Maria Chapin Preston, born in 1842, was the sixth child of Dr. Calvin and Margaret Preston of East Street, Galway, New York.  Like her brothers, she exhibited musical talent early in life, playing the organ at the Presbyterian Church at the age of 14, keyboard instruments at social events, and teaching music.

She also shared their adventurous spirit exemplified by William and Platt, Gold Rush participants and eventual wealthy mill owners in Waitsburg, Washington; and Calvin, Union Soldier in the Civil War and survivor of the 1900 Galveston Hurricane.  Leaving a comfortable existence in Galway, she boarded the Transcontinental Railroad for San Francisco in the mid-1870s, traveling to Waitsburg by coastal steamer and finally stagecoach, joining her brothers and living with Platt while pursuing her interests in music.  In 1885 she married Alexander Stewart, a wealthy Waitsburg businessman.

Unfortunately, while their wealth supported a very comfortable life, Maria’s mental health gradually declined; in 1904 Mr. Stewart became seriously concerned about his wife’s deteriorating mental condition.  He “took her east and consulted eminent specialists on mental diseases in her behalf and…when he returned ….he stated nothing could be done for her”.

The combination of his wife’s illness, their advancing years, and the probability that Alex had chronic health issues of his own motivated him to pursue an arrangement with members of the Stewart family to provide for their care when they were both incapacitated.  His plan was to contract with them to provide care in exchange for transference of property owned by him and his wife.  A problem with the plan: some of the property he intended to transfer was owned separately by Maria, and as she was not mentally competent could not legally enter into a contract to transfer it.  Nevertheless, he had a deed transferring the properties to him drawn up and on April 20, 1906 it was executed by their signatures.

In 1911, Maria and Alex travelled to Idaho to stay with family members. During October of that year, Alex signed a contract with his relatives stipulating that, in return for property transferred to them in Florida and Washington the relatives would support and maintain him and his wife as long as they should live.   In September of 1912 they went to Miami, Florida, where Alex died in November.  At that time all his property and investments including that fraudulently transferred from Maria had already passed into control of the relatives, some of whom lived in that state. 

At about the same point in time William Preston became concerned that Maria’s well-being was in jeopardy. Elderly himself and not in condition for a long trip, strenuous activity, and dealing with legal issues, in February, 1913 he employed an attorney and the attorney’s wife, the latter to provide health care and personal supervision, to travel to Florida and return with Maria.  There they found her in “neglected, in pitiable and filthy condition; …….in feeble health and unable to care for herself…..almost without clothing and in the most abject want…kept in this abject condition by the relatives of her husband”.  One could reasonably conclude that she had been left on her own, to die.

Before permission could be obtained to return Maria to Washington State, the lawyer was required to sign a written contract with the relatives on behalf of William, which described the purpose of Maria’s journey as one of “paying a visit to her brother.” That visit could be terminated by the relatives at any time and  the terms of the original contract signed by Alex and his relatives would not be affected.

“After the contract was executed, suitable clothing was purchased for [Maria], and by easy stages and with the assistance of nurses and hospital attendants secured at various points along the road of travel brought [her] to [Waitsburg] where her health and physical condition …. rapidly improved although her mind [seemed] to be utterly gone.

The next step was to block any attempt by the Stewart family to return her to Florida, and recover her property in Washington.  William was in an awkward position to take the lead in these actions, having authorized signature of the contract prohibiting such, but friends in Waitsburg came to the rescue, applying to the superior court of Walla Walla county to appoint a guardian. The guardian then commenced legal action to recover Maria’s property against the Stewarts to whom the lots had been fraudulently conveyed.  After this action had begun, the Stewarts filed suit to have the guardian’s appointment vacated, and title to the properties restored to them.

The trial judge, upon reviewing the evidence found that the Stewarts were aware of Maria’s insanity when her property was transferred to her husband, issuing a decree setting aside the deeds in question and quieting the title on November 11, 1913.  He also dismissed the action to have the guardian’s appointment vacated.  The Stewarts appealed the actions to the Supreme Court of Washington State.

