Famous Visitors

Lakes, mountains, and wildlife drew a number of famous visitors to the Saranac Lake region. Tuberculosis drew more— whether they came as tuberculosis sufferers or as friends or family members of patients, thousands were brought here by the disease. Many stayed, even after the cure. Many more died here.

Whitelaw Reid, U.S. Ambassador to France, 1889 – 1892. Béla Bartók, 1927, photographer unknown (Wikipedia) Christy Mathewson, December 14, 1910 Veronica Lake, c. 1952

Fly Fishing, Saranac Lake, Winslow Homer, 1889. 
Metropolitan Museum Online Collection

• Swiss geologist Louis Agassiz, the first to scientifically propose that the Earth had been subject to a past ice age, was part of the Philosophers' Camp.
• Thomas Bailey Aldrich was a poet, novelist, and editor, from 1881 to 1890, of the Atlantic Monthly. He came to Saranac Lake accompanying one of his adult twin sons, who had come to cure.
• Béla Bartók was a Hungarian composer who spent the last three summers of his life in Saranac Lake.
• Dr. Norman Bethune was a Canadian surgeon; he was a patient at Trudeau Sanatorium and he worked at Ray Brook Sanatorium. While a patient in Lea Cottage at the sanatorium, he painted a series of murals on brown paper depicting his own life and predicting its outcome. He later traveled to China, where he ran a mobile field hospital for Mao Tse-tung on the Long March, and died there of an infection contracted from operating bare-handed.
• Leader of the women's suffrage movement and progressive reformer Madeline McDowell Breckinridge came for the TB cure.
• Operatic tenor Enrico Caruso, who visited Paul Smiths Hotel c. 1901 and took an interest in local singer Alexander Angus LeRoux.
• U.S. President Calvin Coolidge, 1923 to 1929, used White Pine Camp as his summer White House in 1926.
• Stephen Crane was a novelist, short story writer, poet and journalist, author of The Red Badge of Courage.
• Adelaide Crapsey, the poet who invented the cinquain, took the cure in Saranac Lake from 1913-1914, in a cottage overlooking the Pine Ridge Cemetery. Her cure was not successful; she returned home and died soon after.
• Academy Award winning actress Faye Dunaway was a waitress at the Dew Drop Inn
• Edna Ferber was a novelist, author and playwright and member of the Algonquin Round Table.
• Novelist and artist John Dos Passos visited Sara and Gerald Murphy in Saranac Lake.
• New York Giants second baseman Larry Doyle was the last patient to leave the Trudeau Sanatorium.
• Albert Einstein was a mathematician and theoretical physicist; he summered on Lower Saranac Lake.
• Ralph Waldo Emerson, essayist, philosopher, and poet, was a leader of the Transcendentalist movement, and a participant in the Philosophers' Camp.
• Violinist and child musical prodigy Thelma Given spent time at Spion Kop in 1919.
• U.S. President Benjamin Harrison, 1889 to 1893, dedicated the first Saranac Lake High School, on the site of the Hotel Saranac; his wife was curing at Loon Lake.
• First Lady Lucy Webb Hayes, wife of U.S. President Rutherford B. Hayes, visited Saranac Lake with Vice President William A. Wheeler.
• Ernest Hemingway was a novelist, short-story writer, and journalist; he wrote A Farewell to Arms and The Old Man and the Sea, among others. He visited Sara and Gerald Murphy's son, Patrick, who was being treated for TB, in the Murphys rented house in Glenwood Estates.A founder and leader of the Socialist Party of America, Morris Hillquit came for the TB cure.
• Artist Winslow Homer created a drawing titled "Trout Fishing, Saranac Lake" in 1889.
• New York Governor Charles Evans Hughes and family spent the summers of 1908 and 1909 at Lady Tree Lodge on Upper Saranac Lake.
• Charles Ives, American modernist composer, one of the first American composers of international renown, was treated in Saranac Lake not for tuberculosis but for neurasthenia early in the 20th century.
• Frank Ives, world champion billiard player of the 1890s, popularly known as the Napoleon of Billiards "for the dash and brilliancy of his play," spent the winter of 1897 in Saranac Lake for his wife's health. He died of tuberculosis two years later, in Mexico.
• Singer, comedian, and actor Al Jolson cured in Saranac Lake, ¹ and was active in TB fundraising; he once performed a solo for three hours at a benefit at the Pontiac Theater.
• Fiorello LaGuardia visited his first wife as she was attempting a cure at 76 Park Avenue in 1921; she died the same year, age 27.
