Bidding adieu to 'the deserted village,' Part 1Pending Tahawus Tract subdivision will secure 210 acres for a historic district —

but it probably won't preserve the Tahawus Club ghost town

by LEE MANCHESTER, Lake Placid News, March 24, 2006

An engraving of the deserted village of Adirondac, from a drawing made in 1859 byBenson J. Lossing, just one year after mining operations had been shut down forgood, published in E.R. Wallace's 1887 "Descriptive Guide to the Adirondacks."

ADIRONDAC — It’s been threeyears since the Open Space Institutebought the 10,000-plus acre TahawusTract, in Newcomb township, from NLIndustries.

If all goes according to plan, theAdirondack Park Agency will meetnext month to approve the subdivisionof the tract into three major pieces.About 6,800 acres will be added to theForest Preserve. Almost 3,000 acreswill be dedicated to sustainableforestry. Finally, 210 acres will be setaside for a historic district that will pre-serve the remnants of a 19th century,backwoods iron-mining plantation.

Most of the “ghost town” that visi-tors see when they come to the HighPeaks trailhead at the Upper Works,however, is not currently slated forpreservation. At this point, plans arebeing made only for the preservation ofthe 1834 MacNaughton Cottage andthe 1854 stone blast furnace.

Today’s “ghost town” buildings aremostly the remnants of the TahawusClub colony at the old mining villagesite, built from the 1880s through thelate 1930s. They do not have nearly thehistoric significance of theMacNaughton Cottage or the furnace,but “it is the modest and deterioratedarchitecture of the Tahawus Club thatestablishes the sense of place” at thisimportant historic site, wrote architec-tural historian Wesley Haynes.

The Lake Placid News has pub-lished several features on the ironmines that were established on theTahawus Tract in the 1830s byArchibald McIntyre and DavidHenderson, in part because numerousmagazine articles, books and scholarlystudies have been published on thatoperation.

Until we procured a copy ofHaynes’ 1994 documentation report on

the surviving buildings at the site, how-ever, we knew almost nothing about 90percent of the structures comprisingtoday’s “deserted village.”

In mid-March, on one of the verylast days of the Adirondack winter, wesent our reporter to the site to take alook at the remnants there of theTahawus Club — because they proba-bly won’t be around in a few moreyears.

Before he tells you about what hesaw there, however, let’s first walkthrough the amazing history that led tothe Tahawus Club’s creation.

From iron dam to deserted villageThe story of today’s Tahawus Club

ghost town actually started, early in theautumn of 1826, on the edge of whatwould later become the village of LakePlacid.

Several associates of ArchibaldMcIntyre, founder of the Elba IronWorks that had closed shop outsideLake Placid in 1817, were pokingaround the old forge site when “a strap-ping young Indian ... made his appear-

ance at [the old works’] gate,” wroteone of the party, David Henderson, in aletter to McIntyre.

“The Indian opened his blanket andtook out a small piece of Iron Ore aboutthe size of a nut. ‘You want see ‘emore, me know ‘em bed, all same’,” saidthe man, Lewis Elijah Benedict.

Benedict led the party through theIndian Pass to the headwaters of theHudson River in Newcomb township,where an outcropping of very high-grade iron ore formed a natural damacross the stream.

By 1832, a small community hadbeen established there, with forgesbuilt to extract iron from the hard-rockmagnetite ore. First called McIntyre,after the primary owner, it wasrenamed Adirondac (no “k”) in 1848 bythe U.S. Postal Service when a postoffice was finally opened there.

Two perennial problems plaguedthe Adirondack Iron & SteelManufacturing Co., as McIntyre’s ven-ture was called: the extreme remote-ness of the site, making it prohibitivelyexpensive to ship the company’s prod-

Woodcut by Theodore R. Davis, published in the Nov. 21, 1868 issue of Harper's Weekly.

An 1886 postcard, possibly by Edward Bierstadt. (Courtesy Chris & Nancy Beattie)

uct to market, and the admixture of tita-nium with the iron in the raw ore.

