ADIRONDAC ORE BY OAR: Appreciating the History of the McIntyre Mines

           

MY CAR ACCESSESS the Blue Ridge Road upon exiting the Northway at Exit 29. The six-million-acre Adirondack Park has few roads more sublime or better indicative of the remoteness of the Forest Preserve than this one. We count on one hand the human structures we pass during the 17-mile drive to Tahawus Road where the McIntyre Mine and Iron Works once operated. Our plan is to kayak the waterway that parallels the Tahawus Road. Therein we will gain a deeper insight into the land’s significance at the time Adirondack civilization and nature first met.

We are treated to pristine mountain views on both sides of the road. I lower the windows to better breathe the pine-scented air. Bordering Forest Preserve land most of the way, the road emits a vastness of space. Other than a few hardscrabble roads leading to trailheads or lake shores, the views today are much as they were in 1828. That’s the year when State Senator Duncan McMartin Jr. secured passage of legislation to build the road. Blue Ridge Road was needed to provide access to the 100,00-acre tract of land that McMartin’s business partners David Henderson and Archibald McIntyre purchased the year before after the 1826 discovery of the “mammoth ore bed.” They envisioned a large-scale iron ore mining and manufacturing operation that would jumpstart the American Industrial Revolution.

            Following the construction of Blue Ridge Road came a bustling village filled with hundreds of workers and their families who came to work the mines. Its role was destined as a core component in America’s steel production. Its ore received a gold medal at the 1851 World’s Fair in London. The Village of Adirondac (originally called McIntyre) arose from an uninhabited wilderness into a promising civilization. The community was on an upward trajectory. And then work suddenly ground to a halt. Operations ceased suddenly at McIntyre Mines in the late 1850s. Adirondac quickly become a ghost town.

The Hudson Valley Naturalist John Burroughs visited in 1858, recording his observations:

“One little frame house I remember particularly; the door was off the hinges and leaned against the jambs. The windows had but a few panes left which glared vacantly. The yard and little garden spot were overrun with a heavy growth of timothy, and the fences had all long since gone to decay. … It was a curious and melancholy spectacle.

“…There were about thirty buildings in all, most of them small frame houses with a door and two windows opening into a small yard in front and a garden in the rear, such as are usually occupied by laborers in a country manufacturing district. There was a large two-story boarding house, a schoolhouse with a cupola, and a bell in it, and numerous sheds and forges, and a sawmill. In front of the sawmill, and ready to be rolled in their place on the carriage, lay a large pile of pine logs, so decayed that one could run his walking-stick through them. Nearby, a building filled with charcoal was bursting open and the coal going to waste on the ground.”    

The rise and fall of Adirondac and the later rebirth of its mining operations is a fascinating story of hope and tragedy.

            Today, Adirondac is merely a cul-de-sac parking lot now known as the Upper Works Trailhead that serves as a hiker portal to majestic places in the High Peaks Wilderness Area. Hikers today leave the Adirondac parking lot for wilderness experience at sites named after the pioneering industry men who opened this area for settlement. Mount Colden was originally known as Mt. McMartin; the tripartite high-peak mountain range of Wright, Algonquin, and Iroquios is still known as the McIntyre Range. Beautiful Henderson Lake is a short half-mile stroll from the parking lot.

Like the drive in along Blue Ridge Road, the Tahawus Road (Country Route 25) is picturesque. The route parallels the linear Lake Sanford, Calamity Brook and the Opalescent River – all of which compete for claims as the mighty Hudson River’s progenitor. I have long admired these roadside waterways as I’ve traveled to the Upper Works Trailhead. An avid paddler, I’ve often dreamt of taking my kayak on them. In the wake of New York State’s 2003 acquisition of these lands into the Forest Preserve, my desire can now be realized.

Such anticipation and actualization of a dream adds to my excitement today as Sue and I drive the Tahawus Road to Upper Works with two kayaks strapped to the top of the car. The trip will be new to me, but with a century’s worth of civilization and industrialization attempts abounding here my voyage resembles a visit to the past more so than the present. Where they mined these shores for valuable iron ore, my oars will mine for valuable insights into the historical significance of what was once the McIntyre Mines.  