The Supreme Court decisions on both cases are dated April 20, 1915.  They concurred with the trial judge in both instances. Saving the most critical assessment of the appellant’s contentions for last, the justice opined in part:

 It was not until they [the Stewarts] were about to lose property interests they hoped to control in this state they concluded that their contract had been violated by Mr. Preston … It was then that they concluded that the courts of this state had no jurisdiction to appoint a guardian for Mrs. Stewart, or protect her interests and insisted that she be returned to the state of Florida.  Such contentions, under the facts here known, do not commend themselves to a court of justice.  The judgement is affirmed.”

And that ended the matter.  Maria Preston remained in Waitsburg in the care of William until her death on October 18, 1916.  Had it not been for William’s devotion and decisive actions, she would have died alone, in unspeakable conditions.  She is buried in Waitsburg Cemetery, along with brothers William, Platt and Calvin.

Elder abuse is unfortunately prevalent today. The most likely abuser is a family member and the abuse is frequently financial.

Some people may recognize the name Joseph Henry as that of an imminent scientist of the 19th century, who helped establish the fledgling United States as having experimental and theoretical scientists just as skilled and serious as those in Europe.

Others may know he was the first secretary of the Smithsonian Institute, the Washington, D.C. organization that oversees the nation’s federal museums and research centers. His scientific work was so important that a measurement of electromagnetic induction – the henry – is named for him.

But maybe the most common recognition of Henry’s name is attached to the town of Galway’s elementary school, which seeks to instill Henry’s passion for knowledge and self-education into its students. While Henry was born in Albany, completed his education, and started his career there, he spent formative pre-teen and teen years in Galway, where a grandmother and other family members lived.

In Albany, the family was poor (his Scottish immigrant father worked as either a “cartman” or laborer), and that probably contributed to the decision to send young Joseph to live with maternal relatives in Galway. His father died in 1811, when Joseph was 13 year old; it is unknown whether William Henry suffered prolonged ill health before his death. However, many years later Joseph Henry told a Smithsonian friend that his father was an alcoholic.

Less well-known is that during the time he was conducting scientific experiments at the Albany Institute and teaching mathematics and natural philosophy at the Albany Academy, his Alma Mater,  marrying his cousin Harriet Alexander and starting a family – he occasionally returned to Galway, though for that era, it was a significant journey.

By the summer of 1832, Henry had taught and experimented with electromagnetism in Albany for nearly a decade. He had built a powerful electromagnet for a mentoring colleague at Yale University, with more electromagnets in demand. His reputation had spread far beyond Albany; he was in the process of being considered for a professorship at the prestigious College of New Jersey – the institution that is today Princeton University.

But that same summer, there was an outbreak of cholera in Albany – the sort of deadly intestinal disease outbreak that happened before public sanitation was common. Henry chose to take his young wife and newborn son William out of the city toward the end of August.  They went back to his childhood home to live with an uncle in rural Galway.

“The pure air of the county has an almost magical effect in restoring our prostrated strength,” Henry wrote to his cousin (and brother-in-law) Stephen Alexander on Aug. 27, adding a mention of the “pestiferous air” in Albany.

Two days later he wrote Alexander again, recounting a trip north into the Sacandaga River valley – the region that was flooded nearly 100 years later to create the Sacandaga Reservoir, now Great Sacandaga Lake. His observations offer a contemporaneous glimpse of how that area was viewed.

He and another cousin, Hugh Alexander, took a “jaunt” north on Aug. 28, to the community of Fish House. “We found it a very pleasant little village surrounded with mountains and apparently on the verge of the inhabitable portion of this state,” Henry wrote. “To the north beyond as far as the eye could reach only mountains on piles of mountains met the view.”

That would have been a common sentiment about the Adirondack Mountains in 1832 – it would be decades before it became common for recreational visitors to travel into the Adirondacks. The region north of the Great Sacandaga – which lacks dramatic high mountain peaks but offers dozens of heavily forested low peaks and hundreds of remote lakes and ponds – remains the least-inhabited part of the Adirondacks.

