USA > New York > Warren County > Warren county : a history and guide > Part 10
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Almost immediately after 1813, when Warren County was set off from Washington County, its tiny settlements were alarmed by the threatened British invasion of 1814. Many militiamen, especially from the northern towns, marched to help lift the siege of Plattsburg.
Hardly had the menace of war passed when the people of the County were subjected to a terrible ordeal by a freak of nature. During the so- called "cold summer" of 1816, ice formed in many localities every month of the year and snow fell in June. Only favored sections raised any crops at all and isolated areas lacked the barest necessaries of life. Of the few whose harvests were successful, some could not aid the unfortunate be- cause they needed the food for their own use, while others declined to help "except at such exorbitant rates as to practically shut out the poor."
The western part of the county was particularly hard hit. In Luzerne rye brought $2.00 a bushel and pork $50.00 a barrel. Grist-mills sought to avoid loss of precious food by abandoning the usual process of separat- ing the bran from the kernel in the grinding of grain. Bread was so scarce that families frequently went without it for a month; many, entirely destitute, haunted the mills, seeking an opportunity to sweep the beams for flour dust.
Glens Falls was already in the throes of the depression of 1815 when the cold summer added its difficulties. An old newspaper describes in part the efforts to relieve the situation:
" ... The neighbors clubbed together, raised all the money they could . get, and started Mr. Varney off to Greenwich, Washington County, for a load of rye, for which he paid twenty shillings per bushel. On his return he was met in Sandy Hill by Charles Baker, who claimed that the people there were starving and he must unload. This he did, and took the money and started again for Greenwich for another load. When he arrived at Glens Falls he found the people well-nigh famished."
One fact clearly demonstrated by the hardship of 1816-17 was the need for more adequate communication and transportation. The old military highways were still little better than trails, their bridges, if any, just logs laid parallel and covered with planks. As late as 1820 travel, chiefly by carts and sleighs, was exceedingly uncomfortable, often dangerous. About this time the northern turnpike from Hudson Falls to Glens Falls and thence northward through Lake George, Warrensburg and Chestertown was completed. It was the first long step forward in local transportation.
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In 1832 occurred a most revolutionary travel and transportation de- velopment - the opening to navigation of the Champlain Feeder Canal between Glens Falls and Fort Edward. It gave a great impetus to the lumber and lime industries and to the growth of the County. Glens Falls became the shipping point for the entire region. A colorful sideline of the canal business was the carrying of passengers by "fast" packet boats. As rapid transportation it was surpassed by the stagecoach, but it offered more comfort and the opportunity for the social intercourse associated with water travel.
In 1844 the plank road between Glens Falls and Lake George was built and in 1848 it was extended to Warrensburg. The building of the turn- pike ushered in the picturesque stagecoach era. Until 1882 "red coaches, with top railing and spring cushions," trundled through the principal communities. While it signaled another advance, stagecoach travel was far from luxurious.
With increase in population and industries came the demand for rail- roads. Although the agitation began as early as 1832, it was 1871 before the Adirondack Railway Company completed the first important line to a point well within Warren County, the trackage from Saratoga Springs up the Hudson River to North Creek. Not until July 4, 1869, did the Glens Falls Railroad Company open the five-mile line between Glens Falls and Fort Edward. Then it was such a novelty that people took their lunches and rode back and forth all day long. At Fort Edward this line connected with the Saratoga and Whitehall railroad built in 1849. Soon after the Fort Edward-Glens Falls tracks were extended to Lake George in 1882, all these routes were merged into the present Delaware and Hudson system.
The rise of the railroads spelled the doom of stagecoaches and passenger- carrying canal boats. In 1885 came horse cars, supplanted six years later by electric street railways. About 1900 villages began to improve their streets while the State built better highways through the County. In 1928, after automobiles had become the leading means of transportation, busses replaced trolley cars.
The earliest known resident of Warren County was English. The first founder of a community was Welsh; subsequent arrivals were Irish, Scots, French, and Dutch in the order of their numerical importance. Descend- ants of these racial strains still predominate. How many people lived in Warren County during the ten years following the first settlement in 1766 to the outbreak of the Revolution, is difficult to determine. Prob- ably there were no more than thirty or forty families. All these fled in 1780 to escape the menace of a war torn frontier, but many returned in
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1783 as resettlement commenced. At the same time new families of pioneers began to arrive.
