill were among the operations
here between 1809 and 1817.
The Elba Iron Works faced two challenges. First, the ore from
its Cascade Lakes mine was contaminated with pyrite, making it
necessary to haul high-quality ore in from Clintonville, nearly 30
miles away. In 1814 a new road was cleared over the Sentinel
mountain range, connecting North Elba to Wilmington, a dozen
miles downstream on the River Sable.
Just two years later, however, a climatological disaster struck
the young settlement. Ash from a tremendous volcanic explosion in
the South Pacific spread through the atmosphere, drastically reducing
the amount of sunlight reaching the Earth in northern New York and
New England. The year 1816 became known as “the year without a
summer,” when snow fell in every month of the year. Almost all of
the farmers in North Elba abandoned the settlement to avoid
starvation.
The following year, the Elba Iron Works shut down, too.
If you stand in the pine grove planted in 1940 on the foundry’s
former site, and kick your toe into the duff, you may discover
something the Iron Works left behind two centuries ago: a chunk of
“scoria,” or iron-ore tailings, looking like a reddish piece of
hardened, bubbly lava.

2) Railroad depot
To get to our next stop, go back out to Sentinel Road, turn right,
and drive about a mile to the intersection of Station Street, just before
the Chubb River bridge. Turn left. Park at the railroad station, just
past the first intersection.
The railroad finally made its way to Lake Placid in 1893, but it
was 10 years before the as-yet-unincorporated village got its own


depot. The train station has not been altered in any significant way
since it opened in 1903, although commercial rail service ended more
than 30 years ago. In 1967, the building was acquired for the Lake
Placid-North Elba Historical Society, which now houses its museum
there. The new Adirondack Scenic Railway also uses the depot for
one end of its tourist-train service between Lake Placid and Saranac
Lake, 11 miles away.

3) Hurley Brothers
Next to the railroad depot is Hurley Brothers. Today the
business delivers fuel oil to heat North Country homes, but when the
building was erected in 1909, the three original Hurley Brothers were
dealers in grain, hay, wood and coal. The building that stands there
today is essentially unchanged; the enormous coal and grain silos
built next to it in 1916, however, were razed in 1975.

4) American House site
Across the street from the railroad station and Hurley Brothers
is a utilitarian, warehouse-type building covered in corrugated metal.
The Lake Placid store of the Hulbert Supply Co. stands on the site of
the old American House hotel.
The American House was built by the three Hurley brothers
across from the end of the railroad line around 1893, within a few
months after train service had been introduced to Lake Placid. It was
“a substantial three-story hotel of 30 rooms,” MacKenzie wrote.
“Catering to summer visitors, [the Hurleys] often fed 180 guests at a
time and lodged 40.” The building “was gutted by fire in the early
1940s and was torn down.”
Standing behind Hulbert Supply is the last vestige of the
American House: its former stable, once the headquarters of the Lake
Placid Trotting Association, which sponsored popular wintertime
horse races on Mirror Lake in the early 20th century.

5) Mill Pond
Just down the block from the American House site is Mill
Pond. Just as the early Chubb River dam at Power Pond was the
industrial heart of the first North Elba settlement, so the second dam
above it, built in 1855, helped drive the development of what would
become the village of Lake Placid. A sawmill stood on the north side
of the original wooden dam; later, across the stream, another mill for
shingles and lath was built.
The first dam held until 1974, when it washed out. Rebuilt with
funds raised by a community group led by MacKenzie, among

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others, the second dam was washed out in 1998 by high spring floods
carrying much debris from that winter’s disastrous ice storm. The
dam was rebuilt yet again in 1999, this time by the village of Lake
Placid. The “millhouse” on the north end of the dam is a storehouse
for maintenance supplies for the nearby park.

6) Opera House
On the corner of Station Street and Sentinel Road, just
downstream from Mill Pond, stands Lisa G’s restaurant, originally
built in 1895 as the White Opera House building. The top story,
reached by an outside staircase, had a large hall with a stage and
space for an audience of 500. On the lower floors (there were three,
originally) were a hardware store and a butcher shop.

7) General Store
Across Station Street from Lisa G’s is the newly remodeled and
renamed Station Street bar and grill, formerly styled The Handlebar.
The building was originally a general store, built in July 1886 by
George White. When the Newman Post Office was first opened in
1891, it was located in Mr. White’s store.

8) Newman Post Office
Just one block up Sentinel Road from Station Street, across
River Street from the IGA grocery, now stands the Downhill Grill. In
earlier days, this building served as the Newman Post Office, from
1915 until the office was closed in December 1936. Before 1915, the
building held Hattie Slater’s millinery store. It once played a
prominent role as the bank in one of the many “wild west” silent
films shot in Lake Placid during the early 1920s.

9) Lake Placid Synagogue
Going farther up Sentinel Road, up Mill Hill, we find on our
left a gray two-story house set a few yards back from the sidewalk.
Believe it or not, when this house was built in 1903, it was Lake
Placid’s first synagogue, which served the area’s Jewish community
for nearly six decades. Eddie Cantor and Sophie Tucker gave a
benefit in 1930 in Lake Placid to raise funds for the house of
worship. It was closed in 1959 when the new synagogue was
completed on Saranac Avenue.

10) Lake Placid News
Next door to the old synagogue stands the red, two-story frame
building where the Lake Placid News has made its home since 1975.
The rear half of the building was erected in the 1890s, and for many


years served as Pete McCollum’s harness shop. An addition was later
tacked on the front.

11) Lyon’s Inn (North Elba House; Stagecoach Inn)
Go back down to the train station, get in your car, and drive on
Station Street to the corner of Old Military Road. Turn left. On your
right-hand side, past the modern school building on your left, you
will see the broad porch and arrayed dormers of the 1½-story
Stagecoach Inn. Two or three years ago an attic fire swept through
the inn, putting it out of commission.
The core of this building was once thought to be Iddo Osgood’s
Inn, first built no later than 1833. Mary MacKenzie’s research,
however, convinced her by 1995 that this was definitely not
Osgood’s, but a completely different hostelry: Lyon’s Inn, also
known as North Elba House.
The confusion arose from the fact that both inns stood on land
originally owned by Elba pioneer Iddo Osgood. Osgood sold that
land to Earl Avery in 1851, and Martin Lyon bought it from Avery in
1864.
Lyon expanded one of the houses on the former Osgood land,
turning it into the North Elba House — but not the house that had
served as Osgood’s Inn, according to Martin’s grandson Henry Lyon.
Henry remembered the Osgood buildings standing to the east of his
grandfather’s inn — and he remembered that they were demolished
early in the 20th century. The house that became the original part of
Lyon’s Inn is shown on an 1858 map on Avery’s land, but it is
possible that the house had already been built when Osgood sold the
land to Avery in 1851. It is not possible to date the initial
construction of Lyon’s Inn any more precisely than that at present.
Lyon’s Inn housed the North Elba post office and was the
premiere gathering place for the settlement for many years.