Today, Fishhouse is underwater — but its memory lives on as the name of a county road in Providence and Broadalbin.

Henry also wrote of visiting John Fay, whom he identifies as “a former member of Congress from the county of Montgomery” as well as a friend of Alexander’s father, a grist mill operator from Schenectady.

Fay’s occupations included land surveying (which Henry had also done as a young man), agriculture, and milling. He served as postmaster in Northampton (which at the time was part of Montgomery County) and represented Montgomery County in the New York State Assembly from 1808-1809 and in 1812.

Fulton County, where the town of Northampton is now located, didn’t become a separate county from Montgomery until 1838.

Fay was elected to Congress for a single term, from 1819 to 1821. He later moved to Jefferson County, was elected sheriff, and was a presidential elector for Democrat James K. Polk in 1844.

The community where Fay lived became known as Fayville. It is also underwater now, but the name survives on Fayville Road, another county highway in the town of Providence.

At the time he wrote, Henry was hoping that the cholera outbreak would lead to the cancellation of in-person classes at the Albany Academy, though that hope was in vain.

He also remarks in the Aug. 29 letter on learning of the death from cholera of Hugh Fraser, who was an Albany superintendent of the Schenectady-Albany rail line. “(Fraser) was the last acquaintance I parted with in Albany and the unexpected news of his death affected me more unpleasantly than any death that has occurred by the cholera,” he wrote.

The outbreak subsided, and Henry returned to Albany to teach. By the end of September, he had formally been offered the position at Princeton. He accepted. His cousin Stephen, a graduate of Union College who was primarily an astronomer, joined him at Princeton that year. In 1846, they would go on to the new Smithsonian Institute together, where Henry served as its first secretary for 32 years.

In April of 1930, the gates of the Conklingville Dam closed for the first time, beginning the process of flooding 27 miles of the Sacandaga Valley to create a new body of water that would provide both recreation and power to the region. While it was already being called Sacandaga Reservoir, there was another name being considered, one that would honor the chief engineer of the project, forty-five-year-old Edward Haynes Sargent. A graduate of Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Sargent had started working for New York State as a surveyor in 1911. He had been involved with the reservoir project since its beginning and oversaw the construction of the Conklingville Dam.

It was a reasonable proposal to have his name attached to the body of water he had created. In an interview years after this project was completed, Sargent’s son, Edward H. Sargent, Jr., reminisced that one of his father’s favorite stories was of a state legislator who jokingly suggested that he would “be glad to see the name stick” if the engineer would cooperate by passing away. Though his name was never used, Edward Sargent lived another 20 years, passing away at the age of 69 in 1954. Engraved on his gravestone in the Edinburgh Cemetery there is a map of the reservoir he helped create.

In the months before the closing of the dam, local newspapers had been reporting the growing controversy over a name for the reservoir. During this time thousands of suggestions had been proposed, some good, and some of questionable merit. Here are some examples from Letters to the Editor published in the Gloversville Morning Herald:

I would like to suggest Hudsondaga Lake as a name. Earl Davis

Why not name it “Lake Adirondack”? A.P.W., Gloversville

“Memory Lake.” Mrs. L. W. Cole, Johnstown

For a name with a higher sounding, I suggest “Greater Sacandaga” Mrs. W. Sprung, Gloversville

“Sir William Johnson Lake” Miss Lucy J. Sinclair, Summer-house near Fish-House

In February of 1930, Tracy R. Howard of Ormond, Florida, a subscriber to the Morning Herald with property on the newly created shoreline, brought up the idea of having a formal vote for the new name. At first, the newspaper rejected the idea, pointing out both the extra work it would put on their staff, as well as the fact that naming the lake was not a decision local citizens were being offered.

When the newspaper saw that the controversy over Sargent Lake was not diminishing, on June 24th they began printing a voting coupon each day that could be sent into their office to be tallied. Offering only the choice of Lake Sacandaga or Sargent Lake, the votes that came in on the first day were 118 for Sacandaga, and none for Sargent.

