USA > New York > Warren County > Warren county : a history and guide > Part 14
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POTTERSVILLE, ADIRONDACK SUMMER RESORT
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Saratoga to Whitehall in 1849. A stagecoach line thereafter operated to the railroad station at Moreau. Until this advance the village was depend- ent on tallyho service to Albany and Troy.
"The Great Fire" at Glens Falls broke out on May 31, 1864. Defiance Engine Company No. 1, with its new $1,350 pumper, and Cataract Engine Company No. 2, with the old Defiance machine, purchased in 1842, even with the aid of five companies from Sandy Hill and Fort Edward, were unable to cope with the "sea of livid flames." The entire business section was swept away, and with it "the wealth and accumula- tion of years." Merchants, however, resumed business in shanties, sheds, and dwelling houses. A subsequent building boom was responsible for most of the present business structures.
In 1867, in order to provide adequate railroad facilities, a group of industrial leaders, including John Keenan, Augustus Sherman, Jerome Lapham, and J. W. Finch, secured legislation authorizing the Town of Queensbury to bond itself for $100,000 to build a branch line from Glens Falls to the main line of the Delaware & Hudson at Fort Edward. Opened to traffic on July 4, 1869, the railroad ran "eleven round trips," with free transportation for all.
During this decade was recorded the birth of two of the city's promi- nent sons. John A. Dix (1860-1928), Governor of New York State, 1911-1913, was born on Canal Street.
Charles Evans Hughes, the most distinguished native son of Glen Falls, was born on April 11, 1862, at the Baptist parsonage on Maple Street, son of a minister who came to America from South Wales in 1855. The former Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court moved from Glens Falls with his family in his youth.
In 1873 the village completed the first part of the elaborate gravity system which today supplies water from mountain streams. Firemen, unacquainted with the violence of high water pressure, convinced skeptics of the success of the new water works by blowing out the front of a store in their efforts to extinguish a small blaze. After more than a century without a police department, the village, in 1874, provided for a uni- formed force of four men. Among the duties of these patrolmen was the enforcement of traffic rules that prohibited "racing or immoderately riding or driving any horse or other animal in any of the streets," and provided a fine of $1 to $25 for leaving "any team or horse in any of the streets of the village, untied or unattended."
In 1876 began the business of shirt making, which has given the city a high ratio of women in industry. On June 21, 1879, Addison B. Colvin issued the first daily newspaper, the Glens Falls Times. Mr. Colvin pur-
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chased the Weekly Messenger shortly after the advent of a second daily newspaper, the Morning Star, on April 2, 1883.
The year 1881 marked an important step in the progress of education. School districts 2, 8, 19, and 20 consolidated to form Union Free School District No. 1, and the village named its first board of education. Dis- trict 18 voted the program down, and remains separate to this day. Dr. Sherman Williams, superintendent of schools of the Union district, soon began agitation for an adequate school. Land was purchased, and, in 1884, a building capable of housing 500 pupils was built on the site of the present high school. In 1892 Henry Crandall, lumber baron and philan- thropist, presented the village with space and books for a permanent public library.
These evidences of social progress were but the reflection of the growth and development of wealth and stability. The village had expanded from a population of 1,270 in 1839 to approximately 9,500 in 1890. In the same period it reached its industrial peak. Nine giant lumber and lime companies had replaced the numerous little independent mills of early days.
The Glens Falls Paper Mill Company, enlarged in 1884 to produce 10 tons of paper a day, had by 1899 become a $2,500,000 property of the International Paper Company, producing 275 tons daily. Shirtmaking had grown in 20 years to a business employing upwards of 1,000 persons, mostly women. L. F. Hyde, in his History of Glens Falls, asserts that "more homes were built in the ten years following the start of the shirt factories than in the twenty-five years previous."
In 1893 the Glens Falls Portland Cement Company, one of the impor- tant industries of today, began operations, and in 1901 the Imperial Paper and Color Corporation commenced the manufacture of wall paper. By 1900 canal shipping was earning annual profits of $240,000 and employ- ing 350 persons.
The Glens Falls, Sandy Hill, and Fort Edward Street Railroad Company opened an interurban horse car line in 1885, which was supplanted by a trolley line in 1891. Meanwhile a small steam plant began to supply electricity for street lights in 1887, and in 1903 the Spier Falls hydro- electric plant started operating. Many of the smaller industries, including gristmills, cotton factories, and furniture shops, failed to meet the com- petition of mass production by great corporations.
