North Creek’s celebration of the 90th anniversary of the first Snow Train will start winding down Sunday, March 3 in the most fitting way imaginable: a conversation with five members of the Cunningham family which has done so much to develop North Creek’s ski community for nearly a century.
Even before the 1932 Lake Placid Olympics ignited the nation’s interest in winter sports, Patrick J. Cunningham was selling skis made from barrel staves from his general store at the intersection of Main Street and Bridge Street in North Creek.
His grandhildren — Richard Cunningham, Mary Cunningham Moro, and Tom Cunningham — were there in the 30s and 40s when the Snow Trains were still running and rope tows were still powered by old automobile engines. And they were there when their father, Butler, joined the partnership that established the Gore Mountain Ski Lift Corporation and built a 3,000-foot T-bar, the longest east of the Mississippi.
"That store, the North Creek Ski Bowl, the Great Depression, FDR's work program, and peoples' love of fun and sport all intermingled into a booming economy that produced jobs and commerce and a healthy outdoor pastime for millions of people," says Deborah Hosley Cunningham, who married Pat Cunningham, the grandson of Patrick J. who became a champion ski racer, developed the ski business, and established North Creek’s first white-water rafting enterprise.
Their son, Tyler, returned to North Creek after 15 years in financial services in New York City to take over Cunningham’s Ski Barn and still runs it today.
Now all of them will take the stage together and share stories and photos spanning decades. Moderating the session will be Greg Schaefer, whose father Carl installed the first rope tow and established the first ski school. They’ll expand on the story you’ll find below.
Early Skiing in North Creek
By Deborah H. Cunningham
with contributions from other family members: Richard B. Cunningham,
Mary C. Moro, Justine Cuningham Franklin, and Joe Franklin
Reprinted with permission of the Johnsburg Historical Society
Richard (Dick) Butler Cunningham took his last run at the North Creek Ski Bowl in 2023 where, as a three-year-old, he took his first run 85 years ago. Dick celebrated his love of skiing and the town of North Creek, which has been shaped by skiing and the ski business since the 1930s when Dick’s father, H. Butler Cunningham, and other North Creek business leaders developed the North Creek Ski Bowl. It was a decision that had a transformative effect on North Creek and the Adirondack economy, where for almost 90 years, millions of people have come to North Creek for skiing and winter fun. Dick Cunningham’s last run reminds us to seize the opportunity to document and preserve the rich history of skiing in North Creek.
Dick Cunningham graduated from Johnsburg Central School in 1953 and went on to get a BS in Civil Engineering at Notre Dame and a Masters of Business Administration from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School. He resides in Troy and has been president of Passonno Paints for over 55 years. He and his wife Monique brought their four children skiing at Gore every weekend in the winter. Skiing has been a way of life for his extended family and for countless other families.
“It was a gift from my father to all of us.”
Ski Pioneers
Dick Cunningham’s grandfather, Patrick J. Cunningham, was a state forest ranger who bought a general store in North Creek in 1918. Named for his eldest son, the John E. Cunningham Store stood at the four corners in North Creek until a fire destroyed it in 1969. While John Cunningham went to Union College and Albany Medical School, Butler returned to North Creek after two years at Union to manage Cunningham’s Store, around 1924. After attending the 1932 Winter Olympics in Lake Placid as a spectator, Butler and fellow businessmen returned with a vision of bringing skiing and other winter sports to North Creek. After Franklin D. Roosevelt became President in 1933 and passed the New Deal, people found work through government-funded jobs, including many projects in the Adirondacks. One project was a much-loved Ski Hut at the Ski Bowl in North Creek—the slope where North Creek skiing emerged. When FDR said “Get to work!” Butler Cunningham heard him.
After World War II, the Gore Mountain Ski Corporation was formed and together with the Roebling Corporation, which built the Brooklyn Bridge, built the first metal tower ski lift in the United States at the North Creek Ski Bowl1. The ski lift corporation was formed and the key stockholders were Kenneth Bennet, James O’Keeffe, Bucky Alexander, Butler Cunningham, Philip Brassell, Bill Lee, Charley Sullivan, Baron Fitzgerald, and others.
When customers of Cunningham’s Store wanted ski equipment, Butler ordered it for them. In 1949, Butler became President of the Gore Mountain Ski Corporation. One of his first and most enduring acts was to lower the season ticket price to $55. Some thought the price too low but Butler believed that it would attract a lot of pass holders and they would bring their friends. This indeed occurred, and in the 1950s the crowds visited North Creek in search of skiing. On some days there were 10 to 15-minute lift lines. Butler operated the ski shop next to the lift. Lifts, grooming, ski equipment and clothing all evolved over the years, and served to invite people to try the sport.