CONSTRUCTION OF BLUE RIDGE ROAD and Tahawus road was not immediate. Its development spanned several years. Duncan McMartin wrote of having to wade through the mid-thigh deep Boreas River and mid-body deep Hudson River on his 1830 visit to the McIntyre land. As late as 1833 Archibland McIntyre was still loathing those “abominable” roads.

“I wish we had suitable roads to, and suitable accommodations at ‘McIntyre,’ for our families to go there. I have no doubt it would be beneficial for them to spend a month or two there annually,” the former State Comptroller wrote 16 February 1833. He was speaking specifically about the outlet of Lake Henderson, a stone’s throw away from the parking lot that was then and now known as the Upper Works.

     McIntyre, McMartin, and Henderson visited the site In August 1830. Then Tahawus Road had only been cut as far as the southern outlet of Sanford Lake. A mining base of operations planned here (but not developed until 1844) was designated both as “Lower Works” and “Tahawus,” the latter the Algonquinname given to Mt. Marcy, New York’s highest mountain. We drive past Lower Works, getting out of the car to inspect the 60-foot-high 1854 Blast Furnace adjacent to the road leading to Upper Works.

Head-and-shoulders above the several dilapidated buildings that adjoin the Upper Works parking lot[1], the furnace is unquestionably the McIntyre tract’s grandest relic from days gone-by. Forty feet wide on all four sides, the furnace once capable of processing 14 tons of iron per day is today on the National Registry of Historic Places. For comparison purposes, prior to construction of the blast furnace iron output in 1834 was one ton per week. Primitive methods including smelting the ore by use of a forge and charcoal were in use before the blast furnace. The melted ore was then allowed to settle “in the bottom of the forge hearth into a loop,” wrote Henry Dornburgh in his 1885 pamphlet, Why the Wilderness is Called Adirondack, “This loop was then taken out, put under a large hammer called a shingling hammer, and after being shingled into a loop it was heated again and put under a smaller hammer when it was drawn out in bar iron.”

A perfect archway – large enough for my Volkswagen Jetta to fit beneath – provides entry to the bricks-and-mortar furnace. Although long gone, a wheel house, carpenter shop, and two large coal houses were originally attached alongside a dock and crane capable of loading boats that sent the finished iron south on the river. A previous furnace constructed in 1838 was in prior use, but was destroyed by lightning long after blasting operations were suspended.

“It has four blowing cylinder, made of cast iron, with quadruple the power required at any one time, and so constructed that one blower can work while the others are not in use,” explained a prospectus issued in 1834, “They will blow equal to 5,000 cubic feet per minute. This furnace is located at a dam of never failing water power of twelve feet head and fall.” The dam has long since wasted away in the Great Floods of 1856, but it is just north of here that Sue and I select as our kayak put-in location. Dragging our kayaks down an embankment less than a half mile below the furnace we begin our paddle through an amazing chapter of Adirondack industrial age history.

SUE AND I WASTE NO TIME in commencing our paddling trip. The infant Hudson River broadens, and then narrows again roughly six miles north of the outlet of Lake Sanford. While it is accurate to say that we will be kayaking on the Hudson River at its northern-most paddling section as this flow of water has its source in Lake Tear of the Cloud, others will claim that technically speaking the Hudson begins just south of here in the Town of Newcomb. I’m in the former camp.

Lake Tear of the Cloud feeds the Feldspar Brook, a mountain stream that merges with the Lake Colden spill-waters to form the Opalescent River. It is the Opalescent River – or East River as David Henderson called it – that winds through a precipitous gorge before joining the waterway up ahead that we will paddle today. Our put-in is on the Calamity Brook, which in Henderson’s time was known as the Ore Bed Stream. It only took on the Calamity name after Henderson’s untimely 1845 death. I argue that the Hudson River originates upon the confluence of Calamity Brook with the Opalescent River. I find support in Henderson’s writings who called this section the “infant Hudson.”

