Preserving history: Inside Adirondack Experience’s treasure trove

Objects tell lessons in Adirondack history 

By Zachary Matson 

In a nondescript storage center in Blue Mountain Lake, a six-foot-tall, pink-tiled stove stands.

It’s a remnant of one of the Adirondacks’ Great Camps, and one of the artifacts held by the Adirondack Experience in storerooms of hundreds of items usually unseen by the public. Each has its own story.

This stove was created for Richard Alexander Hudnut. The cosmetics magnate imported the tiles from France in 1905 to outfit his retreat, Foxlair, near North Creek. 

After Hudnut died, Foxlair faced the rules of the Adirondack Forest Preserve. As interpreted at the time, the structure had to be destroyed. 

Before the state torched the great camp in 1973, Hudnut’s kin disassembled the stove and crated the tiles for storage in a neighbor’s basement.

In the early 2000s, the Hudnut descendants donated the tiles to the Adirondack Museum, now the Adirondack Experience.

Doreen Alessi-Holmes, the museum’s conservator and collections manager, used photographs of the bedroom the stove once warmed to meticulously count the tiles. She compared the donated pile to the original structure. Working with the son of the mason who had taken the stove apart at Foxlair, Alessi-Holmes put the relic back together at the storage facility. 

“It turns out we are missing one tile,” Alessi-Holmes said.

She scanned a tile, printed a photo, and pasted it onto a single false tile, stuck it in the back, to complete the stove—a unique example of Great Camp furniture and an artifact imbued with the tension of protecting both wild places and cultural heritage. 

“Not everyone had a rustic aesthetic. This guy, obviously, didn’t,” Alessi-Holmes said. 

Hundreds of other rare examples of Adirondack history are not on display at the museum’s main campus overlooking Blue Mountain Lake. Rather, they are cached in an off-site arsenal of cultural history open to researchers, museum members and, when scheduling permits, the public.

About 30% of the museum’s collection, approaching 10,000 objects, are on public display at any given time. The rest is stored at the collections center, housed in museum vaults or on loan. 

While the museum does not publicize the storage facility’s location, the place isn’t intended to be off limits. They welcome researchers who want to examine an artifact’s fine details or a collection of similar items. A boat builder attempting to replicate a particular guideboat, for example, can visit to study comparable watercraft. Descendants come to see vestiges of their family history. The museum hosts summer tours for members, and the public can also request a look inside. 

“This is a repository of material culture for the Adirondack region, and you don’t have to be a special interest group to get in here and see what we have, to study what we have,” Alessi-Holmes said. “We are not gatekeepers.” 

A behind-the-scenes look at the special collections of Adirondack Experience, The Museum on Blue Mountain Lake, with Conservator & Collections Manager Doreen Alessi-Holmes.

By the late 1990s, storage became critical for the museum. It kept its growing collection in sheds across the road, now used to house equipment. The structures were susceptible to infestation and ill-suited for valuable remnants and items such as antique boats. 

During a fundraising campaign in 1999, the museum sought $1 million for a new storage center. Designed by Saranac Lake architect Richard Hanpeter and opened in 2000, the facility offers 28,000 square feet of climate-controlled space, planned to the museum’s specifications. 

Collections within the collections

The repository is organized thematically, with sections devoted to small and big boats, rustic furniture, stoves, homesteading equipment, horse-drawn carriages, childhood wonder and more.

Some items exist in a category of their own, like a literal horse-powered treadmill for wood chopping and a silent movie-era projector used until 1974 at the State Theater in Tupper Lake. While there is nothing particularly Adirondack about a movie projector, that item connects to a park place and the villagers who gathered at their community’s cinema. 

“This came to us covered in soot and in pieces,” Alessi-Holmes said. Without any instructions, she worked with a retired engineer to piece it back together. 

In a large room, the first boat the museum’s founder Harold Hochschild obtained in 1956 rests. It is an old yacht tender used by the wealthy Whitney family at Little Tupper Lake. Nearby, a small rowboat from actor Kevin Bacon’s family camp awaits notice.

The museum is continuously refining its collection and their backstories: A Rushton canvas canoe used for seven decades on Blue Mountain Lake; ice drivers from Lake Champlain; a nearly intact snowshoe-making workshop; a highly inaccurate map published as a series in the 1860s hanging in a bright stairwell; a Hornbeck kayak; a boat made from paper; butter churns; antique toys; a collection of Saranac beer bottles; winter strollers designed to cut through snow; and a massive stove used to dry hops. 

“It’s an invaluable way to learn history, to actually see these objects,” said Hallie Bond, who worked at the museum and curated its boating exhibit. 

The collection totals around 275 boats, with about 60 on display at the museum. After working as education director at the museum from 1983 to 1986, Bond devoted almost five years planning the Adirondack boating exhibit, which opened in 1991. She also turned the research into a book, “Boats and Boating in the Adirondacks.”

“This is not a dusty old attic,” Bond said. “This is a research institution.”

Sometimes the objects are loaned to other museums or to the original owners. 

In November 1935, the Long Lake Volunteer Fire Department acquired a 24-foot-long 1936 American LaFrance Fire engine. The four-hose truck served the department until the late 1950s, and in 1965 it retired to the museum.

Long Lake borrowed the vehicle for the department’s 50th anniversary parade in 1985 and again for its 75th anniversary in 2010.

It took a full day of rearranging other large artifacts to move it out, and another day to move it back in. But when the fire department returned the truck, they included a surprise. They had found an old box of inhalator equipment of a similar vintage as the truck. There was an empty storage space in the middle of the truck, exactly the size of the inhalator. 

“For me it was more than worth all the effort, just to get that box back in its original spot,” Alessi-Holmes said.

Top photo: This 1936 GM American LaFrance Fire engine was used by the Long Lake Volunteer Fire Department from 1935 through the late 1950s. It has been in the Adirondack Experience collection since 1965 and has been loaned back to the fire department for use in major anniversary parades. Photo by Mike Lynch