USA > New York > Warren County > Warren county : a history and guide > Part 11
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Sorting and counting was done at the boom by crews who sent pro- cessions of marked logs floating to their destined mills to be ripped by the gang saws. From Glens Falls mills, during the eight months season when the canal was open for navigation, were shipped a hundred million board feet of lumber, about one third of the total produced in the entire Adiron-
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dack region. Leading mill owners were J. W. and D. J. Finch, Samuel Pruyn, James Morgan, Augustus Sherman, Zenas Van Dusen, George W. Freeman; names some of which are still associated with the commerce and industry of Warren County.
The forest wilderness had yielded up its treasures for seventy-five years, and some parts of Warren County had been cut over a second and even a third time when the lumber industry began to wane in the closing decades of the nineteenth century. That two-thirds of the standing soft wood had disappeared is only the less ominous part of the story.
Over a period of many centuries the forest had slowly accumulated a covering of flesh over the bare bones of the mountains till they were fattened for the slaughter. The woods were rooted in deep soil, rich with humus from many layers of decaying leaves. In the ravines and hollows, uncounted generations of beavers had built their dams to hold the sedi- ment washed down in the turbid waters of spring floods. Thus the hollows became first shallow ponds, then swamps, and finally little meadows or flats with deep, rich soil.
It was not just the tree trunks felled by the lumbermen that were carried off in the wasteful method of early days. Slash flamed into raging forest fires that swept over miles of territory destroying not only plant and animal life, but consuming the very soil, for humus, too, can be burned away. Wind and flood completed the process of denuding the hills till they were left in some places mere stony skeletons of what the pioneers had found them. Gone were the first and second growth trees and with them went much of the soil. The new growth, if any, was half starved, a rising generation that was but the shadow of its great ancestors in the virgin forests.
Not only the steep hillsides were affected; for the logs driven down swift mountain torrents tore away the barriers behind which lay the swamps and fertile flats. In place of these there appeared stony hollows and deepening gullies. What had once been mossy, shaded banks in the ravines became bare rock open to the glaring sun. Without the spongy reservoirs of root and soil to feed them, springs dried up, and in the place of brooks there remained only their dry rocky beds, through which poured springtime freshets to wreak more destruction. Even the lowlands suffered where masses of rock waste and small stones were washed down to cover deeply the once rich meadows. The gradual process of filling up ponds and lakes was speeded, as gritty sand, gravel, and stones formed barren deltas.
The conservation movement came as a rift in the gathering storm clouds, and threw a bright beam of light across the ruined landscape.
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Banished were the romantic, picturesque buccaneers who had despoiled the land with ax, saw, and fire in their haste to grab great fortunes. The balance of nature is now being restored, and the slow process of rebuild- ing a giant forest is well under way. Even the patient beaver has resumed his important task of soil conservation, protected by law against the trapper and hunter.
Aside from its use as a playground and recreation area within the Adirondack State Park and Forest Preserve, Warren County trees on pri- vately owned land still yield an annual crop of 30,000 to 40,000 cords of pulpwood. This is mostly from areas replanted with poplar and hemlock, reaped and harvested by approved forestry methods that do not impov- erish the soil or injure the new growth to follow. There is still a spring log drive with its hardy crew of drivers, even though the total bulk is smaller and the logs are four foot sticks that a man can toss to the top of a truck load. But instead of whining saws, pulp machines, vats, and rollers that produce paper await their grist of pulpwood.
Another phase of the conservation movement is the more intensive and complete use of the vast water-power resources of the Upper Hudson which cuts across Warren County from north to south and bounds its lower projection. A pioneer in this field was Eugene L. Ashley of Glens Falls who dreamed of a great power development at the very time that others were dreading the day when the shrinking supply of saw logs would render useless the power already developed at Glens Falls.