12) Heaven Hill Farm/Anna Newman house
Continue driving east on Old Military Road until you reach
Bear Cub Road. Turn right. Go a couple of miles down this country
road, until you see the sign for Heaven Hill Farm on your right.
The core of the greatly expanded and altered home currently
standing at the end of the long, long driveway was built in the 1840s
by Horatio Hinckley, a farmer who came to North Elba from Lewis,
another township in Essex County. It is thought to be the oldest
building still standing in the town of North Elba.
The house and farm were purchased in 1875 by Anna Newman,
“a wealthy, benevolent and extremely eccentric Philadelphian,”

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MacKenzie wrote, “who fell in love with the Adirondacks, made
North Elba her home until her death in 1915, and became one of the
town’s chief benefactors.”

13) Old White Church
Heading back down Bear Cub Road, make a right on Old
Military Road. After driving 0.4 miles, look carefully on your left for
the private lane that runs between the Jewish cemetery and the North
Elba Cemetery, for that is the drive down which the town’s oldest
church, known affectionately as the “Old White Church,” was
relocated in the 1990s.
The North Elba Union Church was completed in 1875. Just 10
years later, however, the Baptists and Methodists that had formed the
“Union” separated, each congregation building their own churches in
Lake Placid. Anna Newman paid to keep the White Church open and
maintained until her death in 1915. It stood empty until 1930, when
the local Grange bought it, removing the steeple.
The future of the White Church was in doubt fairly recently, but
community efforts succeeded in getting the structure moved from its
former site, on Old Military Road at the corner of Church Street, to
its present location.

14) Little Red Schoolhouse
Coming back out to Old Military Road, make a right-hand turn
back toward Lake Placid. Go 0.7 miles to Johnson Avenue, on your
right, and turn there. Go through two intersections, Winter and
Summer streets, then look for No. 27 on your left, a 1½-story frame
house, white on the bottom, green on top. This private residence was
once North Elba’s “Little Red Schoolhouse,” the oldest of the town’s
surviving one-room schoolhouses.
Built in 1848, “Little Red” was part of North Elba’s second
wave of settlement. There being neither church nor municipal
building at the time, the schoolhouse served both those functions,
too. When North Elba township seceded from the town of Keene in
1850, it was Little Red where the new town’s organizational meeting
was held.
Classes were held in the schoolhouse until 1915, when
automobiles had become common enough to transport students in to
the village from the outlying areas served by one-room schools. Ten
years later, the building was sold to a private party, who moved it
one block over from its original site at the east end of Summer Street.
Today, almost 80 years after its move, Little Red is the home of
the James Wilson family. Without a photo in hand of the old


schoolhouse, it may be difficult to see Little Red in the Wilson home.
The house today, however, has the same roof lines as the old school,
and the enclosed porch corresponds pretty clearly to the old open
porch of the one-room schoolhouse.

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Historic schoolhouses
of North Elba

When today’s Lake Placid visitors consider what the Olympic
Village’s old schools must have looked like, they may think of the
earliest portion of the handsome, neo-classical Lake Placid High
School building, overlooking the Speedskating Oval, the Olympic
Center and North Elba’s town hall.
The truth is, the modern Lake Placid High School building is
the end product of an evolution in educational architecture that dates
back to the first decade of the 19th century.
Some visitors might be interested in the fact that, in one form or
another, all of the early Lake Placid schoolhouses — or, at least, their
immediate successors — are still standing. For those with a few
hours to spare, we’ve put together a car trip back in time through the
roads around North Elba township to those old one-room
schoolhouses.
As with our other historical surveys, this article depends on
extensive research and original materials painstakingly compiled by
the late local historian Mary MacKenzie. Her files are housed in the
archives of the Lake Placid Public Library.

The first school
This area was first settled around 1800. No one homesteaded
anywhere near Mirror or Placid lakes until 1850. The first colony
here was established in a settlement that came to be called North
Elba, some miles to the south of present-day Lake Placid. By 1810,
the 40 families settled there had already erected a log schoolhouse
for their children’s use.
The “year without a summer,” in 1816, drove three-quarters of
the first colony out of the Adirondacks. The dust cloud created by the
1815 volcanic explosion of Mount Tambora, on the Javanese island
of Sumbawa — said to have been 10 times more powerful than the
Krakatoa explosion of 1883 — covered the sun for months, causing
snow and frost in northern New York and New England well into
August 1816.
The last living memory of the first North Elba schoolhouse was
related to Mary MacKenzie by a local centenarian, who recalled that,
as a little girl, she had seen its ruins still huddled behind the Torrance

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Farm on Heart Lake (Adirondack Lodge) Road, across Route 73
from where a later North Elba School building still stands.

‘Little Red Schoolhouse’
The next attempt to settle North Elba after the “year without a
summer” was more successful than the first. A second wave of
immigration came here in the 1840s. By 1850, North Elba once again
had about 40 families.
The first school built for the new settlers’ families became
known locally as the Little Red Schoolhouse. It was erected in 1848
on the corner of Sentinel Road and Summer Street on land donated
by Iddo Osgood, a holdover from the first colony.
A couple of years later, when North Elba township voted to
secede from Keene, the only public building available for the
organizational meeting was Little Red.
Even when the village of Lake Placid began growing up around
Main Street in the 1870s, Little Red was the school Placid’s children
attended. A private school opened by the local librarian on Main
Street in 1885 took some of the growth pressure off the Little Red
Schoolhouse, succeeded in 1887 by a one-room public school built
below the present high school site across from Town Hall.
The school in the village grew and grew by addition until, by
1902, it had become a two-story, barn-like structure with an
enrollment of 335 students.
Growth continued. By the middle of the decade from 1910 to
1920, Lake Placid had begun debating construction of an altogether
new school building. In the midst of that discussion, in 1915, the
Little Red Schoolhouse finally closed its doors as an educational
institution.
Ten years later the Nov. 20, 1925, issue of the Lake Placid
News reported that Little Red had been purchased by a private party.
The house was moved one block over on Summer Street, from
Sentinel to Johnson Road, “one of the streets in the new Hurley and
Johnson tract, where it is to be hoped it may for many more years
witness the continued development of the village.”
Today, almost 80 years after its move, Little Red is the home of
the James Wilson family. Without a photo in hand of the old
schoolhouse, it may be difficult to see Little Red in the Wilson home.
The house today, however, has the same roof lines as the old school,
and the enclosed porch corresponds pretty clearly to the old open
porch of the one-room schoolhouse.

