Amelia Potter- Whitman, wrote the following memoire in approximately 1936. She was born in Schroon Lake, Essex, NY on November 1859, so her memories would have been from when she was approximately 14- 17 years old around 1876.
In the summer of 2024, Mr. John Whitman Schneider, a resident of Thurmont, MD delivered the following memoire written by his grandmother Amelia to be shared with the folks of Schroon Lake. We hope that you enjoy it... please remember, that these are her words so the grammar and spelling are directly from her diary.
In the summer of 2024, Mr. John Whitman Schneider, a resident of Thurmont, MD delivered the following memoire written by his grandmother Amelia to be shared with the folks of Schroon Lake. We hope that you enjoy it... please remember, that these are her words so the grammar and spelling are directly from her diary.
In the exact words of Amelia Potter-Whitman....
"I have been a resident of Washington for forty two years and love every bit of this beautiful city, but my mind travels back to the Adirondacks, my childhood home, with its wonderful forests and lakes and all the natural beauties that go to make up that part of the country. The brooks with water as cold as ice and full of brook trout that can get away from a hook and line and keep you guessing: the lakes and ponds with their larger trout and pickerel; the woods with the big brown-eyed deer that look at you wondering why men hunt them and kill them for sport.
I was born and reared on the banks of Schroon Lake, one of the prettiest spots in that section of the country. Sixty years ago the only way you could get there was by going to Troy, from there to Riverside, then taking a horse drawn coach to Pottersville where the horses were changed, and then on to Schroon Lake. Pottersville is at the foot of the lake, which is ten miles long. In those days the road was dirt and not very smooth. Little farms bordered all along the banks of the lake on the side the road was on, while across the lake the mountains seemed to come right down on the water's edge. Every two or three miles you would see a sign reading, "$50 Fine for Cutting any Tree in this Section".
You reached the village with everyone looking to see how many city people had come for the summer and what hotel they are going to. At that time there were three, the Ondawa, the Leland House, and the Schroon Lake House. The Ondawa, where I was born, has since burned down and never has been rebuilt. At that time $10 or $15 a week was the standard price for a week's board. Everyone that had an extra room put up a sign "Room and Board". The chambermaids and dining room girl s were mostly school teachers from the cities and got $3 a week for their services. I don't remember a colored employee in any of the hotels at that time. The Leland House and Schroon Lake House are now capable of accommodating from 500-600 in each, while at that time 200 was the limit.
Now a word about Pottersville: My grandfather built the first house there so the village was named after him. At that time he was a young lawyer and his friends called him everything but wise. He built a house of 18 rooms, advertised it in Troy, Albany and New York papers, and the first summer had it filled with people who wanted to rest. He married and took his bride, my grandmother, to the new hotel. People began to read about Frank Potter's House and other houses went up, city people built their own cottages, then he built a little church with a plot back of it for the cemetery. It was years before that little cemetery had a tenant, then my grandfather buried his oldest boy in it. He later sold out his interest in Pottersville, moved to Schroon Lake and built the Ondawa I spoke about in the beginning of this article. He lived to be 79 years old. At the time of his death he was one of the judges of New York State.
About 20 miles from Schroon Lake is what is known as Clear Pond, about five miles long, three miles wide, with water so clean and clear one can see the bottom of the pond anywhere. It was almost impossible to catch fish there. Built so close to the water that there was just room for a road between it and the pond was a large log house with ten huge rooms. My step-mother's sister and her husband lived there and in the summer lodged men who came from the city to hunt and fish. I have stood in the porch of that log house and seen deer with their young fawns come down from the mountain on the other side of the pond to get a drink. At the least noise they would be up and away.
Five miles up, at the foot of Mount Marcie, the highest in the state, is Mud Pond. I've seen the finest and largest trout and pickerel caught there in a very short time.
Remember, all these conditions I am writing about are as I knew them when I was a child more than 60 years ago. (About or before 1876). You had to travel over a ten mile corduroy road to get to the the two ponds. I expect now that that it is macadamized and that any automobile may get in there, but at that time it would be just too bad to meet another team either way.