In 1845, works manager DavidHenderson was accidentally killed byhis own pistol while looking for waysto harness more water power for theiron works.

In 1856, a flood washed away halfof McIntyre’s setup, 11 miles down-stream from Adirondac.

When McIntyre, age 86, died twoyears later, in 1858, the works sudden-ly closed down, never to be revived.

Writer Benson J. Lossing visited thesite just one year later, in 1859, sketch-ing it for later publication in his travelbook, “The Hudson.” Lossing was thefirst to call Adirondac “the deserted vil-lage,” an allusion to a then very well-known poem of the same name, writtenin 1770 by British writer OliverGoldsmith.

Travel writers exploit ‘ghost town’For many years thereafter, whenev-

er a regional travel writer woulddescribe his visit to Adirondac, hewould always follow the hamlet’s namewith “the deserted village.” That is thereputation which, through all the years— and through several metamorphoses— has stuck with the site.

Even in 1846, Adirondac wasdescribed by visitor Joel Headley as“the loneliest place a hammer everstruck in. Forty miles to a post office ora mill — flour eight dollars a barrel,and common tea a dollar a pound inthese woods, in the very heart of the

Empire State!”Richard Henry Dana Jr., writing in

1871 for the Atlantic Monthly of his1849 visit, said that Adirondac was “aswild a spot for a manufacturing villageas can well be imagined — in the heartof the mountains, with a difficult com-munication to the southward, and noneat all in any other direction — a mereclearing in a forest that stretches all theway to Canada.”

It took some time, however, beforethe mining village closed in 1858became known as a place of true deso-lation.

In 1859, the year after the ironworks shut down, Benson Lossingdescribed his excursion to the site: “Atthe house of Mr. [Robert] Hunter, the

only inhabitant of the deserted village,we dined. The little deserted village ofAdirondack, or M’Intyre, appearedcheerful to us weary wanderers,although smoke was to be seen fromonly a solitary chimney.”

Naturalist John Burroughs camethrough seven years later, in 1866. LikeLossing, he boarded with the Hunterfamily.

“Hunter was hired by the companyat a dollar a day to live here and seethat things were not wantonlydestroyed,” Burroughs wrote, “butallowed to go to decay properly anddecently.”

Burroughs described Adirondac asan abandoned settlement, but one thathad not yet started its steep decline to

LEFT — The Adirondack Club, photographed in 1888 by Seneca Ray Stoddard. (Credit: "Photograph #81.800s courtesy ofAdirondack Research Room, Saranac Lake Free Library") RIGHT — Looking north up the Adirondac road earlier this month.

disintegration.“After nightfall we went out and

walked up and down the grass-grownstreets,” he wrote. “It was a curious andmelancholy spectacle. The remotenessand surrounding wildness rendered thescene doubly impressive.

“There were about thirty buildingsin all, most of them small frame houseswith a door and two windows openinginto a small yard in front and a gardenin the rear, such as are usually occupiedby the laborers in a country manufac-turing district.

“The schoolhouse was still used,”Burroughs continued. “Every day oneof the [Hunter] daughters assemblesher smaller brothers and sisters thereand keeps school. The district librarycontained nearly one hundred readablebooks which were well thumbed.”

Two years later, in 1868, Alfred B.Street likewise found the abandonedhamlet to be still in surprisingly goodcondition.

“On each side [of the street] stoodthe houses, so perfect, except here andthere a broken pane, I almost saw peo-ple at the windows, or on the porches,”Street wrote. “One week of repairingwould make them comfortabledwellings again.”

Stoddard puts the ‘ghost’ in ‘ghost town’

Perhaps the best-known traveler’sdescription of deserted Adirondac was

Seneca Ray Stoddard’s. His accountwas primarily derived from a visitmade in 1873, and substantial portionsof it were published unchanged in hisillustrated regional guidebooks through1919, long after the “deserted village”had been revived as a private summercommunity.

In 1870, however, three yearsbefore his best-known visit toAdirondac, Stoddard had made anothertrip to the village. That earlier visit wasbriefly alluded to in his 1873 account,but was not fully described there.