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North Elba School
A couple of years after the Little Red School was opened,
families in the old North Elba settlement built a new schoolhouse for
themselves across the Keene road from the Torrance Farm, where the
original log schoolhouse had stood. Gerrit Smith, founder of North
Elba’s famous Black colony, sold the land for the new schoolhouse
to the school district for $1 in 1850.
That second log schoolhouse stayed in use for some years. It
was torn down in 1886, and a frame building was erected in its place.
In 1920, a small vestibule was added to the west end facing the road,
containing a cloakroom and restrooms — thus, the double roof line
still evident in the structure.
“Back in the old days, when school buses were not available to
bring pupils of outlying sections in to the village to attend classes in
a luxurious central school, at times there were 85 pupils in the one-
room (North Elba School) building on the Cascade road, one teacher
teaching all grades,” said a Lake Placid News article on Jan. 24,
1941.
Gertrude Torrance, born in 1919, lived as a child on her father
Rollie’s farm across the road from the North Elba School, which she
attended.
“I started school when I was 5 years old,” she recalled, “and
went there through the 6th grade, a few years before they centralized.
They drove us in to Lake Placid in a Pierce Arrow car.
“My sister stayed on, though, for a little (at the North Elba
School) — she was 4 years younger than me. By the time the school
closed, there were only four students going.”
The last class at the North Elba School was held in 1936. The
building was sold in August 1941 to school-board trustee Rollie
Torrance. Twelve years later he deeded the school building to his
daughter, Gertrude Torrance Hare. Mrs. Hare still lives in the
converted schoolhouse with her husband Walter.
The former North Elba School house stands today on Route 73,
opposite the entrance to the Adirondack Lodge Road. The old
building is only barely recognizable within the expanded structure
the Hares have built around it. Little but the old double roof line can
still be seen of the North Elba School in the Hare home today.

Cascade School
In 1879, Sabrina Goff deeded half an acre to a new school
district situated at the far end of North Elba township, on the Cascade
Road to Keene Center. Jacob Wood, grandfather of famed local golf
pro Craig Wood, built the schoolhouse for $240.


A 1911 yearbook indicates that the Cascade School was, in
large part, a Goff family operation, though three other families’
children also attended. Three of the 10 pupils were Goffs, as were the
district trustee and clerk.
The Cascade School was one of the last of the one-room
schools still holding class in North Elba township — possibly the
very last one — and the farthest away from the Lake Placid Central
School. When the question of closing the school was debated in
August 1940, Chairman C. Walter Goff broke the 4-4 tie vote to send
the Cascade children in to Lake Placid.
“The call for the closing of the school was issued by the Lake
Placid Central School to eliminate the expense of a teacher,” read the
Aug. 30, 1940, issue of the Lake Placid News, “inasmuch as the
board of education did not think the number of pupils attending
warranted it.”
Albert Goff purchased the building after the school was closed,
turning it into a summer home. Albert deeded it to his nephew
Harold Goff; Harold’s widow, Marie Goff Senecal, still lives in it.
The homes of Harold and Marie’s children surround the old
schoolhouse.
Standing on the left side of Route 73 just past the entrance to
Mount Van Hoevenberg on the way from Lake Placid to Keene, the
Cascade School building has been extended in the rear, but the form
of the old schoolhouse has been lovingly preserved in the structure,
as seen in the bell tower.

Averyville School
Out on the Averyville Road stands another of North Elba
township’s early one-room schoolhouses. The yellow, frame building
is the second of the Averyville settlement’s schools.
The first Averyville School was built sometime in the first half
of the 19th century, after Simeon Avery settled here in 1819. That
building was sold in 1888 and moved to a farm run by Frank Alford,
who later moved to Main Street and operated the Alford Inn, next to
the Marcy. Mary MacKenzie could find no evidence of the first
school building’s survival anywhere in the township.
The second Averyville School, built in 1888 when the first
school was moved off the site, was closed at the end of the 1932
school term. The building was sold at auction in 1936 to Lester E.
Otis.
“He (Otis) has partitioned it off into rooms and made an
attractive cottage which is used by the family on occasion,” read a

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Lake Placid News article of April 21, 1939. “The schoolhouse
property is cultivated as a vegetable garden.”
“For a long time it has been a part of the Malone family
summer residence property,” MacKenzie wrote in November 2001.
“Sadly, it has long been neglected and now presents a very shabby
and forlorn appearance.
“An effort should be made at some level to restore this historic
little building,” MacKenzie added. “There have been no additions
made to it, and the bell tower readily identifies it as an old rural
schoolhouse.”
The house is on the right-hand side of the Averyville Road, past
several sharp curves, about 3 miles from the Old Military Road.
Ray Brook School
The last school on our little tour is in Ray Brook, between Lake
Placid and Saranac Lake.
The original one-room Ray Brook schoolhouse was built before
1876 on the road off Route 86 that now leads to a federal prison.
That school either burned or was demolished, according to
MacKenzie; no trace of it has been identified.
Another school was built on the Old Ray Brook Road between
1903 and 1905 for the children of the employees at the new state
tuberculosis hospital.
An odd bit of history concerning the Ray Brook School was
recorded in 1915 in the Lake Placid News:
“Shortly after entering upon his duties (as school district
trustee) last August, (Merle L.) Harder cut the schoolhouse in two
and started to remove part to another site,” the LPN reported. “His
action was declared illegal, and the removal of the part of the
building stopped after it had been gotten on trucks. He was directed
to replace the school house upon its foundations and restore it to its
former condition.”
Exactly when the Ray Brook School was closed, we do not
know. According to Charles Damp, current resident of the old
schoolhouse, the building was used as a community center through
the 1950s.
“He (Damp) has made many improvements,” MacKenzie
wrote, “but has retained the bell tower so that the building still has
the look of an old schoolhouse.”
The 100-year-old Ray Brook School can still be recognized as
the core of the modern Damp house.


