“When Robert Louis Stevenson lived here, Saranac Lake village was but a backwoods hamlet. The first locomotive had not yet startled the buck and the bear. The community which is now the metropolis of the Adirondacks had in 1887 less than a handful of the thousands who have since followed the trail blazed by Dr. Edward L. Trudeau, himself a victim of tuberculosis. Everybody knows why Stevenson went to Saranac and everybody knows that Dr. Trudeau was his physician.” The Penny Piper of Saranac, Stephen Chalmers (1912)

There are other things everybody is supposed to know, like how did Dr. Trudeau get his idea to put a sanatorium here, on the side of Mt. Pisgah, a sanatorium that looked more like a camp when the creator of Long John Silver came to town. Everybody knows that Dr. Trudeau came to this backwoods hamlet to live, because his previous landlord, Paul Smith, didn’t want him or anyone else as permanent guests in his famous hotel on Spitfire Lake, sixteen miles from the present day corner of Church and Main streets, where the doctor finally made a home for his family in 1884. Everybody knows that Trudeau believed he had staved off death from tuberculosis by coming to the Adirondacks to die from it. Surprisingly, he didn’t die but instead experienced a miraculous recovery and a new lease on life and he blamed it all on the air he was breathing here. Maybe it made him feel religious enough to build a church next to the cow path that went down to the community waterhole, what Church St. is today, and St. Luke’s is the church.

Dr. Trudeau was the kind of frontier physician who ran a practice without office hours but was on permanent call if needed and when he wasn’t home, he was probably out hunting, his favorite sport. There was a scientist inside of him, too, that kept informed on medical affairs in the real world beyond this wilderness. From overseas, Trudeau got wind of the theories of two German scientists, Brehmer and Dettweiler, who advocated the outdoor and institutional treatment of TB. Their ideas could have triggered the famous dream Trudeau had one afternoon when he fell asleep in the woods on Mt. Pisgah. According to Stephen Chalmers in his book, The Beloved Physician, “He dreamed that the forest around him melted away and that the whole mountainside was dotted with houses built inside out, as if the inhabitants lived on the outside.” Trudeau found wealthy donors to invest in his dream which materialized in 1884 with the establishment of the Adirondack Sanitorium.

More news from Germany had inspired Dr. Trudeau to start up a laboratory in a spare room in his house. A scientist named Koch had discovered the culprit behind the ‘white death’–the microscopic tubercule bacillus. Trudeau obtained a translation of Koch’s paper, The Etiology of Tuberculosis and wanted to do his own research which began with his purchase of books and lab equipment. By 1887, Dr. Trudeau was a self-taught, unlicensed laboratory technician when he got a note delivered to him, requesting his bedside presence by a new exile in town, somebody staying at Andrew Baker’s house, somebody with a name everybody would recognize–Robert Louis Stevenson.

“Our house–emphatically Baker’s–is on a hill, and has a sight of a stream turning a corner in the valley–bless the face of running water!–and sees some hills, too, and the paganly prosaic roofs of Saranac itself; the Lake, it does not see, nor do I regret that; I like water (fresh water I mean) either running swiftly among stones or else largely qualified with whiskey.” RLS to Henry James, Oct. 6, 1887.

It didn’t take Louis long to resume writing his letters once he was settled into his newest home. Here at Baker’s, the plan was to sit out the encroaching Adirondack winter, to see if it gets as bad as people say, but also to see if it helps to keep Louis alive. In the meantime, RLS seemed to be in approval of his new surroundings. Baker’s was a shack compared to his last home, a ritzy bourgeois suburban villa in Bournemouth, England, that he called Skerryvore. Skerryvore had been a gift from his father but for the bohemian in Louis, it was over the top in an ostentatious kind of way like he told a friend: “There I sit like an old Irish beggar-man in a palace throne-room. Incongruity never went so far.” But when he writes to Will Low from Saranac Lake on Oct. 8, he says, “We are here at a first rate place. ‘Baker’s’ is the name of our home.” To cousin Bob, he writes, “We have a wooden house on a hill top, overlooking a river, and a village about a quarter of a mile away, and very wooded hills; the whole scene is very Highland for want of heather and the wooden houses.” Included was a drawing to show cousin Bob the layout of the seven rooms he was renting from Andrew Baker for $50.00 a month.

Seven rooms for five people. Stevenson did not travel alone. Along with his wife, Fanny, and her son, Lloyd Osbourne, and their Swiss servant, Valentine, his mother was here, too, and at 58, the senior citizen of the group. Margaret, aka ‘Maggie’, had the best room in the house, Andrew and Mary’s master bedroom with a closet. Today that closet is crammed with left-over items from the 58 years the Bakers lived in the Robert Louis Stevenson Memorial Cottage. From her new quarters, Margaret wrote her own first letters from Baker’s to her sister, Jane Whyte Balfour, in Scotland: “The house is built of wooden boards, painted white, with green shutters, and a verandah around it. It belongs to a guide, who takes parties into the woods for shooting and fishing excursions…Everything is of the plainest and simplest, but sufficiently comfortable.” Plain and simple at Baker’s was an extreme change from life as she had known it for all of her life, for Margaret came from a substantial landed family, the Balfours of Pilrig, and had just recently left her substantial family residence for 30 years, at 17 Heriot Row, in the New Town prosperous part Edinburgh, Scotland. Margaret adapted well to all the strange new conditions she encountered while traveling with her famous invalid son. In Saranac Lake, Maggie joined the congregation of St. Luke’s and made many friends and the Baker children liked her, too. Said Bertha Baker, who was 10 when the Stevensons altered their lifestyle: “We all liked Mrs. Stevenson, the mother of the author, very much. She seemed more like an American than his wife” who was American.

“We are beautifully situated above the river,” continues Maggie, “upon which we look down; the view from our windows is best described as ‘very highland’, but the chief glory just now lies in the autumn colourings…We are about ten minutes’ walk distant from the village.” That’s about how long it would take for Dr. Trudeau to walk to Baker’s to meet his new “illustrious patient,” if he walked.