Historic Tales from the Adirondack Almanack

Village

PREFACE

Over the past four years, through the online journal Adirondack Almanack, I have tried to offer a look at the modern Adirondack Park that includes historical context to today’s political, cultural and economic news and trends. For example, when mining accidents made national news, I wrote about the mining accidents that occurred in the Adirondack region with regular frequency in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. When the excursion boat Ethan Allen sank in October 2005, I wrote about similar accidents on Lake George that had also taken a large number of lives. When debate raged over allowing floatplanes to continue to land on Lows Lake, I wrote a short history of the area’s development. Local events, places and attitudes have been sources of fodder for the Adirondack Almanack’s historical cannon. Bank robberies, the Ku Klux Klan, snowmobiling, gambling, railroads, buried treasure, raising hops, rattlesnakes and earthquakes are just a few of the things that inspired historical pieces about the Adirondack Park. They are all collected here, with a few whimsical historical explorations thrown in for good measure. These essays were meant to be glimpses of history, short pieces on context, not complete historical narratives—although a five-part history of snowmobiling in the Adirondacks may be an exception. I’ve edited them lightly, trying to preserve their character while translating them from the Internet to the printed page.

Thanks are due to the readers of the Adirondack Almanack, many of whom provided feedback and encouragement when these stories were first posted. Although errors and omissions are entirely my own, a debt of personal thanks is owed to those who helped locate relevant photos, including Lawrence Gooley, Jill McKee, Mike and Jessica Todriff, Allan Smith, June Peoples, Mark McMurray, Darlene Leonard, Thomas Blauvelt and John Hammond. The History Press’s Kate Pluhar ably shepherded the project with the assistance of Hilary McCullough, designer Natasha Momberger and copyeditor Jaime Muehl.

Discussion, comments and corrections are welcome at www.adirondackalmanack.com.

PART I

Adirondack Accidents, Danger and Disaster

THE CRUISE BOAT ETHAN ALLEN AND OTHER LAKE GEORGE TRAGEDIES

Sunday, October 2, 2005

According to local news reports, the forty-foot cruise boat Ethan Allen capsized today on Lake George. It happened at 3:00 p.m. with forty-nine senior citizens onboard, which is too many in my mind for such a small boat. The Associated Press reported that twenty were killed, making it the most deadly tragedy in the history of Lake George and the Adirondack region. I’ve been told that the emergency room at Glens Falls Hospital was overwhelmed and was forced to send patients to Saratoga Hospital.

The Ethan Allen was one of the first boats operated by Shoreline Cruises when the company began in the mid-1970s. At the time, Shoreline’s berths were at King Neptune’s Pub in Lake George Village; they are now located beside Neptune’s, within view of the camera to which Capital News 9 cuts when it goes to commercials and during the weather reports.

This latest news is horribly tragic, and similar accidents on Lake George have occurred in the past. On July 30, 1856, the 140-feet-long John Jay (built in 1850) was delayed at Ticonderoga’s Baldwin Dock, waiting on the stagecoach from Lake Champlain. Due to the large number of passengers, the stagecoach had to make several trips to get everyone to the boat. It wasn’t until 7:00 p.m. that the John Jay, now loaded with seventy people, backed away from the dock. About an hour later, the boat was ten miles down the lake. Below, the fireman stoked the boilers as the captain called for top speed—then the worst happened. Owing to that old bonnet on the smokestack, the engineer is reported to have told one of the passengers, it stopped the draft, and forced the flame out of the furnace doors.

The flues were jammed with soot, filling the boiler room with smoke and driving the fireman above before he could get the firebox doors shut. The sparks ignited the woodwork over the firebox. I saw a dense mass of smoke puff out, then another, one passenger later recalled, and there was an instantaneous and indiscriminate…scramble for places of safety. Captain Gale, upon hearing the alarm, ran to the wheelhouse and ordered the pilot to steer directly for shore a half mile away as he yelled to try to calm the passengers. The rest of the crew began fighting the fire.

In the meantime, the passengers in the path of the smoke at the rear of the steamer tried to make their way forward. Some of the men attempted to inflate the life preservers but found them inoperable. Another man, T.C. Thwing of Boston, tried to lower the one lifeboat that hung amidships, but the flames had already spread too far, blocking his efforts. The passengers crowded into the steamer’s bow, as one later wrote,

men, women and children, not knowing but the next moment would be their last…mothers clinging to their children, and children holding fast to parents. Fathers, with pale faces and compressed lips, watching the progress of the flames, and looking about for the means of escape when the boat should reach the shore—women, young and fair, gathered around their protectors and asking piteously: Is there no way to be saved?

