We continue our account of the “Holy Tree” and Dr. Thissell (part two of three parts).
The curtain raised in a strange way on the career of the newly minted doctor, who was to become this community’s grand old man of medicine.
Dr. Thissell was living in Boston, near his home of Berkely, M.A., and he had recently joined the Massachusetts Medical Society. One day he walked into the society’s headquarters where he was introduced to a tall, attractive lady, elegantly dressed in the finery of that period, the daughter of one of Boston’s wealthiest residents. It seemed she had received a telegram from her brother, Addison Child, telling her that he was ill and that she was to come to his estate located in the hamlet of upper New York State (called Childwold, which he named after himself) and to bring a doctor.
Fifty years later, Dr. Thissell, in an interview given to the Malone Telegram while he was a patient at the Alice Hyde Hospital under the care of Dr. F.H. Dalphin, his friend of 46 years, had this to say of that fateful meeting:
“The society’s director had recommended me to Ms. Child. I didn’t want to go. I wanted to go to Europe, France and Germany to study. I told them so.
“’What did you study medicine for?’ they asked me.
“’To relieve human suffering and maybe save lives,’ I said.
“’Well, here’s your chance!’ they told me. I went.”
The brother, of course, was the scholarly, wealthy Bostonian who, in 1868, along with two partners named Kin and Bigelow, purchased 36 square miles of Adirondack timberland. This tract was later divided, and Mr. Child acquired the north third of 12 square miles.
It was on this acreage that he established, in 1878, the farm settlement he named Childwold, and later in 1889, he built the famed Childwold Park Hotel with accommodations for over 300 guests on the shore of beautiful Lake Massawepie. An original hotel brochure boasts of a “qualified young doctor in attendance,” which, of course, was our own Dr. Abbot Thissell, who was to figure prominently in Tupper Lake history.
In 1887, when Dr. Thissell first came to Massawepie, it meant a 50-mile buckboard ride on a dirt road from Postdam, a long and tedious trip up the Raquette River valley, emerging at Gale on Catamount Pond, a short distance from the Park hotel.
Three years later, in 1890, when John Hurd had pushed his railroad to Tupper Lake from Moira (the N.Y. and Ottawa, also called the Northern Adirondack Railroad), a stagecoach road was completed from the hotel through the woods to a station on the shore of Pitchfork Pond, four miles north of Tupper Lake Jct., which Hurd called the Childwold Park Station.
Always an entrepreneur, Hurd ran the stagecoach that took passengers and guests up the shoulder of Mt. Matumbia, over a wooden bridge across the Raquette River and came out at Gale. Hurd’s stagecoach was a high-bodied carriage of a type called a “tally-ho” pulled by six horses, and it could hold 12 to 15 people (steamer trunks and other luggage were transported in a separate wagon). Hurd had it painted a bright red with the letters, N.A.R.C. on the sides in bold relief.
It was a lucrative business (in those years, the hotel was usually filled to its 300-person capacity), but it suffered a setback two years later when Dr. Webb completed his railroad (the N.Y. and Montreal or Mohawk and Malone, as it was originally called) and established a station on his line also called Childwold.
It was a more accessible route to the hotel, and guests could take a stagecoach here along a route called the bridle or carriage road, which continues as a woods road today. Note: this station was just beyond where the Mt. Arab road from Rte. 3 crossed the track today at milepost 106. Snowmobilers and others using the tracks might wonder at the large letter H preceding each numbered mile on the signposts along the railroad line. A year after completion, in 1893, Dr. Webb, in a profitable move and a laugh of his critics, sold the M&M to the NY Central, and the southern terminus became Utica, no longer Herkimer. Mileposts along the grade, however, always tied into Herkimer, hence the H.
Tupper Jct. station was a milepost 113.68. Beaver River to the south on the line is at 77.69 miles, and Horseshoe is at 99.91 miles.
The hotel ran into lean times in the 1900s, and it closed permanently in 1909 with all its fittings intact (including Brusell carpeting). It would remain this way in ghostly splendor for 36 years.
By this time, Dr. Thissell had relocated, first at the south end of Tupper Lake, later at Moody, and finally at Tupper village.
Medical facilities didn’t exist here at the time, and the village was fortunate to have Dr. Thissell and, later, Dr. Austin, also a hard working and dedicated practitioner. Still, it was a grim outlook for anyone seriously injured in the sawmill or woods operations, which was so common in those hazardous occupations. It would be quarter century before this community would have a hospital (not until 1916, when four rooms were set aside in the Morgan home on the corner of Cliff and High streets, across from today’s fire hall).
It is reported that Dr. Thissell before that time traveled over 10,000 miles on horseback to reach patients. Lumbermen also came for miles to see him, even to have teeth extracted.
“Sometimes,” he once related, “they would stop me on the road. ‘Well,’ I’d say, ‘you sit down on that log over there. Now, which one is it?’ And I’d pull it out. No ether or gas or anything like that in those days. One fellow came 84 miles to get a tooth pulled.”
The doctor was a great believer in the health benefits that could be obtained by eating blueberries. In fact, he wrote a paper to the medical association detailing what he felt were the scientific reasons for that conviction. He also felt that the aroma given off by spruce, hemlock and other coniferous trees influenced the ozone layer of the atmosphere and was a positive contributor to the balms of health. It was his opinion that the purity of our forests was an extra reason to live in the exciting frontier land we now call the North Country.
Dr. Thissell was a wonderfully kind person who did not bill patients who lacked the money to afford his services, and in many other ways, he helped many people.
In our next Transitions, we will relate more about this remarkable physician and his medical and civic contributions to the community, including his ill-fated reservoir dam above Dr. Scranton’s veterinary clinic at Moody.