• Veronica Lake spent her early teenage years in Saranac Lake, graduating from St. Bernard's School's eighth grade and starting at Petrova School.
• Lila Lee, a silent screen actress with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, died at Will Rogers Hospital.
• Adolph Lewisohn was an investment banker, copper mining magnate, and philanthropist; he owned Prospect Point Camp on Upper Saranac Lake, now Young Life Saranac Village, a Christian camp for high school students.
• James Russell Lowell was a poet, critic, editor, and diplomat, and a member of the Philosophers' Camp.
• Norwegian discoverer and ethnographer Carl Sofus Lumholtz cured at 50 Baker Street (old address) for four months; he died there of tuberculosis on May 4, 1922, and is buried in Pine Ridge Cemetery.
• Wilderness activist and explorer Bob Marshall spent the summers of his youth at Knollwood Club. With guide Herb Clark and brother George, he established the Forty-sixers.
• George Marshall was a political activist and conservationist. Son of Louis Marshall and brother of Bob Marshall, he summered at Knollwood Club.
• Louis Marshall was a corporate and constitutional lawyer, mediator and Jewish community leader; he was an original owner of Knollwood Club.
• New York Giants pitcher Christy Mathewson cured at the Santanoni Apartments, at 90 Park Avenue, and at 21 Old Military Road, where he died.
• W. Somerset Maugham was an English playwright, novelist and short story writer; he wrote Of Human Bondage.
• Rollo May, a noted psychologist and author, treated at Trudeau Sanatorium
• U.S. President William McKinley, visited by train in August 1897.
• Theatrical agent William Morris had a Great Camp, Camp Intermission on 110 acres on Lake Colby.
• Joan Vincent Murray was a Canadian American poet^.  She studied at The New School, with W. H. Auden.  She died in Saranac Lake in 1942.
• Gerald and Sara Murphy were famous for their circle of friends that included F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Pablo Picasso and Cole Porter. Their son Patrick was treated for T.B. in Saranac Lake, and died here, at what is now St. Joseph's.
• Artist Maxfield Parrish spent time in Saranac Lake between 1900 and 1902 attempting a cure.  It was the cold winter temperature that caused him to switch from pen and ink to oil paint, as he had trouble with his ink freezing.
• Walker Percy was a doctor who was treated for T.B. at the Trudeau Sanatorium. While a patient here, he decided to become a writer.
• Poet, novelist and short story writer Sylvia Plath broke her leg skiing on Mount Pisgah while visiting her boyfriend who was curing at Ray Brook Sanatorium. She fictionalized this incident in her novel "The Bell Jar."
• Philippine President Manuel Quezon cured in the village and at a rented camp on Lower Saranac Lake, where he died.
• Writer  Martha Reben cured by camping in the wilderness. She wrote several popular novels based on her experience.
• Whitelaw Reid was a U.S. politician and newspaper editor, and author; his family has summered on Upper St. Regis Lake ever since.
• Theodore Roosevelt stayed at Paul Smith's Hotel and at Martin's as a boy; he wrote Birds of Franklin County, New York.
• Actress Rosalind Russell performed at a tent theatre behind the Haase Block — a place remembered by many as the starting point of her career.
• Marching Band leader and conductor John Philip Sousa and his family summered on Upper and Lower Saranac Lakes from the late 1800s to the early 1900s.
• Prudence Spargo, wife of labor leader John Spargo, came for the TB cure.
• Scottish novelist and poet Robert Louis Stevenson stayed in Andrew Baker's cottage from October 3, 1887, to April 16, 1888.
• William James Stillman was a painter, journalist, and photographer, and a member of the Philosophers' Camp.
• Seneca Ray Stoddard was a photographer, naturalist, writer, poet, artist, and cartographer who wrote about the lakes, mountains and hotels of the area.
• Author and humorist Mark Twain who wrote Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, summered in a camp on Lower Saranac Lake in 1901. The camp has been known forever after as the Mark Twain Camp.
• William A. Wheeler, U.S. Vice President under Rutherford B. Hayes.
• William Chapman White was an author who married Ruth Morris, the daughter of actors' agent William Morris, and wrote Adirondack Country.

Footnotes

1. Readers Digest, 1949 full text