In the first national census of 1790 when Washington County included this entire region, and Queensbury alone was named in what is now Warren County, the total population numbered 183 families, a total of 1,081 persons, including one slave belonging to John Thurman. No Indians at all are listed though there is a column for "other free persons" of whom there were only three in Washington County, and 4,642 in the entire state.
The first census lists have been republished. Many of the names that James Gordon, the assistant marshal who drew up the Washington County lists, recorded as heads of families in Queensbury are still to be found in the Warren County telephone directories. Moreover, many present-day Warren County names appear in the 1790 census lists of counties nearby or farther down the Hudson. Vermont was not admitted to the Union until the year after the 1790 census, but its 1800 census lists contain many familiar present-day Warren County names.
In 1790 there were in New York State eighteen Wing families of whom three were in Washington County, eight were in Dutchess, one in nearby Columbia, five in Albany County, and one in Mohawk, Montgomery County. They were certainly a restless, pioneering tribe. There were 67 Merritt families listed in New York State in 1790 of whom eleven were in Dutchess County. Nehemiah, Ichabod, and Daniel Merritt, three brothers, married three daughters of an Abraham Wing in the early 1740's in Dutchess County.
Only three Thurman families are listed for New York State in the 1790 census, and all had slaves. The local John Thurman, with a large family of his own, had the only slave in this section. Another John Thurman, with a family of two in New York City, where slaves made up less than 7 percent of the population, had four slaves, and Sarah Thurman, widow with a son and four daughters living at Orange in Orange County, where slaves were but 5 percent of the population, had three. Evidently the Thurmans were people of means and lived in comparative luxury, for slaves were seldom employed in New York except as domestic servants. Few families could afford them, especially in newly settled places, where labor was scarce and even people of means worked hard to keep the wolf from the door and a roof over their heads.
When Warren County was carved out of Washington County and its present boundaries definitely set, it embraced a population of about 8,000. A typical Adirondack region, except for its one urban center, it has never been densely populated, but it showed a consistent increase to 19,699 in
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1860, and 29,943 in 1900. Since then the increase has been at a slower rate with a slight temporary drop in 1920, though the next five years showed a gain of 2,397.
In 1930, with a population of 34,174, about 87 percent or 31,767 persons in the county, were American-born whites. The foreign-born white population numbered 2,318; those of other races totaled 89. For- eign elements are infusions of the present century, who concentrate almost entirely in the urban area in the southeast. They consist principally of English, Irish, Germans, Italians, Greeks, and French-Canadians.
In 1940 the census showed a population of 36,035 for Warren County of whom more than half, 18,836, were credited to Glens Falls. Several hundred more who work in the city have their homes just beyond the city limits of the town of Queensbury, so that Warren County has a larger number of urban than rural dwellers.
While each successive census since 1790 (except 1920) has shown at least a small increase for the county as a whole, some of the rural towns have fallen off, a few having lost more than half the number of people they could count while the stored up wealth of the virgin forest was being ruthlessly exploited. At that time, too, the industrial workers de- pended for food and supplies largely upon the product of the fertile farms of the county.
The 1935 agricultural census shows that in five years the number of persons in Warren County actually living on farms increased by almost one-fourth to a total of 5,023. Only about a third of Warren County's rural population live on farms, but of the 23 percent increase of 942, more than half or 502, just 10 percent of the total number of farm resi- dents, had been city dwellers five years earlier. It is evident that more people are turning to agriculture, both those who are already rural dwellers, and in even larger numbers, those who are moving out from cities to become part-time or subsistence farmers.
The industrial picture in Warren County began to change before the turn of the present century when the economic bulwarks of pioneer days, lumbering, tanning, potash burning, lime making, and manufacturing for local needs declined or disappeared. Modern industry thereafter con- centrated in the southeast and fostered the urban development in that section. Farming in the same years became less profitable and people out- side the industrial area turned to the development of the tourist trade. A more detailed account of how these developments went hand-in-hand with transportation changes, the exhaustion of natural resources, and the conservation movement, will be found in the chapters titled Industry and Commerce, Glens Falls, Lake George, and The Towns.
