A Walking Tour of North Creek Preview

Welcome to North Creek, the last stop on Thomas Durant's Adirondack Railroad. That made it the gateway to the great camps of the Adirondacks and an important center for freight and commerce.

The railroad also made it easy to get to Gore Mountain. That’s why the Schenectady Wintersports Club picked North Creek as the destination of its first Snow Train on March 4, 1934 — 90 years ago.

We'll tell you all of this history and more in this 1.5 mile tour, which we begin with a curtain: The O’Keeffe Opera House curtain, which hung for a half century in a large hall on the second floor above the R.R. Higgins Drug Store, a building and business that was later acquired by pharmacist James O’Keeffe.

The O’Keeffe Opera House was for several decades the center of North Creek’s social life, hosting plays, lectures, dances, church services, political rallies, silent movies, and even high school graduations.

If the Tannery Pond Center is open, you can go in see it hanging in the lobby to the left.

Ten Main Street businesses commissioned the production of this hand-painted curtain, which served as an early form of advertising. When the Tannery Pond Center opened in 2002 thanks to a gift from Elise and Woody Widlund, the Johnsburg Historical Society found the perfect place to hang this 10-foot by 17-foot artifact as a reminder of the community’s history early in the 20th century. We’ll tell you about these businesses on our tour’s last leg on Main Street.

You’ll find other mementos from North Creek’s past here as well as a gallery that’s open Tuesday through Friday between 10 a.m. and 4 p.m. and between noon and 4 p.m. on Saturdays.

When you're ready for the tour's next leg, make your way to the driveway on the building's south side and head toward the loading dock you'll find at the building's rear. Veering into the woods on the right is a path that will take you along North Creek to the Hudson. Follow this trail.

Welcome to North Creek, the last stop on Thomas Durant's Adirondack Railroad. That made it the gateway to the great camps of the Adirondacks and an important center for freight and commerce.

The railroad also made it easy to get to Gore Mountain. That’s why the Schenectady Wintersports Club picked North Creek as the destination of its first Snow Train on March 4, 1934 — 90 years ago.

We'll tell you all of this history and more in this 1.5 mile tour, which we begin with a curtain: The O’Keeffe Opera House curtain, which hung for a half century in a large hall on the second floor above the R.R. Higgins Drug Store, a building and business that was later acquired by pharmacist James O’Keeffe.

The O’Keeffe Opera House was for several decades the center of North Creek’s social life, hosting plays, lectures, dances, church services, political rallies, silent movies, and even high school graduations.

If the building is open, you can go in see it hanging in the lobby to the left.

Ten Main Street businesses commissioned the production of this hand-painted curtain, which served as an early form of advertising. When the Tannery Pond Community Center opened in 2002 thanks to a gift from Elise and Woody Widlund, the Johnsburg Historical Society found the perfect place to hang this 10-foot by 17-foot artifact as a reminder of the community’s history early in the 20th century. We’ll tell you about these businesses on our tour’s last leg on Main Street.

You’ll find other mementos from North Creek’s past here as well as a gallery that’s open Tuesday through Friday between 10 a.m. and 4 p.m. and between noon and 4 p.m. on Saturdays.

When you're ready for the tour's next leg, make your way to the driveway on the building's south side and head toward the loading dock you'll find at the building's rear. Veering into the woods on the right is a path that will take you along North Creek to the Hudson. Follow this trail.

Entering the woods, you’ll come immediately to an interpretive sign that shows you Mill Pond as it once looked – until storms washed out for good the dam that had been built in the late 1840s.

You'll probably want to read the sign and look around as I continue the narration, and that's fine. This narrative lasts about nine minutes, which is about how long it takes a relatively fast walker to reach the Hudson. I'll start my next story at the railroad bridge that crosses North Creek.

In just a few hundred feet, you'll come to a wall that was part of the concrete and stone dam that George Ives built to replace the cruder log dam that preceded it. A lumberman, Ives also built a sluice high on Gore Mountain down which he sent logs to the pond, floating them in rushing water drawn from Roaring Brook.

William Waddell tells the story of Kenneth Eldridge, an adventurous young man who, for a lark, decided it would be fun to ride a log a short way down the sluice and jump off. The problem: It plummeted so quickly down the chute he was unable to jump off. He took a wild ride and, at the end, shot 15 feet into Mill Pond. Luckily, there were only a few logs in the pond. Had he landed on one, he could have been killed.

