USA > New York > Franklin County > Historical sketches of Franklin county and its several towns > Part 22
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running into Canada six or eight miles to the cast, and there is no competition.
The town has three small hamlets- Bombay, Hogansburgh and South Bombay. Bombay has a population of possibly five hundred. It has six stores, two churches, a town hall, a school employing five teach- ers, a railway station, the manufacturing establishment of Shields Bros., a feed and grist mill, and a moving picture hall and theatre. The Bombay Grange, which owns its building and has a considerable mem- bership, is the only public organization in the place, except those of a religious character. Shields Bros. have built up an extensive business in the manufacture of moccasins, play suits of Indian, cowboy and cow- girl costumes, and baseball, military and boy scout uniforms. They make also burned leather and burned wood goods, and deal largely in Indian-made baskets of splint and sweet grass. They employ about fifty hands in the factory itself, and nearly as many more in the sales- rooms and in outside work, and a large corps of selling agents represent them in far places.
Hogansburgh claims a population of about three hundred, and has practically no business enterprises other than mercantile, though for- merly it had a large toy and basket factory, operated by Dwyer and Lantry. The St. Regis river cuts the hamlet in two, and the parts are about as separate and distinct as if miles apart. The saw mill and grist mill do only a small business, and of wholly a custom character. Fire has scourged the place severely upon a number of occasions, especially on the west side of the river. A fire in August, 1915, wiped out the hotel there, all but two of the stores, and several dwellings, entailing a loss estimated at forty thousand dollars. A few weeks later the basket and toy factory building, which contained an electric light- ing plant also, was burned. The village is electric lighted, has four or five stores, three churches (one an Indian mission) and the Indian Industrial School for Girls, conducted by the Sisters of Mercy.
South Bombay consists only of a church, a saw mill, a grist mill, and a few scattered houses.
In July, 1849, a forest fire swept over the central part of the town- ship, destroying forty buildings, fences, crops and bridges, and burning to death large numbers of sheep.
In 1863, in order to escape a draft, the voters of the town authorized a bond issue to provide funds for bounties to be given for volunteers, but the supervisor refused to sign the bonds. Retribution came to him the next year, when he was defeated for re-election. The people of the
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town were understood to be largely in sympathy with the Southern cause, and I recall having heard in my boyhood that a rebel flag had been raised there, which was probably not true, as later I have been told that the report originated from the fact that an irresponsible char- acter in the town, acting only upon his own initiative and responsibility, did put out a nondescript emblem, which had quite a different significance.
The Massena Springs and Fort Covington Railroad was built by the Grand Trunk Railway through the town in 1887. It connects at the former place with the New York Central system, and at the latter with the Grand Trunk. Bombay contributed nothing but the right of way to the enterprise. Two years later, Ernest G. Reynolds, in association with the Central Vermont Railroad, built a line from Moira to Bombay Cor- ners. At Meira it had a connection with the then Northern Adirondack (now the New York and Ottawa) Railroad and with the Ogdensburg and Lake Champlain (now the Ogdensburg division of the Rutland Railroad). This line never did much business, and never paid. Effort was made to sell it to the Grand Trunk, but the latter would not buy even at the value of the rails. The road was abandoned in 1896 and the rails taken up and sold. In 1891 a company was organized to build a railroad from Bombay Corners to the St. Lawrence, via 'Hogans- burgh, but it never began operations.
Bombay ranks perhaps seventh among the towns of the county as a dairy district, and finds the industry more profitable than it used to be. for in 1843 an Eastern buyer purchased a large quantity of butter there at ten cents per pound, and ten years later a local operator con- tracted with the farmers for all of their June, July and August product at fourteen cents. A cheese factory was built by Mortimer and William Russell in 1872, which was burned three or four years later. In 1875 the farmers of the vicinity united to build a creamery, which Thomas A. Sears bought and enlarged, and in 1892 sold to William MeKenna. who bought also and operated the Clark & Ross creamery at Dog Hollow. These two establishments are now owned by the Franklin County Con- densary Company of Bangor, and the milk received at them is shipped to Fort Covington. Another co-operative creamery was located between Bombay and Hogansburgh, but friction between its patrons led to its sale to Bradley & Monaghan. Work in it has ceased, and the building is to be torn down. There is also a creamery at Hogansburgh, built by Henry Bowker, sold after his death to Michael Crowley, and now owned and operated by Benjamin & Totman.
