Mill Pond

Following the path you’ll find at the end of the Tannery Pond Center’s driveway, you’ll come Immediately to an interpretive sign that shows you Mill Pond as it once looked – until storms washed out for good the dam that had been built in the late 1840s.

On the first part of our tour, you’re walking along what essentially was the bottom of Mill Pond.

Soon after the sign, you'll come to a wall that we surmise was part of the concrete and stone dam built by George Ives to replace the log and timber structures that had preceded it. A lumberman, Ives also built a sluice high on Gore Mountain down which he could send logs to the pond employing water from Roaring Brook.

William Waddell tells the story of a young Ives employee named Kenneth Eldridge who, for a lark, decided to ride a log a short distance down the sluice and jumped onto a four-foot piece. 

“He found that the thing went so fast he was unable to get off. He took a wild ride all the way down and dropped off the end of the sluice some 15 feet in the Mill Pond. He was very lucky there were not many pieces of wood in the pond as he could have been thrown on them and killed.” 

As the trail takes you around this wall, look to your left at the substantial clearing and toward the North Creek Laundromat on Bridge Street. That's where the main building of the tannery stood, about the length of a football field. At its peak, the tannery transformed as many as 30,000 hides annually into rugged leather for saddles and shoes. 

Before the tannery, lumberjacks built the first semi-permanent structures here for themselves and their horses between 1840 and 1850. They did much of their cutting in winter so they could more easily transport their 13-foot logs by horse-drawn sleds and stack them by the side of the creek. When the snow melt was at its highest each spring, they shoved them into the stream to float them down to the Hudson, where they embarked on a 40-mile journey to the sawmills of Glens Falls. 

The tannery built by Milton Sawyer and Wheeler Meade in 1852 was North Creek's first real business that required the construction of housing. They used the creek not as a means of transport, but as an energy source. Mill Pond’s water wheel drove the scrapers and hammers that cleaned and softened the hides before they were placed in large tannin-filled vats. Ultimately, they would employ 25 men and annually transform into leather as many as 30,000 hides sourced chiefly from Brazil and Argentina.

Those countries had the cattle, but we had the tannin from hemlocks that was essential in the tanning process. Hides arrived by ship at the Port of Albany. They they were packed on barges on the Champlain and feeder canals and brought to Glens Falls. The hides were then stacked on wagons and brought to North Creek along rough plank roads. Hides were also delivered to tanneries at the Glen, Wevertown, and Oregon, southwest of Bakers Mills. 

Glenn Pearsall writes: 

“Imagine the sights and smells of this active tannery with its men shouting orders above the sound of tannery machinery, the smells of raw hides and the tannery “baths,” and the horses helping to bring in the hemlock bark stacked tall on wagons and sleds.”

“Hides were salted and dried to preserve them for the long trips to eastern seaboard ports. Hides were often packed with flesh and dirt that caused parts of them to rot. Some hides had holes that were caused by ticks and other insects common to more tropical regions. Getting the hides to the tanner was surely dirty, smelly work.” 

Hemlocks would be cut, stripped of their bark, and left on the ground to decay. With four tanneries in Johnsburg alone, much of the land around here was left barren and its waters polluted in the mid and late 1800s. 

Here's how a New York Times reporter described the East Branch of the Sacandaga River in 1889, where the Oregon tannery was located: 

"The foul combination of the hemlock juices and malodorous hides flows in an inky stream into the river which kills the fish that have the misfortune of swimming into it from their mountain streams."

Six years later, voters would approve the addition of the Forever Wild clause to the New York State Constitution, strengthening the protections that had been imposed when the State Forest Preserve was created in 1885. 

Tanneries typically would have to close within 20 to 40 years because all hemlocks within a ten-mile radius would be destroyed. That's what happened to North Creek's tannery. After it burned in 1890, Billy Baker built a sawmill on the site, opening it on August 29th. Three days later, half of it was destroyed when the dam went out. He rebuilt it two weeks later, showing the kind of determination that was typical of these early settlers. 

Before the dam was washed out for the last time in the 1940s, James O’Keeffe, the local pharmacist, ran an ice-harvesting operation here.

He would hire several teams of men and horses to cut the ice by hand and then, with pike poles, push the cakes up a ramp and onto a sled, which the horses would drag to O’Keeffe’s pharmacy. They then lugged the ice into the basement, where they would stack it and pack it in sawdust.

There were no refrigerators in those days, so the ice was needed to keep food cold in the warmer months. “A full cake would sell for fifty cents and a half cake for twenty-five cents,” writes his son Dan O’Keefe in Halfway to Heaven, his invaluable memoir of “livin’ in the ‘Crick.’”