A History of Saranac Lake
By Mary Hotaling, Historic Saranac Lake and Rachel Bliven, New York State Historic Preservation Office
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Introduction The dense urban streetscape of the village of Saranac Lake, New York, is a marked contrast to the vast stretches of unpopulated forest and tiny isolated hamlets that exist in the Adirondack region. The extraordinary building stock of Saranac Lake, with its multiple porches and walls of windows, its sophisticated commercial blocks and elegant residential districts, is the unique legacy of more than seventy years when this community was an international center for the the treatment of pulmonary tuberculosis. Here doctors developed the first successful methods of treating — and even curing — a disease that had been the equivalent of a death sentence for almost all of recorded history. In so doing, they also developed a specific building type — the cure cottage — designed to facilitate the healing process for tubercular patients. Many of these cure cottages still stand in Saranac Lake, the most visible reminders of the village's days as America's "Pioneer Health Resort."
The incorporated Village of Saranac Lake is located in the Adirondacks, a jagged outcropping of mountainous peaks sliced by rapid-flowing streams and dotted with clear glacial lakes, which juts up out of the glacial plains of upstate New York. Six million acres of this rugged country and its isolated valley hamlets are part of the Adirondack Park, where 2.5 million acres of state-owned forest land have been protected as "forever wild" since as early as 1885. Deep in the heart of this wilderness, in a sheltered valley crossed by the winding Saranac River, lies "the little city of the Adirondacks."
The modern village of Saranac Lake is still the largest settlement within the Adirondacks. Its political boundaries cross both county and town borders: two-thirds of the village lies within the town of Harrietstown, in Franklin County; while the remaining third is split between the towns of North Elba and St. Armand in Essex County. {| <tbody>|-/n|I. Early Settlement (1819-1860)||IV. The Architectural Development of the Cure Cottage|/n|-/n|II. In Pursuit of Health -- The Rise of the Curing Industry (1860-1881)||V. The Second Boom (1918-1939)|/n|-/n|III. Boom Time as a Tuberculosis Curing Center (1888-1918)||VI. Decline and Rebirth (1939-1990)|/n|-/n| ||Bibliography|/n</tbody> |}
See also:
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Include page Saranac Lake - Early Settlement Include page Saranac Lake 1888-1918b Include page Saranac Lake 1860-1881 Include page Architectural Development of the Cure Cottage Include page Saranac Lake 1918 - 1939 Include page Saranac Lake 1939 - 1990 Include page Saranac Lake 1888-1918 Include page Saranac Lake History Bibliography