CHAPTER VIII
BRANDON
Brandon was set off from Bangor January 28, 1828, and then included seven townships, one and a half of which, after a long and hard contest, were detached from it and added to Harrietstown in 1883, and afterward four and a half others were set off to make Santa Clara. The original settlers were mostly from Vermont, and the town was named by them from Brandon in that State. It has never had importance indus- trially, commercially or agriculturally, and until within a few years it never had a single inhabitant whose financial rating exceeded more than about twenty thousand dollars, and only one whose estate reached that figure, which sum he accumulated simply by spending practically nothing and saving everything. He lived to be about ninety years of age, and his earnings were never large. Living alone, and having neither wife nor child, and being very abstemious, it is doubtful if, except when he was in Malone, serving the town as supervisor, his expenditures for sustenance amounted to half a dollar per week, and clothes and other items cost correspondingly.
Brandon's people were industrious, frugal and generally shrewd and hard-headed. An illustration is found in the fact that when the dis- tinction between county and town poor was abolished, eighty odd years ago, and the statute permitted each town to make disposition as it might choose of any surplus in its poor fund, Brandon voted to apply such surplus to the payment of the taxes of residents, notwithstanding it must have been the fact that substantially all of the amount had been contributed by non-resident taxpayers.
The character of the locality is such that opportunity for money- making in a large way has never been present, except perhaps through extensive lumbering operations, which required larger capital than any early resident possessed. Almost the only arable land within the pres- ent limits of the town, except a few river bottoms, lies along the north- ern border, comprising a strip of from a mile to a mile and a half in width. Within this belt are a few fairly good farms, though most are of light soil and not very productive. South of this belt is only a wilderness, abounding in rock and sand, and utterly worthless save
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for the timber on it. The river bottoms referred to are adapted only to the raising of hay and oats, frosts precluding cultivation of corn and other crops. Fortunately the ownership of Brandon's timber lands has been so divided that no one large concern, anxious for a quick clean-up, has had control, so that the town's natural resources have been con- served, and, as operations are now conducted, the timber may be made to last for moderate cutting for a generation yet. Had it been other- wise, the larger part of the town's area would be to-day a denuded waste.
The nearest approach to a village or hamlet in Brandon is Reynolds- ton, in the western part, where within a mile or such a matter there are a sawmill, planing mill, blacksmith shop, one small store and pos- sibly thirty or forty dwelling houses. Half or more of these houses and the store, mills and shop are owned by Reynolds Brothers, viz., Herbert H., Berton L. and Newton, who have about ten thousand acres of timber lands, stretching across the southern end of the town. The father of these brothers, Orson L. Reynolds, moved to Brandon from Bangor in 1870, buying a water power and a small tract of land, to which he added other parcels as he had opportunity and could find the means; and the like policy has been followed by the sons since his death. Prior to the time of Mr. Reynolds's original purchase his father-in-law had been offered practically all of the township at the price of a shilling an acre. whereas adjacent tracts no better timbered and no more aeces- sible have sold during the past few years as high as ten dollars per acre.
For a number of years past Reynolds Brothers have had a contract for the delivery annually of from three to five million feet of logs from the southern half of their holdings to the Brooklyn Cooperage Com- pany, which has a private railroad running from its mill in St. Regis Falls across Waverly and through the Reynolds lands in Brandon, a distance of about fourteen miles, and delivery of logs to it was made at any convenient point along the railroad line. The contract expires in 1918, and now Reynolds Brothers plan to confine their activities to lumbering the soft timber on the south half of their tract and both the hard and soft on the north half exclusively for their own mill at Reynoldston. During the life of the contract with the Brooklyn Cooper- age Company they employed as many as a hundred men in the winter season, but with the completion of their contract the number will doubtless be smaller.