I want to tell you about the log house at Clear Pond. I told you it was used during the summer as a sort of hunting and fishing lodge; in the winter it was used to room and board loggers, men who worked in the mountains cutting down trees and getting them ready to come down the river in the spring. The lumber camp was about five miles up the mountains. The men that had charge of it employed about 30 loggers. Mrs. Fiske, my step-mother's sister, roomed and boarded them. She used two barrels of flour a week. They had to get up at 4:30 in the morning to fry meat and potatoes and make pancakes for the thirty men. In addition there was also either doughnuts or ginger cookies, for men in that part of the country always wanted something sweet for breakfast. Mrs. Fiske had a daughter named Belle, about four years older than I was and I often went up there to stay a month or two with her and really enjoyed it. You would not believe so much food could be consumed. When the men finished breakfast and left for work to the sound of the creaking of the sleds carrying them up the mountains, we had to start in to cook their midday meal which Mr. Fiske carried to them. This was a regular dinner. We would boil a whole ham or a great big chunk of corned beef, cook potatoes, and some other vegetable, slice five or six big loaves of home-make bread, butter it, and put it in a big tin can, another with huge slices of meat, nearly a bushel of potatoes, and often six big pies all cut ready to take out of the tin. There was a big shanty where these men were working, a huge stove and tables, tin plates, tin cups and everything to eat their dinners with. (By the way, these things were always left there until the next winter and I never heard of them being molested in any way.) After we got their dinner off to them, we began to think of supper, which consisted of cold meat, either fried or baked potatoes, corn bread, or hot biscuits, stewed or baked apples, some kind of cake, pickles and other little things. After they had their supper some of them went right to bed, others sat around, smoked, read, or played cards or dominoes. By ten there was no light in the log house on the banks of the Clear Pond.
I have known Mrs. Fiske to bake 17 loaves of bread in one day (and they were big; it would take four ordinary bakers loaves to equal one of them) and Belle and I have fried enough doughnuts to fill a good size wash tub. There were two big stoves in the kitchen, one with twelve griddles and the other with eight, and there was always something in the ovens. You cook and bake for thirty men that have worked out in the Adirondack Mountains for ten hours and see what it takes to fill them up. Mr. Fiske had a way of salting fish and had a barrel of trout or pickerel and we would soak it out and cook it. Was it good? You ask some of them men!
When we had our first snow early in November, Mr. Fiske would buy a young beef or steer and cut it up in roasts, steaks, stews, and soup bones, put a layer of snow in the barrel and layer of beef until the barrel was filled and let it stay outside to freeze. When we wanted beef we went to the barrel. I have known him to kill eight large hogs, make sausage, smoke hams and shoulders, pickle the feet, make head cheese, and make liverwurst. In the fall just before the ground froze, he would dig a hole in the ground, perhaps eight or ten feet deep, fill it with potatoes, cabbage, beets, turnips, carrots, cover it up and leave it until spring when the frost went out of the ground. Then, when the vegetable cellar were running low, we would open it up and they were like new vegetables. Mrs. Fiske generally canned 200 to 300 cans of berries. The woods were full of blueberries and blackberries and little strawberries were plentiful in the fields. It was a tiresome job to pick them, but there were always willing hands. There was no way to get an egg or a drop of milk or anything in the eating line after the first snow came about the first of November. The road was simply impassable; maybe for three months the road would be covered with drifts eight or ten feet high. So we had to have the storeroom well stocked. Can you imagine never having to go to a store or market to buy food of any sort?
Now suppose we go back to Schroon Lake for awhile. After the death of of my grandfather, my father took over the Schroon Lake House. In the winter we used only the main floor for our living quarters with only a traveling salesman, or drummer as we called them, stopping by to break the monotony. In the middle of the lake was an island, I should say about a mile square. A man named Clark owned it. He was a very rich New Yorker and had a beautiful home built there where he came every summer, and his horses and a yacht, had a family who took care of it in the winter and led a rather gay life. He was a widower with five daughters and a son, none of them married. They always had a house full of guests. They were Episcopalians and as we had no Episcopal church he built is own, hired his own rector, furnished a house for him and paid his salary. The first few years he was there only during the summer months, but gradually the townspeople began going to the church and eventually he stayed the year around. The only thing Mr. Clark asked of the village people was to furnish the wood to heat the church, which they gladly did.
