The Captain Departs: Ulysses S. Grant's Last Campaign

3. Mount McGregor Becomes a Summer Resort

3. Mount McGregor Becomes a Summer Resort THE MEDICINAL virtues of springs in the general vicinity of Saratoga were known to the Indians. The Mohawks in 1767 took their ailing friend Sir William Johnson to one of these springs to drink the waters. He was greatly benefited. The word of what seemed a remarkable cure to one of the most distinguished men in the American colonies spread quickly. Visitors began to journey to the springs even before the Revolution.1 The long years of the struggle for independence, in which the Mohawks took the British side and the whole New York frontier was a scene of recurring devastation and slaughter, interrupted the traffic. It began again with the coming of peace, and by the early nineteenth century Ballston Spa was a popular health resort, with summer hotels and boarding houses. Its mineral springs had a worldwide reputation. Saratoga Springs, a few miles to the north, became its rival beginning in 1802, when Gideon Putnam built there the first Grand Union HoteF Saratoga Springs eventually eclipsed its competitor, and by the middle of the century was a center of wealth and fashion. An authoritative travel guide described it in 1857 as "the most famous place of summer resort in the United States," with ten hotels and numerous boarding houses. In or near the village were twelve medicinal springs, the most famous being the Congress Spring, whose waters were bottled and sent all over the world.3 Saratoga Springs rose to further heights of fashion and popularity after the Civil War. 46 Mount McGregor Becomes a Summer Resort 47 The rugged region of the Adirondack Mountains to the north began to be exploited for its timber during the same period. While the lumber rush was still far from its peak, another use of this wild and beautiful eountry developed. Gentlemen of means began organizing hunting and fishing trips to the Adirondacks , and the professional hunters and trappers who had moved in as the Indians left gradually developed a new specialty and became guides. Hunting camps, at first crude and temporary, came to be sometimes elaborate structures intended for use year after year. In 1858 the Saturday Club of Boston, a group of the intelligentsia that included Ralph Waldo Emerson and Louis Agassiz, spent part of a summer in the Adirondacks, attracting a good bit of attention.1 The big rush to the Adirondacks began after the Civil War, with the publication in 1869 of the Reverend William Henry Harrison Murray's book, Adventures in the Wilderness, or Camp Life in the Adirondacks. This book, extolling the virtues of the outdoor life and the healthgiving qualities of the Adirondacks in particular, became immensely popular and started a mass migration that took on the proportions of a gold rush. Summer hotels and permanent summer camps began to replace hunters' lodges, and railroads to support them pushed up into the mountains.5 Outlying spurs of the Adirondacks came within 10 miles of Saratoga Springs. The scenery immediately around the springs was dull and the air sometimes became oppressive, but a little to the north the abrupt Palmertown range offered a wilderness setting, cooler air, and spectacular views. The two attractions were brought into commercial contact by an enterprising gentfeman from nearby Glens Falls, where the Hudson River tumbles out of the Adirondacks. Duncan McGregor, born in 1808 at the family homestead in Wilton, at the foot of the mountains, had been a farmer and later became a lumberman. Hc moved to the falls in 1867, and soon afterward his attention was drawn to the possibilities of a new activity. A visitor from South Carolina, it was recounted later, became enthusiastic over the attractions of the mountains so close to the fashionable resort of Saratoga. McGregor listened and, after careful inspection on his own, 48 THE CAPTAIN DEPARTS thought that one of the peaks of the Pahnel'town range could be developed into a popular mountain park.6 He began buying up parcels of land on the mountain, some at tax sales, until he acquired nearly a thousand acres including the summit and the eastern slope. The top of the mountain was already a popular local picnic spot, accessible only by trail. The mountain was named for him by the Reverend Robert G. Adams, the Methodist minister in Wilton, who had organized a town picnic on the summit in 1872. McGregor, at the time...