Boomtown to bust: The lasting impacts of the rise and fall of industry in the Adirondacks

Economic disruption that hit the North County in the post-WWII era can still be seen today

By Tim Rowland

At World War II’s conclusion, Republic Steel decided to treat its Moriah employees, many of them recent immigrants, to something unusual for the times: indoor plumbing. For those workers in the North Country’s ample industrial base, it was another sign of progress.

“Today the Adirondacks is a good place to live,” said the Ticonderoga Sentinel in 1948. “There are good schools, movies, doctors, churches and a dependable income for those who want to earn it.”

Yet, just one generation after the Sentinel story, this rosy economic and social fabric shredded, and many Adirondack communities unraveled as well. 

Unemployment in some areas of the park reached 20%, and in the latter part of the century was typically double the national average. Schools shut down as student populations plummeted. So, too, were churches, repurposed into art galleries or general stores, or left to decay. 

Towns that had multiple car dealerships, hotels and movie theaters in every hamlet lost many or all. One moment, said Jay Town Historian Sharron Hewston, families felt they were living in a Norman Rockwell setting, and the next, a great uncertainty swept the region.

“Back in 1970, we had it all. Imagine being us, the last generation of mill kids, witnessing the demise of the local shops along Main Street in the Forks.”

Jay Town Historian Sharron HewstoN

In the history of Adirondack employment, nothing compared to this brief but destructive era, from which it’s taken the North Country a half century to recover—if indeed it has. 

An unraveling economy

In the 1960s and ’70s, the Adirondacks lost Republic Steel mines in Lyon Mountain and Moriah. Star Lake’s Benson mines closed, and so did the paper mills in Au Sable Forks and the massive Oval Wood Dish plant in Tupper Lake—a town that, according to the Cary Institute, once set a world record for sawing a million board feet of lumber in a day.

Plants still alive in 1980, like the paper mill at Newton Falls and National Lead’s titanium mine at Tahawus, clung by fingernails until slipping into history themselves.

But for John Neggia, who had just returned home from marching across Europe for Gen. George Patton, in 1948 there was no end of the work in sight. Neggia’s brother had been killed in the mines at the age of 21, death being a constant reminder that economic security came with a cost.

“There were a lot of widows in town,” said Neggia, who insisted on staying above ground, cutting and bending galvanized and cast-iron pipes for Republic Steel’s company housing.

Republic Steel had taken controlling interests in Adirondack mines as a hedge against the potential depletion of its Midwestern ore beds in the 1930s. When World War II erupted, it appeared to be a savvy move.

Private investment was bolstered by the federal government, which ran a railroad to the Tahawus titanium mine north of Newcomb and built the hamlet of Grover Hills next to Mineville, with dormitories, 207 houses and a school for families employed at a nearby iron mill completed in 1943.

At its apogee, Republic Steel employed as many as 600 in Moriah and 300 more at Lyon Mountain. In adjusted dollars, its payroll pumped $3.1 million into the Adirondack economy monthly. This was not to mention investments in equipment, tools, machinery and company housing—now with indoor plumbing.

RELATED READING: Death of an Adirondack relic in Mineville

In Au Sable Forks, where the mill employed 270 people, most residents had electricity about the time of World War I—well in advance of the nation as a whole—because J. & J. Rogers wired the town. That it had done so on its own ran afoul of the state’s new Public Service Commission, which insisted power be provided by an unreliable, but duly licensed, dynamo in Keeseville—drawing the fury of the Forks’ local newspaper.

Rogers represented what was the best and worst of Adirondack industry.

As an iron works in need of charcoal and later as a producer of paper and pulp, it mowed down the forests between Wilmington and Keene. Yet the town was important enough that a mill executive cajoled President Grover Cleveland to deliver a speech to the people of Au Sable Forks from the balcony of his Church Street mansion.

The companies held significant sway over the towns, but they also paid an outsized share of local taxes. Republic Steel covered nearly half of Moriah’s tax base by 1971, said former Moriah Supervisor Tom Scozzafava. The Benson mines, which fed the mills of Jones and Laughlin, contributed an adjusted $3.2 million to the local tax base.

Big industry, booming communities

Without a price tag but of equal importance was the vitality that pulsated through these Adirondack industrial towns. Lyon Mountain fielded one of the best amateur baseball teams in the Northeast, and its rival in Au Sable Forks was top notch, too.

Miners took pride, Neggia said, keeping neat and tidy homes, planting flower beds and raising vegetables.

Any holiday was an excuse to take to the streets. Weekends were built around Labor Day with parades, sports and fire departments turning their water hoses on their rivals.

When the 1932 Olympics had quit town, the games left behind something in Lake Placid that no other community in the United States had: a bobsled run.

Miners, mill workers, truck drivers and cops by day became bobsled tinkerers by night, and some of them got good enough to compete for medals on the international stage.