Carl Schaefer powered the rope tow he established at the Ski Bowl in 1935 with the 1929 Buick you see pictured below. Schaefer moved the tow in 1936 to a nearby parcel where he established a ski school. The car is still up there, as his son Greg can show you.
Early Skiing at the North Creek Ski Bowl
The 1932 Olympics in Lake Placid featured jumping and Nordic events but not alpine skiing. Soon after the Olympics, however, people began to take an interest in downhill skiing. The North Creek Ski Bowl was built in 1934, making it one of the ten oldest ski areas in the United States. It was formed naturally by a ridge that resulted from water flowing from the creek for which North Creek gets its name. The height of the ridge to the creek was approximately 125 vertical feet. In the late 1930’s ski trains began transporting sports enthusiasts from New York City, Albany and Schenectady to ski in North Creek.
Rope tows were made from old cars with long hemp ropes to pull people up the hill. Because of the garnet mine on the top of the mountain, there was an existing road up to almost the top which made “ride up – slide down” skiing possible, a downhill version of cross country skiing. From that time until the lift was built in 1946, skiing was supported by rope tows or by taking a car to Barton’s Mines.
“When we were small, Dad would have someone come to the house and drive all of us (children) to Barton’s,” Dick recalls. “The trail back to the North Creek Ski Bowl was five miles long. From the drop-off point, at Barton’s, it was necessary to climb up half a mile to the beginning of the trail. While it was called downhill skiing, the trails were not steep, but narrow -- probably less than 25 feet. Most of the time people skied on the existing track like cross country today but without packing the trails.
”That is the way it was before snow grooming, a luxury of modern-day skiing. After a good snowstorm, Dad encouraged everyone to ride the lift up and sidestep down the mountain to pack the trail. The ski corporation hired a couple of men to snowshoe and pack and fix as many bad spots as possible. At some point, they mowed the trails in the summer and fixed the logs as best they could.”
Snow Train, February 10, 1935
Butler ran the general store in town and branched into selling ski equipment. After meeting Margaret Callahan Collins, who moved to North Creek from Raquette Lake to be the Latin teacher, they married and raised four children. After the North Creek Ski Bowl was built, Margaret and Butler continued to sell and rent ski equipment out of their general store, then built a ski shop at the Ski Bowl where for the next 50 years they would sell and rent skis and ski equipment.
Cunningham’s Ski Shop moved to Gore Mountain when the state ski center opened in January 1964 and operated there for several years. After losing the bid for the contract in the late 1970s, Cunningham’s Ski Barn was founded in an old cattle barn on Route 28 and was operated by Butler’s youngest son, Patrick J. Cunningham for 50 years. Pat expanded the business to five ski shops and also pioneered the upstate rafting business when he opened Hudson River Rafting Company in 1979. Today, Cunningham’s Ski Barn in North Creek and Lake Placid is owned and operated by Pat’s youngest son, Tyler Cunningham. An alumnus of Burke Mountain Academy and Saint Lawrence University, Tyler moved back to the Adirondacks after 15 years in the financial services industry in New York City and is proud to continue the Cunningham family legacy.
Cunningham’s: Oldest Ski Shop in the US
Cunningham’s Ski Barn today
Memories of Early Ski Days
Dick Cunningham reminisces about his early ski days in North Creek. “When I was a boy, on the ridge there was a wooden toboggan chute that ran down the steep hill and onto a pond. It was very fast and probably dangerous. It must have been torn down in the early 40’s. The North Creek Dam had gone out in a big rainstorm, so the toboggans ran out onto the pond. People also skated on the pond.’
“When we were kids, we would hike up the ridge and ski down the west side of the ridge to the Ski Hut and ski the rope tows. Two rope tows operated in the Bowl,” he recalls.
“The lower tow where the New York State slide area currently sits was a perfect hill for a rope tow. The south side of the tow was narrow and the shape of the hill was best for ski jumping. You get enough speed to jump from the lip almost to the bottom of the hill, and we did.
“The north side of the tow opened up the area serviced now by the small chair lift. The T-bar that preceded that chair was built by my Dad and (brother) Pat around 1963. T-bars were challenging for beginners; the chair lift made skiing more accessible for beginners learning to ski.”
The tobaggan chute “was very fast and probably dangerous,” Dick Cunningham recalls.
What Was Early Skiing Like?
In the thirties, North Creek had the mountain, the road up the mountain, snow in the winter and old lumbering roads that could be turned into ski trails. But a major problem was that only a few knew how to ski. The Schaefer family brought German engineers from General Electric who had skied as children in Europe and a local kid who had skied at college, Arnold Alexander. They began to teach. Arnold was a hometown boy who could ski and he knew how to communicate with people who wanted to ski. He had a gift for that perhaps because his family was into skiing. Every person who was better than the next, had a theory on how you made a turn. Only certain people, however, had the athletic skill, the interest and the patience to help people learn the sport.