It was an era of transition, of progress that involved painful readjust- ments. The shortage of timber, made suddenly acute by the enforcement of conservation measures, caused a rapid decline in the supply of logs. Finch Pruyn and Company, a merger of four independent companies, incorporated in 1904, turned from lumber to the manufacture of paper.
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On its extensive lands in Warren County, and elsewhere in the Adiron- dacks, it now grows much of the pulpwood used in its mill at Glens Falls. Lime production began to decline because of its dependence on sawmills for fuel, and its replacement in construction by cement. Thus the twin industries that had brought money and people to this region were rapidly waning, and with them went the importance of the canal already suffering from competition with its younger and more vigorous rival, the railroad.
Through all these changes, despite heavy losses, there was a net gain in the number and prosperity of the people. After a vigorous campaign by The Morning Post, a new daily paper, the New York State Legislature, in 1908, passed a bill to incorporate Glens Falls as a city, which was signed by Governor Charles Evans Hughes.
At the time of the city's incorporation, Glens Falls' population was nearly 15,000. In the business district new buildings were erected - the Y.M.C.A., a gift of Jonas Ordway; the City Hall; the Empire Theater, which occupies the site of the old stage barns; and the home office building of the Glens Falls Insurance Company.
The two most important industries founded at Glens Falls in the past three decades are devoted to the manufacture of pigment colors, and silk gloves and cloth.
The economic structure of the city received a severe blow when, in 1921, after a series of labor troubles, the International Paper Company shut down its mill at South Glens Falls. Other industries absorbed most of these workers. The amount of wages paid in 1940 was practically the same as in the peak year of 1927.
The growth of the southern Adirondacks as a winter and summer rec- reation area has increased the importance of the city as a trade center.
POINTS OF INTEREST
1. COOPER'S CAVE AND THE FALLS, beneath the concrete viaduct over the Hudson, are reached, except when the river is at flood level, by an all concrete spiral stairway.
On an island of rock at the foot of the falls, with a 60-foot watery avalanche pounding on either hand, is the cave, an arched stone cavern, its floor barely above low water. It has become widely known as the scene of one of the most thrilling episodes in James Fenimore Cooper's Last of the Mohicans. A biographer of Cooper, Henry Walcott Boynton, says the famous novelist actually received his inspiration to write the book during a visit to the cave with some friends in the summer of 1825. One member of this party, who later became Lord Derby, Prime Minister of England, remarked that here was "the very scene for a romance." Cooper's response was that he would provide one.
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2. FINCH PRUYN & COMPANY, INC., 1-27 Glen Street (open 9-12 a.m., 1-4 p.m., Mon .- Fri., tours, guides), was formed in 1904 by the consolidation of four associated companies whose histories date back to about 1836. The long, red brick paper mill is situated on a narrow strip of land containing about 90 acres, bounded on the north by the Feeder Canal, on the south by the river. A colonial-style office is built of lime- stone from the company's quarries.
In the yard of the plant is a huge pile of pulpwood, 4-foot logs from the company's 23,000 acres of woodlands in the Adirondacks. In the mill this wood is beaten to a liquid pulp by the use of steam and huge stone grinders. It is then pumped to sloshing vats where sulphite pulp and various chemicals are added to the seething mass. From the vats the yellow-white liquid passes to the paper machines, giant monsters of mats, wires, belts, wheels, and huge hot metal rollers that extract the water and transform the crushed wood fibers into white paper.
3. ST. MARY'S ACADEMY, northwest corner of Warren and Church Streets, is a modern school building of variegated sandstone, designed by Ralph Adams Cram. The Great Hall is a reproduction of Westminster Hall. The first stone for the foundation, laid June 29, 1930, the date of the canonization of St. Isaac Jogues, came from Auriesville, in the Mo- hawk Valley, where St. Jogues, French missionary priest, was killed by Indians. The cornerstone was laid on October 5, 1930, and the Academy opened January 29, 1932, the year of the school's Golden Jubilee.
4. QUEENSBURY HOTEL, 50 Maple Street, is a community-owned hostelry, Colonial in architecture and interior decorations. In the main lobby hangs Cooper's Cave, a painting by Griffith Baily Coole.
