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Tall Tales in the Adirondacks  

6/23/2016

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While wandering around in a used bookstore in Ithaca, NY, I came upon a book in the New York State history section called Tales from an Adirondack County written in 1961 by Ted Aber and Stella King. It includes fascinating accounts of events and tall tales from the central Adirondack region, mostly stories passed down by generations of people that lived in the area. For each lake region represented in the book, the authors list names of people they interviewed for the stories. The book is a composite of oral histories. These tales are a treasure for their simplicity and near-mythical qualities.
 
One that caught my fancy was the story of the Lake Pleasant Pot of Gold.
 
This piece of folklore was passed down from the Civil War era and I’m curious to know whether the myth still circulates. As related by the authors, when the Civil War broke out in 1861 men in the town of Lake Pleasant began practice drills by aiming and shooting at targets hung from a large Elm tree on the farm of Charles Leston where the road to Moffit Beach meets the Speculator-Lake Pleasant highway. It is a telling piece of history that when the book was written in 1961, the authors stated the Elm tree was still standing.
 
People became especially alarmed when in 1864, armed confederate soldiers robbed three banks in nearby St. Albans, Vermont, stealing $200,000. The target practice at the old Elm became more fervid after that. This new turn of events frightened the local children whenever they passed the Elm tree so a legend grew in the hopes it would comfort them: buried under the roots was a pot of gold.
 
According to the folklore, to unearth the pot one must dig until it comes into view, then toss coins upon it and the gold will magically appear. During this procedure however, one must not laugh or talk, or make any sound whatsoever or else the pot of gold will disappear.
 
None of the sources admitted to ever having looked for the pot of gold as a child. Although I wonder how this myth could have survived one hundred years if that was the case.
 
Perhaps the most famous character chronicled in Adirondack folklore is the guide Alvah Dunning. Indeed, a whole book could be written about Alvah. His antics were also recorded in the Tales from an Adirondack County but were probably first written down in Arpad Gerster’s Notes Collected in the Adirondacks (1895-1898), then Donaldson’s A History of the Adirondacks (1920); Harold Hochschild’s Township 34 (1962); and finally Ruth Timm’s Raquette Lake: a Time to Remember (1989). All reveal first hand accounts of Alvah’s unique belief system such as the earth being flat, not round. “I ain’t believin’ such tommyrot as that!”
 
Or that all women were ‘pizen’.
 
His disdain of the city folk whom paid him for his services as a guide, were also well known. He claiming, “they can’t hit a deer if they see it and don’t want it if they do hit it.”
 
Supposedly Alvah shot the last known moose inhabiting all of the Adirondack forests in 1861 while guiding. It would take almost one hundred years to bring their population back. And the most interesting story of all, he chased down an injured bear on the iced-over Raquette and flattened it by swinging the butt of his rifle at its head.
 
A tall-tale indeed. What better place to spread it than around a campfire in the woods?


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High Tea in the Adirondacks

6/23/2014

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Picture of Adirondack guide, and one of his 'city' clients. Note the difference in attire. Source: Wikimedia.

One day this year I was emailing back and forth with my editor in England and he said,"I'll get back to you in an hour or so, I'm cooking tea for the family."

Cooking tea? I thought; and said, "What do you mean cooking tea? And why would it take an hour? You boil water throw it over a tea-bag and call it a day."

Granted, that's even more than I do while at work. One of my campus offices doesn't have a stove or electric kettle so my version of 'cooking tea' is placing a teabag in a mug, pouring water over it and placing it in the microwave for two minutes.
Voilà - hot tea!

Blasphemy to some, but then, I'm American. What do I care about afternoon tea? During summer afternoons I'd much rather have an iced coffee anyway. My ideal beverage is poured over ice in a biodegradable plastic cup at the local coffee house. I add a dollop of liquid sugar, cream, cap it with a lid, and insert straw - perfect. I can idly walk around my village slurping away while perusing the $185 dollar sleeveless blouses at the corner boutique that I might one day buy without guilt once this book makes a gazillion dollars for me.

Back to the tea tradition though. I was not brought up with it. So it was difficult for me to consider how to write the tea party scene with one of the characters in my novel,  Alvah Dunning, a gruff, belligerent, famous, Adirondack guide and Mrs. Heloise Hannah Timbrell Durant -  Dr. Thomas Durant's English wife.
(Durant was famous for building the transcontinental railroad.)

According to testimony I found documented in a court case (People vs. Ladew 1907), over the ownership of Osprey Island; in 1879, William's cousin, Charles Durant, wanted to build a house on Osprey Island where Alvah owned a couple of cabins and claimed squatter's rights.  Mrs. Durant invited Alvah to Pine Knot one afternoon to discuss the 'occupancy' issue over a cup of tea.

Not much is known about Hannah Timbrell Durant. What I have found out is that she was born in 1825 in England and that her father, a corn dealer, went bankrupt in 1830. Shortly afterwards, Hannah's mother died and her family emigrated to America where she eventually met and married Thomas Durant in 1847.

In 1861, Hannah and the Durant children moved to England to live while her husband Thomas Durant built the Transcontinental Line - soon after the Civil War broke out. They lived more than a decade overseas. Taking part in tea parties as an afternoon activity would have figured prominently in their lives. So I assume it was a custom they brought back with them to the States. (It is telling, that the inventory of the items left behind at Pine Knot when William sold it to Collis P. Huntington in 1895 includes six tea, but only one, coffee pot).

Given my lack of knowledge about tea besides that it comes in a bag and in many varieties, I was at a loss on how to approach the tea party scene with Alvah and Mrs. Durant. I found inspiration one day while sitting in the library, thoughts of tea and how little I cared about it swimming through my head, when I happened to see in my peripheral vision on the book shelf a small, charming book with the title:  A Proper Tea by Joanna Isles.

I took it off the shelf to read. My goodness! Who would have thought that anyone cared so much about tea? The Brits, obviously. This little book explained the history of tea in Britain, and even more importantly, defined clotted cream (when someone suggested I try clotted cream and scones with tea when I visit England this summer, I thought, clotted cream? Why would I want clotted cream in my tea?).

According to Joanna Isles, middle and upper-class Brits started the tradition of taking tea around four or five pm to stave off hunger before the large evening meal. Credit for this brilliant idea goes to the Duchess of Bedford who first invited ladies to her parlor to imbibe in gossip and tea in the early 1800s.

It was easy then to imagine the Adirondack guide, Alvah Dunning's reaction to the invitation from Mrs. Durant to partake in an afternoon tea party. What might he think about being served tea on a hot afternoon in the Adirondack Wilderness from a fine English teapot, served in fine English teacups while negotiating a land transaction? I pretended I was him when I wrote the scene.

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    Sheila Myers  Professor at Cayuga Community College in Upstate New York.

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