Lake Placid–North
Elba History Museum
F IRST PUBLISHED J UNE 6, 2003

When you think of Lake Placid, what comes to mind?
The Olympics?
Mirror and Placid lakes?
The High Peaks country?
The Lake Placid Club?
The “Adirondack style” of architecture and houseware design?
There’s one place in the village where you can be introduced to
all of it, and where you can see it in its historic context.
That place is the Lake Placid-North Elba Historical Society
Museum.
The museum’s home is a piece of Lake Placid history itself: the
village’s old railroad station, which is celebrating its 100th
anniversary this year.
The Delaware & Hudson Railroad built the Saranac Lake-Lake
Placid spur off the main New York Central line between Utica and
Malone in 1893, but it was not until 1903 that a passenger and
baggage depot was built in Lake Placid.
Highway construction after World War II undercut the
economic foundations of America’s railroads. The last D&H
passenger train visited Lake Placid in 1965. The village’s railroad
station seemed doomed until sisters Frances and Louise Brewster
bought the building in 1967, giving it to the historical society that
summer for use as a museum.

THE MUSEUM has had several directors over the last 36 years.
The latest is Gary Francois, who took over in March.
“They didn’t hire me for my vast knowledge of Lake Placid
history,” admitted the Lake Placid photographer. “What I had to
offer is my energy, my commitment and my artist’s eye.”
With just a couple of months to get the museum ready for its
five-month season, Francois went to work right away, cleaning out
the restored railroad depot’s overfull Waiting Room.
In years past the walls have been covered — some would say
cluttered — with unframed historic photos, while the floor has been
packed with display cases stuffed with precious historic artifacts.

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Francois has been paring down the numbers of items on
display, framing the rarest historic photos and creating enough room
around them so that they are accessible. He’s done the same with
both the contents of the cabinets and their arrangement, creating
simpler, more meaningful displays on different aspects of local
history in a series of cases that are easy to move around.
While not himself a historian, Francois seems to understand
what makes history significant to museum visitors. He showed our
reporter a series of photographs of the Joseph Nash 19th century
homestead on the northern edge of Mirror Lake, on the site where the
Ramada Inn now stands.
The first photo was shot in 1873 by Seneca Ray Stoddard. It
shows the Nash farm complex standing alone on a rolling green
hillside, below it the waters of Mirror Lake — then called Bennet
Pond after the village’s original settler.
“I appreciate the innocence of this photo,” Francois said. “I
don’t want to lose that sense of things.”
The other two Nash farmstead photos, though shot just a few
years later, show more and more buildings erected nearby.
Today, that same area is Lake Placid’s prime shopping district.

THE WAITING Room at the railway depot museum uses all the
space at its disposal for displaying historic artifacts. On the floor are
cabinets that tell the stories of the Lake Placid Club, radical
abolitionist John Brown, Lake Placid’s 98-year-old Volunteer Fire
Department, and a farm that is nearly as old as North Elba township
itself, the late Henry Uihlein’s Heaven Hill Farm.
One entire wall in the Waiting Room is devoted to the growth
of winter sports in Lake Placid and the village’s Olympic history.
Another wall displays farm implements recovered from nearby
barns, fields and meadows, evidence of the work done by North
Elba’s earliest agricultural settlers.
In a loft overlooking the Waiting Room are various 19th
century conveyances, including a bicycle with a huge front wheel
centered by a pair of tiny foot pedals.

THE MUSIC Room, situated just off the Waiting Room, is the
smallest display area in the history museum. One wall is dedicated to
the memory of legendary singer Kate Smith, most famous for her
signature rendition of “God Bless America.” Smith summered in
Lake Placid, where she was much-beloved. A group called the Kate
Smith Society visits the museum every year to maintain “Kate’s
Wall.”


Visitors to the Music Room will also find a working 1890s
Edison phonograph, a 1940s Philco radio set and a Victorian organ
standing next to a relic of another Placid summer person, conductor
Victor Herbert’s music stand.

THE MUSEUM’S central display room is usually called “The
General Store.” The room serves as a catch-all for the kinds of items
one would typically find in a turn-of-the-20th-century sundries store,
complete with a pharmacy, a cigar-store Indian and the post-office
boxes from the old Newman neighborhood postal station, which used
to stand just down the street from the railroad depot.
The General Store has lots of interesting artifacts — perhaps
too many. It awaits Francois’ paring skills.
Beyond the store is the museum’s final display area, the
Adirondack Room, containing a fine display of typical Adirondack
camp furniture, including a dining table set with service from the
legendary Camp Underhill, on the north shore of Placid Lake.
On the Adirondack Room’s walls are stuffed samples of a wide
variety of Adirondack wildlife, including the supposedly extinct
Adirondack mountain lion — “supposedly,” we say, because the cats
continue to be spotted once or twice every few years, from the High
Peaks to the Champlain Valley.

THURSDAY EVENING programs are a regular part of the
history museum’s annual calendar, with anywhere from half a dozen
to two dozen people attending a given night’s activities. This year’s
lecture series, which starts at 8 p.m. each evening, includes:
• July 31, “Why Historic Preservation?” with Steven
Engelhart, executive director of Adirondack Architectural
Heritage;
• Aug. 7, Gary Francois shares some of his Adirondack
landscape and recreational photography in an audiovisual
show;
• Aug. 14, Jay artist Terrance Young talks about his
Adirondack etchings and poetry;
• Aug. 21, Doug Wolf, president of the Whiteface Historic
Preservation Society, talks about the cultural and natural
history of Whiteface Mountain, and
• Aug. 28, a color slide program on the recently completed
restoration of the stained-glass windows at Lake Placid’s
Adirondack Community Church.
An extra feature on the museum’s calendar is a fund-raising
craft fair scheduled for Saturday, Aug. 2.

26 Olympic Region

THE LAKE Placid-North Elba Historical Society Museum will
be open from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. over the next three weekends — June
7 and 8, June 14 and 15, and June 21 and 22.
From Tuesday, June 24, through mid-October the museum will
be open Tuesday through Sunday (closed Mondays) from 10 a.m. to
4 p.m.
The railroad depot museum is located on Averyville Road in
Lake Placid, a block off South Main Street at the base of Mill Hill.
Lisa G’s restaurant, an opera house 100 years ago, stands on the
corner of South Main Street and Averyville Road.
This year there is no fixed admission fee to the museum, though
a $2 donation is recommended. Museum supporters are encouraged
to join the Lake Placid-North Elba Historical Society. Membership
dues are $15 a year.
The museum also welcomes contributions. Gifts are now being
sought to help pay for repairs to the museum’s original slate roof.
Work on the roof is scheduled to begin later this month. Nearly
$40,000 has been raised for the project, but another $10,000 is still
needed.
For more information about the Lake Placid-North Elba
Historical Society, call (518) 523-1608.