We, the young people, thought it right hard if we did not have skating the length of the lake by the first of November. The boys would go ahead, building bonfires every little way so we could see. But on bright moonlight nights we didn't need the fires. About five miles from the village my grandmother on my mothers side lived. My brother and I would take an old green sled every Friday after school and as it was almost all down hill, we would coast over there on the snow. What times we did have! I slept in the room over the kitchen and all the heat it has was a small register in the floor over the kitchen stove. Grandmother had to go upstairs with me as I could not get in the bed alone. It was in the middle of the room with a canopy all around it. I would stand on a chair, and she would give me a push and over I would go into the bed and out of sight. In the morning she would call us to breakfast and tell us to go outside and wash ourselves. We went in a little entry outside the kitchen door where there was a bench with a small three-legged iron kettle, a big cake of home-made soap, a course towel, and a bucket of water. Usually we had to break the ice in the bucket to fill our little kettle and wash ourselves. Sunday afternoon we would start for home, always finding someone who would let us tie or sleds onto their cutter and be drawn along.
My father owned what they called a sugar bush, meaning about 100 maple trees and the facilities for making maple sugar. In the early spring when the sap commenced to run, buckets were hung on spigots that were put in the trees. The sap had to be carried to a shanty where a big kettle was kept boiling night and day to make sugar. It was hard work to carry the sap to the little shanty and keep the pot boiling. When it reached the sugar stage we stirred it until it commenced to get thick, then poured it in pans to harden. All that is done by machinery now, so that you dont ever have to watch it to keep it from burning.
We always made up parties in sugaring time to go up to the shanty and have a good time. We took biscuits and pickles and when the syrup was just on the point of turning in to sugar we poured it over the biscuits. My, it was so good! It may not seem so to people today but you must remember that there was very little amusement in that part of the country at that time of the year.
During the winter we would give a "donation" party for the minister. Everyone who went had to take something eatable. I often have marveled since of the variety that was taken: potatoes, sugar, ham, in fact, everything that could be used on the table. I don't suppose his salary was more than $50 a month. Someone would take him a cord of wood. I do not remember anyone burning coal up there at that time. Wood, all cut and ready for the stove, sold for $3.00 a cord. I remember the first lump of coal I ever saw, and wondered how anyone could expect to make a fire with it.
From the hotel to the school was, I should think, about six city blocks. I have been to school in the winter day after day with the temperature ten degrees below zero. We had to take what we called our "dinner" with us. Everyone had a little tin pail and many a time whatever you had in that pail would be frozen hard when you got to school. The room was heated with an immense stove that would hold three or four great big knots of wood and back of the stove was two rows of hooks. When we got there we would hang our little pails of frozen food on a hook and by noon it would be thawed out so we could eat it. School closed only for Christmas, New Years and Thanksgiving days. There were no Easter holidays. School ran from 8:30 until 4:00. The school teacher had a right to inflict any kind of punishment he saw fit. If by any chance you broke a rule he could call you up before the whole school, you would hold out your hands, and with a black walnut rule you got as many blows as he saw fit to give. If you did not happen to be a favorite and he was not in the right mood it was just too bad! Your humble servant knows all about it.
But with it all, I think we had a pretty good time with our skating, maple sugar parties, "donations", and occasionally a dance. About ten miles from Schroon Lake was a big hotel at Lake Paradox kept by a man by the name of Depp Root. All the young people called him "Uncle Depp." Every winter after the first of January he gave a dance and oyster supper. The tickets were 50 cents a couple. Perhaps twenty or thirty young people would pile into a double sleigh which actually was a big raft on two sets of runners. It would be filled with hot bricks and stones under a layer of straw with plenty of blankets and Buffalo robes. It took four horses to pull the load. With horns we make the night hideous. We commenced to dance about 8:30 and kept it up until 11:30 when we had our oyster supper. Then back home. All those bricks and stones had been taken in the hotel when we got there and when we got ready to go back home, were put back hot. After there were heavy snows and sharp winds that piled the snow in immense drifts so that the road could not be seen, the boys would have to go ahead with shovels to make a way for the horses to pull us. We have been until daybreak getting home. Not much fun for the boys! But the seasons have changed so that now, even in the Adirondacks, they do not have such severe winters.