5. CRANDALL CITY PARK, east side of Monument Square, was given to the city by Henry Crandall. Close to the business district, its four-acre expanse is laid out in well-kept lawns, with shrubs and trees, criss-crossed by bench-lined shady walks.
6. The CRANDALL LIBRARY, in Crandall Park, was built mainly with funds bequeathed by Mr. Crandall. It is of red brick with marble architrave along the second story and at the windows. Georgian in style, it was designed by Charles A. Platt of New York. The building was opened September 23, 1931.
7. The CIVIL WAR SOLDIER'S MONUMENT, on the north side of Monument Square, is a tapering shaft of sandstone surmounted by an eagle with wings out-spread. Work was commenced in 1867, and the dedication took place on May 30, 1872.
8. The GLENS FALLS INSURANCE COMPANY BUILDING, 191 Glen Street, at the intersection of Maple, Bay and Glen Streets, is a five- story structure of white marble and buff brick, with four simple Doric
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columns rising three stories above the entrance. The original building of 16,000 square feet was built in 1912. An addition of 30,000 square feet, identical in style, was erected in 1928.
9. The FIRST PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH, 240 Glen Street, opened its present building on July 10, 1927. The Glen Street facade, 44 feet from the street, its stone walls of Weymouth granite, rises with double turrets to a height of 78 feet; the graceful, slender spire, 140 feet from the front of the building, towers 148 feet from the ground level. Ralph Adams Cram was the architect for the group of buildings extending to a depth of 200 feet, including the church school building at the rear of the transept.
10. RECREATION FIELD, extending several blocks along the west side of Glen Street, is another donation of Henry Crandall. His remains and those of his wife are entombed in the base of a 50-foot monument in Crandall Park at the south end of the field. Among the facilities of the field are a quarter-mile track, four tennis courts, two baseball diamonds, a football field, an archery range, a 250-foot toboggan slide, a large skat- ing pond, and a lighted hockey rink.
At the northern edge is the Glens Falls' World War Memorial. Its life- size bronze figures of Victory and Peace were executed by Bruce Wilder Saville. The Glens Falls American Legion Post raised funds for its erection by popular subscription. At the dedication on May 30, 1927, the prin- cipal speaker was Merch B. Stewart, a native of Glens Falls, who was then Superintendent of the United States Military Academy at West Point.
Lake George
Railroad Station: Delaware and Hudson Station, Beach Road, for Dela- ware and Hudson R. R.
Bus Stations: Canada and Montcalm Sts. for Adirondack Transit Lines; 150 Canada St. for Champlain Coach Lines.
Taxis: 50c per person.
Accommodations: 10 hotels; tourist homes, cabins.
Information Service: Chamber of Commerce, 156 Canada Street.
Theaters and Motion Picture Houses: 1 motion picture house; 1 outdoor theater.
Golf: Lake George Country Club, 9 holes, $1.50.
Baseball and Tennis: Lake George High School Grounds, Canada Street.
Swimming: Shepard Memorial Park, Battleground Park.
Riding: 2 riding academies.
Hiking: Organized trips up Prospect Mountain.
. Camping: Battleground Public Campsite, US 9; Hearthstone Public Campsite, State 9N.
Boating: Public Dock; steamer (300 passengers) through lake daily (June 15 -Sept. 15), $1.50 one way, $2.00 round trip, $3.00 car; passenger yachts, speed boats, canoes.
Annual Events: Golf Tournaments, Lake George Country Club, August; Sailboat Races, Lake George Country Club, August; Shuffleboard Tour- nament, September; Horse Racing on Ice, each Sunday, February; Winter Carnival, February; Ski Tournaments, February - March.
LAKE GEORGE, (331 alt., 803 pop.), the County seat, is a summer and winter sports and trading center at the southern tip of Lake George. The village occupies a slope rising gently westward for half a mile to the abrupt ascent of Prospect Mountain (elev. 2,021) which rises from the western edge of the residential section. A park that extends from Main Street to the lakeshore has an open-air theater, quoits and shuffleboard games, and a public beach with bathing facilities.
As a railroad terminal Lake George receives many summer travelers who continue their journey by bus, motor boat, or steamer, while in winter snow trains unload gaily clad crowds with skis and skates. As summer draws towards its close there is the usual Labor Day exodus, but not a few linger to enjoy the late summer sunshine or make week-end trips while autumn brightens the landscape.
