10 Years at Tannery Pond: The Tannery

The Tannery Pond Community Center on Main Street, North Creek is named for the tannery and pond that were once on this site. The tannery was built here by Milton Sawyer and Wheeler Mead in 1852 and used the water power of the dammed up North Creek stream. There was virtually no village of North Creek at the time. The tannery was not the first in the area; however, the first tannery in the township was established in 1833 in Wevertown across from today's T.C. Murphy Lumber Yard. The second was at the Glen, established in 1838. A fourth tannery was established in 1877 in Oregon, a settlement now long gone, just west of Bakers Mills. Tanneries were established near dense clusters of hemlock forest. Northern Warren County was especially rich in such forests. Hemlock bark was stripped from the felled trees and boiled. The tannin that resulted was essential to the tanning process. The hides tanned were not local deer hides, but rather cattle hides. Research by Barbara McMartin in her book "Hides, Hemlocks and Adirondack History" (North Country Books, 1992) indicates that the majority of hides came from California, the Rio Grande Valley and Central and South America. By 1850, 70 percent of all the hides tanned in the United States were shipped from such places as the pampas of Brazil and Argentina and the Orinoco Plains. Hides arrived at eastern ports (the port for North Creek was Albany) and were then loaded on buckboards and shipped to tanneries on rugged dirt roads. Hides were often packed with dirt and flesh that caused parts of the hides to rot and holes were created by insects common to more tropical regions. It was surely smelly, dirty work. Along with mining and logging, tanning was one of the major industries in the Adirondacks in the 1800s, but as the hemlock forests were stripped and depleted, often in as little as 20 years, tanneries would close, jobs would be lost and populations would moved on. The particularly dense hemlock forests in Johnsburg township helped keep the North Creek tannery going for longer than most. In 1872, the railroad arrived in North Creek and no doubt hides and finished leathers arrived and were shipped by rail after that date. The partnership of Sawyer and Mead dissolved in 1876, but then John Reed took over operation of the tannery. By the 1880s, the tannery's main building measured 350 feet long; 25 men were employed turning out 35,000-40,000 hides a year. The dirt road in front of the tannery was crowded with buckboards piled high with hemlock bark and the air was ripe with the smell of salted hides and the tanning process and the noise of horses and men hard at work. The tannery burned to the ground in June of 1890, just about the time the population of the town peaked. W. H. "Billy" Baker then established a sawmill on the site. Three days after the sawmill was completed, the dam went out in an unusual flood and half the sawmill was destroyed. It was quickly re-built. By the turn of the century little evidence of the tannery remained. For a while A.J. Pettis and then Bert Turner operated a blacksmith shop here. That was followed by the Alexanders who established a small service station on the site. Over the years, the pond out back was used by local kids in the summer for fishing and then ice skating in winter. The pond has come and gone as the dam was breached more than a few times by spring flooding. Today all that is left is the North Creek stream which meanders through the woods and stone walls once part of the various dams. Next week: The Ski Bowl Burns

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10 Years at Tannery Pond: The Tannery

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