Apollos' Fortune

In the 1840s a rangy, big-boned, imaginative young Vermonter named Apollos Smith operated a boat through the northern canal connecting Lake Champlain with the Hudson River. In the course of a hunting trip Apollos was enchanted by the chill beauty of the Adirondacks and decided to open a sportsmen's lodge on the Saranac River near Loon Lake. He built it himself, with a living room and kitchen on the first floor and eight thinly partitioned sleeping rooms upstairs. Board and lodging cost $1.25 a day; no women were admitted. From a barrel of whiskey standing in a corner guests drew their own drinks, at 4-c- apiece. Seven years later when Apollos Smith built a less Spartan 20-room lodge on Upper Saint Regis Lake he had changed his name through "Pol" to a dignified "Paul" and had become a substantial Adirondack character.

The Civil War made Paul Smith's remote lodge famous when many a gilded young New Yorker and Bostonian hid out there to avoid conscription. Paul was an expert and talkative guide and his wife cooked such bounteous dinners of venison, flapjacks and trout that the lodge grew into an immense rambling structure with 216 rooms. It had such guests as Phineas Taylor Barnum, Mark Twain, Grover Cleveland, Edward H. Harriman. When Paul Smith, an alert, erect oldster of 87 with snowy hair, a Vandyke beard and broad-brimmed hat, died in 1912 he left his three sons the largest estate in Franklin County.

Son Phelps Smith alone stayed on. As shrewd and eccentric as his father, Phelps added to his holdings until he had some 30,000 acres of Adirondack resort land, including 23 miles of navigable waterway and ten lakes. Neighbors like Edward F. Hutton and Ogden Reid collected their mail from Paul Smith's township postoffice, used electricity from Paul Smith's Light & Power Co., shunted their private cars onto a railway spur that the Smiths built from the New York Central at Lake Clear Junction. When the old hotel burned to the ground in 1930, Phelps Smith remarked that the hotel business was no longer what it had been anyway, replaced his father's palatial edifice with groups of snug cottages. He went on paying low wages, giving away $100 bills, warning his employes never to marry, in general behaving with the gruffness expected of him. Last January, after two years of bitter wrangling with the village of Saranac Lake which has threatened to put up a municipal power plant, crotchety Phelps Smith was suddenly stricken with pleural pneumonia and died.

Last week the curious fortunes of Apollos Smith and his son came to a curious end as Son Phelps' will was probated in the courtroom at Malone. With the exception of a $100,000 trust fund for several servants and relatives, Phelps Smith's $10,000,000 estate will go to establish a "corporation ... to be known as Paul Smith's College of Arts & Sciences . . . to be located upon the shores of St. Regis Lake if practicable . . . for the higher education of boys and girls." To keep out undesirable neighbors, Phelps Smith also provided for the formation of a "Paul Smith's Country Club," whose members should have sufficient "character, wealth, and breeding" to buy the old hotel site from the estate within ten years for $1,000,000.

Four attorneys representing Phelps Smith's 14 cousins, his only apparent heirs, appeared at the hearing, announced they might enter objections later.

Beyond that Phelps Smith said little, leaving the rest to his two executors, the Adirondack National Bank & Trust Co. and Attorney John M. Cantwell, of Malone, both well trained to accept the Smith word as law. Last week no Adirondack native doubted that Paul Smith's College of Arts & Sciences would soon be a proud reality.

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