The vibrancy of the industrial towns materialized in ways that are unthinkable today.

In the Tahawus Cultural Center hangs a painting of elephants parading down Main Street in Au Sable Forks, a fond commemoration of when the circuses drew Adirondackers.

Impacts of former industries

But industrial towns came with less-pleasant realities. The work was hard and dangerous, and labor issues were often contentious.

Immigrants of differing nationalities often didn’t get along, either, and on payday workers might find themselves shaken down by the Black Hand, something of a local chapter of the Italian Mafia.

Nor would it be possible to calculate the environmental damage. Companies sprayed oil on dirt roads to keep the dust down, used rivers as open sewers and, in the case of the Benson Mines, failed to properly maintain a pipeline, which over the years allowed such a large lake of No. 2 fuel oil to accumulate below ground that it has taken $30 million to clean. 

The nascent environmental movement marked by the creation of the Adirondack Park Agency in 1971 absorbed blame for the economic misfortunes, and indeed, companies understood they would be on the hook for expensive anti-pollution equipment if they stayed. 

But environmentalists were hardly responsible for the decades of poor management and failure to modernize—a fact the J. & J. Rogers’ president himself acknowledged in 1971 while speaking to a town delegation begging him to reopen the plant. 

The Benson Mines were victimized by the collapse of the U.S. steel industry in 1973; mine shafts in Moriah had grown so deep that an unproductive hour of each workday was spent by the men riding in cages descending to the bottom. 

As industries vanished, communities were stunned. But there had been warning signs, said Betty Lamoria, whose father was foreman at Mineville’s No. 7 iron mine (and the boss of her grandfather, a situation that could get complicated).

Labor strife was growing more contentious, and across the region machines that once hummed around the clock were shutting down under the guise of maintenance or cleaning.

Lamoria said miners in Moriah had the opportunity to move to Republic Steel’s operations in Buffalo or Pittsburgh. Some did. Older worker just a year or two shy of a full pension left, then came back.

Others caught on with the paper mill in Ticonderoga or found work in Vermont.

But the hole these industries left can still be seen today. Neggia said he now warns visitors to his home against straying too far off the main street because of crime and drug use.

Company towns, without the company

Communities that had effectively been run by the companies were unprepared to take the reins and determine their own futures after the big employers departed. 

Geoff Hewston, Sharron Hewston’s husband, who lost his mill job when Rogers left, said local government jobs in those days were not filled based on leadership capabilities, but on who needed work.

If a milkman lost his job, the town would band together and elect him to town office, Hewston said.

Workers who lost their jobs as National Lead was downsizing tried to find work with the state, or caretaking for camp owners. As the mine closed, so did the government-built railroad. The last load of ore shipped in 1989.

“There was very little forward thinking,” said Joan Burke, director of the Newcomb Historical Museum.

Today, the railroad is owned by a rail-biking company that bought it at a bankruptcy auction.

“There was a scramble to find jobs, and nobody knew where they were going to land. The advice was hang on, it will get better.”

Jerry Delaney, director of the Adirondack Park Local Government Review Board and member of the APA

Whatever the quality of local leadership, there was little money to invest in towns’ futures. Residents had grown accustomed to industry paying the lion’s share of the taxes, and it was difficult to ask those who had just lost their jobs to pay more. The predictable result, Scazzafava said, was a deterioration in town infrastructure.

The rise and fall of prison towns

A page was turned in 1980 when the Olympics came to Essex County, bringing the prison industry along with it. The Olympic Village in Ray Brook was designed as the federal prison it would become after the games—drawing no small degree of ire from international athletes who objected to sleeping in thinly disguised prison cells.

The private capital that had dried up with the exit of the mills and mines was replaced with public capital spent on ski centers and corrections. “People felt there was an unspoken promise,” Delaney said. “In exchange for the (economic) harm the APA would do, the state was going to give us jobs.”

“The building of the federal prison at Ray Brook also provided communities across northern New York with a model of how to deal with (economic) crises through the construction of prisons and employment of guards,” wrote Jack Norton in a scholarly examination of North Country prisons. “Many of these small mining and agricultural towns transitioned to prison towns in the years following the games.”

From 1983 to 2000, the state built 38 prisons in rural communities, and by the end of the century the 45th Senate District covering the North Country had 14 prisons in communities that included former industrial towns like Moriah and Lyon Mountain.

Yet by 2020, this model was recognized as unsustainable and racially fraught. “We have consistently said that prisons are not an economic development program,” Gov. Andrew Cuomo said. 

As the North Country emerged from the COVID-19 pandemic, prison populations were plunging and the administration of Gov. Kathy Hochul concurred with Cuomo’s prison-closure program.

Adirondack employment would have to reinvent itself yet again.