In 1898 Ashley had used the surplus energy of the impounded waters that ran his mill at Kanes Falls for electric lights in the streets of White- hall in Washington County. Having formed the Kanes Falls Electric Company, he planned a further development on the Hudson River, a great dam that would provide a steady flow of power on a grand scale. With determination and energy as his chief assets Ashley pressed on to acquire river rights along the Hudson some miles west of Glens Falls. In 1899, Ashley, his friend, Elmer J. West, and their associates, formed the Hudson River Water Power Company with the avowed purpose of build- ing the proposed dam.
In 1900 the project, declared visionary by many, actually got under- way. During the three years of construction work many an unforeseen obstacle was surmounted. An unexpected 65-foot depression in the bed of the river was found, and there were floods, ice, logs tearing through the cofferdam, loss of life, litigation, and lack of funds. At one stage, when ruin faced the builders, William E. Spier, lumber baron, handed to Ashley his personal check for $150,000 as an unsecured and non-interest- bearing loan.
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Friends smiled cynically, enemies jeered, but Ashley's dream, through anxious days and sleepless nights, gradually became a reality. In August 1903, the dam was completed and named in appreciation, Spier Falls. It then ranked fourth largest in the world, and the largest dam ever built solely for generating power.
On September 8, 1903, water flowed through the penstocks of the world's first high head electric development, and hydroelectric power at 30,000 volts was carried from Spier Falls on transmission lines to nearby Glens Falls and as far away as Albany, Schenectady and Troy. At that time the power station was equipped with four generators to develop a total of 19,000 horsepower. During the first two decades three more generators were added for a total capacity of 36,000 horsepower, and in 1924 a new type generator of 9,000 horsepower, almost twice the capacity of any of the earlier units, was installed. In the years immediately follow- ing, two new hydroelectric developments close to Glens Falls, Feeder Dam and Sherman Island, one mile and six miles west of the city, were tied in with Spier Falls.
In 1930 came the greatest expansion of the Spier Falls plant with the installation of a single 57,000 horsepower unit, greater than the combined capacity of all those previously in operation. This generator stands 90 feet high, 45 feet in diameter, weighs 1,345 tons, and supplies enough electrical energy to light more than a million 40-watt lamps. The great turbine that drives this massive machine was the largest in the world in physical proportions, though not in horsepower development, and its 150- ton wheel, 20 feet in diameter, could handle the entire flow of the Hudson River at Spier Falls during the dry season. If operated full load for 24 hours, the wheel would require four billion gallons of water, more than a day's supply for the entire population of upstate New York. The diameter of the pipe which carries water to the wheel is about equal to the width of a three lane concrete highway. Of the older units some have been re- moved and others modernized so that today there are seven units capable of generating 70,800 horsepower at Spier Falls, making it the largest hydroelectric development in the state except at Niagara. Thus it has utilized the water power of the Upper Hudson to an extent that far exceeds the dreams of its pioneers.
Eugene L. Ashley's Hudson River Water Power Company evolved with expanding business through merger after merger into the Adirondack Power and Light Company in 1911. In 1925 the Adirondack system, which had acquired small companies operating at Bolton, Warrensburg, Chestertown, and North Creek, began distributing electricity on new power lines to the erstwhile wilderness of pioneer lumbering, days. This resulted in part from recognition of the growing resort business, the hotel
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and tourist trade, as one of the County's most important assets. By 1938 the program of rural electrification had strung approximately 350 miles of power lines in Warren County.
The old Adirondack Company has now been united with the New York Power and Light Company as a part of the far flung Niagara-Hudson system. This industry, instead of the 35 workers employed by the original company in Warren County during its formative years, now directly em- ploys 125 persons in the County; but these are only a handful of the thousands in the territory served by Spier Falls power, who derive their livelihood from the industries dependent on electric power and light. The harnessed water of the Upper Hudson River lights cities, runs factories, and plays radios from the Canadian boundary to the Lower Hudson and from the New England border to Syracuse.
