Saranac Lake, NY – Historic Saranac Lake Museum Archivist/Curator Chessie and Museum Assistant Emily have been on an adventure to retrieve an important tuberculosis and public health history collection. The collection contains more than 1,000 fascinating items documenting the treatment, prevention, and detection of tuberculosis from Saranac Lake, across the country, and the world. It was generously donated to the museum to make sure that it could be used by the public and generations to come.
Chessie and Emily arrived home on Tuesday [Jan. 31] after spending several days sorting, inventorying, packing, and driving the artifacts and ephemera home from Georgia.
Those with the museum expressed thanks to those who supported this project with special donations. Museum staff haven’t quite reached their goal to help them process these new donations and make them available to the public, so please visit the fundraiser page to donate if you can.
Photo at top: Historic Saranac Lake Museum employees (Archivist/Curator Chessie and Museum Assistant Emily) embark on a road trip to collect items for the tuberculosis and public health history collection. Photo courtesy of the Historic Saranac Lake Museum.
Message In a Bottle
When I was a boy growing up in our house on 1 Stevenson Lane, my mom had an antique bottle collection that she kept on a shelf. One of those bottles had a rustically intricate attached metal stopper. The engraved circular glass on the front read “ISAAC MERKEL & SON, BOSS LAGER, SARANAC LAKE.” That bottle always held a special fascination for me. I still have it.
It all began innocently enough, quite by accident really, about three summers ago as I quietly rowed my Zen boat canoe from South Creek into camp. As I crossed some shallows near the shore of an island as I entered the lake, something glistened blue, reflecting morning sunlight from the lake’s bottom.
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