The North Elba Cemetery
A walk through Placid History

It's Mud Season. The trails are too sloppy for hiking, but the
weather is too pretty to stay inside.
What to do?
Here's an idea for an enlightening walk: a historical tombstone
tour through the North Elba Cemetery. Many of the people who
made the village of Lake Placid and the town of North Elba what
they are today can be found there, resting from their labors.
The North Elba Cemetery is on the north side of Old Military
Road, about a quarter mile west of the Cascade Road, across from a
roofless, cylindrical brick tower rising from an open field (an
environmental sculpture left over from the 1980 Olympics).
The North Elba Cemetery is divided into sections by the
network of one-lane roads passing through it. Most of the graveyard's
historic tombstones can be found in the section to the right of the
westernmost entrance to the cemetery, adjacent to Old Military Road.

EUNICE NEEDHAM. North Elba was first settled in 1800. Most
of the members of its First Colony did not stay on past 1816, known
as “the year without a summer,” and the closing of the local iron
works in 1817.
Among those who made up North Elba’s First Colony were
brothers Charles and Jeremiah Needham Jr. Born in Wales,
Massachusetts, the Needhams arrived in North Elba on June 26,
1806. It’s not clear whether Eunice Needham, daughter of Jeremiah
and his wife Ruth, was born before or after they arrived here. What’s
certain is that little Eunice was the first person to be buried in the
North Elba Cemetery, on Jan. 2, 1810, “in the fourth year of her
life.”
Eunice’s tombstone is a simple, gray marker, broken near the
base and laid flat across her grave.

THE OSGOODS. Another member of the First Colony was
Iddo Osgood, who came to North Elba on March 4, 1808, at the age
of 28. Osgood was a fairly substantial farmer, buying up much of the
cultivated land abandoned when the First Colony collapsed. Osgood
later became North Elba’s first innkeeper as well as a man of some
political substance on the local scene.

28

For many years, most Placidians thought that the Old
Stagecoach Inn on Old Military Road was an expansion upon
Osgood’s original inn. The year 1833, shown on the sign at the
Stagecoach Inn, refers to the earliest known date when Osgood’s
hosted paying guests.
In the mid-1980s, however, researchers concluded that
Osgood’s and the Old Stagecoach Inn had been separate structures,
and that Osgood’s had been torn down sometime in the early 20th
century. Osgood’s Inn was probably located where the Uihlein
Mercy Center stands today.
Iddo, a Congregationalist deacon, held religious services at
Osgood’s Inn, and his son Dillon grew up to become an ordained
Congregationalist minister as well as North Elba’s first postmaster.
Four Osgood graves stand together in the North Elba Cemetery:
old Iddo, who died in 1861 at the age of 82; the first of Iddo’s three
wives, Clarista (d. 1816); his second wife, Prudence (d. 1831); and
Dillon, who died the year before his father at the age of 39.

ROBERT SCOTT. Another early Elba settler was Robert Scott.
Born in 1803, Scott came to Alstead Hill in Keene as a young
child with his mother and father shortly after 1810. In 1840, when
only nine other families were living in North Elba, Scott and his wife
Laura bought a 240-acre tract on what is now called the Cascade
Road, about a half-mile east of today’s municipal golf course.
By 1850 the Scotts had built a frame house at the base of a little
mountain that came to be known as Scott’s Cobble. They began
taking in guests, one of whom was early travel writer J.T. Headley,
who said of North Elba, “I had never heard of it before, and am
surprised that its location has not attracted more attention.”
From 1849 to 1851, Scott’s nearest neighbor was John Brown,
who later gained notoriety in the Harper’s Ferry raid of 1859. Brown
was returning home one winter day from a business trip to
Springfield, Mass., when he got stuck at Keene without a ride over
the mountains to North Elba. Brown nearly died on that journey
through the deep snows of the Old Mountain Road, but he managed
somehow to make it to Robert Scott’s, who let him rest up and get
warm before hitching his oxen to a sleigh and taking Brown home.
In 1854, Scott was part of the three-man team responsible for
building today’s Lake Placid-Wilmington Road through the
Wilmington Notch, replacing the old winter road running through the
Sentinel Range above the Notch behind Connery and Winch ponds.
Scott’s boarding house was expanded in the 1870s by niece
Martha Scott and her husband Moses Sampson Ames, who


rechristened it the Mountain View House. Guests came from all over,
and the Mountain View was widely hailed for many years. It burned
in 1903.

BROWN FAMILY. The graves of abolitionist John Brown and
many other members of the Harper’s Ferry party can be found near
Brown’s farmhouse in North Elba. Three members of John Brown’s
family, however, are buried in the North Elba Cemetery: daughter
Ellen, daughter-in-law Martha, and grandson Frederick.
Freddie was born in August 1859 to Watson Brown and his
wife Belle Thompson, daughter of North Elba pioneer Roswell
Thompson (also buried in the North Elba Cemetery). The Brown and
Thompson families were very close; Belle’s brother Henry had
married Ruth Brown in 1850. Two months after Freddie was born,
his father was killed in the Harper’s Ferry raid.
The following year, Freddie’s mother took him on a visit to the
home of Louisa May Alcott in Concord, Mass., along with his
grandmother Mary, John Brown’s widow.
“The two pale women sat silent and serene through the clatter,”
wrote Alcott, “and the bright-eyed, handsome baby received the
homage of the multitude like a little king, bearing the kisses and
praises with the utmost dignity.
“When he was safe back in the study, playing alone at his
mother’s feet, C. and I went and worshipped in our own way at the
shrine of John Brown’s grandson, kissing him as if he were a little
saint, and feeling highly honored when he sucked our fingers, or
walked on us with his honest little red shoes, much the worse for
wear.”
Little Freddie died just three years later of diphtheria. He was 4
years old. His broken tombstone, lying flat on the ground above his
grave, says simply, “Gone Home.”

EPPS FAMILY. John Brown came to North Elba in 1849 to help
a small, fledgling African-American colony that had been established
here by wealthy abolitionist Gerrit Smith. The members of that
colony were not escaped slaves, or even freed slaves; all had been
born as free men and women, most of them in New York state. Born
as city folks, however, they were having a hard time making it as
farmers.
Thirteen Black families are recorded on the North Elba census
from 1850 to 1870. By 1871, only of those 13 families remained: the
family of Lyman Epps.

30 Olympic Region

The Epps family came to North Elba from Troy in June 1849,
taking a wagon trail up the Vermont side of Lake Champlain and
crossing by ferry to Westport where, according to one story, they met
John Brown’s family. The two families joined forces, making the 40-
mile journey together through the wilderness to “the Plains of
Abraham,” as North Elba was called in its earliest days.
Lyman Sr. and his son Lyman Jr. became famous for singing a
favorite hymn of Brown, “Blow Ye the Trumpets Blow,” at the
abolitionist’s funeral in December 1859. Both were highly regarded
in the community. In 1875 the elder Epps became a founding
member of North Elba’s first formal hall of worship, the White
Church (named for the color of its paint, not its members). He also
helped establish the Lake Placid Public Library in 1883.
Individual headstones, arrayed in a line on either side of the
Epps family obelisk, mark the graves of Epps family members.
Buried with them is William Appo, another member of the North
Elba Black colony, who married one of the Epps daughters.