The number of sawmills that at various times Brandon has had has
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been large, but all of them except the Reynolds proposition and one other have had only a small product. The second exception was that of Hon. Joseph R. Flanders, of Malone, which was disastrous. Having acquired a large traet by contract in 1866, Mr. Flanders proceeded to build a road in the winter across very difficult country south from Skerry, and also to build a dam and mill in the same season at a point on Deer river where he proposed to operate. The cost was heavy, and the burden of this initial expense, together with the long haul that had to be made to the railroad, compelled abandonment of the enterprise in 1873. Pretty much everything in and about the mill was stolen or left to rust and decay, and the property was never operated afterward. Webster Brothers subsequently obtained control of the lands, and cut large quantities of bark there for their tannery in Malone. Reynolds Brothers now own the tract.
Other mills have been Ira Ewings's, the first built in the town, and owned later by Lyman Weeks; James Skerry's, later owned by Warren Aldrich, and now by L. C. Bowen ; one built by Charles J. Adams of Bangor, three miles south of Skerry, and sold to D. Adolphus Dunn, on whose hands it was twice burned during the year 1885, and after which it was owned by Michael Donahue, and again burned and the site abandoned ; one built by Warren Aldrich three miles south of the Adams mill (sold to George Walker, and now torn down) : one in the western part of the town, built and operated by William C. Betterly ; and the " priest " mill, built by H. Y. Tarbell, and afterward owned by Father Francis of Malone, James Dwyer, David MeGivney, McGivney & G. C. Stevens, and finally by McGivney again, during which latter ownership it burned, and was not rebuilt. There may also have been earlier mills, but none of them large.
Brandon formerly had two starch factories - one north of the Center, built by J. V. R. Bowles and Jonathan Farr, who sold to Benjamin and Stoughton Lawrence and they to Hannibal Wilcox; and the other built by Lyman Weeks. Both went up in flames.
It has also had at least two creameries, one of which is at Skerry, and still running. It was built by Gaius A. Lane about 1880, and sold to Fred Lawrence. It was next sold to Norman Wilson, who now owns it. The other was built by George Taylor. in the western part of the town, near the Bangor line. It was burned.
The population of Brandon fifty-eight years ago was eight hundred, and the gain since then has been less than one hundred, though this
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does not take into consideration the loss by the setting off to other towns of the southern townships. There is no ground for reasonable hope that the number may ever increase, because, as has been seen, there are no lands that may be converted into farms, nor waters on whose shores a summer hotel business might be developed. Therefore, the outlook would seem to be for a decrease in the number of inhabitants as lumbering operations fall off. The only settlement other than Reynoldston which has even a resemblance to a hamlet is Skerry, at which there are a store, a blacksmith shop and a scattering of houses.
Before Brandon lost its southern townships to Harrietstown and Santa Clara it had a few settlers around the head of Upper Saranac Lake, forty-odd miles as the crow flies, and perhaps seventy miles by highway, from the center of town government. There were not enough of them to justify the creation of an election district in their section, and it speaks well for the quality of their citizenship that at least a part of them could be persuaded in years of intense political interest or excitement to make the long and arduous journey from their homes in order to cast their votes. The memory of such a public service ought to shame the men of to-day who shirk the duty of registering and voting even in cases where they need take hardly more than a step from their residences or places of business in order to exercise the privilege of the electoral franchise.
The dismemberment of Brandon alluded to was fought strenuously by its supervisors for several years because the lands set off to be added to Harrietstown and to create Santa Clara, amounting to almost a quarter of a million acres, owned by nonresidents, paid something like two-thirds of the town's entire tax levy. Since the dismemberment the remaining nonresident lands have borne only about one-fifth of the tax. Thus the two partitions added heavily to the tax burdens of the resi- dents - requiring them following the first partition to contribute a half instead of merely a third of the town's expenses, and after the second nearly four-fifths instead of the original third part.
