It was noted in the Dec. 31, 2003, issue of this newspaper that consideration is being given to bring a name change from Town of Altamont to Town of Tupper Lake. The following historical background may be of interest to readers.
Donaldson, in the History of the Adirondacks, explains for us the term “Town” by noting, “Towns are the political subdivisions of a county. Within their boundaries, the inhabitants have minor administrative powers – the care of roads, the schools, and the poor and like matters of community interest. They are always designated by a name as: the Town of Newcomb; also as one word, Harrietstown, Elizabethtown, etc. ‘Townships’ are purely geographical subdivisions of land and are designated by a number.” (Township 19, Township 20, etc.)
Note: The Town of Altamont became a political entity in 1890, and its name reputedly came from the prominence of Mt. Morris within its boundaries (alta – high, mont – mountain).
Louis Simmons, in his definitive history of this community, Mostly Spruce and Hemlock, tells best how the formation of the town occurred:
In 1808 Franklin County was set off from Clinton, its area substantially the same as today with the exception of a five-square-mile tract in Altamont, taken from St. Lawrence County in 1913 and annexed to Franklin so that a highway, in which St. Lawrence was not particularly interested, connecting Tupper Lake with roads leading to Utica and Albany, could be completed. During 1808 four towns were formed comprising all of Franklin County – Chateaugay, Malone, Constable and Dickinson.
Dickinson was, literally, the grandsire of Altamont, and the more patriotic and politically aware pioneers of this region who wanted to cast a vote, particularly in heated presidential campaigns, had to do it the hard way. The polls were at Dickinson Center, and they had their choice of a hundred miles or so if they went by way of Potsdam and Moira, or 35 or 40 miles on foot if they tramped through the woods. Isolation had its advantages, too. The early teachers who acquainted Tupper’s few children with the mysteries of the three Rs didn’t have to worry much about supervision.
Seaver, county historian, notes that the school commissioner resided at Moira around 1880 and visited this district “but once in six years.”
The pioneer settlers who swarmed in and cobbled together a village on the shores of Raquette Pond almost simultaneously with the arrival of Hurd’s Railroad demanded – and got – their own local government. In 1890, the Town of Altamont was formed from the Town of Waverly, which had itself been set up only 10 years earlier, from Dickinson. Altamont then comprised three townships, or 76,168 assessed acres, to which was added a strip a mile wide and five miles long, taken from St. Lawrence County in 1913 for further road construction, as noted earlier in the account. Altamont was the last of Franklin County’s 19 towns to come into being, and it proved to be a lusty baby. It had a newspaper by the time it was five years old, but unfortunately only a few scattered copies of the Tupper Lake Herald still exist dating back prior to 1911. They would have constituted an irreplaceable record of Tupper’s growing pains.