STUART BAIRD. The tombstone spells his name “Beard,” but a
short article in the Essex County Republican spells its Baird, and this
is the spelling preferred by local historians.
Also known locally as “Old Baird,” the itinerant tinker’s name
was linked with that of the White Church in one of Alfred
Donaldson’s famously inaccurate stories about Adirondack history.
According to A.D., Baird was an eccentric who wore the same
clothes for years at a time, patching them over when holes wore
through the fabric. When he died on Oct. 19, 1873, Donaldson wrote,
“his coat of many rags was peeled off, some of the half-rotten
patches split open and were found to contain bills of various
denominations. ... The total yield was $350. ...
“The suggestion was made that it be used to build a church,”
Donaldson wrote. “It [the White Church] still stands — and is a
monument to a vagabonding tinker who unconsciously spent his life
in hoarding and secreting funds for its erection.”
Nice story — but not completely true. When Baird died at the
home of one of his customers, the poormaster —none other than
Robert Scott — found just under $200 in cash on the tinker’s person,
which was applied to the cost of his tombstone and burial plot.
Fund-raising to build the Union Church — the proper name for
the White Church — had been under way for a considerable while by
the time of Baird’s death, and pledges from the community had
already covered the anticipated cost: between $1,200 and $1,500.


Work was started on the building in the fall of 1873; two years later,
it was finished.
The late North Elba historian, Mary MacKenzie, wrote that the
White Church “was a monument not to Stuart Baird, but to the many
North Elba residents who made it possible by their willing
sacrifices.”

JOSEPH V. NASH. Young Joe Nash’s first exposure to North
Elba came in 1839 when, as a 13-year-old boy, he and his brother
Timothy, age 15, came walking up the Old Mountain Road on their
way from Willsboro, driving before them a herd of young cows.
Their father had bought a farm from Roswell Thompson, and the
family was starting a new life on the Plains of Abraham.
In 1850, 24-year-old Joe Nash paid $240 for a 160-acre plot in
the wilderness of Bennet Pond’s western shore. (Today, we know
that pond as Mirror Lake). Nash built a cabin, cleared a farm, and the
following year married schoolteacher Harriet Brewster, whose family
had come to North Elba from Jay in 1841.
Joe built a frame house around 1852, and in 1859 bought
another 160 acres, again for $240, extending south from his earlier
tract. Nash’s farm covered all of what would later become Main
Street, from the Hilton to the high school, including much of Signal
Hill.
In the late 1870s, just a few years before his death in 1884,
Nash began subdividing and selling off his property for development.
Much of the core of the village of Lake Placid was built on the lots
created out of Joe Nash’s farm, and many think of him today as the
founder of the village.

BENJAMIN T. BREWSTER. Nash’s brother-in-law, 22-year-old
Ben Brewster, bought the tract just north of Joe’s in 1851. For two
decades, Brewster farmed. But in 1871, several years after Joe Nash
had started taking in boarders at his home, Brewster decided to build
the first real hotel within the boundaries of what would later become
the village of Lake Placid. He called it the Lake Placid House, but
most folks knew it simply as Brewster’s.
Brewster did well — not as well as Nash, but well enough to
build himself a stately Victorian residence in 1883 that, 40 years
later, became the Mirror Lake Inn. There, Brewster lived out the
remainder of his long life in comfort and ease.
Near the end of his days, at the age of 84, white-bearded
Benjamin Brewster was cast for a bit role as Father Time in one of
the many silent films then being shot in Lake Placid. When told that

32 Olympic Region

his face would soon be seen all over the country, he was not
impressed.
“Well, I’m known all over the country anyhow,” he said — and
he was probably right.
Note: While a marker for the graves of Benjamin Brewster’s
father, Thomas P. Brewster, and other members of his family stands
in the same section of the North Elba Cemetery as most of the other
historic burial plots, the headstones for Ben Brewster and his wife,
Julia Ann Washburn, are found to the north of the eastern end of the
road running along the back of the cemetery.

THE DEWEYS. Heading back out toward Old Military Road
from Benjamin Brewster’s grave, there are two more sites on the left
that are especially worthy of note.
The first, standing far back from the driveway, is the family
plot of the Deweys. Father Melvil and son Godfrey may have played
the most significant roles of any two individuals in the whole history
of Lake Placid. Melvil Dewey founded and developed the Lake
Placid Club, and Godfrey Dewey single-handedly won the bid for the
1932 Winter Olympic Games in Lake Placid.
Our final stop after visiting the Deweys’ headstone is a few
steps back toward the driveway.

THE MacKENZIES. Mary MacKenzie, who died on April 15,
2003 — two years ago today — was, for all practical purposes, the
creator of Lake Placid and North Elba history, being the first to delve
into the source material of that history in a really rigorous, systematic
way. She was first named official North Elba town historian in 1960,
the same year her husband Seymour died. In 1980, the year the
Olympics returned, the village of Lake Placid also named her its
official historian.
MacKenzie’s small, illustrated book, “Lake Placid and North
Elba: A History, 1800-2000,” was published the year before her
death, and two more of her books are being published posthumously.
“Collected Poetry 1931 to 1937” is being released next month by
Blueline, the literary magazine of the Adirondacks. And next year a
massive volume, “The Plains of Abraham: Collected Writings on the
History of North Elba and Lake Placid, N.Y.,” will be published by
Nicholas K. Burns Publishing.
If there is anything in this brief historic walk through the North
Elba Cemetery that you have found enlightening, stop for a moment
at Mary’s grave and thank her.


Palace Theater marks
75th anniversary
F IRST PUBLISHED J UNE 18, 2001

The main venue for film exhibition at this weekend’s Lake
Placid Film Forum is the Palace Theater on Main Street, which is
celebrating its 75th anniversary this year.
The Adirondack Theater Corporation, a locally owned and
managed concern, erected the Palace Theater in 1926. As the
building neared completion, the corporation also took out a long-
term lease on the only other movie house in Lake Placid, the 15-year-
old Happy Hour Theater.
The Happy Hour had been built in 1911 by its owner-operators,
referred to in the Lake Placid News of the day only as “Messrs.
Walton & Adams.”
“During the intervening period (since the Happy Hour’s
construction), extensive alterations have been made in the property,”
the 1926 News said, “which have materially increased the seating
capacity of the auditorium.”
ATC took possession of the Happy Hour on May 16, 1926, less
than two weeks before the doors were opened to the Palace.
It’s not certain when the Happy Hour closed, but current Palace
owner Reg Clark recalls that it was not long after the new theatre’s
opening.
The final touch to the new Palace cinema was the installation of
“a first-class, strictly orchestral concert organ,” said the LPN. “The
organ differs from the so-called pipe organs and church organs in
that it is strictly orchestral in practically all its qualities.
“There are two departments or organs, one on each side of the
stage. It requires many miles of wire for the electrical works, and a
15 h.p. motor to operate it.”
The organ was played to accompany the silent films being
shown when the Palace was built.