It is a clear, bluebird day in early September. Beyond our sterns are the cones and domes of the High Peaks, rising majestically in the sky. Frequently I twist my torso when swooping my paddle from bow to stern just to gawk at the mountains to our rear. I wonder if maybe one day kayaks will come with rearview mirrors? For the present moment, the rotation of the boat with my turn strokes suffices.

Void of the “purples mountains majesty,” the river view south is equally sublime. Tall spired Black Spruce, bushy Balsam Fir and curious-looking red cedars share space along the riverfront with birch, beech, and maple. It is hard to believe that these lands were once denuded of all trees, a result of the need to feed fuel to the charcoal kilns and the blast furnace. I am happy that Nature has reclaimed the river corridor. Verdant trees and shrubs again thrive. It looks today like I imagine it did in 1826 when Lewis Elijah Benedict, first led McMartin, Henderson, and others through the Indian Pass to behold these lands.

The Penobscot’s reveal of these lands to the Scottish-born prospectors changed the history of these lands forevermore. They came to the North Woods in search of silver but found iron ore instead. A small mining operation in North Elba (east of modern-day Lake Placid) was already established at the time, but the Scots were frustrated when the North Elba ore proved unworkable. That’s when Benedict offered to lead them through a mountain pass with the promise of a greater specimen.

“Here is the great mother vein of iron,” Henderson wrote full of excitement after this 1886 discovery, “which throws her little veins and sprinkles all over these mountains.” Both sides of the river in which we now paddle were once saturated with ore, “eighty feet into the wood,” Henderson claimed.

“In the middle of the river where the water runs over – the channel appears like the bottom of a smoothing iron,” Henderson’s 14 October 1826 report to his later father-in-law Archibald McIntyre boasted, “In short, the thing is past all our conceptions.”

The pair wasted no time in purchasing the land of Township 47 (modern day Newcomb) in 1827. Land clearing and the construction of a sawmill began in 1830. One imagines the pride beaming from McIntyre’s grin when he wrote his brother-in-law McMartin on the 3^rd day of January in 1832, “We have a field for extensive and vast operations and that probably at some time or other works of great magnitude will be erected and carried at our place.”

      A row of half-submerged rocks crosses the channel ahead of my kayak, perhaps the remains of a dam or bridge. There is little time to study or reflect on their past purpose. I focus entirely on charting my path through the broken water.

Then my gaze is diverted to a fisherman wading in the waters ahead. I channel my boat far from his line. I am always daunted when I come across an angler while paddling. Like me, he is a fellow recreationalist maximizing his opportunities for solitude and serenity such that I view him as a compatriot, yet here I am intruding upon his space – and perhaps scaring away the fish. I offer a respectful nod as I drift past.

Lake Henderson, which feeds this section of river, is home to a fish hatchery where Lake Trout has been spawning since its inception in the Nineteenth Century. The hatchery was built when sporting clubs began leasing the McIntrye lands following the mine’s demise. For awhile Henderson Lake was also stocked with California Salmon, while Lake Colden was stocked with Speckled Trout. I do not know what fish species today calls the Ore Bed Stream its home.

The river current, while never obtrusive, is nonetheless swift. Soon, we reach the County 76 bridge leading to the open pit mine at Lower Works for which mining operations remain active today. I cannot see much of the mining facility from my kayak, but imagine it is far different than when Henderson established facilities in 1844. He oversaw the building of a dam, dock, sawmill, worker housing, and a steel plant with plans to begin forging steel using the charcoal method. During the 1850s an iron warehouse was built, as also a blacksmith shop, a larger boarding house, barn, schoolhouse for worker’s children, and a lime kiln on a 350-acre clearing. It’s tragic now for me to realize that all this development came to naught when operations ceased in 1857 following Henderson’s untimely death.

