Born: 1831
Died: August 11, 1893
Married: Olivia J. Bull in 1852
Children: Cora Norton Smith, and four more
Martin J. Norton was the first superintendent of Dr. E. L. Trudeau's Adirondack Cottage Sanitarium. The Norton family lived in the first main building, and Mrs. Norton and their daughters also worked there.
On page 745 in the St. Armand section of biographies of History of Essex County appears the following:
"Norton, M. J., p. o. Saranac Lake, was born in Essex county in 1831; is a superintendent of the Adirondack cottages. In 1852 he married Oliva J. Bull, and they have five children."
On page 168 of An Autobiography, Dr. E. L. Trudeau wrote that he "hired M. J. Norton, a man who had been a small farmer in the region, and made an agreement with him for a year for his services in doing the outside work of the place, and for the services of his wife and two daughters, one eighteen and the other fifteen, to take charge of the housekeeping and inside work. He was also to furnish his horse and cart. Of course none of these people had ever heard of a sanitarium, or had the slightest idea of what it was intended to do, except to furnish board and lodging to a few invalids. The building of a little rough-board barn and a portion of the main building had progressed sufficiently by the middle of the summer of 1884 to enable Mr. Norton to move his family in and live on the place, and late in the fall Dr. Loomis" sent up the first two patients. . . They were both in wretched health, poorly clad to stand the Adirondack winter cold, and were nearly dead with fatigue when they reached the Sanitarium after a forty-two mile drive from Ausable Forks. Mrs. Norton and her daughters took them right into the family circle, my wife got some warm clothes for them, and I examined them and advised them as to what to do, and encouraged them to the best of my ability. At that time only the foundations and frame of the first little cottage had been built, and the cottage was not completed and occupied until February 1, 1885." This means that the first two patients, Alice and Mary Hunt, lived with the Nortons in the main building that winter.
On page 194, Trudeau wrote: "Mr. Norton and his family were in charge of the Sanitarium until the fall of 1888, when they retired to a little home near Saranac Lake and Mrs. Julia A. Miller became Superintendent. The institution was growing less like a big family. . . ."