The Palace opens
Today, the Palace Theater remains the same in many details as
the grand, 925-seat movie palace that opened on May 29, 1926,
“before an audience that filled every seat of the big auditorium and
overflowed into such standing space as was available,” according to
the News.

34

“The buzz of conversation ceased as the special orchestra struck
up an overture. The audience seemed to realize that here was
something more than a mere theater opening. In truth it was a dream
made real,” the News reported.
When Chamber of Commerce President W.R. Wikoff addressed
the audience — gathered from as far afield as Plattsburgh, Keene and
Au Sable Forks — he spoke of the Palace as an emblem of Lake
Placid’s shining future.
“He (Wikoff) dwelt on the fact,” the LPN said in its decidedly
biased report of the opening, “that the Palace was a monument to the
optimists of the village, the men who said, ‘It could be done.’ He
also pointed out that Lake Placid is going ahead in no uncertain way,
as proved by the new theater.”
Sources differ on who designed the Palace Theater. The June 4,
1926, Lake Placid News gives the credit to John N. Linn, of
Brooklyn. A later historical assessment, however, lists architect
Louis Wetmore, of Glens Falls, as the designer.
Both sources agree that the building was constructed by George
Bola, a Lake Placid contractor.
The Palace that today’s movie-goers experience exhibits many
of the distinctive architectural features of the original 1926 building,
including:
• the Neo-Classical “cast stone” detailing on the Palace’s
Main Street facade, with its central Palladian window, lotus-
capital pilasters and pediment;
• the orchestra pit in the main, downstairs movie hall,
complete with the Robert Morton 1926 pipe organ, built in
Van Nuys, Calif., and bought for $25,000 — or, in the
inflated currency of 2001, about a quarter of a million
dollars;
• late Art Nouveau stenciled walls; and
• original cast plaster chandeliers and wall sconces.
The theater’s painted ceiling panels originally depicted angels,
suspended in the heavens above and watching over the movie patrons
below. The angels were covered over in the 1930s with a
composition material designed to improve the auditorium’s acoustics
after the introduction of “talkies.”
“Talkies” — motion pictures synchronized with a soundtrack
— were first brought to the Palace in 1929.
“Lake Placid as a village would probably not have talking
pictures for some time to come, due to the heavy initial expense of
installation,” observed the April 5, 1929, edition of the Lake Placid
News, “but (Placid’s) position as a resort town, and the wish of the


local owners and manager to keep up with the parade, bring (the
talkies) to Lake Placid ... a year or two ahead of what would be the
case if the summer-visitor angle did not enter into the calculations.”

Clark restores the Palace
Reg Clark inherited a Lake Placid funeral parlor, and running it
constitutes his “day job.” But at night, the man who worked in the
Palace as a lad runs his very own movie house.
In 1960, the year Clark bought the Palace, 12 cinema screens
were operating in the area. By 1983, all but the Palace and Saranac
Lake’s Berkeley Theater, also run by Clark, had closed. (The
Berkeley closed last year.)
For more than 20 years, the Palace continued to rotate several
movies a week across its single screen, just as it had since its 1926
opening.
Then, in 1983, following the advent of the first multiplex
theaters in the larger cities, Clark closed off the balcony to make way
for a second screen. A “grand re-opening” was held on June 10,
1983, to mark the occasion, with Kate Smith singing “God Bless
America.”
Two years later Clark cut that upstairs room in half, making for
three screens in all.
Today there are 298 seats downstairs at the Palace, and 136
more in each of the two upstairs viewing rooms, for a total seating
capacity of 570.
Though the viewing space was broken up to accommodate the
greater variety demanded by modern audiences, Clark hired Eileen
Black, of Saranac Lake, to restore the Art Nouveau wall paintings in
the two upper halls and duplicate the style of their trim on the wall
dividing the rooms.
“Dividing the theater improved its economic viability without
significantly impairing its integrity, as the main auditorium remains
intact,” wrote Troy architect Janet Null in a 1990 evaluation of the
Palace for the Lake Placid-North Elba Historic Commission.
“Apart from the changes above and minor alterations on the
facade, the theater retains its original form and fabric,” said Null.
She characterized the Palace as “eclectic rather than innovative
in design, but nevertheless harmonious. It is a very prominent part of
Main Street, and well-appreciated in the community.”
Null’s study of the theater was conducted as part of an effort by
Clark and Lake Placid Building Inspector James Morganson to
secure money from the N.Y. Office of Historic Preservation to
renovate the building’s crumbling Main Street facade.

36 Olympic Region

The money did not come soon enough for some, however, as a
report from the Village Board’s July 1991 meeting indicates. A
resident came to that meeting to complain that pieces of crumbling
brick had fallen onto the sidewalk in front of the theater, inches from
his parked car.
Protective nets had to be thrown up over the sidewalk before
the facade was finally stabilized.

The return of the pipe organ
The building was not all that Reg Clark restored at the Palace
Theater.
In 1998 Clark commissioned the rebuilding of the original
Robert Morton organ, which is one of only two such organs still in
operation in the theaters in which they were originally installed.
Not only had the Morton organ suffered the normal indignities
associated with age and disuse, but the wires connecting its central
console to the two pipe units on either side of the stage had been
accidentally cut in the process of modernizing the downstairs
viewing hall in the mid-1980s.
Melvin Robinson, who rebuilt the Palace organ, said that
theater organs had been designed in the silent-film era to give a “big
sound” to a one-musician instrument.
“What’s especially unique about the Palace’s organ,” he told
the News, “is that it comes with all the ‘toys’ — the tam-tams,
drums, whistles and other percussion instruments.” Those rare
percussive add-ons accompanied the organ as it played the
soundtrack to the Twenties’ silent film classics.
The Morton organ had its revival debut in October 1998 for the
Lake Placid Institute’s Silent Film Festival, and it’s gotten a workout
for that festival every year since.
In addition, the organ was played last year during the inaugural
Lake Placid Film Forum as accompaniment for a silent film.
At this year’s Forum the organ will again be played by Jeff
Barker, who assisted Robinson in restoring the Palace instrument
three years ago, for a showing of Buster Keaton’s “The Cameraman”
(1928, 90 minutes) this Sunday, June 10, at 4 p.m.