1
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Automobiles, roads, radio, daily papers, the habit of shopping in town, attending the village or city churches and theaters, have all helped erase the line between rural and urban residents. In fact, with an excellent public school system and much contact with visitors from afar, the typi- cal inhabitant of rural Warren County is not markedly different from the typical urban dweller.
Warren County has always been governed by supervisors. The founder of the earliest settlement within the area of the present boundaries of the county, Abraham Wing, took office as supervisor at the first town meet- ing in 1766. He was the leader of his little colony through all the hardships of frontier warfare, relinquishing the office to son-in-law Phineas Babcock after the settlement had been abandoned in 1780 to escape the savagery of Carleton's invasion.
Abraham Wing, the first supervisor of Queensbury, died 18 years before Warren County took its place among the counties of New York State. From the earliest days, when it was described as the Dismal Wilderness, until 1772 the entire Adirondack region was a part of Albany County. In that year a vast section of Albany was set off to form two new coun- ties, Tryon in the west and Charlotte on the east. In the post-Revolu- tionary swing away from anything British, Tryon County was renamed Montgomery, and on April 2, 1784 Charlotte became Washington County.
On March 12, 1813 Warren County, named in honor of General Joseph Warren who lost his life at the Battle of Bunker Hill, was created by dividing Washington County into two almost equal parts. This new county, which still retains its original boundaries, is a little the larger geographically. It takes in the territory north of the great bend in the Hudson River, and as far west as the Hamilton County line. The eastern boundary follows the eastern shore of Lake George, so that Warren County includes the entire lake with all its islands except for about two miles of the northern tip which extends into Essex County. South from Kattskill Bay the county line follows the Queensbury town line to the Hudson River east of Glens Falls.
After Washington County was set up, it was sixteen years before Queensbury was incorporated as a town in 1788. In 1792 the wilderness north and west of it was divided into the towns of Fairfield and Thurman. Fairfield became Luzerne in 1808. From Thurman were sliced Bolton and Chester in 1799, though no settlers are recorded in Chester until 1805; Johnsburg, named for John Thurman, in 1805; Hague in 1807; Cald- well in 1810; and Warrensburg, just before Warren County was set up in 1813. At that time the remaining slice of the old town of Thurman was called Athol, which, in 1852 was partitioned into the towns of Stony
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Creek and Thurman. There is a Thurman station on the railway that winds up the course of the Hudson River, an Athol post office a mile or two northwest of it, and a Thurman post office several miles beyond that. Horicon was carved out of Bolton and Hague in 1838.
Each of the eleven town supervisors is a member of his Town Board. With the incorporation of Glens Falls as a city in 1908, five supervisors, one from each city ward, took their places with the town supervisors as members of the County Board of Supervisors, which has jurisdiction over all matters of a county-wide nature. They meet quarterly at the county seat, Lake George.
Industry and Commerce
PULPWOOD LOGS ENTER THE PAPER MILL'S GRINDERS
PULPWOOD, FLOATED DOWN THE HUDSON, IS STORED IN HUGE PILES
PULPWOOD, IN PASTE FORM, IS PROCESSED INTO PAPER
GARNET MINED HERE MAKES FINE ABRASIVES AND WATCH JEWELS
PORTABLE SAWMILL
AT SPIER FALLS THE HUDSON TURNS HUGE HYDROELECTRIC GENERATORS
THE GLENS FALLS FEEDER WINDS TOWARD THE CHAMPLAIN CANAL
Industry and Commerce
W OOD and water have long been Warren County's chief assets. Trees built the pioneer's log cabin, fed the whining, droning saws of the mighty sawmills, and later the hungry hoppers of the paper mills. Water still carries pulp logs to the mills though the great drives of yesteryear are but a memory. A water wheel turned the fron- tiersman's crude millstones and saw, and today water power translated into electric energy lights homes and streets and operates countless ma- chines from the domestic washer and cleaner to the great factories that make tree trunks into paper. Surplus energy on State-wide power lines is also distributed far and wide outside the County.