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In 1934 the winter sports program was inaugurated; ski trails were cut on Prospect and Cobble Mountains, a tow was put in operation, and the road to the top of the ski runs was improved. Skating rinks, a tobog- gan, and special winter accommodations were provided. Since then there have been added winter carnivals, ski tournaments, and harness racing on the ice of the lake. Aside from spaces cleared of snow for skating and hockey, the ice on the lake is sometimes favorable not only for ice boating but also for long skating trips.
From the village Lake George extends northward for 32 miles, its blue-green waters studded with wooded islands and over-shadowed by towering, pine-clad peaks and ridges. All along the lake, cottage colonies, spacious mansions, and bulky frame hotels, surrounded by bungalows, cling to jutting points, stand out boldly in clearings, or hide in the forest.
The west shore of the lake at Lake George Village, and for a dozen miles northward, has gently rolling hills and is easily accessible from the high- way, State 9N. Here are resort villages, a State Park campsite, golf links, and many miles of bridlepaths. By contrast the houses and settlements along much of the lake's eastern shore are so closely crowded by mountain ramparts that they can be approached only by water. Rocky cliffs rise so steeply on both sides of The Narrows, beginning twelve miles above Lake George village and extending for six miles, as to leave hardly space to pitch a tent. However, there are numerous State-owned islands, many of them popular sites for camping and picnicking.
The Lake George region has a romantic history. Adjacent to the village is Battleground Park, with Fort George, Saint Isaac Jogues Memorial, and the Lake George Battle Monument. Nearby is the knoll that was once the site of Fort William Henry. At the far end of the lake is Rogers Rock, behind which was fought the Battle on Snowshoes, and Rogers Slide, the scene of Major Rogers' fabled leap to elude his pursuers.
All along the intervening thirty-two miles are scores of islands, points and bays with names reminiscent of skirmishes, massacres, prison camps, military hospitals, encampments, or fortifications. They hark back to the days when Indians, French, British, and Colonial warriors struggled for mastery and the possession of not merely this territory, but the North American continent - an empire even greater than they realized at that time.
In 1759, soon after the fall of Quebec heralded peace on the northern frontier, pioneers arrived to take up lands about the head of Lake George. They had progressed little beyond log cabins and small farms in stump- filled clearings when the raiding Indians of Burgoyne forced them to flee. In 1787, however, settlement was resumed as James Caldwell, at this time patentee to many acres, sold or rented land to settlers.
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Like a feudal lord of the manor Caldwell built a gristmill and iron forge to serve settlers on his properties. By reason of its location at the head of the lake, the little village quickly developed into a trading center for the county and a shipping point for logs to Ticonderoga. But in 1832 much of this business began to disappear when the Glens Falls Feeder Canal was opened, diverting the lucrative log shipping trade from Lake George to the shorter and quicker inland waterway that gave access to the Hudson River as well as to Lake Champlain.
Meanwhile the fame of the lake's beauty had spread abroad, and visitors, despite the meager conveniences of stagecoach and tavern, began to arrive in larger numbers. As early as 1800 the famous old Lake House stood on the present site of Shepard Memorial Park. In 1817 the first steamer, the Caldwell, went into service to connect the village with the hotels and growing communities along the lake shores. An early historian says of these times that the natives lived largely on "fish and strangers."
That there was once a prominent resident of Caldwell who did not take kindly to strangers is indicated by the historian Max Reid. He quotes a vacation tourist in 1851 who refers to an old pioneer as "an accentric gentleman who owned the whole region, built a hotel on the wrong spot, determined no one else should build there or anywhere, and ardently de- sired that no more people settle in the neighborhood." The same traveler pointed out the lack of luxurious accommodations at Lake George in those days of stagecoaches, mud, and corduroy roads. In his opinion its charm was "the beauty of a country cousin, a diamond in the rough, when com- pared with the absolute elegance and fascination of Como," in Italy.
But the 1880's brought the railroad and with it a greater number of summer visitors, including many people of prominence. In this decade and the next, hotel development reached its peak; the Lake House, the old Fort William Henry with its ample piazzas, the Fort George and the Crosbyside, around the head of the lake, offered accommodations to an even larger number of guests than do the hotels of today, when so many visitors stay at tourist homes, cottages, cabins and camps.