Less picturesque and imposing, though no less important, are other power plants along the river at sites that have furnished power locally since the days of the earliest gristmills and sawmills, and have contributed so much to commercial and industrial progress. Today the total horse- power, mechanical and electrical, produced by these lesser power plants along Warren County's section of the Hudson River for use directly by local industries amounts to a greater total than that of the more spec- tacular Spier Falls plant.
The third member of the triumvirate, pine, power, and play, whose story is the drama of the County's economic history, has stepped from a minor role into the leading part. The gradual beginnings of the resort business can be traced to an early date. Poor roads and primitive accom- modations only temporarily retarded its development, for the attraction of natural beauty, the wooded hills and lakes, added to historical interest in points along the Great Warpath, drew tourists from the very first.
The old Indian trails did not long serve the white man's purpose. John- son had to cut a military road through the forest to Lake George in order to drag to Fort William Henry the artillery which won the Battle of Lake George. With the growth of settlements and the necessity for trans- porting supplies and the products of farms, factories, mills, and mines, this road was improved and extended across the county and into the back country. Stage coaches on the new roads brought more tourists, and as early as 1800 there were hotels for tourists as well as for businessmen at Lake George. However it was not till the 1880's, after the completion of the railroads that hotels really became numerous and, in some of the more favored sections, almost palatial.
A bitter campaign waged at this time to preserve the Adirondack forests from destruction culminated in 1885 in drastic legislation. The wild lands belonging to the State were withdrawn from sale to create the
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Adirondack Forest Preserve and arrangements were made for the State to increase its holdings. Bringing thus forcefully to the minds of the people the value of this mountain region as a health and pleasure playground, it was an important factor in creating a resort that has grown to gigantic proportions to serve the visitors for whom the automobile and modern highways later provided easy access.
Tanneries, asheries, lime kilns, black marble quarries, and paper mills played a part in the general development or in the expansion of certain communities of the County. All these have been abandoned except the manufacture of paper which had its beginning about 1864, became indus- trially important by the 1890's, and is still a weighty economic factor in the County.
Lime making began about 1830 and occupied a conspicuous place in the industrial picture until after 1900. It was a local industry that sup- plied the needs of the builders in the neighborhood until the opening of the feeder canal furnished cheap transportation. That also boomed the sawmills whose waste provided fuel for the lime kilns till the forests were destroyed. Even after that lime was burned because the availability of limestone close to the canal still made the business profitable. It was the slackening demand for lime after 1900 when builders had begun to use cement as a substitute in construction work that caused the industry to wane, while the cement works increased their output. In 1938 the Glens Falls plant produced 800,000 barrels of Portland cement.
A fashion that called for black marble fire places once created a profit- able side line for the Glens Falls limestone quarries, but a later preference for Italian veined marble reduced the demand for this stone and the industry gradually declined. A high grade of iron ore occurs at many points in the Adirondacks, but the veins in Warren County have never been worked extensively. In early times some ore was mined and a little iron was produced, but never on a large scale or over a long period. Lime- stone was used as a flux in reducing the ore to pig iron as well as for lime, but the important limestone quarries today produce crushed stone for roads and for concrete construction.
Graphite, mined at Hague, for some years furnished most of the raw material for the processing plant at Ticonderoga. Since the successful development of graphite mines requires technical skill in addition to large capital outlay, many a vein netted a profit only to unscrupulous promot- ers. However Hague once produced a large proportion of the graphite mined in this country. Cheap ore from abroad now supplies our require- ments for heavy lubricants, lead pencils, and other uses, but the American Graphite Company of New Jersey still uses the Ticonderoga factory, and
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an interruption of the supply of foreign ore may make it profitable to work the Hague mines again.
A garnet mine on Gore Mountain near Thirteenth Lake and North River in Johnsburg, opened toward the close of the nineteenth century, produces most of the garnet used in the United States for manufacturing high-grade abrasives. The supply is practically unlimited, and for the past thirty years production has been fitted to a steady demand so that the mine has kept its crew steadily employed.