Before Milton Sawyer and Wheeler Meade built their tannery, lumberjacks built the first semi-permanent structures here for themselves and their horses between 1840 and 1850. They did much of their cutting in winter so they could more easily transport their 13-foot logs by horse-drawn sleds and stack them by the side of the creek. When the snow melt was at its highest each spring, they shoved them into the stream to float them down to the Hudson, where they embarked on a 40-mile journey to the sawmills of Glens Falls.

Sawyer and Meade also used the creek as an energy source. Mill Pond’s water wheel drove the scrapers and hammers that cleaned and softened the hides before they were placed in large tannin-filled vats.

Brazil and Argentina had the cattle, but we had the tannin from hemlocks that was essential in the tanning process. Hides arrived by ship at the Port of Albany. They were packed on barges on the Champlain and feeder canals and brought to Glens Falls. The hides were then stacked on wagons and brought to North Creek along rough plank roads. Hides were also delivered to tanneries at the Glen, Wevertown, and Oregon, southwest of Bakers Mills.

Glenn Pearsall writes:

“Imagine the sights and smells of this active tannery with its men shouting orders above the sound of tannery machinery, the smells of raw hides and the tannery “baths,” and the horses helping to bring in the hemlock bark stacked tall on wagons and sleds.”

“Hides were salted and dried to preserve them for the long trips to eastern seaboard ports. Hides were often packed with flesh and dirt that caused parts of them to rot. Some hides had holes that were caused by ticks and other insects common to more tropical regions. Getting the hides to the tanner was surely dirty, smelly work.”

Hemlocks would be cut, stripped of their bark, and left on the ground to decay. With four tanneries in Johnsburg alone, much of the land around here was left barren and its waters polluted in the mid and late 1800s.

Here's how a New York Times reporter described the East Branch of the Sacandaga River in 1889, where the Oregon tannery was located:

"The foul combination of the hemlock juices and malodorous hides flows in an inky stream into the river which kills the fish that have the misfortune of swimming into it from their mountain streams."

Six years later, voters would approve the addition of the Forever Wild clause to the New York State Constitution, strengthening the protections that had been imposed when the State Forest Preserve was created in 1885.

Tanneries typically would have to close within 20 to 40 years because all hemlocks within a ten-mile radius would be destroyed. That's what happened to North Creek's tannery. After it burned in 1890, Billy Baker built a sawmill on the site, opening it on August 29th. Three days later, half of it was destroyed when the dam went out. He rebuilt it two weeks later, showing the kind of determination that was typical of these early settlers.

Before the dam was washed out for the last time in the 1940s, James O’Keeffe, the local pharmacist, ran an ice-harvesting operation here.

He would hire several teams of men and horses to cut the ice by hand and then, with pike poles, push the cakes up a ramp and onto a sled, which the horses would drag to O’Keeffe’s pharmacy. The men then lugged the ice into the basement, where they would stack it and pack it in sawdust.

There were no refrigerators in those days, so the ice was needed to keep food cold in the warmer months. “A full cake would sell for fifty cents and a half cake for twenty-five cents,” writes his son Dan O’Keeffe in Halfway to Heaven, his invaluable memoir of “livin’ in the ‘Crick."



You're approaching the bridge over North Creek that told north-bound passengers on the Adirondack Railroad that they were about to pull into the North Creek station. Of course, this is not the original structure, but this is where the tracks ran. The Delaware & Hudson Railroad took over its operations in 1902, and this entire area became its rail yard.

In a few hundred yards, you'll see off to the right an interpretive sign that tells you the history of the Hudson River Bridge. You may want to stop and read it and enjoy the scene. This narrative will last five minutes. My next be triggered as you approach the Waddell Buildings.

As the major promoter of the Union Pacific Railroad, Thomas Durant was made rich in part by his role in the Credit Mobilier debacle, which we learned briefly in our American history classes was the most egregious political scandals in the 19th century.

But we can say this much for Durant: He knew how to get things done, and he did a lot for North Creek.

After Sawyer and Meade opened their tannery in 1852, Durant established a home here and acquired large tracts of land all the way to Blue Mountain Lake, Raquette Lake, and Long Lake. In North Creek, he built a sawmill and wood-working mill. And, in 1865, he started building the Adirondack Railroad, starting in Saratoga Springs and following the west bank of the Hudson River 60 miles to North Creek.

Way back in 1848, a first attempt was made by the Saratoga and Sacketts Harbor Railroad, which laid 20 miles of disconnected track north of Hadley, but the venture failed. As the end of the Civil War neared, Durant resurrected that effort.