It was not until many years later,after Stoddard had begun publishinghis Northern Monthly magazine in1905, that the story of his 1870 visit toAdirondac was written up, wrappedaround a ghost story. TheElizabethtown Post & Gazette of Nov.7, 1907, offered its readers a much-condensed version of that story, enti-tled “The Forsaken Village.”

“The story on which the legendfounded,” the Post columnist wrote,“runs that a New York businessman inthe Adirondacks for rest and recreation,when wandering afield one day,chanced across the moss-coveredremains of the little village abandonedyears before. Entering one house betterthan the rest, he found it perfectly fur-nished, as its occupants had left it yearsbefore.

“A little further down the street hecame across the office of the company

by whom the mines had been operated.Even the ledgers had been left in thesafe, the doors of which were open. Inthis he occupied himself until he real-ized that the night was upon him.Deciding to make the best of the situa-tion, he returned to the house he hadfirst entered and, taking possession ofone of the silent bedrooms, threw backthe musty bed covers and made himselfas comfortable as possible for thenight.”

A ghost, “the founder of the vil-lage,” appeared to the man in the storythat night, searching for a letter writtento the ghost’s daughter by the lover hehad sent away. The next morning,“moved by the pitiful tale,” the visitorhunted around the house, eventuallyfinding the letter.

“That night he placed it on the cen-ter table in the house where he hadpassed the night before. Again his mid-night caller came, and the sleeper wasawakened by a great cry of joy. Whenhe finally reached the table where theletter had been, it was gone,” the Post& Gazette story ended.

Stoddard concluded the guidebookaccount of his 1873 visit to Adirondacwith a vague allusion to the incident:

“Well do I remember the nightwhen they [the Hunter family] sent usto sleep in one of the deserted houseshaving the reputation of being haunted.We did imagine that we heard curioussounds during the night,” Stoddard

The Debevoise Cottage, built ca. 1900

wrote, “but whether uneasy spirits orsome poor dog that we had robbed ofhis nest we could not tell.”

Only in the very first account of thatvisit, however, was this final sentenceincluded:

“This is reminiscent, however, andoccurred three years previous to thetime when in 1873 the professor[Stoddard’s traveling companion] andmyself tramped that way and beyond.”

‘An air of solitude and desolation’It seems that 1873 was the point at

which the old mining village turned acorner. No longer could it be describedas a temporarily vacant, but essentiallysound, settlement; it had become anauthentic ruin.

“It is a strange feeling which oneexperiences as he comes suddenly,after days of tramping through unbro-ken wilderness, upon this desolatehamlet,” wrote an anonymous reporterfor the Plattsburgh Republican in 1873.“The forges will soon be overgrownwith vegetation, and the water-wheelsconverted into masses of rotten wood.

“You enter shops and are startled bythe strange echo of your footsteps,which seem to threaten the intruderwith disaster for disturbing their longrepose.

“The wide and hansom [sic] streetis covered with a thick mat of greenturf, while the houses have a muffled,funereal air. ... The little church [whichdid double duty as the schoolhouse]still stands, but its back is bent withage, and it will soon fall beneath itsown weight. ...

“Over the whole scene there reignsan air of solitude and desolation whichthe tourist is glad to leave behind,” thePlattsburgh paper concluded.

Stoddard’s guidebook, “TheAdirondacks Illustrated,” described thesettlement as “the ruined village, wherea scene of utter desolation met our view[and] the grass-grown street led awayinto shadow.

“On either side once stood neat cot-tages and pleasant homes, now stainedand blackened by time. Broken win-dows, doors unhinged, falling roofs,rotting sills and crumbling foundations,

pointed to the ruin that must surelycome.

“Near the center of the village wasa large house said at one time to haveaccommodated one hundred boarders,now grim and silent.

“Near-by at the left stood the prettyschool house [and church]. The steps,worn by many little feet, had rotted andfallen, the windows were almost pane-less, the walls cracked and rent asunderwhere the foundation had droppedaway, and the doors yawned wide,seeming to say not ‘welcome’ but‘go’,” wrote Stoddard.

