Frederick A. Isham | Obituary

5 March 1937 | Lake Placid News

Frederick A. Isham 1895

From: The Adirondack Enterprise Supplement, Vol. I, No. 1, Thursday, February 21, 1895, page 2.


No name is more intimately associated with Saranac Lake than that of Frederick A. Isham, attorney, and present counsel of the village. Mr. Isham came here when the town was in its infancy, and he has been foremost among the energetic ones who pushed forward enterprises for the welfare of the town, assisting greatly in bringing this beautiful mountain village to the place of its present occupancy among the villages and cities of the State.

Frederick A. Isham was born in Plattsburgh, N.Y., on May 22, 1860. He attended schools in that vicinity and, after graduating from Plattsburgh Academy, went to Columbia Law School, New York, from which institution he graduated with the degree of L.L.D. in 1883. He was then in the buoyant flush of youth and, having been admitted to the bar in Jan. 1884, began the practice of his profession in New York. There he became very successful and he had the promise of a still brighter future when ill health compelled him to leave the city in 1889.

Mr. Isham arrived in Saranac Lake in June, 1889. The population was then [. . .t] 200, yet Mr. Isham, believing that the place was destined to grow and flourish, at once invested heavily in real estate and decided to remain here permanently.

Mr. Isham was married in 1885 to Miss Laura Haynes, of Plattsburgh, a daughter of one of the best known men of that town. Three bright children bless the union.

Transcribed from a poor photocopy by Mary Hotaling, 3/31/2010. 

Frederick A. Isham

from the Historic Saranac Lake Wiki

Born: May 21, 1860 (or May 22, 1859), Plattsburgh ¹

Died: February 26, 1926, Lake Placid

Married: Laura Haynes of Plattsburgh in 1885

Children: Three children, including Helen, for whom Helen Street is named

Frederick Asher Isham was senior partner in New York law firm Isham and Isham, and lived in New York City and Lake Placid; he was the son of H. L Isham. ² With the Blood family, he bought 21 acres of sheep pasture between Church Street and Pine Street and developed it, laying out 88 "Villa sites" on his eleven acres, along with the streets of Helen Hill. Fred Isham named Helen Street for his daughter, Helen Isham.

He was one of the original four Saranac Lake village trustees elected in 1892. With Milo B. Miller, he campaigned for the incorporation of the village of Saranac Lake, and in 1892, the first village board meeting was held in his office; he was named village clerk. ³

His sister, Ida Belle Isham, married Charles J. Greenough, a prominent Saranac Lake citizen.

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From the Adirondack Daily Enterprise Weekender, June 13, 1992, p. 2.

Of History and Humor: Saranac Lake's early days

By JOHN J. DUQUETTE

A rare photograph and a bit of Centennial history combine to afford us a glimpse of a rather unusual episode of local interest. The sequence begins with a parcel of Main Street property, a residential business office and the owner's role in the establishment of our village. Enter a picture-taker and the proprietor of a nearby hotel, who jointly conspired to produce the illustration which accompanies this article, and the drama unfolds.

A survey is in progress which is apparently locating the site for the new high school scheduled for 1890. The residence is the home of Frederick A. Isham with the square block addition serving as his law and real estate office. Isham, together with Milo B. Miller, was pressing for the community's becoming an incorporated village. Area growth in both population and additional buildings was creating an expansion that called for reliable municipal services and some sort of civil administration.

Hundreds of health seekers were arriving and resort hotels were springing up as sportsmen favored our area. Support merchants multiplied in accordance and it became obvious that such prosperity would necessitate a valid preparation just to keep pace. Isham, Miller and other concerned community leaders deemed it feasible to proceed with the incorporation plan. Seeking approval from the public in general, a special election was arranged to be held in early May with the results being currently celebrated during this our Centennial year. Officers elected were: Dr. E.L. Trudeau, president, Milo B. Miller, Francis M. Bull, and Dr. Charles F. Wicker, trustees; Frederick A. Isham, clerk. With the first village board, established steps were taken to appoint commissioners of the various departments and establish a set of laws to govern the community.

The first board meeting was held in Isham's office on June 16th, 1892, with Tuffield Latour being named street commissioner while W.J. Slater, Dr. C.F. Wicker, and Dr. J. C. Russell were appointed to the board of health. Subsequent meetings announced that tax collections would be forthcoming and William E. Roberts was named to the post of police constable. On July 13, a street survey and mapping project was authorized at a fixed amount of nine dollars per day. On Aug. 6 the board recommended the formation of a water commission and by Nov. 2nd, a constructor was set to work on a water and sewer project. On May 5, 1893 Dr. Trudeau retired and was replaced by Milo B. Miller and on Nov. 17th E.E. Lobdell was appointed to act as night watchman.