Born in Lee, Massachusetts in 1820, Durant had planned to become a doctor and actually earned a degree from Albany Medical College in 1840. But instead of practicing medicine, he promptly joined his uncle’s flour and grain business and started speculating in stocks. In time, he achieved a remarkable ability to manipulate stocks, especially railroad stocks. Being volatile and plentiful, they were an especially promising terrain for grifters, a bit like crypto today.

During the Civil War, Durant used his participation in the Missouri & Mississippi Railroad to make a fortune smuggling contraband cotton from the Confederate States. He parlayed those profits into a scheme to control the Union Pacific Railroad, through which he was able to make additional millions by overcharging the government for the track he laid for the Transcontinental Railroad.

In 1869, Durant was there with Leland Stanford at Promontory Point, Utah to drive the celebrated golden spike. By that time, he had completed 37 miles of his Adirondack Railroad to Thurman. Two years later, he reached North Creek with a plan to extend the railroad first to the big McIntyre iron mine in Tahawus and onward to the eastern shore of Lake Ontario.

The Erie Canal had been one big idea for opening the young nation's interior. Durant's was another. Via the Great Lakes, he would transport passengers, manufactured goods, and natural resources from the Adirondacks to the Midwest.

After reaching North Creek, Durant wanted to keep going to Lake Ontario, but the Financial Panic of 1873 nearly wiped him out and touched off a six-year depression and made further financing of the railroad impossible. But North Creek thrived. The railroad brought in tourists and made it cheaper to transport hides and leather, garnet ore, iron ore, and wood products.

Durant’s charter with the New York State gave him control of nearly one-fifth of the Adirondacks. He ultimately acquired more than one million acres free of taxes for 20 years. He envisioned the Adirondacks as a wilderness from which to wrest further wealth. His son William innovated the Adirondack “Great Camp, showcasing rustic elegance and native materials in mansions bought by Carnegies, Vanderbilts, Morgans, and Rockefellers.

Durant started his railroad with one engine called the General Hancock, a passenger car, a mail car, a baggage car, and four or five flat cars. Then he quickly doubled the number of locomotives and added fifty freight cars, storing them here in the rail yard.

Durant built a sawmill here beside the Hudson even before completing his railroad to North Creek. Between 1905 and the early 1930s, Dr. Lee Somerville operated a mill here that made broom handles and “mangle rolls,” which were used in wash tubs of the time to wring out water and press fabrics.

A new era in the railroad's history began in 1902 when the Delaware & Hudson Railroad fully acquired it and assumed its operations. The D&H upgraded the infrastructure of its Adirondack Branch with new locomotives, heavier rails, and more comfortable passenger cars.

For the next half-century, the railroad remained a vital conduit for the transportation of timber, minerals and other products to broader markets, and the ease and comfort of rail travel made towns like Saratoga Springs and North Creek accessible to more people. Resorts and hotels thrived.

During World War II, when the nation had a critical need for titanium for planes and weaponry, the U.S. government spearheaded the construction of an additional 30 miles of track to the former McIntyre Mine in Tahawus.

But as more people began to favor the convenience of cars and trucks, demand dwindled. The D&H terminated passenger service on the branch in 1956 and freight service in 1989.

Revolution Rail Co. launched its innovative rail cycling operation here in 2017, using several miles of track in both directions to give visitors a new way to experience the the Adirondacks. Some dream of a rail trail that might someday enable cyclists to ride the entire route from Saratoga Springs to the southern entry to the High Peaks region at Tahawus, but that would require pulling up the tracks. So long as the titanium ore at the mine has value, an argument can be made for keeping those tracks in place.

The Waddell Buildings are coming up. Let's keep going.


Operating between Memorial Day and the end of September, the Adirondack Glassblowing Studio occupies one of two buildings that were built by William R. and Lee Waddell, who established a successful general store in Wevertown in 1865 and then expanded their business to North Creek. First, they established a slaughterhouse that produced beef and lamb mostly for such hotels as the Prospect House on Blue Mountain Lake and other hotels on Indian Lake. Then they established a stage line that ran 20 miles from North Creek to Indian Lake and built one of these buildings as a stable for their horses. They bought this property from William W. Durant, Thomas's son, in 1901.

William was also a partner in the stage line that ran from Riverside — now called Riparius — to the great Gilded Age hotels on Schroon Lake. When motor cars and Stanley Steamers came on the market around 1910, William was among the first to use them. No longer needing horses, he converted his North Creek stables into stores for grain, hay and coal.

At this point, I'll be telling stories that are packed closely together. To hear them in their entirety, you'll want to stop as soon as the story starts and stop to hear it out. I'll tell you when to move on and where to go.