Around these spacious hostelries revolved the social life of the summer colony. President U. S. Grant frequently lent his presence to functions at the Fort William Henry, while General Sherman told Civil War stories to children at the Lake House. The large, rambling buildings with their rococo elegance were little more than great wooden boxes compared with modern hotels. Lake transportation was correspondingly crude. An old resident, Robert E. Henry, recollects that the ferry between the village and nearby hotels along the lakeshore was a rowboat seating eight to ten passengers. Lake George itself he describes as a quiet and pretty village with a wide dirt roadway bordered by tall and beautiful trees.
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With the turn of the century came a trend toward the present expanded resort life. Wealthy families, including the Haydens, the Cramers, the Tuttles, the Prices developed impressive estates along the shores of the lake. More people of moderate means built less pretentious summer cot- tages. Stores and specialty shops were opened in the village to serve these warm weather residents and the vacationists who came in increasing numbers as the motor car supplemented railroad travel. Social life turned from hotel to camp, cottage and estate.
The village and State began to establish facilities for those tourists who remained but one day or a week-end. The site of the Lake House became a park, a cool spot on the paved main street of the busy resort community. Diving piers and beaches were developed and sleek speed boats, cabin cruisers, and yachts replaced the old rowboat ferry.
The State opened Lake George Battleground Park to preserve Fort George and other historic remains, and to provide grounds for tourist picnic parties. Later the adjacent Battleground Public Campsite added its facilities, improved from year to year. Soon the long, curving beach in front of the Park and campsite became the most frequented stretch of sand on the lake.
POINTS OF INTEREST
1. SHEPARD MEMORIAL PARK, Canada Street, an elm-shaded greensward sloping down to the lake in the midst of the business district, is the scene of much summer and winter recreational activity. At the small outdoor theater there are concerts and vaudeville. Shuffle-board and quoit games are provided, and the sand beach at the foot of the park, with its swimming dock and diving boards, is popular. In the winter the lake opposite the park is a center for varied sports. On a kite shaped track laid out on the ice, horse races are run as at a county fair. Fishing through the ice, skating, ice boating, ski-joring, and hockey attract crowds of participants and spectators.
2. LAKE GEORGE BATTLEGROUND PARK on the Beach Road beyond the Delaware and Hudson Railroad Station, a short walk east of US 9, is a 35-acre historic site reserved by the State for public use. Its free bathing beach is much frequented and there are fire-places and tables for picnics, running water, rest rooms, and a large rustic pavilion for shelter which is sometimes used for public gatherings. LAKE GEORGE BATTLE MONUMENT with its life-size bronze statues of Sir William Johnson and his friend, the aged Mohawk Chief, King Hendrick, stands on a knoll near the entrance. Hendrick, beloved alike by his own people and the English to whom he was a faithful friend and wise counselor, lost his life in this battle in 1755 in an ambush nearby. Johnson also was wounded, but the French and their Indian allies were finally repulsed. -
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The RUINS OF FORT GEORGE, a mound 15 to 20 feet high and 100 feet long, grassgrown except where the east and south walls have been partially restored, lie hidden among trees in the center of the park. This fort was begun in 1759 by Lord Jeffrey Amherst, Commander of the British forces, but never completed. It was seized by the American forces in 1775 soon after they took Ticonderoga and other forts. Aban- doned to Burgoyne in 1777 it was again occupied by Patriot soldiers after the Battle of Saratoga, but in 1780 Major Carleton surprised and captured it while raiding in this region. Markers at trenches, hospital sites, and burying grounds commemorate the stirring events that took place in this battle area. .
The SAINT ISAAC JOGUES MEMORIAL, a heroic bronze statue near the Battle Monument, was erected by the State of New York to honor the first white man known to have seen and traversed this lake. He called it Lake St. Sacrament, a name it bore till more than a century later, when General Johnson, encamped here in 1755 just before his vic- torious battle with the French, renamed it Lake George for the king who later rewarded him with a title of nobility. Father Jogues, a Jesuit priest, the first Catholic missionary to the Mohawks, suffered torture as a captive in 1642, martyrdom in 1646. He was canonized by an act of Pope Pius XI in 1930, one of the first eight American Saints.
3. LAKE GEORGE BATTLEGROUND CAMPSITE, a free state camping ground with accommodations for 100 camping parties, is shaded by a grove of white pines. Adjoining Battleground Park, it is at Canada Street near the crest of the grade on US 9, at the southern entrance to the village. It was the scene of fierce engagements during the French and Indian War.
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