Work was also halted at Upper Works when the company lost its able overseer. Following Henderson’s death were abandoned 16 dwelling houses, six coal houses, three coal kilns, three large barns, two kilns for roasting ore, a cupola furnace, a blast furnace, a forge and paddling furnace, a stamping mill, a mill for driving small machinery, a saw mill, a grist mill, hay scale, brick house, granary, tool house, ice house, blacksmith shop, schoolhouse, piggery, storage shed, powder house, a large boarding house, store, overseer’s house, and several stables for cow and oxen.

It is a travesty to me that all these buildings were vacated as much as it marvels me that under Henderson’s leadership so much development took place. Nevertheless, both Works became a ghost town such that John Burroughs was able to comment in his 1863 visit “that things were not wantonly destroyed but allowed to go to decay properly and decently.”

It is almost as if the site was abandoned with hopes that some economic stimulus or new leadership might revive it. Such an attempt was made a half-century later. In 1908, Archibald McIntyre’s grandson James MacNaughton incorporated the MacIntyre Iron Company (now spelling McIntyre as MacIntyre) and renewed the mining of iron. Two tons of iron was mined alone in 1909. Iron-producing efforts faltered, however, when a one-percent titanium-impurity was discovered in the MacIntyre iron ore. While such impurity was inconsequential during the early days of steel production, after more exacting steel standards were adopted in the Twentieth Century James MacNaughton’s enterprise also came to a halt.

In 1941, National Lead Company purchased the MacIntyre Iron Company for $8 million. By then the paint and enamel pigment industry had taken off, for which titanium dioxide was an essential need. National Lead resumed mining operations, with the added component of separating the titanium dioxide from the iron oxide with the iron now only a by-product. Historian Harold Hochschild (whose tremendous research on this topic is herein acknowledged), called the role reversal of titanium from a waste product to the industry’s salvation “the Cinderella of the ore body.” Once the forges were repurposed to output titanium National Lead rose to prominence in the country, particularly when metal became an urgent national need following the outbreak of World War II in the 1940s.

Considering National Lead’s later successes that followed in the wake of the challenges that doomed the earlier efforts of the McIntyre and MacIntyre corporations’ iron efforts it is somewhat “ironic” then to consider Archibald McIntyre’s 1834 prophetic words to Duncan McMartin, “The more I think of our unfortunate concern, the more I am satisfied of the egregious folly of our whole proceedings,” McIntyre wrote on 19 September 1824, “We are at least half a century too early in opening that region.”

  A HILL ON OUR LEFT obscures views of the mining operation, but tailing and other visible rock debris indicate that Sue and my flotilla has entered an industrial area.

The river passes under the road via a culvert. We could exit the river and portage over a rock pile, but the thirst for adventure as a complement to the historical aspect of this trip wins out. We snap apart our paddles so that they will fit inside the narrow pipe and then paddle on through the dark chamber. The occasional spider and web needs batting as we go, but as the expression goes, “there is light at the end of the tunnel.”

The tunnel plops our kayaks into Lake Sanford. I read afterwards that it was named in honor of a regional pioneer and politician. Major Reuben Sanford of Wilmington who earned distinction resisting the British advance during the War of 1812’s nearby Battle of Plattsburgh. Later, he was elected to the State Senate during the time of the McIntyre mine’s startup years.

Now in placid waters, history is the farthest from my mind. Instead, it is the beauty of Lake Sanford that captivates my attention – well, that and a re-emergent hunger. The breakfast that Sue and I enjoyed at a tiny diner on the way up was so long ago. I place my paddle down to grab some nourishment.

I unclip my drybag from the deck of my kayak and reach in for a silver pouch containing strawberry Pop-Tarts. I’m craving sugar. Sue shakes her head in disapproval, preferring fruit for her sugar source. “I’m going to start calling you Pop-tart,” she chides me. I start into my defense of how the physical activity of kayaking justifies me to eat unhealthily, as if one balances out the other. Realizing I won’t win the quarrel, I give up instead remarking on the beauty of Lake Sanford.