Built by Thomas Durant in 1874, the North Creek Railroad Station was on the brink of demolition in the early 90s when a group of local residents set out to save it, creating the North Creek Railway Depot Preservation Association. Today, the station serves as a museum of local history, showcasing the railroad’s rich heritage and the pivotal role it played in the region's development.

One of its exhibits spotlights Teddy Roosevelt's celebrated midnight ride in the early hours of September 14, 1901. That’s when he was summoned from the base of Mount Marcy to join a dying William McKlnley in Buffalo. Roosevelt received the somber news of McKinley's death on this station’s platform.

Another exhibit spotlights the railroad's role in the development of skiing at Gore Mountain.

This story begins early in the Great Depression when Lake Placed hosted the 1932 Olympics. For the first time, upstate New Yorkers saw world-class athletes competing in cross-country skiing, hockey, speed skating, ski jumping, figure skating, and the "bobsleigh." Norway’s amazing Sonja Henie won gold in figure skating. Eddie Eagan won gold in the bobsleigh, making him only the second American athlete in history to win gold medals in both the Summer and Winter Olympics. He had won gold in boxing in 1920.

The games were an eye-opener for a half-dozen young men from North Creek who returned home determined to revive the economy and turn Gore Mountain into a destination for skiing. Driving five miles up the road that led to Barton Mine, they cleared an old logging road to a width of ten to 30 feet and named it the Pete Gay Trail.

For 25 young people from Schenectady — many who worked at GE — the experience was similarly life-changing. Launching the Schenectady Winter Sports Club, they started organizing a “Snow Train” to take them to more mountainous terrain. Joining the trail-builders in North Creek, they organized the first Snow Train on March 4, 1934, 90 years ago. So popular did the D&H become as a convenient way to get to ski country the railroad started scheduling Snow Trains from Albany and New York City as well. The popularity of skiing at Gore grew throughout the Great Depression, making North Creek a national success story.

By now you may have spotted opposite the museum a great tower with a pot-like vessel on top. Let's keep going and see what that's all about.

This long building opposite the Depot Museum once was home to the North Creek Woodworking Corporation. They made simple wooden items like broom and ax handles, knobs, pallets, and heels for ladies’ shoes.

A big funnel driven by an airplane propellor pulled sawdust out of the air and drove it to the tower at the end of the building. The sawdust was blown into carriers hauled away by trucks to be used an absorbent material in cat litter and other products.

When the Adirondack Railroad arrived in 1871, hotels were among the first businesses to be established and naturally they were built nearby. That’s why John McInerny built the American Hotel in 1871 on the site of today’s Phoenix Inn Resort, which is coming up on Main Street. When you make the turn, you'll pass the small red cottage known as the Owens House. Built in 1857, this once was the home of the Owens family and today is believed to be North Creek's oldest existing structure. Owned by the North Creek Depot Museum, it will soon be renovated and made into a space for additional collections.

You'll also pass a Little Red Gondola, one of 110 imported from Switzerland and installed at Gore Mountain in 1968. You'll see another a ways up Main Street. We'll tell you its story there. For now, please continue to the Phoenix Inn Resort.

While fire destroyed John McInerny's American Hotel in 1903, Jake Waldron gave it another go on this site in 1920. His newer version offered steam heat, a beautiful garnet bar, and a dance floor, which made the New American Hotel a favorite for country bands.

Carl Schaefer operated his ski school from the New American Hotel during the winter of 1935-36. That was the same ski season he created New York State’s first rope tow after studying what they did in Woodstock, Vermont. He planted a line of poles with pulleys and wrapped rope around the rear axle of a 1929 Buick he'd bought for $100.

Developer Eliot Monter tore down the New American Hotel and replaced it with the 31-room Copperfield Inn in 1990. Renamed the Phoenix Inn Resort in 2017, the hotel was purchased by Zihan “Hannah” Ren and her father Buhai Ren early in 2023. It’s fitting that the community’s largest hotel still operates on the site of the old American Hotel. Let's continue to the Tassi House.

This house is named for Louis Tassi, a cobbler who ran his business in the small building next door. It was constructed as a three-family residence in 1926 by J. Frank Waldron, a builder whose work is reflected in a number of Main Street structures.

William W. Durant innovated the form of Adirondack architecture we see in his "great camps." That was architecture for the wealthy, with lavish log siding, stone fireplaces, and twig furniture. But most Adirondack locals lived in simple one- or two-story farmhouses, and retail stores were similarly unpretentious. Business owners ran their commercial operations on the ground floor and resided with their families on the second floor. Many had two-story front porches, as you'll see in a half-dozen buildings here on Main Street. Other common features included clapboard and wood shingles, double hung windows, and decorative posts and cornices.