An almost forgotten murder occurred in Brandon in 1862. Peter Mulholland, a dissipated and violent character, was visited on the day of the crime by an associate of like habits, who brought liquor with him. Mulholland proceeded to get drunk almost to the degree of uncon- sciousness, but yet was able to see, or fancied that he saw, improper conduct between his guest and his wife. Crawling along the floor, Mul- holland lunged with a knife at his visitor, as is believed, but struck his
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wife instead, the knife penetrating her abdomen. The woman lived until the next day, but utterly refused to make any statement to Coroner Lyndon K. Hutchins in explanation of her condition, or to inculpate anybody. Mulholland was arrested and indicted. While awaiting trial he made a confession to the district attorney, and upon arraignment pleaded guilty to murder in the second degree. He was sentenced to imprisonment at Dannemora for ten years.
If Brandon had any church history of date earlier than 1848 I have been unable to ascertain it. In that year it had a Baptist organization, which numbered fifty-two members, and at about that time was served by Elder Thayer of Burke as pastor, or at least as preacher. L. C. Herrick was pastor also in 1848, and John C. Smith in 1853 and 1854 -- serving at Burke also. The society was manifestly poor, as it reported to the St. Lawrence Baptist Association in 1848 that it could not afford to maintain a pastor, but could raise fifty dollars a year for " support of preaching." In 1855 it reported that some who had been regarded as pillars in the church had left them, and in 1856 that the church was feeble. In 1857 it reported forty-three members, and after that date no mention of the Brandon society appears in the association's proceedings.
There seems to have been no regular church organization in the town after the collapse of the Baptist society until 1891, when the First Con- gregational Society of Brandon was incorporated, and a church edifice erected the same year at Skerry. While the Baptist organization was in existence, and from that time continuously down to 1891, religious services were held, though usually with considerable irregularity, in school houses in one or another part of the town -sometimes by a clergyman of one denomination, and then by another, from Bangor. Rev. Alonzo Wells preached there for a time. Since 1891 the church has had a pastor regularly for most of the time, but not exclusively its own - the Congregational minister at Bangor so serving usually. In 1916 and 1917 before entering the army as a chaplain Rev. J. B. Webster, of the Malone Baptist church, officiated there Sunday afternoons.
A Holiness church was built near Skerry in 1905. It has a pastor, and enjoys services regularly.
Rev. Father Lauzon of North Bangor officiates at intervals at Reynoldston.
CHAPTER IX BRIGHTON
The town of Brighton comprises all of township eighteen of great tract one of Macomb's purchase and the south half of township fifteen. It was set off from Duane in November, 1858, and takes its name from a town in England. Until about twenty years ago it was merely what the famous hotel and summer resort known as Paul Smiths made it. At the date of its erection it had about two hundred inhabitants, the number decreasing in 1865 to one hundred and sixty, and never exceed- ing five hundred until 1892, since when the population has remained almost stationary - never falling under seven hundred and never quite reaching eight hundred. The State enumeration of 1915 gives it as seven hundred and forty-one. The growth that the town has had in the last quarter of a century has come principally from the establish- ment of institutions and boarding houses for the accommodation of people afflicted with tuberculosis, and from the settlement made at Gabriels following the opening of the Dr. Webb railroad through the Adirondacks.
The earliest known settlers in Brighton were Moses Follenshy, Samuel Johnson and Amos and Levi Rice. The date of Follensby's locating is unknown, but he disappeared in 1823, without having left any impress upon the town except the giving of his name to two or three of its waters. Johnson is understood to have settled in 1815 about two miles east of Paul Smiths, and the Rices about 1819 or 1820 - Levi near Paul Smiths, close to the site of St. John's Church in the Wilderness, where he is said to have built a primitive grist mill, and Amos farther north, at what is now known as MacCollom's. Peter Sabattis (St. Baptist), a St. Regis Indian, frequented the woods and waters of Brighton at an early time, and found rare good hunting and fishing. Oliver Keese and Thomas A. Tomlinson came into the town in 1851, and built and operated a sawmill three miles west of Paul Smiths, which was afterward run for a time by McLean, who had earlier been at Franklin Falls. James M. Wardner located about 1854 at Rainbow Lake, and kept a hotel of modest proportions for a generation or more. Later he rebuilt, after the burning of his original house, and
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the new hotel was much larger and better in all respects. Mr. Wardner was for six years a school commissioner of the county. His hotel prop- erty was acquired after his death by the Independent Order of Foresters, and converted into the Rainbow Sanatorium for the care and treatment of members of the order suffering from tuberculosis. The institution was opened July 10, 1910, can accommodate fifty patients, and in 1915 had an average of about thirty-five. Dr. J. Seymour Emans, of New York, himself tuberculous, is the physician in charge.
