Pictured above: Ralph Baker with twin sisters Blanche and Bertha. (Photo provided)

Andrew Baker had a farm, and on that farm, he set up big tents with 10-inch poles, 10 of them, making for a tent motel. He always waited until spring to do it, for 40 years, starting in 1867. If you were a city dweller back in the day, planning your next Adirondack getaway, you might have looked through a copy of the Brooklyn “Daily Eagle Summer Resort Guide.” You might even have made reservations from it, like a place called “Baker Cottage,” Saranac Lake, Andrew J. Baker, proprietor, rates $9 to $12 weekly, capacity 20 guests, May to November.

These guests who came from afar to get their wilderness rush, were called “sports” by the locals, probably synonymous with greenhorns. The sports and their guides, along with lumberjacks and trappers, had been based in Saranac Lake for over two decades before Dr. E.L. Trudeau came along in 1876, bringing his disease and subsequent sanitorium that would put Saranac Lake on the map.

During those pre-Trudeau years, Andrew and Mary were watching their plans materialize. The Baker family owned a lot of property. Andrew was master of his domain with a lucrative guide business and a typical low-yielding Adirondack farm. He found ways to make more money, like by victimizing frogs for fancy New York City restaurants. A letter among Baker’s leftovers is from “Trimm and Sumner, Dealers in Poultry, Game, etc. 421 and 422 Washington Markets, N.Y.C.” It gave Baker instructions about the proper packing of frogs for shipment, e.g. “Take your bags made of clean muslin, put in the frogs with ice in each bag, then pack in box and surround with ice, Grass or Moss …”

Running Baker’s guide business was a mom-and-pop operation. Andrew had built another structure right next to his farmhouse, on the east side. That was the summer kitchen and storerooms where Mary Baker prepared all the meals their sports would need. Mary’s reputation as a cook was pretty good. If you were a real hunter, Mary would even cook your kill for you upon request in her summer kitchen.

As a paying guest or “sport” at Baker’s, you would go to Mary’s kitchen early in the morning and from it you would return to your tent in the evening. The Bakers had their private kitchen in the family farmhouse, only 3 inches away. That was the kitchen used by RLS and his family in the winter of 1887/88. It should be obvious by now why Stevenson called this place the “Hunter’s Home.”

In November 1874, Andrew’s father, Col. Milote Baker, died. Next “Baker’s Tavern” and the store Baker had on present day Triangle Park were shut down. By 1887, the famous hostelry was a boarded-up empty shell when Robert Louis Stevenson looked down on it every day from his rented veranda.

Andrew and Mary Baker were blessed with five children. They were cursed because they outlived all of them. When their daughter, Bertha, died at Christmas time in 1923, age 47, her parents wrote in the last available space on the death page in their big 1872 family Bible: “Our last dear child is gone. How lonely we are.” Neither parent was around to see the spring. Mary was last.

A three-page document in the Society’s archives is poorly typewritten and ends with this: “Copied from Biographical Review, Essex and Clinton Counties, N.Y. 1896.” It makes claims not found elsewhere (yet?) in the Society’s collection, e.g., that Andrew had a brother “Milote, a promising boy, who was fatally poisoned by a careless nurse;” also that Andrew was “extensively engaged in lumbering.” It says that Andrew is “the subject of this sketch … He owns over six hundred acres of land including Baker Mountain. The latter place is a favorite haunt of tourists, who, looking from the summit can feast their eyes on one of the most beautiful scenes in the world.

“Mr. and Mrs. Baker had five children of whom only two are now living (1896), Blanche and Bertha, comely young ladies of nineteen, who strikingly resemble each other and are pupils in the Plattsburgh Normal School,” now SUNY Plattsburgh. The first born, Grace, died at the age of 12; Clara Louise Kellogg Baker died in 1882, at the age of 9; and Ralph, the only son, died of typhoid fever, April 18, 1895, at the age of 22. Ralph was 15 when he shared his family’s home with the Stevenson expedition. Ralph lived only half as long as RLS and they all say that Stevenson died young. If it’s true that only the good die young, then Ralph had only himself to blame. He was almost too good to be true, according to this article allegedly copied from the above-mentioned publication:

“Ralph graduated from the Plattsburgh High School in 1891, from the Normal School, in 1892, taking the two-year’s course in one year, and during the summer of 1892 was clerk at Saranac Lake House. In the fall he was elected principal for the grammar department of the Union free school at Saranac Lake, and subsequently made an enviable record as a teacher. In the autumn of 1894, he resigned his position and entered the sophomore class at Union College, intending to follow his graduation here with a course at the Albany Law School. An ambitious scholar and an accomplished athlete, he was also a gentleman in the highest sense of the word.”

The following tribute from the captain of the football team of the college, a member of the senior class shows Ralph Baker’s standing among his schoolmates:

“I never knew a man to enter Union College and take so prominent a position, not only as an athlete and scholar, but as a man who won the love of his class and fraternity men, the respect and admiration of every student, and the confidence of all the members of the faculty as did Ralph Baker. Of the one hundred and ten members of his class, he ranked first as an athlete, among the first five in scholarship and deportment, and first as a man in every sense of the word.”

As Christmas, 1887, approached, a tea chest from England arrived at Baker’s with a scribbled address on its top (artifact #97):

Per Globe Express

Louis Stevenson Esq.

Saranac Lake

Adirondaks

New York State

U.S.A.

The chest was filled with items ordered by Andrew Baker’s famous tenant, including Christmas gifts. Twins Blanche and Bertha received a deluxe copy of “A Child’s Garden of Verses” to share. Ralph got his signed copy of “Treasure Island” to keep all for himself. When he died on April 18, 1895, his mother, Mary, took the book to keep to herself. When the Bakers allowed the Stevenson Society to set up a museum in part of their house, she allowed them to display her son’s book, too. The Society listed it in their first annual report in 1916: “TREASURE ISLAND, With Autograph Inscription, No boy lives but would treasure such a volume as this. It was presented by R.L.S. as a Christmas gift to the young son of Mr. and Mrs. Baker, his hosts.”

———–

RALPH BAKER

from

THE AUTHOR

Saranac Lake, N.Y.

Xmas 1887

Loaned to the Society by Mrs. Andrew Baker

———–

This book has the distinction of being the only genuine copy of “Treasure Island,” signed by the author, on public display, anywhere. Technically, Mary Baker could materialize at will, anytime, to take back her son’s book but where would she take it? She knows it belongs here, too, where it came out of a tea chest from England.