Let's keep going to the former site of Smith's Restaurant, an Adirondack classic.

Frank and Anna Smith established their business as a bakery in 1924, making their residence on the second floor. It grew later into a full restaurant. When Adirondack guides came out of the woods, when river drivers brought their logs down the Hudson River gorge, when prohibition rum runners stopped for a break on their way to New York, and when skiers came in from Schenectady, Albany and New York City on the Snow Trains, Smith's Restaurant was there to feed them.

“In the early morning, you could smell those fresh donuts and buns," Tom Butler recalls. "You usually ate about twice what you're supposed to. All the truckers and loggers stopped there with their log trucks."

Directly across the street was another culinary classic, the Red Diner.

“It was like a street diner you’d find down in Albany with a curved roof and stools and benches and more seating in the back,” says Tom. “You could probably seat 40 to 50 people. It had fabulous cooks, a Wurlitzer jukebox, and pinball machines for the young ones to play. They had the best cheeseburgers and hot turkey sandwiches."

Let's keep going to the Hudson River Trading Company, which was once North Creek's main livery.



In the days before automobiles, people needed a place to keep their horses and carriages. In North Creek, this was it, built by Frank Kelly. Inside, signs of this early use are still clearly evident, as Laurie Arnheiter, the building's current owner, will be glad to show you. They kept horses on the ground floor downstairs, while carriages were parked on the street level.

After Kelly died, C.W. Sullivan reopened his grocery store in this building after his first next door was destroyed by fire. The Arnheiters opened the Hudson River Trading Company here in 1996. After filling 7,000-square feet of retail space in this building, Laurie acquired the historic "Dr. Lee" building next door and opened the Hungry Crow as a market and tasting room.

Let's continue to the Hungry Crow, which has an interesting history as the former home of a famous physician. It was called the "Doctor Lee House."

Long forgotten, Lee's Save the Baby was a popular cough remedy in the early 1900s. Made from petroleum jelly, camphor, oregano, rosemary, and balsam oils, it was rubbed on the chest. Its inventor was Dr. William R. Lee, a 1902 graduate of the Columbia University School for Physicians and Surgeons who built this home in 1915.

Dr. Lee kept his horse and buggy next door in Frank Kelly's Livery. After contracting tuberculosis, he abandoned his medical practice while pursuing a cure. When his condition improved, he became the Town of Johnsburg's health officer.

The original structure had open porches on both floors with Dr. Lee's office in the downstairs front public space. When he contracted tuberculosis, he enclosed two-thirds of his upper porch in glass.

Let's keep going to Walgreens, which long ago was known as the O'Keeffe Pharmacy with its second floor "Opera House."





Remember the O’Keeffe Opera House curtain we showed you at the start of this tour? It was here on the second floor that it hung throughout the early decades of the 20th century. R.R. Higgins owned this building and pharmacy first, and so this space was called “Higgins Hall” and we find his name on the curtain. James O’Keeffe bought the building in 1917. That's when people started calling this space the O’Keeffe Opera House.

Dan O'Keefe, James' son, describes Saturday nights In Halfway to Heaven, his memoir of “livin’ in the ‘Crick.'"

“We'd climb the stairs with our dates and a bag of popcorn and watch the movies as the pianists, Blanche Alexander and T. Landon, played the songs of the day and the younger kids read the subtitles out loud. One can imagine the thrill when the "talkies" make their debut in the Crick.”

Look to the left and you'll see the door that leads to the exterior stairs Dan described.

Let's keep going to Izzy's Market, which was built in 1903.

Dave and Kathy Waite opened Izzy's here in 2012 with a 100-percent home-cooked menu. The building has a long history dating back to the beginning of the 20th century, which is apparent in the original tin ceiling and scroll work under the eaves. Nathan and Millie Braverman opened this building as a dry goods store, and you still can see their original wooden display counters and built-in cupboards.

In 1926, it was purchased by Gabra (Ja-bra) Baroudi, who among all of North Creek's early entrepreneurs may have the most interesting backstory. A Syrian born in 1872, he was sent to America by his mother at age 16 to escape constant street fighting with Turks. Gabra first found work as a door-to-door salesman, peddling wares between New York City and Albany. Then, with his four brothers, he started buying and establishing a series of businesses that included the Happy Hour Theater, a restaurant, a barbershop, four apartments, and a grocery store that catered to "camps" all the way to Schroon Lake.