Rock produced from mixed layers of the old ocean sediments is of special interest in the story of garnet. This developed into various kinds of rocks composed of feldspar, pyroxene, mica, quartz, garnet, horn- blende and other minerals. From the hornblende-garnet gneisses of Gore Mountain most of the world's supply of garnet for abrasive purposes is obtained.
Garnet is a widely distributed mineral, being found in many varieties of rock. It occurs as crystals, both perfectly and irregularly shaped, as solid rock masses, and as grains in sand and gravel; but the high-grade garnet suitable for abrasive purposes is very limited in its distribution, being found only in the Adirondack Mountains.
Depending upon chemical composition, there are eight varieties of gar- net with a wide range of colors, including white, black, yellow, brown, rose, green, red and occasionally bluish. Chemically the different garnets are silicates of two or more of the following: iron, alumina, lime, magne- sia, chromium, manganese, and titanium. Garnet gems are cut almost entirely from pyrope, rhodolite, and almandite, and though it is the latter that occurs at the Barton Mine, the principal sources of the gem variety are Bohemia, Ceylon, and Burma.
Garnet crystals are found in South Africa enclosing crystals of dia- monds. At Gore Mountain large flakes of biotite (black mica) are occasionally noted within the garnet. The hardness varies in the different garnets from 6 to 8, and a given variety does not always have the same hardness in different localities. The almandite variety usually runs from 7 to 7.5, but the Gore Mountain garnet has a hardness of 8, the same as topaz. While the Gore Mountain garnet is practically all used as an abrasive in various industries, gem stones do occur and each year several hundred are cut to meet the demand for a local gem.
Refined garnet from the Barton mill is the only garnet used for making abrasive paper and cloth. This is because it is the hardest ever found, and when crushed to produce the many grades of garnet sand used for making garnet paper and cloth, it breaks into cube-like grains with sharp chisel- like edges. These do not wear smooth but continue to break and form fresh sharp edges.
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While the garnets of Bohemia are measured by inches, the Barton mine is noted among scientists as the source of the largest single crystals ever found, two and one-half feet in diameter and weighing over a ton. Crys- tals six inches to more than one foot in size are common.
Garnet was first used as an abrasive in the early eighties by Mr. H. H. Barton, the grandfather of Mr. C. R. Barton, now president of the Barton Mines Corporation. While connected with a company in Philadelphia that manufactured abrasive paper made from quartz and emery, he recalled that some years before, during his association with a firm of jewelers in Boston, a piece of garnet from the Adirondacks had been brought in to be cut as a gem. He therefore went to Boston where he was able through the jewelry firm to trace that piece of garnet to North Creek in Warren County. He did this because he knew that garnet is much harder than quartz and he believed that it might be introduced as a new abrasive.
During a hunting trip in the North Creek region, lumbermen showed him what they called "red rock," and an investigation indicated a very extensive deposit of garnet readily available at reasonable cost. He de- veloped his own abrasive plant in Philadelphia and the success of garnet from the Barton plant as an abrasive has continued to the present time, a period of 55 years.
At first garnet was separated by hand picking or cobbing, the large crystals being knocked out with small pick hammers. In 1924 a concen- tration plant with modern improvements was erected which not only separates the garnet from newly mined rock, but also reclaims what was lost in the huge piles of refuse accumulated while cruder methods were used.
As practically all of the product of the Gore Mountain mine and mill is used for industrial purposes, the general public is not aware of its impor- tance and how widely it is used. Most people have seen it only on the small "cardboards" used by the dentist and manicurists. These have white quartz or sand on one side and finely crushed garnet on the other. Jewels for bearings in watches and scientific instruments are also made of garnet. It is estimated that 250,000 small stones are used annually for this purpose.
The product of the Barton mill or concentrator, consisting of mixed grains and pieces of garnet from about one-sixteenth up to five-eighths of an inch in size, is shipped in 100-pound sacks to domestic and foreign manufacturers of abrasive products. In these factories, the garnet is crushed and screened through silk gauze to grade it accurately before it is applied to strong paper and cloth with glue. Loose grains and powdered garnet are also used in special grinding and polishing operations.