Creation of the clubsAdirondac’s previous caretaker,

Robert Hunter, had left the hamletbetween Stoddard’s first and secondvisits after Hunter’s wife, Sarah, diedin 1872. Her tombstone stands in theAdirondac cemetery between the vil-lage and nearby Henderson Lake.

Hunter’s successor, “the independ-ent Californian” John Moore, was thelast custodian of Adirondac before itbecame the headquarters of a series ofnew sportsman’s clubs, founded by thedescendants of Archibald McIntyre.

The first such club, called thePreston Ponds Club, was a tentative

venture created in February 1876. Afisherman’s club, based in the pondsjust north of Adirondac, it was quicklysucceeded by the Adirondack Club inJanuary 1877, which based itself in theold mining settlement.

The following year, AdirondackClub member Francis Weeks took onthe job of repairing the sturdy, two-story frame house built in 1834 by theMcIntyre company for use by themine’s owners and supervisors. Thenknown as the Hunter House, it laterwas occupied by McIntyre grandsonJames MacNaughton, whose name hasbeen associated with it ever since.Today, the MacNaughton Cottage is theonly extant dwelling left over from theMcIntyre iron plantation.

As Adirondack Club membersmoved in to the former mining settle-ment, they took over surviving mine-era buildings before tearing them downand, in many cases, building new cot-tages on the old foundations.

The Adirondack Club had only a20-year lease on the McIntyre property.When that lease expired in 1898, theterms of the new lease required a reor-ganization of the club, which renameditself using the popular faux-Indianname for Mount Marcy, a major por-

Interior of Mrs. Taylor’s Cottage, also known as Lazy Lodge, built ca. 1890

tion of which the McIntyre companyowned.

Thus was born, on Nov. 26, 1898,the Tahawus Club.

NEXT WEEK, we will walk youthrough the 16 structures still standingat the site of Archibald McIntyre’s 19thcentury iron settlement.

Two former residents of the desert-ed village will also tell you a little bitabout what it was like for them as theygrew up there. One of them spent herchildhood summers at the TahawusClub before World War II.

The other former resident livedthere after the village had been appro-priated as workers’ housing for theNational Lead Company’s nearby tita-nium mine, following World War II. Heleft for college before the tiny settle-ment was closed down by NL in 1963when, in the words of another formerresident, the mining company “got outof the landlord business.”

After that, the workers’ hamletagain became an abandoned village —though a completely different aban-doned village than the one writtenabout by 19th century travel writers.

Getting thereTo get to the deserted village from

Lake Placid, you will drive on stateRoute 73 through Keene and KeeneValley to Northway (I-87) Exit 30, thenjog south to Exit 29 (North Hudson).

From Exit 29, it’s a 17.5-mile drivewestward on the Boreas/Blue RidgeRoad, heading toward Newcomb, beforeyou reach county Route 25 (TahawusRoad), where you will turn right.

Zero your trip meter as you makethat turn, then watch the mileage soyou don’t lose your way.

You’ll pass the Lower Works Roadon the right at 0.4 miles (Route 25curves left). The Lower Works is thesite to which the Tahawus Club movedin 1947 after its former headquarterswas taken over by National Lead.

At 6.3 miles, county Route 25branches off to the left toward theUpper Works. Make sure you make thatleft turn; don’t keep going straight ontocounty Route 76, or you’ll end up at the

gate to the abandoned National Leadtitanium mill.

The “New Furnace,” an 1854 blastfurnace from the McIntyre era, rises onthe right side of the road at 9.1 miles,looking like a small Mayan pyramidthat somehow got lost in the NorthCountry woods.

The 1834 MacNaughton Cottage,the only building surviving from theAdirondac iron-mining days, stands onthe right at the beginning of the ghostvillage, at 9.7 miles.

At the end of Route 25 is the park-ing lot for the southern trailhead to theHigh Peaks, at 9.9 miles.