In 1990, developer Eliot Monter replaced the “Baroudi Block” with what we now call the Tops shopping center. This was around the same time he built the Copperfield Inn in 1990.

Let's keep going. We'll tell you about the fire that destroyed the Hewitt-Barbour Garage, where Hey Days pizzeria stands now on the other side of Main Street. Keep walking toward Marsha's Restaurant and this narrative should trigger.

In 1896, the Swain brothers opened a funeral home here after purchasing this property from Thomas Durant. In addition to selling caskets, they sold furniture, bedding supplies, window shades, rugs and carpets. They also were agents for pianos and grafonolas, an early kind of record player.

Celebrated local artist Kate Hartley established the H'art Studio and Gallery here in 2021, showcasing a variety of fine arts and hand-crafted objects from 50 North Country artists. Offerings include paintings, mosaics, watercolors, jewelry, cards, books, and calendars. She also hosts a range of classes, making it a hub for artists and art enthusiast alike.

Look up Main Street 200 yards and you'll see Kate's masterpiece, the Mosaic Wall. Over a ten-year period, she engaged 2000 volunteers in creating this 180-foot piece of public art, the largest in the North Country. This project transformed a 9-foot-high concrete retaining wall into a stunning mosaic masterpiece, depicting a variety of scenes from the Adirondacks, including white-water rafting, downhill skiing, fishing, and local flora and fauna. Incorporated in this work are more than 200,000 tiles and bits of shell and glass.

In the rear of the store, Kate keeps boxes of supplies used in creating the Mosaic Wall. "This was once the embalming room," she explains, showing you the exterior door through which the deceased would be discretely carried.

Our next stop is 274 Main Street, the impressively all-brick former headquarters of North Creek National Bank.

One day in 1910, Frank Husselback walked into Arbuckle’s Barber Shop, which at that time occupied this spot on Main Street. He represented a group of local businessmen who had joined in creating a bank in North Creek, and they had determined that this would be the ideal place to build it. “Would you be interested in selling?” Mr. Husselback asked Mr. Arbuckle as he was giving a customer a shave. When Mr. Arbuckle said he would, Mr. Husselback asked for his price. When Mr. Arbuckle gave it to him, Mr. Husselback, said “Sold!’ Whereupon, it is reported, Mr. Arbuckle “immediately took off his barber coat, leaving the customer sitting in the chair with lather on his face, and walked out the door."

The building was sold that day and was soon in business as the North Creek National Bank. In 1927, the bank moved up the street to a new structure on the site of the former Straight House, which was destroyed by fire in 1920. I'll tell you that story when we come to it. Let's move on to the sad story of yet another fire. The victim this time was the The Gables, the mansion owned by Thomas Durant.

The Alpine Lodge was opened as the Alpine Motel by Joe and Gloria Baroudi in 1957. A decade later, they opened the Alpine Restaurant, which is now Marsha's.

But let's go way back to 1871. That's when Thomas Durant, who built the Adirondack Railroad, bought the "Coleman House" which stood on this property and renamed it the Gables. This ultimately became a compound with stables, greenhouses, a chicken house, and numerous out buildings. The main house was located down the slope at the end of what we now call Baroudi Lane. Durant died here on October 6, 1885. Fire claimed the Gables in 1959, when temperatures sank to near zero in mid-March.

As you pass the Alpine Lodge, note the Little Red Gondola beside the main entrance. When the state installed New York State's first gondola at Gore in 1969, it imported 110 of these four-passenger cabins from Switzerland. Thirty years later, these small cabins were made obsolete by the eight-passenger cabins we see in today's Northwoods Gondola. The Olympic Regional Development Authority kept about 70 of the four-passenger cabins to loan out to various organizations in the area. You'll see a number of these around.

As you head toward our next stop at Cafe Sara, look across the street at the Hey Days pizzeria and imagine taking place there in 1965 one of the most intense fires in North Creek history. Feeding on oil and other flammables associated with auto maintenance, the conflagration destroyed the big Hewitt-Barbour Garage. After nine hours of fighting the blaze as a volunteer fireman, Tom "Buckshot" Butler returned to the brand new Chevy truck he'd parked across the street and discovered that the side that faced the fire had been scorched from "green to burnt."

John Wade was a butcher who opened a meat store here on Christmas morning, 1894. You'd enter it off Circle Avenue. Wade was also an undertaker, and you’d enter his funeral home off Main Street. Later, this building housed the Post Office on the left and the New York Power and Light offices on the right.