Oysters came to us in quart, half gallon, and gallon kegs, which looked like little barrels. We would knock the little kegs all to pieces and there was a frozen mass of oysters. It was our only way of getting them and we thought them fine. An oyster supper in the winter was a great treat.
I have known that lake to be frozen so you could ride the length of it in a cutter the first day of April. Then when the maple sugar was made and sent to the city, it sold for the immense sum of ten cents a pound, and the logs had gone through the ice and reached their destination and spring came what a time those three hotels had getting ready for boarders. Cleaning, scrubbing, papering, and painting, everything a hustle and bustle, everyone working, no one idle. When everything was spick and span letters began coming in asking for rates. By the first of July the visitors commenced to pour in. Every room on the first floor had a big fireplace and there were not many evenings after supper that you didn't have to have a fire in those fireplaces. What a treat it was to those city folks, how they would draw their chairs around to watch those big flames, and smell wood burning.
The summers were short, there was so much going on that the months slipped by all too quickly. What a change in that little village of Schroon Lake that could boast of three hotels that could take care of all the city people that came. Now there are wonderful city homes built on each side of the lake and at Lake Paradox there is nothing else but cottages and hunting lodges.
I look back all these years and think of the joys and sorrows, the laughter and tears that have come to me and I am now at the age when I don't know when I will be called to cross the dark river that flows at the foot of the hill of life and I imagine myself the carefree girl that I was then and ask myself - would you like to live it over and think "Yes". I would be willing to go through it all again with all its joys and sorrows. There were so many things that meant so much to me and I wonder how I was able to take up my cross and carry it and anyone who reads this will remember that it is all facts. I look back in fancy and see those wonderful lakes, those magnificent forests, the mountains soaring almost to the sky and I say to myself, they belong to me; just as much as they belong to anyone. I probably will never see them again and am alone for not one of the people I have written about is living. They have all passed on and, to a certain extent, I am living in the past. And what a past. I would not take a king's ransom for the remembrance.
"I have been a resident of Washington for forty two years and love every bit of this beautiful city, but my mind travels back to the Adirondacks, my childhood home, with its wonderful forests and lakes and all the natural beauties that go to make up that part of the country. The brooks with water as cold as ice and full of brook trout that can get away from a hook and line and keep you guessing: the lakes and ponds with their larger trout and pickerel; the woods with the big brown-eyed deer that look at you wondering why men hunt them and kill them for sport.
I was born and reared on the banks of Schroon Lake, one of the prettiest spots in that section of the country. Sixty years ago the only way you could get there was by going to Troy, from there to Riverside, then taking a horse drawn coach to Pottersville where the horses were changed, and then on to Schroon Lake. Pottersville is at the foot of the lake, which is ten miles long. In those days the road was dirt and not very smooth. Little farms bordered all along the banks of the lake on the side the road was on, while across the lake the mountains seemed to come right down on the water's edge. Every two or three miles you would see a sign reading, "$50 Fine for Cutting any Tree in this Section".
You reached the village with everyone looking to see how many city people had come for the summer and what hotel they are going to. At that time there were three, the Ondawa, the Leland House, and the Schroon Lake House. The Ondawa, where I was born, has since burned down and never has been rebuilt. At that time $10 or $15 a week was the standard price for a week's board. Everyone that had an extra room put up a sign "Room and Board". The chambermaids and dining room girl s were mostly school teachers from the cities and got $3 a week for their services. I don't remember a colored employee in any of the hotels at that time. The Leland House and Schroon Lake House are now capable of accommodating from 500-600 in each, while at that time 200 was the limit.