Plans afoot to restore
historic 1932 bob run
F IRST PUBLISHED J ULY 11, 2003

In 1929, Godfrey Dewey had a dream: to bring the Winter
Olympics to Lake Placid.
To win the bid, though, Lake Placid would have to build from
scratch a bobsled run — the first in the Western Hemisphere, where
virtually nobody knew a thing about the sport.
Today, more than 70 years later, the abandoned channels and
curves of the first half mile of Dewey’s history-making bob run still
snake down the slopes of Mount Van Hoevenberg, still discernible
through the brush that’s grown up in the course’s track.
What would it be like if that bobsled run were cleared of brush
so that visitors to Mount Van Hoevenberg could hike its channels
and curves, experiencing it for themselves, with interpretive plaques
along the way to help them understand what they were seeing?
That’s the idea brought to the table earlier this year by Liz de
Fazio, executive director of the 1932 and 1980 Lake Placid Winter
Olympic Museum, and Jonathan Becker, a member of the museum’s
board of directors. Along the way they gathered support from others
interested in preserving the ‘32 bob run, including the U.S. Bobsled
Federation, based in Lake Placid, and the Olympic Regional
Development Authority, which operates the Verizon Sports Complex
at Mount Van Hoevenberg.

‘If you build it ... ’
Godfrey Dewey himself deserves most of the credit for the
success of Lake Placid’s 1932 Winter Olympic bid, since Dewey
traveled solo to Switzerland in March 1929 to press the village’s
case. The Lake Placid Club, founded by Dewey’s father Melvil in
1895, had already helped establish the village’s reputation as a winter
sports Mecca. Dewey knew that, besides the routine construction of
an indoor arena and a speedskating track, all Lake Placid needed to
host a Winter Olympiad was a bobsled course.
Before leaving on a steamer for Europe, Dewey was able to win
a guarantee from then-Governor Franklin Roosevelt that the state
would pay for a bob run’s construction if Placid won the Olympic
bid.
That left only two problems:

38

1) Nobody in North America had ever built a bobsled run
before — indeed, only a handful of Americans had even ridden in a
bobsled by 1929; those who had were expatriate Americans who
trained and raced in Europe.
2) The best sites for such a project were on state land in the
Adirondack Park, where construction was forbidden by the famous
“forever wild” clause in the state constitution.
Before leaving Europe Dewey solved his first problem by
securing the services of famed German bob-run engineer Stanislaus
Zentzytsky.
By the time Dewey returned to Lake Placid that summer,
however, the second problem was far from being settled. Zentzytsky
was asked to develop separate designs for bob runs at each of three
potential sites: the Wilmington Notch and Scarface Mountain, both
on state land, and Mount Jo, overlooking the newly rebuilt
Adirondack Loj, both owned by Melvil Dewey’s Lake Placid Club.
As an interim measure, Dewey and Zentzytsky designed a
temporary practice run for the LPC’s Intervales ski-jump site.
“This would at least enable workmen to become familiar with
both construction and maintenance of the walls of snow and ice, and
would give Americans a chance to practice the sport,” wrote Chris
Ortloff in his definitive history, “Lake Placid: The Olympic Years,
1932-1980.”
The practice run at Intervales was a half mile long, compared
with the Olympic’s one-and-a-half miles, with just seven curves
versus the 26 that would later be constructed. The Intervales course
was finished in time for the winter of 1929-30, when the very first
North American bobsled practice runs and competitions were held.
It wasn’t until March 1930 that the courts finally ruled that the
bob run could definitely not be built on state land. Rather than
proceed with construction on Mount Jo, however, Dewey wrote
Zentzytsky that he’d found another site owned by the Lake Placid
Club that was far more suitable: South Meadows Mountain, which
would later be renamed Mount Van Hoevenberg for the late, revered
LPC engineer.
“On Aug. 4, (1930,) the workmen walked into the wilderness of
Mount Van Hoevenberg,” Ortloff wrote. “A remarkable 148 days
later, there stood a completed bobsled run.”
The full length of that original course, which ran for a mile and
a half down Mount Van Ho, was in steady use from the winter of
1930-31 until 1939, according to reliable sources. That summer the
upper half-mile of the course was shut down for safety reasons, never
to be opened for bobsleds again.


The reason: While even a few of the older, lighter sleds
(average speed: 46 mph) had shot off the mile-and-a-half course,
none of the newer, heavier sleds could handle the long track safely.
While the latest bobsled run on Mount Van Hoevenberg,
completed just 3 years ago, follows the course of the old track, with
the start house located where the treacherous Whiteface Curve used
to be, only a DEC hiking path (No. 79 in the latest ADK guide to
High Peaks trails) now follows the old top half-mile. The trail runs
parallel to and about 20 feet uphill from the overgrown contours of
the abandoned Olympic relic.

Reviving the ’32 run
“I’ve been thinking about restoring that run for years, ever since
I first read about the (bobsled) track and its condition in the Ortloff
book,” said Jonathan Becker, a member of the Lake Placid Winter
Olympic Museum board of directors from Guilford, Conn.
“Last year I asked Steve Vassar to take me up there,” Becker
said. Vassar, a former amateur bobsledder, is an administrative
assistant at the Olympic Museum. “He knows that thing like the back
of his hand.
“It’s basically intact. All we need to do to bring it out again is
to clear the brush out, dig out the moss and soil from the stoneworks
(on the curves), and anyone can see it.
Becker and Liz DeFazio, Olympic Museum executive director,
agreed that “it’s a natural for the Winter Olympic Museum to be
involved in this,” Becker said.
The first half-mile of the original bob run “was so historical that
we needed to start preservation on it as soon as possible,” DeFazio
said.
The two organized a first meeting of museum, ORDA and
Bobsled Federation officials with community leaders early this year
to generate ideas.
“Right now, we envision it (the restored bobsled run) as a
hiking and walking experience,” DeFazio explained.
From the start house at the top of the new bobsled run, an
existing trail to the starting point of the 1932 track would be cleared
and improved. Then the channel itself would be cleared of
vegetation, opening up that even, half-barrel-shaped course as a
walking path. Interpretive markers along the way would explain the
history and engineering of the run, helping visitors better appreciate
what they were seeing.
There has been talk of possibly relocating two of the warm-up
buildings constructed for the 1932 Olympics back to their original

40 Olympic Region

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