On June 23rd, 1894, Steve Merchant had to appear before the board in answer to a complaint that one of his lumber stacks was blocking the road next to the Main Street Bridge. Steve owned and operated the former Pliny Miller sawmill where the Saranac Lake Village office building is presently located. He agreed to move the lumber. Moving on to 1895 a new street was approved that would run from Broadway to "Trestle Street" and was to be named Woodruff Street (Trestle Street later became Bloomingdale Avenue and the former name reflected the narrow gauge railroad timber trestle that ran from Union Station to Pine Street) The railroad was the Chateaugay, which reached Saranac Lake from Plattsburgh in 1887 and was extended to Lake Placid six years later On January 22nd, the firm of Jackson and Merkel was granted a franchise to operate a telephone system in the village for a term of five years.

And so it went, step by step the emerging village was testing its wings in the civil realm. The many complicated functions related to municipal management were met and mastered by our village fathers, although they possessed little or no previous experience in such matters. It was our good fortune to have had personnel of that caliber during those developing years. Business also seemed to prosper with the native enterprise and the ability to adapt to both the health and recreation industries. Local entrepreneurs as well as some of the visiting gentry erected substantial buildings along Main Street and Broadway as the village took shape.

That pretty much takes care of the historical aspects... so where's the humor?

Returning to the subject of the photograph, Isham's house and office were moved to what is now Academy Street to make way for the new Main Street High School. It was in this new location that the early board meetings were held as the school was built in 1890. By 1906 Isham had moved to Lake Placid and years later the wing that held his office was occupied by A. B. Hokanson as a tailor shop. The photo, which was taken by George Baldwin in 1888, contains the humorous part of our story. What is purported to be a bona fide survey in progress is actually a burlesque. The "surveyor's" transit is an empty beer case mounted on a stepladder and the sighting scope, which is mounted on the beer case, is nothing more than an empty whiskey bottle. His assistant, near the porch, is holding a sapling pole to represent a level rod. The surveyor at the transit happened to be R A. Streeter who, at that time, was the owner of the. Berkeley Hotel across the street and his assistant, the rod man, was J. H. Wilson, who was the bartender at the Berkeley, It had to be either Baldwin or Streeter who instigated this prank but, in any case, it was a superb bit of deception!

To the right of Isham's house is the McKee building and above its roofline the tower of the old Town Hall can be seen. In 1888 it had just been completed and the town clock had not as yet been installed (note the blank circles). The large boulder at the right has appeared in many of the early village photos but was removed for the construction of Academy Street. Seaver Miller and Judge Utting both claimed that, as children, they played on the rock. If you happen to have a copy of the Centennial Booklet you can find this same boulder on Page 10, "A Barren Main St.," and again on Page 15 "President Harrison dedicates new high school" Apparently it was a rock with a good press agent.

At some period of time between Isham and Hokanson the main portion of the former residence was separated from the smaller office and quite possibly remains, although somewhat altered, at No. 7 Academy Street. A second story was added to the little office building but, oddly, the roofline decorative frieze remained in place. For a brief time the building served as a telephone office. Today, as the Decorator Shop, ⁴ it is sandwiched between two driveways at No. 5 Academy Street across from the Hotel Saranac. It has been slightly altered and a concrete block addition has been added in the rear but nothing can detract from that history was made here 100 years ago. Four years earlier Baldwin and Streeter had joined forces on Main St. to prove that even such an important page in local history can have its comic section appropriately entitled "Of History and Humor."

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Sources:

• Foerstner, Abigail, James Van Allen: the first eight billion miles, University of Iowa Press, 2007. p. 69 Full text here
  
• Gallos, Philip L., Cure Cottages of Saranac Lake, Historic Saranac Lake, 1985. ISBN 0-9615159-0-2

• 1Brainard, Homer Worthington, A survey of the Ishams in England and America: Eight Hundred and Fifty Years of History and Genealogy, 1938
• 2Plattsburgh Sentinel, January 15, 1886
• 3Adirondack Daily Enterprise, Weekender, p. 2, November 6, 1993, "Profiling Milo Miller"
• 4The Decorator Shop has since moved to 17 Church Street

The Grip: Seldom Told Tales of Helen Isham Halsey

Helen Isham Halsey & Charles Henry II, Newfoundland, 1911

Not only was life with a clergyman "quite a change of pace for the patrician Helen," after sailing alone for twenty-one days with her two boys, ages 18 mos and 2 mos, and two teenage charges through a massive hurricane from Newfoundland to the states on board a ship transporting a black bear bound for the Boston Zoo and on which there was also a fire, it seems that my great grandmother Helen, in her third winter in Cincinnati, found herself with three children under age 5 in the midst of a nationwide epidemic of The Grip.

Helen Caroline Isham Halsey, Cincinnati, 1933

from THE "GRIP" EPIDEMIC OF THE WINTER OF 1915-1916, Louis I. DUBLIN, PH. D., Statistician, Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, New York City.

Early last winter the country experienced a severe epidemic of what was popularly called 'grip.' It started in December and reached its height in the middle of January. The disease seems to have swept the entire land, moving from west to east. The duration of the epidemic in anyone locality was from six to eight weeks. It is not an exaggeration to state that in certain cities from 40 to 50 percent of the population was affected. As a result the general death rate was appreciably increased, and this made itself especially felt in a markedly higher mortality from lobar pneumonia.