Now a word about Pottersville: My grandfather built the first house there so the village was named after him. At that time he was a young lawyer and his friends called him everything but wise. He built a house of 18 rooms, advertised it in Troy, Albany and New York papers, and the first summer had it filled with people who wanted to rest. He married and took his bride, my grandmother, to the new hotel. People began to read about Frank Potter's House and other houses went up, city people built their own cottages, then he built a little church with a plot back of it for the cemetery. It was years before that little cemetery had a tenant, then my grandfather buried his oldest boy in it. He later sold out his interest in Pottersville, moved to Schroon Lake and built the Ondawa I spoke about in the beginning of this article. He lived to be 79 years old. At the time of his death he was one of the judges of New York State.
About 20 miles from Schroon Lake is what is known as Clear Pond, about five miles long, three miles wide, with water so clean and clear one can see the bottom of the pond anywhere. It was almost impossible to catch fish there. Built so close to the water that there was just room for a road between it and the pond was a large log house with ten huge rooms. My step-mother's sister and her husband lived there and in the summer lodged men who came from the city to hunt and fish. I have stood in the porch of that log house and seen deer with their young fawns come down from the mountain on the other side of the pond to get a drink. At the least noise they would be up and away.
Five miles up, at the foot of Mount Marcie, the highest in the state, is Mud Pond. I've seen the finest and largest trout and pickerel caught there in a very short time.
Remember, all these conditions I am writing about are as I knew them when I was a child more than 60 years ago. (About or before 1876). You had to travel over a ten mile corduroy road to get to the the two ponds. I expect now that that it is macadamized and that any automobile may get in there, but at that time it would be just too bad to meet another team either way.
I want to tell you about the log house at Clear Pond. I told you it was used during the summer as a sort of hunting and fishing lodge; in the winter it was used to room and board loggers, men who worked in the mountains cutting down trees and getting them ready to come down the river in the spring. The lumber camp was about five miles up the mountains. The men that had charge of it employed about 30 loggers. Mrs. Fiske, my step-mother's sister, roomed and boarded them. She used two barrels of flour a week. They had to get up at 4:30 in the morning to fry meat and potatoes and make pancakes for the thirty men. In addition there was also either doughnuts or ginger cookies, for men in that part of the country always wanted something sweet for breakfast. Mrs. Fiske had a daughter named Belle, about four years older than I was and I often went up there to stay a month or two with her and really enjoyed it. You would not believe so much food could be consumed. When the men finished breakfast and left for work to the sound of the creaking of the sleds carrying them up the mountains, we had to start in to cook their midday meal which Mr. Fiske carried to them. This was a regular dinner. We would boil a whole ham or a great big chunk of corned beef, cook potatoes, and some other vegetable, slice five or six big loaves of home-make bread, butter it, and put it in a big tin can, another with huge slices of meat, nearly a bushel of potatoes, and often six big pies all cut ready to take out of the tin. There was a big shanty where these men were working, a huge stove and tables, tin plates, tin cups and everything to eat their dinners with. (By the way, these things were always left there until the next winter and I never heard of them being molested in any way.) After we got their dinner off to them, we began to think of supper, which consisted of cold meat, either fried or baked potatoes, corn bread, or hot biscuits, stewed or baked apples, some kind of cake, pickles and other little things. After they had their supper some of them went right to bed, others sat around, smoked, read, or played cards or dominoes. By ten there was no light in the log house on the banks of the Clear Pond.
I have known Mrs. Fiske to bake 17 loaves of bread in one day (and they were big; it would take four ordinary bakers loaves to equal one of them) and Belle and I have fried enough doughnuts to fill a good size wash tub. There were two big stoves in the kitchen, one with twelve griddles and the other with eight, and there was always something in the ovens. You cook and bake for thirty men that have worked out in the Adirondack Mountains for ten hours and see what it takes to fill them up. Mr. Fiske had a way of salting fish and had a barrel of trout or pickerel and we would soak it out and cook it. Was it good? You ask some of them men!