Apollos A. Smith, familiarly known the world over as " Paul," came to Brighton in 1859 from the vicinity of Loon Lake, where he had located ten years earlier. He was born in Vermont August 20, 1825, and previous to removal to the Adirondacks had been a boatman on Lake Champlain. At Loon Lake he conducted a small hotel for a time, and then the house called Hunters' Home. In Brighton Mr. Smith bought fifty acres of land on what was then known as Follensby Pond, but now as the Lower St. Regis, for three hundred dollars, the grantor reserving the pine suitable for saw logs. He erected a primitive hotel building, and from time to time during the next twenty years added nearly a thousand acres to his original purchase at a cost of about five thousand five hundred dollars. In the meantime the original hotel building, which had been little more than a shack, had given place to a much larger and finer structure, with boat houses and other appurtenant buildings, the whole comprising the finest accommodations for sports- men and pleasure seekers then known in all the Adirondack region. To these many other and large improvements have since been made. Many factors entered into this great development, not the least of which was Mr. Smith's personality. An attractive location, the fine fishing that the surrounding waters afforded, and a table and general appoint- ments that equaled those of the best city hostelries all counted for suc- cess, of course, but without Paul himself the establishment could not have so prospered and so gained and held the affection of guests. Though he had lacked early advantages, Mr. Smith had a native ability, a readiness of wit and a shrewdness of judgment that even the wizards of industrial enterprises and the masters of "big business," as well as scholars and statesmen, who became his guests were quick to recognize as entitling him to a place among them, and disposed them to fellow- ship with him on the plane of equality - esteeming him not merely as their entertainer, but as their friend. Genial, an irrepressible joker whose quips and jests never stung, a raconteur whose reminiscences and
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anecdotes always interested and amused, Mr. Smith held his own easily in any circle, and was as popular as he was widely known. Nor was Mrs. Smith less contributory to the success of the resort. Her admirable qualities of womanhood, and genius as housewife and chatelaine, were invaluable in the establishment, and endeared her to all visitors.
Thus Paul Smiths gained a world-wide fame, and gave an enjoyment to its guests that convinced them that there was no other place like it, and brought them back summer after summer to delight in its home- like atmosphere, and to build up among themselves friendships that endured. From the mere fifty acres of shore front and encompassing forest with which the resort started, it has grown to be a private park of thirty thousand acres, and a hotel with annex, casino, cottages, work- shops, etc., that can accommodate five hundred guests, with side lines which include a sawmill turning out fifty thousand feet of lumber daily; an electric railway seven miles in length of standard guage and equipment, connecting with the New York Central at Lake Clear ; and a power development plant at Franklin Falls and Union Falls generat- ing five thousand horse power, whose transmission lines furnish light and power to Ausable Forks. Bloomingdale, Saranac Lake and adjacent country, Paul Smiths, Gabriels, Lake Clear and the St. Regis and Osgood chain of lakes, including the William Rockefeller property, with extensions planned to reach Lyon Mountain, Port Henry, Tupper Lake and the Adirondack Iron Works in Essex county. In the summer season the business employs a hundred women and a hundred and fifty men. The establishment has a store stocked to meet all of the require- ments or fancies of any camp or guest; a local telephone system of a hundred instruments with long-distance connections; a telegraph line : general work shops; golf grounds and club house; boat houses filled with skiffs, sail boats, and steam and electric launches : billiard parlors : bowling alleys ; and a garage for the accommodation of motorists among the guests, and containing hotel cars for hire. Besides the fourteen cot- tages which are a part of the hotel system, there are about seventy-five camps in the immediate vicinity privately owned by men of wealth. and which represent an outlay of from twenty-five thousand dollars to a hundred and fifty thousand dollars each, and the best of which com- mand ten thousand dollars a season when rented. Many of these are as Inxuriously and completely appointed as any city home - electrically lighted, with modern plumbing, long-distance telephones, and private macadam roads leading to the public highways. Among the camp
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