72 ADIRONDACK LIFE September + October 2019
of millionaire Orrando Dexter near his
Great Camp on Dexter Lake unleashed
front-page predictions of wildcat insur-
gencies, with a “remarkable conspiracy
of the native woodmen and guides” sub-
jecting outsiders to a “reign of terror and
lawlessness.... These natives, deprived
of their ancient privileges in the woods,
are believed to have determined upon
individual revenge.”
A confluence of influences at the
end of the 19th century and the start
of the 20th got people thinking differ-
ently about poverty and its victims,
and considering the economic forces
that kept hard-working people in penu-
ry and debt. And an outraged citizenry
assumed more public responsibility for
the safety of young children and abused
women. Able-bodied men who walked
out on their families, or failed to sup-
port their indigent parents, faced much
worse than gossip. There were arrests
and fines, jail terms and headlines bla-
zoning the names of the negligent for all
the county to see. William Hennessey,
of Plattsburgh, who worked for the New
York Humane Society from 1905 into
the ’20s, investigated a slew of cases of
child neglect and spousal abuse in Clin-
ton, Franklin and Essex Counties. In Au
Sable Forks, he discovered the Kurbin
family in an abandoned ore separator,
five children “on the brink of starva-
tion.” In Chazy, Harry Smith’s family
was tracked to “an old one-room shack
in utmost misery and squalor,” barefoot
children “shiver[ing in] shreds of clothes
that barely sufficed to cover their naked-
ness.” In Lake Placid, the Gadways sub-
sisted “in harrowing destitution” with a
cracker box for a coffin for an infant who
died at birth.
But hopeful excursionists prepar-
ing their great Adirondack adventure
weren’t reading news items about Hen-
nessey’s great busts in local papers.
The Chamberlains, of Au Sable Forks, a
family of 13 “slowly starving to death”
in 1926, six children in a bed (villagers,
alerted by an alarmed gravedigger, came
to the rescue with a truck laden with
food, clothes and fuel), weren’t on the
tourists’ map. Nor was a visitors’ read-
ing list likely to include a state report on
“Abandoned Farm Areas in New York,”A POOR VIEW
Continued from page 68