The forests were destroyed by ruthless exploitation, and with their passing springs dried up, while brooks became alternately dry gullies and raging torrents that began to tear away the top soil to fill up lakes and ponds and leave the hills mere rocky desert wastes. But conservation for more than a half a century has curbed the destruction. Again woodlands hold the soil and water for streams that feed lakes and ponds.
Today the supply of lumber and wood is only about enough to meet local demands for building and cordwood, with some pulpwood for the paper mills which, however, import much of their raw materials from outside Warren County. Varied industries at Glens Falls and Warrensburg bring raw materials from afar and ship their products far and wide. For the most part only water power and labor are supplied locally.
Warren County housing is chiefly in frame buildings for which local forests supply most of the lumber, but no longer does this pass through great mills to which logs are driven with tearing force down mountain streams. Today's lumbermen load their portable mills on trucks and carry them to the forest. Quickly set up, these little mills rip tree trunks into boards and planks close to the stumps from which they fell.
In 1813 when Warren County was split off from Washington County, the giants of the forest were being felled at a fearful rate. Few indeed of those ancient trees have survived, and not enough time has elapsed to re- place them. It is recorded that the trees averaged 130 to 160 feet in height, about 40 to 48 inches in diameter. A few, specifically reserved in royal grants and patents as masts for the royal navy, are said to have towered erect to a height of 250 feet, the trunks measuring 72 or even 80 inches at the base.
A 100-acre patch of the old pine and hemlock forest survives in Warren County at the Charles Lathrop Pack Demonstration Forest (see Tour I),
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three miles north of Warrensburg on US 9. Here may be seen trees whose like it will take centuries to reproduce, such trees as once covered this entire region. Elsewhere in the County may be found old trees here and there that have escaped the lumberman's ax and the even more destructive forest fires, but this is the most extensive tract that has been preserved.
The stored up wealth of the forest attracted many workers to exploit it, thus rapidly building up new communities. Some of these faded to ghost towns once the mountains were denuded of their first-growth tim- ber. But the forest floor was covered with deep rich soil, and with his plow the farmer dug another fortune from the land stripped by the ax of its wealth in standing trees.
Forestry methods developed in Europe long ago have shown that a forest can be so managed as to produce a valuable crop of lumber each year without devastation. As the "ripe" trees are cut off they are re- placed, and far from being depleted, the size and number of trees left standing increases from year to year, their quality improved by weeding out sickly specimens, and planting better stock. This system is employed today by the Finch Pruyn Company of Glens Falls, in cutting and grow- ing trees for pulp wood in its 23,000-acre forest in the lower Adirondacks.
Charles Lathrop Pack, heir to a lumber fortune and himself successful as a lumberman, was anxious to put the entire lumber industry on a sound basis consistent with conservation of forests. To this end he gave demon- stration forests to Yale, the Universities of Michigan and Washington, and to the New York State College of Forestry of Syracuse University.
In selecting a site in New York in 1926, the 250-acre tract that had been in the Woodward family of Warrensburg for 150 years was found ideal as to location in the heart of the white pine region of eastern New York and easily accessible by way of trunk highway US 9. Moreover the Woodwards, unlike other lumbermen, did not strip their land bare, but allowed many fine trees to stand, though they had a sawmill and made a fortune in lumber. It was therefore included in the 2,200-acre tract selected.
The purpose of the Pack Memorial Demonstration Forests is to show the commercial possibilities of growing timber as a continuous crop on land adapted to the purpose, and to furnish out-door laboratories for students. Ripe timber is cut and sawed in a small mill on the grounds, soils are carefully studied, and replanting is done scientifically. For senti- mental reasons the oldest trees are allowed to remain standing, and only when they show definite signs of decay are these ancient forest giants felled. By the time they are gone, younger trees will have attained the present dimensions of trees 400 years old, towering 160 feet with a diameter at the butt of 48 inches.
