Crossing the Glen Bridge
The first Glen Bridge was an engineering marvel when it was completed in 1816.
It was in the Hudson River Corridor that American popular culture first confronted and embraced the idea of a permanent wilderness. Vacationers who came to the Adirondacks in the 1850s found just a scattering of hotels. Twenty years later, there would be more than 200. Such was the impact of books like Rev. William H.H. Murray's Adventures in the Wilderness and magazine accounts in The Atlantic, Scribner's, and The Saturday Evening Post.
Thomas Durant's Adirondack Railroad made it relatively easy for these early adventurers to enter the wilderness. Durant's main objective in building the railroad was to haul out iron ore from the McIntyre Mine, which had been established in 1827 at Sanford Lake near Mount Marcy. Durant actually wanted to go all the way to Sacketts Harbor on the eastern short of Lake Ontario, where iron and other goods and passengers could be placed on ships and transported to the nation's interior via the Great Lakes as an alternative to the Erie Canal.
Starting construction in Saratoga Springs following the Civil War, Durant made it as far as North Creek by 1871, laying just enough track -- 60 miles -- to earn the 800,000 acres of prime forest that New York State had promised in return. Then the Financial Panic of 1873 nearly wiped Durant out. Though Durant never made it as far as the McIntyre Mine, he did a good business with Henry H. Barton, who used the railroad to haul garnet ore from his mine on Gore Mountain. Durant's railroad also supported the many tanneries that located on rivers along the route. They brought in cattle hides from South America and shipped out leather to be used in shoes, gloves, and saddles.
While North Creek was as far as vacationers could go by train, Durant took them more deeply into his empire via stagecoaches and small steam-powered boats. His son William innovated the Adirondack "great camp" -- fabulous lodgings on Indian Lake, Blue Mountain Lake, and Raquette Lake. Shorter trips would bring vacationers to equally impressive locations on Friends Lake and Schroon Lake, so Durant put a station at The Glen, where a 300-foot wooden covered bridge built in 1816 for the first time connected the towns of Chester, Johnsburg, Thurman and Warrrensburg.
In 1843, an ice jam swept away the greater part of this first bridge but left the ends intact. When it was reconnected, the middle section was made into a double track, and in 1858 the ends were rebuilt so the structure was symmetrical throughout. In 1903, the bridge was destroyed by a log jam that lifted it three feet off its foundation and carried it several hundred feet downstream. The current bridge was built in 1959.
The Adirondacks' First Humans
Once you cross the Glen Bridge, you'll pass through another five miles of forest. That makes this a good stretch in our First Wilderness Audio Tour to reflect on the Adirondacks' first humans. We think these early people were the last wave of migrants who crossed the Bering Land Bridge, Paleo-Indians who arrived 13,000 years ago as the great Laurentide Glacier was melting in a period of global warming. The Adirondacks were a treeless tundra laid bare by the glacier. The Champlain Sea -- twice the size of Lake Michigan -- emerged to the north and west, populated by icebergs and Atlantic sea creatures. In 1949, railroad workers were surprised to find the bones of a beluga whale while laying track in a swampy area near Charlotte, Vermont.
Archaeologists have found no evidence that indigenous people made permanent, year-round settlements in the Adirondacks. Territories controlled by the Iroquois and Mohicans had fuzzy boundaries that would shift in the course of hunting, fishing, collecting shellfish, and quarrying stone for tools and weapons. Following the Revolutionary War, many Native American tribes faced displacement and loss of land due to treaties favoring the new American colonies, leading to forced migrations and significant cultural upheaval.
Around 1788, an influential land speculator named John Thurman decided at the age of 60 to relocate from New York City to the Adirondacks, where he ultimately would own more than 100,00 acres.
Introducing John Thurman
The Pomeroy Foundation placed this marker at Elm Hill on the South Johnsburg Road in 2014.
The son of a wealthy Dutch merchant, Thurman had started as a dry goods merchant in what today is the heart of New York's Financial District. He traded in deerskins and beaver and raccoon pelts from the north and dress goods, brandy, and cotton stockings from overseas. Then he started speculating in Adirondack real estate, starting with a vast parcel that on a map produced in 1775 by British Army engineers was described as "impassable and uninhabited" by reason of "mountains, swamps, and drowned lands."
Thurman introduced farming here and created an industrial complex that ultimately supported a hamlet of 700 people. He built a road from Lake George to Johnsburg. Then he built a road from Chester to Schroon Lake. Then he cleared the land for the Champlain Canal, running from Half Moon near Albany to Wood Creek, near Whitehall. He ultimately owned so much land in Warren County that both Thurman and Johnsburg are named for him.
When one of his surveyors told Thurman about Mill Creek, Thurman relocated north and built a home on the plateau he called "Elm Hill." Its foundation is still there along with a historic marker you'll find on the South Johnsburg Road.
In Thurman's day, Mill Creek was known as Beaver Brook. He first built a sawmill to produce lumber required for permanent dwellings. Next came a grist mill that encouraged farmers to clear land to extend their fields and plant more crops. Then the first framed barn in the region. Then a store with a distillery. Then a woolen factory that soon was changed to a cotton factory and then a calico printing works, one of the first in America.
At the age of 79 in 1809, Thurman was having lunch at his farm at Trout Lake when he received word that a newly purchased bull had gotten loose. Thurman immediately rushed out and attempted to restrain the animal, but the bull charged and gored him.
Thurman died the next day --but what a legacy he left. At the age of 38, Thurman co-founded the first New York City Chamber of Commerce.
With Zephaniah Platt, he built a road from what we today call Lake George to Schroon Lake and then on to Plattsburgh. The first section of that road was called the John Thurman Road. Today we call it New York State Route 9.