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Furniture factories use garnet extensively because it is particularly adapted to give a smooth surface to wood. Spokes for wooden wheels and handles for tools are smoothed with it, and it is extensively used for buf- fing felt hats and for giving a good finish to leather, rubber, bakelite, celluloid and other materials. Farrington, an American scientist has said: "Garnet perhaps contributes more largely to the comfort and happiness of the world than when it was the property only of kings."
Aside from the chief forest products, lumber and wood pulp, there were two early by-products that brought a cash return to some pioneers who saw very little other money, and gave employment to others. Pearl ash for making lye was collected by burning wood and was sold to the local factories for a shilling a bushel. Also in tanning hides a great deal of hemlock bark was used. Tanneries employed many workers in their plants especially at Warrensburg, Chestertown and North Creek, and in the woods stripping bark, and in transporting the hides. These industries declined and faded away with the destruction of the virgin forest.
Farming still contributes to the support of a large section of Warren County's rural population. Although it was the wealth of the virgin forest that attracted most of Warren County's early population, there were from the very first farmers who lived on what they raised from the soil on clearings in the woods. For cash the new settlers depended largely upon selling wood ashes, and many of them also worked for wages strip- ping hemlock bark for the tanneries or chopping and doing other work for the lumber barons.
There was also a local market for what they could raise beyond their own needs because of the presence of many industrial workers who had to be fed. High transportation costs helped to offset the unfavorable farming conditions, so that while the forest was being exploited, farming was relatively profitable. Then, too, entertaining strangers at inns, tav- erns, and in private homes was an early source of profit.
Today there are some prosperous dairy farms in Queensbury near the Washington County line that have good pasturage and that can raise enough hay and ensilage for their stock. The steady demand for fresh milk in Glens Falls provides a local market which these farms share with dairies in neighboring counties. The summer resorts also consume large quantities of dairy products in season.
Queensbury has a swampy area with muck or peat soil, a small part of which has been developed as a celery farm that does a good business in supplying the local market. Though a larger area could be drained it is questionable whether such farms could compete in a wider market with similar areas that have a considerably longer growing season.
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In Queensbury and other parts of the county there is some vegetable gardening. However the season is a week or two later than on similar farms within fifty miles by truck in the Mohawk and Hudson valleys, so that local growers miss the higher prices paid for the first tomatoes and other early fruits and vegetables.
It is the policy of the State Conservation Department to increase its holdings and retire marginal land from cultivation. Gradually the forest is swallowing up little mountainside farms and the arable area of the county is shrinking. However a good many farmers in the mountainous districts find a favorable market for their fresh produce by serving it on their own tables to tourists and summer boarders. There is even a profit for some small dairy farmers with a dozen or twenty cows though their upland pastures may be growing up to bushes and saplings, and they have to bring in truck loads of hay from outside the county for winter feeding. A number of poultry farms also show good returns.
The more expensive hotels and dude ranches are financed mostly by outside capital, and are largely manned by workers imported for the busy season only. However they do hire some local help from among the permanent residents, and construction work on the highways gives the farmers another source of cash income. This makes possible higher stand- ards of living, especially housing in the rural districts of the County, where the farmers share their homes with tourists and boarders.
The host of tourists brings intimate contacts with the outer world and an active, progressive farm bureau is helping the farmers make the most of their opportunities. Census figures show an increase in the number of persons living on farms, but a large proportion of these are part-time farmers with some other source of income. While it cannot be denied that agriculture in Warren County is declining, tilling the soil will still provide a living. Small scale farming does not require a large investment, land is not expensive, taxes are not high, and there are exceptionally good roads and schools.
At Glens Falls, after lumbering and lime burning declined, new industries arose to employ the wage-earning population. The story of the development of pigment color, wallpaper, shirts, cement, paper, gloves, and other industrial enterprises is told in the Glens Falls chapter.
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