When we had our first snow early in November, Mr. Fiske would buy a young beef or steer and cut it up in roasts, steaks, stews, and soup bones, put a layer of snow in the barrel and layer of beef until the barrel was filled and let it stay outside to freeze. When we wanted beef we went to the barrel. I have known him to kill eight large hogs, make sausage, smoke hams and shoulders, pickle the feet, make head cheese, and make liverwurst. In the fall just before the ground froze, he would dig a hole in the ground, perhaps eight or ten feet deep, fill it with potatoes, cabbage, beets, turnips, carrots, cover it up and leave it until spring when the frost went out of the ground. Then, when the vegetable cellar were running low, we would open it up and they were like new vegetables. Mrs. Fiske generally canned 200 to 300 cans of berries. The woods were full of blueberries and blackberries and little strawberries were plentiful in the fields. It was a tiresome job to pick them, but there were always willing hands. There was no way to get an egg or a drop of milk or anything in the eating line after the first snow came about the first of November. The road was simply impassable; maybe for three months the road would be covered with drifts eight or ten feet high. So we had to have the storeroom well stocked. Can you imagine never having to go to a store or market to buy food of any sort?
Now suppose we go back to Schroon Lake for awhile. After the death of of my grandfather, my father took over the Schroon Lake House. In the winter we used only the main floor for our living quarters with only a traveling salesman, or drummer as we called them, stopping by to break the monotony. In the middle of the lake was an island, I should say about a mile square. A man named Clark owned it. He was a very rich New Yorker and had a beautiful home built there where he came every summer, and his horses and a yacht, had a family who took care of it in the winter and led a rather gay life. He was a widower with five daughters and a son, none of them married. They always had a house full of guests. They were Episcopalians and as we had no Episcopal church he built is own, hired his own rector, furnished a house for him and paid his salary. The first few years he was there only during the summer months, but gradually the townspeople began going to the church and eventually he stayed the year around. The only thing Mr. Clark asked of the village people was to furnish the wood to heat the church, which they gladly did.
We, the young people, thought it right hard if we did not have skating the length of the lake by the first of November. The boys would go ahead, building bonfires every little way so we could see. But on bright moonlight nights we didn't need the fires. About five miles from the village my grandmother on my mothers side lived. My brother and I would take an old green sled every Friday after school and as it was almost all down hill, we would coast over there on the snow. What times we did have! I slept in the room over the kitchen and all the heat it has was a small register in the floor over the kitchen stove. Grandmother had to go upstairs with me as I could not get in the bed alone. It was in the middle of the room with a canopy all around it. I would stand on a chair, and she would give me a push and over I would go into the bed and out of sight. In the morning she would call us to breakfast and tell us to go outside and wash ourselves. We went in a little entry outside the kitchen door where there was a bench with a small three-legged iron kettle, a big cake of home-made soap, a course towel, and a bucket of water. Usually we had to break the ice in the bucket to fill our little kettle and wash ourselves. Sunday afternoon we would start for home, always finding someone who would let us tie or sleds onto their cutter and be drawn along.
My father owned what they called a sugar bush, meaning about 100 maple trees and the facilities for making maple sugar. In the early spring when the sap commenced to run, buckets were hung on spigots that were put in the trees. The sap had to be carried to a shanty where a big kettle was kept boiling night and day to make sugar. It was hard work to carry the sap to the little shanty and keep the pot boiling. When it reached the sugar stage we stirred it until it commenced to get thick, then poured it in pans to harden. All that is done by machinery now, so that you dont ever have to watch it to keep it from burning.
We always made up parties in sugaring time to go up to the shanty and have a good time. We took biscuits and pickles and when the syrup was just on the point of turning in to sugar we poured it over the biscuits. My, it was so good! It may not seem so to people today but you must remember that there was very little amusement in that part of the country at that time of the year.
During the winter we would give a "donation" party for the minister. Everyone who went had to take something eatable. I often have marveled since of the variety that was taken: potatoes, sugar, ham, in fact, everything that could be used on the table. I don't suppose his salary was more than $50 a month. Someone would take him a cord of wood. I do not remember anyone burning coal up there at that time. Wood, all cut and ready for the stove, sold for $3.00 a cord. I remember the first lump of coal I ever saw, and wondered how anyone could expect to make a fire with it.