On the empty lot to the left of this store, Wade’s son, Charles, owned a grocery, which he advertised on the O’Keeffe Opera House curtain. In the 1950s, that burned along with the Wade Hotel, which was owned at the time by the Farrell family.

When the existing Wade building was renovated for Café Sarah in 2000 by Sarah's dad, Larry Hayden, they had to raise the entire building six inches to rebuild the old foundation. Sara opened the Cafe after an apprenticeship in French pastries at a high-end French restaurant in Seattle. She wanted to run her own bakery and so came back home to launch it.

Let's continue on to another Adirondack classic, Braley and Noxon Hardware. If you're in need of just about anything, you may want to drop in. It's a lot bigger than it looks from the outside.



Braley and Noxon goes all the way back to 1888 when two cousins in Chestertown -- William Noxon and Alfred Braley -- saw the growth taking place in North Creek and decided to open a hardware store. They put up this building and moved their business into it in 1896. Early inventory included horse-drawn mowing machines, wheelbarrows, grindstones, and wooden barrels, plus hardware and housewares. Braley and Noxon made news in 1901 when they installed acetylene gas for illumination, replacing kerosene lamps.

In the store’s early days, Cora Montgomery ran her millinery shop on the store’s south side. She sold men's and women's hats for every season, some beautifully trimmed with ostrich feathers, flowers, or both. She priced them at $1.50 and up. Her store is among the ten advertisers featured on the O’Keeffe Opera House curtain, as are Braley and Noxon.

Following William Noxon’s death in 1930, the store was owned and maintained by a series of descendants, including Ernest Noxon and his sisters, Grace, Ruth, and Mary who assumed ownership until 1988, a century from the store’s founding. In 2003, the store was acquired by present owners Richard and Agnes Green.

Let's move on to The Foothills of the Adirondacks, formerly Prescott's Jewelry Store.


Of all of the historic structures on Main Street, this is the one that a time-traveller from the early 20th century would have most trouble recognizing. In its original construction, this was a two-story house in which jeweler, clock repairman, and optician Albert E. Prescott lived with his growing family and elderly parents and in-laws. Its front facade was about 15 feet back from the street. If you step back from the store so that you can view its second story, you'll see that this original house is still there. A long-time store employee named William Cobb bought the business and property in 1969 and built this extension and stone facade.

Before moving on, take a look at the building directly across the street, which represents another interesting design solution. It's called the "Bottom Up Building" because it achieved its three-story height in a most unusual way. Built prior to 1893, its owner, Lou Pereau, owned land only to where -- quote -- "the building's eaves dripped," so the only way to add space was to go up. He did this by raising the first level to the third level, thereby the name "bottom up."

Let's keep going to the Community Bank building. I'll tell you the sad story of what happened here the night the Straight House burned.


Here on the site of Community Bank once stood one of North Creek's earliest hotels: The Straight House was built here even before Thomas Durant completed his Adirondack Railroad to North Creek in 1871. Its business was rooted largely in lumber operations and the tannery, which Milton Sawyer and Wheeler Meade built in 1852 right over the hill from here. It was three stories with four dormers across the front and porches encircling the building on both first and second floors. It had 30 rooms and large gardens in which to grow vegetables for guests. It was a busy place, especially after the railroad. "Folks taking the train would often leave their horses to be tended at the Straight House barns while they were gone; something like dropping your car at 'Easy Park' at the airport these days," writes Glenn Pearsall. Alas, the Straight House burned to the ground on the night of January 18, 1920.

"The wind was blowing from the north and the fire fanned by the strong wind quickly spread throughout the building," writes William Waddell. "A bucket brigade was formed from the 'Mill Pond' but it was a case of too little, too late." North Creek Community Bank, which first occupied the building where Mr. Arbuckle had his barbershop, relocated to this spot. Among its many iterations since then: First Trust of Albany, Bankers Trust, Key Bank, First American, Albank, and Charter One. The bank parking lot occupies the lot where the parsonage of the First United Methodist Church was located before it was destroyed in the same 1920 fire that took the Straight House. The building the Methodists sold to Jennifer Zimmerman in 2017 is directly across the street and now houses Kirche, her antique store. Because the building is expensive to heat, Jennifer generally operates her store only in warmer months and the winter holidays. When she's open, she'll have a sign outside. Continue walking on Main Street's left side to hear the building's story.

First, I should explain the name. Kirche is German for "church," and so very appropriately is the name Jennifer Zimmerman gave her antiques store several years ago. She loves the building and went so far as to install an electronic carillon that plays hymns three times daily from its steeple.