Lake Sanford is an idyllic scene. To our right is a tranquil bay adorned with water lilies and Pickeral plant. Our boats drift towards some noteworthy protruding rocks that capture our attention. It is not until some time later that I learn that these rocks that I photographed have a name. As reported in T. Addison Richard’s 1859 Harper’s Magazine article, “The Adirondac Woods and Waters”:

“Among the rocks in Lake Sanford there is an odd formation called ‘Napoleon’s Cap’ from its striking likeness to the immortal chapeau of that famous hero. The cap seems to have dropped overboard and to be floating quietly on the water.”

The dams have long since given way; lowering the water levels such that Napoleon’s cap is now much larger, rising 10-12 feet above the surface of the lake.

The dams at Tahawus and Adirondac that once raised the waters to permit the of ore shipping by barge were destroyed in 1856, a year of heavy flooding. Sue and I gain an up-close view of how destructive flooding can be when several miles past Lake Sanford we come to the largest logjam that I have ever seen.

Hundreds of uprooted tree trunks block the river’s path. The height of the impasse is easily two stories high, the mass the length of a basketball court. Its depth is 30-40 feet thick, a figure I can personally verify as I hauled and dragged our 15-foot kayaks across the top. I think to myself that if the force of flood can exert this much power today, how much stronger was it in the 1850s when most of the land was denuded of trees whose root systems might have otherwise mitigated its forcefulness?     

Shortly after leaving Lake Sanford, a stream enters on our left. This is Opalescent River, whose waters originate at Lake Tear of the Cloud at the edge of Mt. Marcy. If there was any doubt hitherto, we are now conclusively kayaking in the Hudson River. We turn into it, paddling upstream for several bends for the sake of exploration before backtracking. My prior research informed me that a set of railroad tracks lie across the Opalescent Creek that I wish to see.

Like the Blue Ridge Road a century before, these tracks linking Lower Works with the train depot at North Creek 29 miles to the south were installed to carry the mine’s ore to markets. The single biggest issue that doomed the mining enterprise in the Nineteenth Century was lack of reliable transportation. Wagons and sleighs pulled by oxen were just too impractical. Loggers at least had the floatation benefit to drive logs down the river. Ore needed railway access to thrive.

The lack of railroad lines in the Adirondack region during the Nineteenth Century was not for want of trying. Railroad track was rapidly being laid across the United States as part of America’s manifest destiny to connect its two coasts. The final spike connecting East and West was hammered on 10 May 1869. As vice president and manager of the Union Pacific Railroad, Thomas C. Durant officiated at that ceremony. Afterwards, he turned his attention to bringing railroads to the Adirondack region.

Durant bought the holdings of the former Sackett Harbor & Saratoga Railroad Company in 1863. This included vast lands in the central Adirondacks (including Blue Mountain and Raquette lakes that his son William will later develop). Durant began laying track, reaching North Creek in 1871. Then his money ran out. Efforts to attract investors to his Adirondack Railroad Company failed. Although the former Sackett Harbor Company had been contracted in 1848 to lay track to the McIntyre Mines, this line did not materialize until the advent of World War II when the government required the mine’s titanium output.

The lack of rail lines to the McIntyre works was a major contributor to octogenarian Archibald McIntyre’s decision to sell the iron works in the 1850s. Other factors included the death of Duncan McMartin and David Henderson, the latter the enterprises’ leading spirit. McIntyre’s death came in 1858.

We hear and then pass through a short stretch of rapids shortly after overcoming the logjam. We beach the boats and take out before the river passes under a bridge at the Tahawus Road. The Blue Ridge Road that we drove in on is a short distance away.

Both roads bore witness to a century’s worth of events, hopes, disappointments, and labors that transpired along the shores that we just finished paddling. So did we.

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Michael Kelsey operates AWAY Adventure Guide Service and Outfitters. He can be emailed at KelseyADK@yahoo.com. History-heavy blogposts like these are a hobby effort. Consider supporting future research by making a donation below.

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[1] These have since been removed.