As they approached the shore, the boat struck a rock hard and nearly keeled over. It was then that some of the panicked passengers, five in all, including Thwing’s wife, Annie, and his sister-in-law, jumped or were thrown overboard. Some leapt into the water with deck chairs and anything else they could find that would float as the flames spread, cutting the tiller lines and making the boat impossible to steer. Some made it ashore, but five drowned. At the water’s edge, those still onboard leapt for their lives as the John Jay burned to the waterline. We had scarcely reached shore, one man reported, when the baggage which had been rescued from the wreck was seized upon by a gang of harpies, who took articles of apparel which happened to suit their fancy, and appropriated them without ceremony to their own uses.

The surviving crew and passengers made their way to the nearby home of a man named Garfield, who supplied them with whatever they needed as the dead were brought in and laid out. One survivor later wrote bitterly:

In my judgment, the cause of the disaster is to be attributed to the miserable inefficiency of persons in charge of the steamer, and the loss of life is chargeable to the neglect of the owners of the line, in failing to provide the appliances which accidents may render indispensable to the salvation of life.

The following week, someone wrote to the New York Times from Lake George to say that "the number of visitors here is not great. The travel in this direction has fallen off some seventy or eighty percent, since the burning of the steamer John Jay."

Until today’s sinking of the Ethan Allen, the lamentable distinction of the greatest tragedy on Lake George (and in the Adirondacks in general) belonged to a similar-sized steam-powered boat, the Rachel. On the night of August 3, 1893, the Rachel was chartered by more than twenty guests of the Fourteen Mile Island Hotel to take them to a dance at the Hundred Island House. The Rachel was owned by the Pearl Point Hotel, but the usual captain, a man named Barber, fell ill and went home early, leaving the boat in the hands of a less experienced pilot, Claude Granger. The boat arrived safely at Fourteen Mile Island Hotel and, with the passengers loaded, twenty-nine in all, left the dock at 9:00 p.m. There was little or no moon as the boat neared the Hundred Island House. The passengers on the deck were laughing and some ladies were singing as Granger steered unknowingly out of the channel and struck an old dock south of the hotel, tearing a large hole in the side of the boat below the waterline. Some of those onboard were caught on the shade deck and died quickly as the boat listed and almost immediately sank. With only its smokestack left above water, a number of men from shore rowed boats from the two nearby hotels to the scene to rescue the survivors. A young man named Benedict, an excellent swimmer, dove for his sister but couldn’t find her. Nineteen-year-old Frank Mitchell of Burlington drowned while trying to save his mother, who also drowned. Eight other women (some from Warrensburg, Troy, Hoboken and Brooklyn) drowned.

That night, nine bodies were recovered and three more were found later. The New York Times reported:

One result of this accident is to show how necessary is the legislation which was attempted a few winters ago by gentlemen interested in Lake George navigation, who attempted to have a law passed that would prohibit pilots or engineers from having charge of steamboats on Lake George unless they could pass an examination before a board of experts; also to have boilers tested regularly.

While the record of the most deaths on Lake George in a single incident had belonged to the Rachel before the Ethan Allen catastrophe, the Sagamore holds another record. At 224 feet and able to carry fifteen hundred passengers, the Sagamore was the largest of the steamboats plying the lake for the Champlain Transportation Company. It also has the dubious record for the most groundings and collisions.

The Sagamore story starts, oddly enough, in a rescue attempt. On October 23, 1909, the steamer Mohican ran aground at Hulett’s Landing, on the west side of Lake George north of Black Mountain point. It was late in the season—in fact, the Mohican was the only boat running the lake—so the Sagamore was brought from its winter quarters and manned by a crew from the shipyards at Burlington. It arrived at the scene at midday, and lines were strung to the Mohican, but just as the steam was put on and the line went taut, the ropes snapped and the Sagamore was driven aground too. The Horicon was then needed to drag both boats from the shoal. Three years later, it was the Horicon again that came to the rescue when the Sagamore ran aground in the sands of Hague Bar during the night of August 11, 1912. The passengers got off safely using small boats, but the Horicon broke its hawser lines and anchor chains trying to pull the Sagamore free the next day.

The Sagamore next got into trouble on July 6, 1920. Maude and Florence Leavey of Hudson Falls were in a rowboat