This building dates back to 1879, when it was known as the Methodist Episcopal Church. Its stained glass windows are its most remarkable feature, not only for their craftsmanship but for the nameplates on each that honor prominent individuals and families. Two church members, Robert and Marian Morse, have researched and published a booklet on their lives, which is available inside.

The former parsonage to the right of the building replaced the parsonage across the street that was destroyed the same night the Straight House burned.

Just to show you how all of these stories I'm telling interconnect, the Methodists built their new parsonage on a lot they acquired following the death of Bertha Kenyon, who had owned the building with her husband Howard. This was where they ran their business in lumber and “ladies and gents furnishings” that we saw advertised on the O’Keeffe Opera House curtain.

Our next point of interest is St. Thomas Church. It's on the other side of the street, but stay on the left and I'll tell you about its two notable connections to skiing.




Back in the 1930s, the pastor of St. James Church was Father James McMahon. In some way, he had the means in 1934 to purchase 430 acres on the slope of Gore Mountain nearest the train station and sell it to the town for $1. Thus was the Ski Bowl born, becoming the focus of skiing in North Creek until New York State opened the Gore Mountain Ski Area 30 years later. The Ski History Room in the North Creek Depot Museum is dedicated to Fr. McMahon.

The church's other connection to skiing comes via Vince Schaefer, the noted GE scientist and inventor who in his 20s founded the Schenectady Wintersports Club, which organized the first Snow Train in 1934 and many Snow Trains subsequently. In retirement, the ever-curious Vince started exploring what resulted when you sliced an Adirondack rock thinner than a potato chip using a diamond-tipped circular saw blade. What you got, he discovered, was a translucent oval as beautiful as stained glass. He made a dozen remarkable works that he mostly gave to family members and friends, but he saved his masterpiece, The St. James Window, for this church. The window is best seen from the inside, but you can get a sense of it by walking up the driveway to the rear. Or just see the photo and store we've included on this app.

Our final stop is the empty lot across the street on the southeastern corner of Main Street's intersection with Bridge Street. That's where Cunningham's General Store stood. It played a central role in the story of how skiing came to North Creek. We'll tell it to you as you return to the start of our tour at Town Hall.



As you can see, we've almost completed our tour. Up ahead are the Tannery Pond Center and Town Hall, a building that for 30 years served as an automobile showroom before being brought into government service in the 1950s. Where the library’s parking lot now sits, George and Grace Saunders offered sandwiches, donuts and coffee at the Ideal Lunchroom. Look to your left down Bridge Street, and you'll see the site of the tannery that Milton Sawyer and Wheeler Meade built in the 1850s, right where the North Creek Laundromat stands at the end in the road. And on this empty lot beside the Tannery Pond Center stood Cunningham's General Store, which played a central role in the story of how skiing came to North Creek. Patrick J. Cunningham started the store with his wife Catherine in 1908. When skiing started to become popular in the late 1920s, Patrick started making skis from barrel staves and, bringing his son Butler in the business, started expanding into what we now know as the oldest continually operating ski shop in the country.

The pivotal moment in this story arrived with the 1932 Lake Placid Olympics, which Butler attended with Kenneth Bennett, Howard and Guy Alexander, Lee Hewitt, Art Prescott, Dr. Braley and others.

Here’s Dick Cunningham, son of Butler:

"The Depression was really horrible. In economics, they talk about the velocity of money. Well, there wasn't any money so there wasn't much velocity. My dad sold anything you could buy at a general store -- skis, meat -- and they might take in $15 or $30 for the day. “Now you had the Olympics. This was so exciting. 'Let's go! Let's see it!' But these young men didn't go in style. They took their tents and sleeping bags. They tented outside and went to all the events. When they came back to North Creek, they said, 'Winter doesn't have to be terrible. Life doesn't have to be boring. We've got a great mountain. We even have a road up the mountain and there are trails because they logged that whole side of the mountain and they could come down those log roads."

The Cunningham family's involvement in skiing and the shop's operations continued for generations. Pat Cunningham, a former member of the U.S. ski team, took over the business in the 1950s and managed it until 2019. Throughout its history, Cunningham's Ski Barn has not only been a commercial entity but also a significant part of the local skiing community and history.

With that story, we'll leave you. If you still have the energy and would like to see more of North Creek, "the Carol A. Thomas Trail, which can be accessed from the rear of the lower parking lot at the Town Hall, will take you along North Creek beneath Route 28 to the Ski Bowl. That's where you'll get an up-close look at Gore Mountain. Thanks for listening. We hope you enjoyed this GPS-triggered history of the hamlet of North Creek.