From the hotel to the school was, I should think, about six city blocks. I have been to school in the winter day after day with the temperature ten degrees below zero. We had to take what we called our "dinner" with us. Everyone had a little tin pail and many a time whatever you had in that pail would be frozen hard when you got to school. The room was heated with an immense stove that would hold three or four great big knots of wood and back of the stove was two rows of hooks. When we got there we would hang our little pails of frozen food on a hook and by noon it would be thawed out so we could eat it. School closed only for Christmas, New Years and Thanksgiving days. There were no Easter holidays. School ran from 8:30 until 4:00. The school teacher had a right to inflict any kind of punishment he saw fit. If by any chance you broke a rule he could call you up before the whole school, you would hold out your hands, and with a black walnut rule you got as many blows as he saw fit to give. If you did not happen to be a favorite and he was not in the right mood it was just too bad! Your humble servant knows all about it.
But with it all, I think we had a pretty good time with our skating, maple sugar parties, "donations", and occasionally a dance. About ten miles from Schroon Lake was a big hotel at Lake Paradox kept by a man by the name of Depp Root. All the young people called him "Uncle Depp." Every winter after the first of January he gave a dance and oyster supper. The tickets were 50 cents a couple. Perhaps twenty or thirty young people would pile into a double sleigh which actually was a big raft on two sets of runners. It would be filled with hot bricks and stones under a layer of straw with plenty of blankets and Buffalo robes. It took four horses to pull the load. With horns we make the night hideous. We commenced to dance about 8:30 and kept it up until 11:30 when we had our oyster supper. Then back home. All those bricks and stones had been taken in the hotel when we got there and when we got ready to go back home, were put back hot. After there were heavy snows and sharp winds that piled the snow in immense drifts so that the road could not be seen, the boys would have to go ahead with shovels to make a way for the horses to pull us. We have been until daybreak getting home. Not much fun for the boys! But the seasons have changed so that now, even in the Adirondacks, they do not have such severe winters.
Oysters came to us in quart, half gallon, and gallon kegs, which looked like little barrels. We would knock the little kegs all to pieces and there was a frozen mass of oysters. It was our only way of getting them and we thought them fine. An oyster supper in the winter was a great treat.
I have known that lake to be frozen so you could ride the length of it in a cutter the first day of April. Then when the maple sugar was made and sent to the city, it sold for the immense sum of ten cents a pound, and the logs had gone through the ice and reached their destination and spring came what a time those three hotels had getting ready for boarders. Cleaning, scrubbing, papering, and painting, everything a hustle and bustle, everyone working, no one idle. When everything was spick and span letters began coming in asking for rates. By the first of July the visitors commenced to pour in. Every room on the first floor had a big fireplace and there were not many evenings after supper that you didn't have to have a fire in those fireplaces. What a treat it was to those city folks, how they would draw their chairs around to watch those big flames, and smell wood burning.
The summers were short, there was so much going on that the months slipped by all too quickly. What a change in that little village of Schroon Lake that could boast of three hotels that could take care of all the city people that came. Now there are wonderful city homes built on each side of the lake and at Lake Paradox there is nothing else but cottages and hunting lodges.
I look back all these years and think of the joys and sorrows, the laughter and tears that have come to me and I am now at the age when I don't know when I will be called to cross the dark river that flows at the foot of the hill of life and I imagine myself the carefree girl that I was then and ask myself - would you like to live it over and think "Yes". I would be willing to go through it all again with all its joys and sorrows. There were so many things that meant so much to me and I wonder how I was able to take up my cross and carry it and anyone who reads this will remember that it is all facts. I look back in fancy and see those wonderful lakes, those magnificent forests, the mountains soaring almost to the sky and I say to myself, they belong to me; just as much as they belong to anyone. I probably will never see them again and am alone for not one of the people I have written about is living. They have all passed on and, to a certain extent, I am living in the past. And what a past. I would not take a king's ransom for the remembrance.
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