The Ku Klux Klan was briefly active in the Saranac Lake area, though there is little trace of its existence in the newspaper archives. It may have been tied to the national organization's support of Prohibition.
Ticonderoga Sentinel, February 17, 1927
Newspaper Versus The Ku Klux Klan
The Saranac Lake Enterprise has been receiving some attention from the Ku Klux Klan. according to statements in that newspaper. The Klan criticizes the paper, so the Enterprise says, because it places St. Bernard’s church first in its columns of church notices, because it didn't run the story of the death of a Protestant clergyman on the front page, and for various other reasons. The paper is keeping up its end of the affair and has devoted considerable space to the Klan and its opinions of it.
Press-Republican, May 11, 1982
Around and about
There's a mountain top for sale in Saranac Lake. Moses first saw the biblical promised land from the 'summit of Pisgah'. The local mountain top up for grabs is also called Pisgah...
Pisgah is deceiving in its height. In the 1920s when the Ku Klux Klan was nocturnally active around the North Country, the plateau that Frank is trying to sell was considered the best place, and consequently often used for burning crosses.
On a clear night in August you could be certain to witness a fiery symbol of hate designed to instill fear into the hearts and minds of the black race.. Since there were only about five black families and a few Pullman porters in the village, the Ku Klux Klan activities had a limited effect, to say the least.
Everyone wanted to know who belonged to the Klan and what it was doing up here in the north where "darkies" as they were they called, couldn't stand the cold. Stephen Foster called them "darkies" in his plantation songs about the south.
If you hung out more than five sheets on washday someone would point at the clothesline and say a Ku Kluxer probably lived there. Since the scare-prone black population was so limited, the idea surfaced that the.cross-burning was a show of antagonism against the Pope. Saranac Lake was largely Catholic.
Then to top off the confusion at a moment of peak interest, the Methodist Church put up a huge cross on the steeple that could be electrically lighted at night. People from Bloomingdale and Donnellys Corners gathered in folksy knots on their lawns night after night thinking that another cross-burning was in progress around Saranac Lake.
If you really wanted to get into "kluxing" you had to know the lingo since practically everything began with a "K." A Klockard was a lecturer and the Kloran Was the Bible. A Klippgrap was a secretary and the Klabee was the treasurer.
Nobody figured out what a "Kluck" was but nobody wanted to be called one either.
Their language was a step above pig latin and taboo outside the circle of the Grand Dragon.
Once you paid your Klecktoken (initiation fee) you were issued a sheet and a manual of language tools. AYAK meant "Are you a klansman? AKIA transllates to "A klansman I am." ITSUB...in the sacred unfailing bbhd." And KIGY to "Klansmen I greet you."
The return of the Klan is top news today and anywhere they hold a parade, flying bricks and fractured skulls, are the end result, their old motto still prevails as it did on Mt. Pisgah..."Non Silba Sed Anthar" (not for self but for others). A sweet but warped sentiment under the circumstances...
