it seemed that if I built a big camp like this, I would want my room next to the kitchen, and with a covered walkway, so that I could walk over during a rainstorm in my socks … maybe it was a privacy thing ). The second row of decidedly smaller, and less fancy, cabins was originally built to house staff, but as their numbers had decreased over the years, some of these had been repurposed for children or guests wanting/needing to be a bit off the main strip of great camp life. We walked through a few of the cabins, at my request, mostly so I could get a feeling for the history. I didn’t see how this exploration could help me find out what had happened to Deirdre Crocker all of those years ago, but it couldn’t hurt. In all honesty, my involvement in this case was entirely based on owing Dorothy a favor ( any favor she cared to ask, so this one was easy ) and my interest in the history of the Adirondacks and Adirondack great camps.
Most of the cabins still had tiny wood -burning stoves in each room, and when I wandered over to look more closely at the intricate ironwork on one of them Mike came back to life a bit, and showed it to me. “If you look inside this one, you can see that it couldn’t hold full-sized logs. They had to be cut shorter than for standard woodstoves or fireplaces, and were also split into smaller pieces than for use in regular stoves. I remember when I was twelve, feeling like such a big boy when I heated my room with a fire that I had made.” He grinned at me, perhaps forgetting who I was, and why we were here for a moment, wrapped up in the happy memory. “They’re pretty little stoves, but they burn hot and fast, so the room is either roasting or freezing. I remember one Thanksgiving when we came up, Da came through all of our cabins to feed them in the middle of each night; he slept through his Westclox alarm clock on our last night, and my room was like ice the next morning.”
Mixed in with cabins for the help were buildings for storage and maintenance, along with other, more arcane, rich-person support infrastructure that no longer exists; Mike walked with me, explaining what each building had been used for in his childhood, and what it was used for now. At a huge building with numerous small rooms, tubs, tables, and laundry lines inside and out he remarked, “This was the laundry. I remember playing tennis in the morning, changing for lunch, and having my clothes cleaned and pressed in my cabin for the afternoon.”
A small building with no windows and heavily secured door intrigued me. When he opened it, and gestured me inside, he explained the metal walls, ceiling, and floors with delight, “We just called it the ‘Tin Room,’ for obvious reasons. It was used to store bedding and some dry goods in here between periods of occupancy, to keep mice and porcupines from them; before my time, mostly. I remember it smelling like mothballs, and being very dark with the door closed. Playing ‘Murder in the Dark’ in here as a kid scared the hell out of me.” I could see from his eyes that he meant it, and could momentarily remember the fright of someone hunting him in the pitch black.
I knew the next one, from my explorations into Adirondack history in the Saranac Lake Free Public Library, but let it go by when Mike looked questioningly at me as we walked up to the long and low building with a door that looked as though it belonged on a restaurant’s walk-in refrigerator. I had read about them, and even been inside the ruins of one while trespassing the ruins of long-abandoned ‘Frontier Town’ in North Hudson (‘Frontier Town’ was an amusement park that closed before I was born, but some of the buildings are still standing, and it makes for a fun trip ). “It’s an ice-house. Back in the day, the caretaker and a hired crew would wait until the ice on the lake out front got nice and thick, then cut out blocks, bring them up here, and cover them with sawdust for insulation. The
Most of the cabins still had tiny wood -burning stoves in each room, and when I wandered over to look more closely at the intricate ironwork on one of them Mike came back to life a bit, and showed it to me. “If you look inside this one, you can see that it couldn’t hold full-sized logs. They had to be cut shorter than for standard woodstoves or fireplaces, and were also split into smaller pieces than for use in regular stoves. I remember when I was twelve, feeling like such a big boy when I heated my room with a fire that I had made.” He grinned at me, perhaps forgetting who I was, and why we were here for a moment, wrapped up in the happy memory. “They’re pretty little stoves, but they burn hot and fast, so the room is either roasting or freezing. I remember one Thanksgiving when we came up, Da came through all of our cabins to feed them in the middle of each night; he slept through his Westclox alarm clock on our last night, and my room was like ice the next morning.”
Mixed in with cabins for the help were buildings for storage and maintenance, along with other, more arcane, rich-person support infrastructure that no longer exists; Mike walked with me, explaining what each building had been used for in his childhood, and what it was used for now. At a huge building with numerous small rooms, tubs, tables, and laundry lines inside and out he remarked, “This was the laundry. I remember playing tennis in the morning, changing for lunch, and having my clothes cleaned and pressed in my cabin for the afternoon.”
A small building with no windows and heavily secured door intrigued me. When he opened it, and gestured me inside, he explained the metal walls, ceiling, and floors with delight, “We just called it the ‘Tin Room,’ for obvious reasons. It was used to store bedding and some dry goods in here between periods of occupancy, to keep mice and porcupines from them; before my time, mostly. I remember it smelling like mothballs, and being very dark with the door closed. Playing ‘Murder in the Dark’ in here as a kid scared the hell out of me.” I could see from his eyes that he meant it, and could momentarily remember the fright of someone hunting him in the pitch black.
I knew the next one, from my explorations into Adirondack history in the Saranac Lake Free Public Library, but let it go by when Mike looked questioningly at me as we walked up to the long and low building with a door that looked as though it belonged on a restaurant’s walk-in refrigerator. I had read about them, and even been inside the ruins of one while trespassing the ruins of long-abandoned ‘Frontier Town’ in North Hudson (‘Frontier Town’ was an amusement park that closed before I was born, but some of the buildings are still standing, and it makes for a fun trip ). “It’s an ice-house. Back in the day, the caretaker and a hired crew would wait until the ice on the lake out front got nice and thick, then cut out blocks, bring them up here, and cover them with sawdust for insulation. The
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