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Not all who worked in the forest grew rich, but there were huge for- tunes for the lumber barons, some of whose descendants still possess the wealth acquired in those early days. Lumbering created the wealth which enabled a few leaders who controlled it to procure the machinery essential for quantity production and the exploitation of the local resources on a scale that would benefit the state and nation as a whole. It made available, when needed, the capital to build canals, turnpikes, railways, great dams, hydroelectric plants, enormous mills, and at one period hotels of similar magnitude.
The first phase of Warren County lumbering began with the settlement of Queensbury in 1763. In this first year of settlement Abraham Wing built a log cabin, and then a sawmill. It was only a crude little structure located at the falls (Glens Falls) and surrounded by a magnificent stand of tall pines on the high, sloping banks of the Hudson and on the vast plains beyond. But it set the pattern for the first fifty years of lumber- ing, an individual or partnership sawmill located at a waterpower site, usually on a small stream, close to an abundance of timber.
As settlements spread through the County many such sawmills were set up. Even those sections that were not provided by nature with ade- quate waterpower had their "thunder storm mills" that operated only during high water. Moreover Caldwell, Bolton, and Hague became ship- ping points for rafts of logs down Lake George to Ticonderoga. The little village of Caldwell (now Lake George Village) developed as the early trade center for the North Country.
Lumbering was of local importance to the growing settlements in the period from 1785 to 1832, but it did not become "big business," princi- pally for lack of transportation facilities. Some sources state that heavy loads were moved to distant points only in the winter when sledges slid easily over frozen roads, where in summer the wagons made deep ruts in dirt roads, dragged heavily through sand or sank hub-deep in marsh land. However, a more common procedure was to haul the lumber overland to Fort Edward, where it was rafted down the Hudson to market.
The southeastern plains of the County, where at first the sawmills could easily be set up in the woods, were by 1830 almost entirely denuded of their timber resources, once considered inexhaustible. To fill this gap, Norman and Alanson Fox, with whom was associated Abraham Wing, grandson of the pioneer sawmill owner, began the second and vastly more important phase of Adirondack lumbering - cutting the trees on moun- tain sides hitherto considered inaccessible and sluicing the logs to distant sawmills.
To accomplish their purpose, these men, according to local sources, originated the system of log-driving today in vogue on the rivers of this
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and other countries. The rafting of timber was an ancient custom, but the herding of loose logs down swift, narrow, rock strewn streams was a new departure. The Fox brothers also devised both a system of distinctive log marks for each lumber company like the branding of cattle herded together on the western plains, and a standardized method of marketing, using as the unit of measure a log thirteen feet long and nineteen inches in diameter at the top, called a "standard" or "market." Buying and selling was by count or computed contents with five "markets" con- sidered equal to one thousand board feet. Thus, if a lumberman bought "fifty thousand markets" his purchase was the equivalent of ten million feet of lumber. To emphasize the originality of this method it may be noted that outside of the Adirondacks timber was sold according to board measure log rule of either Doyle or Scribner, which involved much more complicated computations.
Log driving began in 1813 on the Schroon River, adjacent to the Brant Lake tract, which the Fox brothers were lumbering. Immediately success- ful, it became the vogue and made profitable the lumbering of the vast timber lands of the Adirondack wilderness. Until 1832 the new system seems to have done little more than check the decrease in the lumber trade, that had begun to set in. Then the Hudson at Glens Falls was connected with the Champlain Canal at Fort Edward by the opening of the Feeder Canal between these two points. This supplied the long needed transpor- tation artery to metropolitan centers. Thereafter forests brought a new prosperity to Warren County, which had previously been hardly more than a backwoods frontier. As a water-power and transportation center, the little settlement of Glens Falls grew fast, while the economic impor- tance of the small independent sawmills decreased. Giant plants with screaming battalions of saws sprang into action at this natural terminal of the log drives.
Just above the city the associated lumbermen of Glens Falls, Hudson Falls, and Fort Edward flung a gigantic barricade across the swift stream, a huge network of wood and iron, logs and chains. "The Big Boom" is still there to catch four-foot poplar and hemlock logs, pulp wood for the paper mills. But in those days it held thirteen-foot logs, the trunks of lofty pines and hemlocks from virgin forests. Behind it were ofttimes several fortunes in lumber, the fruit of two seasons of toil on the part of a far flung army of lumberjacks with ax and peavey.
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