On the local slopes or using a rope tow people would essentially come down the hill straight until they fell. The Germans were heard yelling “Christie! Christie! Christie!” At first everyone thought they were swearing at skiers until those that had some sense of skiing convinced skiers they needed to learn to turn. The accepted and perhaps only method known at that time to turn while skiing was the stem christie. It involved shifting the weight from ski to ski and opening the skis into a v shaped snowplow, continuing to shift one’s weight to the downhill ski and completing the turn. With instruction and watching better skiers more and more began to learn to turn. Dr. John Cunningham and his brother Butler Cunningham born in 1902 and 1904 skied into their 80’s but while the style of turning had changed to shifting the weight with the skis parallel and close together, both never got past the stem christie style of down-up-down, to arrive at placing most of the weight on the edge of the downhill ski. This so-called Arlberg technique was a progressive system that took the skier from the snowplow turn to the parallel christie turn through various stages of improvement.
In 1948, common thinking within the ski industry was that North Creek would become a significant ski area. There were attempts, but it did not happen. As skiing progressed in fits and starts, some basic building blocks began to be put in place. The famous ski instructor, Otto Schniebs, moved to North Creek. Born in Germany in 1892, Otto Schniebs moved to the Adirondacks to become known as the “Dean of American Ski Pioneers.” The Lift Corporation cleared an instructing area, to the left of the steep Hudson hill. In addition two well-known French ski instructors came to town. The French brought the long thong binding which the good local skiers quickly adopted.
The problem was North Creek was a mining and lumber town. No one had ever made any money from tourists so there was no structure to promote skiers and certainly no big mountain and lifts like today. No group had invested enough money to make North Creek a real ski area. North Creek had parts but not the whole package. North Creek had good areas for advanced skiers but nothing for the beginner. The T-bar was too hard to ride for most inexperienced skiers.
In 1950 the national college championship identified the best skier in the US. The best skier was William “Bill” Tibbitts, a North Creek boy and Dartmouth skier, who won the big race. Locally the next best skier was Billy Lackey who skied in the best and worst of conditions. He perfected the ability of driving the weight onto the inside edge of the downhill ski. The force of the weight bent the ski to develop a moment of force in the same way children on their hand sleigh bent the front of the sleigh left or right. Billy Lackey could make beautiful turns in any kind of conditions.
Over the years a number of talented skiers have stood out in the North Creek region: Arnold Alexander, Bill Tibbits, Billy Lackey, Pat Cunningham — and in more current times, Kevin Morse and Chuck Goodspeed. And Gore Mountain’s head of ski patrol for decades, Mark Anderson.
Starting in 1935, rope tows were great for beginners. More experienced skiers continued to “ride up, slide down” the old logging roads that had been turned into ski trails, starting at Barton Mine.
Pat Cunningham
All of Butler and Margaret’s children skied well, but their youngest, Patrick J. Cunningham, named after Butler’s father, was one of the best to ever come out of this region. A gifted athlete, Pat was selected for the 1957 National Junior Championship in Reno, Nevada. There was a town fundraiser to help get him out west and a banner that hung in front of Johnsburg Central School that said Good Luck Pat.
Pat skied for Norwich University and was offered a position on U.S. Army Ski Team after graduation in 1961. Based in Berchtesgaden, Germany, he traveled to ski races throughout Europe in his VW in what is now known as the World Cup. Cunningham was so accomplished that he was given the chance to try out for the 1964 Winter Olympics but broke his elbow weeks before the competition and had to withdraw. He raced in the Hahnenkamm and the Lauberhorn, widely recognized as ski racing’s most challenging downhills.
Pat Cunningham racing in the Hahnenkamm, one of ski racing’s most challenging downhills.
Postscript
To say that skiing gave the North Creek area an economic boost is an understatement. Skiing allowed Butler Cunningham to take a general store selling meat and eggs in a poor area during the Great Depression, and proceed to raise a family, send four children to college and two to graduate school. Three children left the area to be successful in other areas; one stayed and expanded the business to eight ski shops and participated in the launch of white water rafting on Adirondack rivers in the 1970’s and 1980’s. Families and tourists always came to enjoy the Adirondack lakes in summer; now they had good reasons to visit in winter, spring and fall.
Gore Mountain has a tribute to the Cunningham family in one of its gondolas. It describes the family’s contributions to the ski industry, Pat Cunningham’s racing career, and claims that approximately 90 members of the extended Margaret and Butler Cunningham family currently ski at Gore Mountain.
