Paul Smith's Hotel Fire, 1930
Unidentified clipping
THE FIRE AT PAUL SMITH'S
Hundreds of woods lover will read about the burning of Paul Smith's Hotel in the Adirondacks with mixed feelings. It was a landmark of other days, like the United States Hotel at Saratoga. Somehow it had never been able to catch the modern spirit and still hold its ancient charm, as the Equinox House did at Manchester, and the Brighton at Atlantic City. The bathrooms were too plainly an afterthought. The electric spur line the old man build and operated with current from his own rich water powers, so that the Pullmans could roll up to his door, always seemed out of place , even though it was a convenience. Jazz, echoing over the lake, was a poor substitute for the baying of hounds and the muffled click of oarlocks and the laughter of men starting out on the day's hunt.
Its gaping piazzas were an anachronism. And yet what memories clustered about the place! There, on the shores of Lower St. Regis, PAUL SMITH had built a hunting lodge in the late fifties, which afterward became the nucleus of the spreading caravansary which was to inscribe his name on the map of New York State. Men came there from Boston and New York and up-State cities for rest and recreation, driving in over wilderness roads. Accommodations were very primitive at first. You got your water in a tin dipper from a spring which bubbled out of the side of the hill. But thanks to MRS. SMITH, a wizard with venison and trout and flapjacks and other forest cookery, you ate magnificently. At night the old guide would sit at the head of the candle-lit table and carve the venison steak, with the chains of the hounds hung around his neck. DR, TRUDEAU, who has described the scene in his autobiography, was one of his early guests, coming to the woods to die in peace, finding in their fragrance and fresh airs not only health and length of days for himself but a new gospel for all of the host of his fellow sufferers from tuberculosis.
His friend E. H. HARRIMAN drove up, rifle in hand, shooting the gilt ball off the top of PAUL SMITH'S flagpole in the exuberance of his spirits. GROVER CLEVELAND was a familiar of the near-by streams, where trout abounded--in the days before all these waters were whipped to death. Gradually camps, increasingly luxurious, dotted the shores of the neighboring lakes, and the hotel became a fashionable resort. PAUL had bought thousands of acres of woodland for a song and sold them at a handsome profit. He had been foresighted enough, too, to garner in the water powers that went with the lakes and streams, and when the hotel business fell on evil days they and his timber stood him in good stead. After he died, in 1912, his oldest [surviving] son carried on, proud of his heritage, but somewhat baffled by the extraordinarily difficult problem of adapting the place to the demands of the new day. Perhaps, after all, the fire was a good thing. Out of the ashes of the hotel may spring some enterprise which will not have to strive so hard to bridge the generations.
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