Tahawus, the deserted village

A vice president was here, in the middle of the Adirondacks, when word came that the president was dying.

Tahawus, also called Adirondac or McIntyre, was a village in the Town of Newcomb, Essex County, New York, and it is now a ghost town inside the Adirondack Park. In 1901 Theodore Roosevelt learned at Tahawus that President William McKinley was dying, and left from here.

The village existed because of iron. Archibald McIntyre and David Henderson found ore here in 1826, and Adirondac became the company town of the Adirondack Iron Works. Ore was extracted at what was called the Upper Works with moderate success between 1827 and 1857. Then the operation failed. The iron carried impurities of titanium dioxide that the equipment of the era could not process properly, a local flood and a national economic crisis finished the argument, and in 1857 the Adirondack Iron Works surrendered to the remoteness of the wilderness. Adirondac became known as the deserted village, which is the name that stuck.

The mining came back and went again. Facilities were still standing as recently as 2005 and have since been demolished and removed, apart from some minor garages, blast furnaces and outbuildings. The Adirondack Iron and Steel Company site was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1977.

The historian Lee Manchester has gathered the primary material into anthologies, and his framing is the useful one: the tale of the Deserted Village sits at the centre of the story of how the Adirondack High Peaks were explored at all. From the discovery of the ore deposit in 1826, Adirondac drew industrialists, scientists, journalists and adventurers into country that had barely been mapped. The Tahawus Club colony later established itself in the abandoned ironworkers' village, and in 2003 the Open Space Institute, a non-profit conservancy, purchased the vast Tahawus Tract.