The profound influence of the epidemic upon the mortality of the country may be seen in the returns already at hand from some of our largest cities . . . In 1915-1916, the number of deaths from influenza in this group of cities was increased more than sevenfold in comparison with 1914-1915. Apparently the most marked change occurred in Cincinnati [2 deaths from influenza in 1914-1915; 81 in 1915-1916], but without exception there was a marked rise in the number of deaths in every one of the cities. Pneumonia also shows a striking increase.

Helen & Charles Henry, Newfoundland, 1911

Helen's grandfather, Harry Isham, was a prominent wagon and sleigh maker, called by my great aunt "the Henry Ford of his time," who owned a factory in Plattsburgh during the second half of the 19th century. Helen's father, Frederick Isham, was educated at Columbia, graduated Columbia Law School in 1884, lived at 66 W 22nd Street while in law school, then engaged for a short time in some "entrepreneurial work" in Saranac Lake and married Laura Haynes, whom he knew from Plattsburgh.

Frederick and Laura had two children, Helen and Robert in 1890 and 1891, and the growing family soon moved to New York City where Frederick established a thriving law practice and they lived a life of comfort, luxury, and society "out in the country"--somewhere on the upper west side around 113th Street--partaking in the last vestiges of the Gilded Age with designated upstairs and downstairs maids, governesses and nannies for the children, and professional piano and singing lessons for both mother and daughter. While in New York, however, tragedy struck. Two of Helen's younger brothers, both born in the city, died from diphtheria in the mid-1890's. The family was so distraught by the boys' deaths, Helen's mother took her two surviving children back upstate and moved in with her Isham in-laws who had since given the Isham Wagon Company to their oldest son and retired to Lake Placid.

Following financial set backs resulting from the 1890's economic depression, Frederick rejoined his family and maintained homes in New York and Lake Placid to faciliate his law practice. He served two terms as mayor of Lake Placid and embarked on a lucrative business scheme developing homes for patients seeking tuberculosis treatment at the Adirondack Cottage Sanitarium. (Ironically, Frederick Isham's grandson and namesake would spend the better part of a decade in and out of mental institutions following a schizophrenic break in 1932, eventually dying of tuberculosis contracted in the Cincinnati Sanitarium in 1939).

In 1905, tragedy struck the family again when Laura died in childbirth. Helen, 16 years old at the time, didn't even know her mother was pregnant. She came home from school one day and her mother was gone.

Helen Halsey on board Grenfell's schooner the George B. Cluett, 1912

Although she wanted to attend Vassar, Helen stayed in Lake Placid tending to her widower father as her younger brother went off to Exeter, Colgate, and NYU, and eventually joined his father's law firm. In 1909, Jesse Halsey was visiting his sister, Ibby, who was taking the cure at the sanatorium in Saranac Lake (Jesse's older brother Harry had died of TB, preventing Jesse from enrolling at Princeton as an undergraduate) and speaking on behalf of the Grenfell mission in the church in which Helen played the organ. As the story goes, the lights in the church went out and when they came on again, Jesse was sitting on the bench next to Helen. In much the same way, Jesse joined Sir Grenfell's organization in Newfoundland and Labrador. Upon being told that Grenfell's outpost wasn't in need of another minister, Jesse asked the Englishman what he did need. Grenfell said, "A plumber," and Jesse repied, "I'm your plumber." Jesse and Helen married in 1910 and immediately set off for missionary life in Newfoundland.

Jesse and Helen's oldest sons, Charles and Frederick, were born in hospital in St. Anthony, delivered by Dr. John Little, Jr. Later, when Jesse and Helen lived in Cincinnati the Little family resided in New Hampshire and Jesse and Helen and their children would occasionally visit.

"Tuckamne Croft" - Charles Henry & Helen I. Halsey, 1912

Each spring when the straits began to thaw in Newfoundland, Jesse traveled on dogsled from St. Anthony across the island to St. John's, then set sail in a schooner to Boston to retrieve all the supplies needed for the mission in the coming months. From the time he departed in April or May until his return several months later, Helen would not know anything about him. She didn't know where he was, when he would come back, whether a polar bear had eaten him, if he was adrift with the dogsled on an icepan, or whether he was alive or dead. He was gone for months on end and there was no communication between the two of them whatsoever. By the time Jesse made the return trek, the harbor had melted and he sailed directly into St. Anthony.

Every afternoon in the spring of 1912, awaiting Jesse's return from the annual supply trip and pregnant with Frederick, Helen held tightly onto the little boy Charles's hand and walked out onto the rocky cliffs of the peninsula to watch for the sails of ships coming back into the harbor.

The photos of Helen on board the Geo. B. Cluett, and Helen and Charles Halsey on the dogsled in Newfoundland are courtesy of Con Crowley, from a collection of photos belonging to his grandfather, Captain Ed White, Jr., who sailed on the crew of Grenfell's schooner from Newfoundland to Boston with Helen et al in October 1912.

the Ishams in America

Grandfather Frederick Asher Isham pictured with (clockwise from upper right): Charles Henry II, age 9; Helen Augusta, age 6; Wilmun (Billy) Haynes, infant; and Frederick Isham, age 8; c. 1920