THE TOWN THAT GENEROSITY BUILT
He was dying. And after caring for his brother eight years earlier—comforting him until his last gasp—he knew how this would end. But if consumption would soon kill him, leaving behind his beloved wife, two babies and a happiness and stability he could only have imagined, he wanted to spend his last days in the mountains and the forest. In his 1915 autobiography, Dr. Edward Livingston Trudeau wrote that such surroundings “seemed to meet a longing I had for rest and the peace of the great wilderness.” Weak and feverish, Trudeau endured the trip from his home in New York City to the remote, rugged northern Adirondacks. He was jostled and slammed in a horse-drawn wagon the last 42 miles from Au Sable Forks to Paul Smith’s hotel, where he was carried like a sleepy child to his room.
After three months at Paul Smith’s place, the young doctor—sunburned, 15 pounds heavier and in improved health—returned to his family. His time in the outdoors seemed to have arrested the ravages of tuberculosis, a disease then synonymous with death.
Soon, Trudeau and his family were boarding in a simple clap-board house in Saranac Lake, at that time just a settlement of a half-dozen guides’ shanties. To prolong his life, wrote Edward, he and his wife, Lottie, “decided to
