In 1890, a pioneer family by the name of LaFountain built a handsome home on the outskirts of what was to later become the busy village of Tupper Lake. It was of a famous farmhouse design, pretentious by the local standards of the day, and one of the first homes built here. The location of the home is where the present Mercy Health Care Center is today. There was no Rte. 3 then, and the house was sited on the north edge of the extensive McLaughlin farmlands. LaFountain, who was an assistant surveyor under Meekham of St. Regis on Hurd’s N.Y. & Ottawa Railroad, had married Rebecca, McLaughlin’s daughter. After a prominent career here as surveyor, LaFountain moved his family to Cass Lake, Minn.
This was at a time that Dr. Livingston Trudeau, who was to become the father of modern tubercular therapy, had come to Saranac Lake prepared to die, wracked with pulmonary consumption that was considered an absolutely fatal disease. The mountain air was so beneficial that Dr. Trudeau regained his health and vigor and lived for another 40 years.
During his stay in Saranac Lake, Dr. Trudeau chanced upon the theories of the German physician, Brecher, who was advocating the outdoor and institutional treatment of tuberculosis. Based on his own successful experience of fresh air and rest, and noting the similarity with the German physician’s theory of regulated fresh-air cure, Dr. Trudeau became convinced that what was then a fatal disease could be prevented in its early stages and eventually cured.
“From that moment on,” historian Alfred Donaldson tells us, “the doctor’s life suffered a radical change. The quest of his own health became secondary to the saving of others.” Note: He even cut back on his hunting and fishing, activities he so loved. He did continue to visit his favorite hunting camp, called Little Rapids on the Beaver River, provided for him and kept exclusively by his friend, Dr. Seward Webb (Nehasane). Indeed, he shot his last buck there while confined to a special chair that could be carried, constructed for him by his guide and placed at his favorite watch (he was a crack shot). Donaldson further explains, “He exemplified to full the maxim of a great French physician, which he was fond of quoting: ‘Guerir quelquefois, soulager souvent, consoler toujours.’” (Meaning “to heal sometimes, to relieve often, to console always.”)
The Adirondacks, with its natural endowments of climate and its quality of dry, pure air, fulfilled that philosophy. Many were healed, many were relieved, if only for a time, and always was the loving care – rich or poor – given by this remarkable physician, himself suffering with the disease.
Saranac Lake soon became known as “The Town of Second Chance,” and a large private sanatorium developed there. William Chapman White, in his regional study, Adirondack Country, notes, “When the infectious quality of the disease became known, tourist hotels refused to take invalids. The result was the appearance of many boarding cottages in Saranac Lake after 1890, run exclusively for the sick and served by those doctors who had remained as private physicians.”
As Saranac Lake’s reputation grew, the number of cottages increased. By 1920, more than 150 of them cared for the 2,000 patients who were in the village. The big, screened-in porch, a part of the cure, became a feature of Saranac Lake architecture. Saranac Lake became world famous.
You may wonder what the foregoing had to do with the LaFountain home. The connection is this: That home began the groundwork for our first hospital here. The background that follows, which I hope you find of interest, especially in view of its recent purchase by the Adirondack Medical Center, is the Genesis of a desperately needed facility.
The birth of our first real hospital in this community began as a result of some prominent local businessmen who observed the success of the cure cottages just a few miles away. They quickly realized that the Tupper Lake climate and elevation also had the same virtues for the sick as their neighboring community of Saranac Lake, that the surrounding forests contained just as much ozone and had lots of conifers that produced the resinous odor considered beneficial as part of the tubercular fresh-air cure then in vogue. Yes, you guessed it – they decided to build similar sanatorium facilities here.
Those businessmen were L.C. Maid, pioneer pharmacist and astute investor; Barney Seigel, owner of the large and successful Seigel Hardware Company here; and H.H. Day, bank officer and president of the Norwood Manufacturing Company, which was then operating the Big Mill on Racquette Pond. These gentlemen, in 1910, purchased the Will LaFountain home and, according to Louis Simmons in Mostly Spruce and Hemlock, “remodeled the building, adding sun porches and heating system.” In 1911, it opened as the Tupper Lake Sanatorium. These three entrepreneurs were what today we would call heavy hitters: successful, well to do, venturesome – all had many irons in the fire with a proven track record.
Tupper Lake’s first and only “San” would be an immediate success and enjoyed great patronage from the outset, many of its patients coming from New York City. The first doctors were Dr. Charles Rytennberg and Dr. A. MacDonald Bell, New York physicians who had been practicing at Saranac Lake. Other doctors who practiced there included Dr. P.J. Barrett, who later served as a much-loved physician at Faust for many years.
As Louis Simmons states in his local history: “More serious than the need for sanatorium facilities here was the pressing need for a hospital equipped to administer properly to the seriously ill or injured for whom the long trip to a downstate or Canadian hospital was a grim form of ‘Russian Roulette.’”
Tupper Lake was entering a period of great activity at this time: hundreds of lumber camps nearby, five sawmills on the shores of Racquette Pond, cranking out millions of feet of pine and spruce. We were the undisputed lumbering capital of New York State. Gang saws, shingles and lath machines, axes and falling trees made this occupation a frightfully dangerous one in which to work. Life-threatening injuries were common, as might be expected, and, as Louis notes, the only recourse was to wait for a train and send the injured to an Ottawa, Ont., or Utica hospital and hope they survived until they arrived there – frightening!
Next Transitions: The challenge of a hospital was met head on.