At the same time as the ballots were being distributed, Frank Rogers, the manager of the paper filed an application with the state submitting “Lake Sacandaga” as the official name of the lake created by the impounding of the Sacandaga River. While the Hudson River District Regulating Board was pushing for Sargent Lake, the decision was in the hands of the New York State Department of Education’s Committee on Geographic Names. While a state law had been passed giving the Education Department authority “over the naming of mountains, and other natural features,” there were questions raised if that included artificial bodies of water such as a reservoir.

To establish the public interest in the naming of this new lake, Rogers accompanied the application with a letter to committee secretary Arnold van Laer, and also published in the June 23, 1930, Gloversville Herald, that concluded with this obvious preference for a name:

I am sending part of the clippings of communications sent to our newspapers during the period when the whole countryside took an interest in offering suggestions for names. You will find a large variety, the majority, I believe, favoring “Lake Sacandaga.” You may have noted that newspapers in Ballston, Amsterdam, Albany, Troy, and Schenectady, gave editorial comments upon the fact that “Lake Sacandaga” is the most fitting name for this body of water, Yours sincerely, The Leader Republican Herald, Frank L. Rogers, General Manager.

At the end of the first week of voting the voice of the people was clearly calling for Lake Sacandaga. Each day hundreds of ballots were coming into the newspaper office, with the tally so far being 2136 to 12. The voting closed on July 3rd with a final 380 votes placed into the hands of the Leader Herald. Soon headlines like this one from the Glens Falls Times were proclaiming “Almost Unanimous for Lake Sacandaga.” While it was certainly written to catch the reader’s eye, it expressed the truth as Lake Sacandaga amassed 3177 votes to only 19 for Sargent Lake.

It would take the State of New York six months to make a final decision, announcing in February of 1931 that the name would be Sacandaga Reservoir. With all of the talk about an Education Department committee making the decision, it seems that in reality, the final say was always in the hands of the Hudson River Regulating Board, with clear proof given in their announcement of this decision when they stated “the new reservoir will remain Sacandaga reservoir, as it has been known ever since the reservoir project was proposed.” For the next 30 years, everyone settled into calling this new body of water “Sacandaga Reservoir,” with the next proposed change again coming from the group that had chosen the first name.

On June 5, 1960, the Albany Times Union ran an article with the headline ‘Reservoir’ Name Scares Vacationers: Sacandaga Name Change Eyed. The Hudson River Regulating Board now merged into the Black River-Hudson River Regulating Board, proposed making the name “Great Sacandaga Lake,” removing the often-misunderstood designation as a reservoir. They hoped that through this change boaters, fishermen and others looking for recreation would not assume that this body of water was closed to the public like many similarly named bodies of water across the northeast.

This new name, Great Sacandaga Lake, became official in 1968 through a bill signed by Governor Nelson Rockefeller. In the announcement, the Great Sacandaga was called “one of the last and most popular unspoiled vacation lands in the Northeast.

In the 56 years that have passed since this change, this body of water has provided countless thousands with opportunity for swimming, boating, and many other forms of outdoor recreation, and through the work of so many now and in the future the Great Sacandaga Lake will continue to hold its place a premiere attraction for many generations to come.

A historic marker along the Waterford Road denotes “Leland House: Raided by French and Indians in 1748, rebuilt in 1749, later the home of revolutionary patriot John Ten Broeck 1740-1822.”

The beautiful house that stands a short distance from the marker is indeed the one that was rebuilt 275 years ago.  It was built from lumber cut right there on the farm, with bricks made from clay obtained from the soil thereon.

But just what happened and why did it happen to the family that lived on that spot and farmed what has for many years been known as the Leland Farm back in 1748?  It was a sad occurrence, but by no means an isolated incident back in the 18th century here in our area.

As settlement by countries of Western Europe grew in this so-called New World, the English and Dutch were predominant in the areas along the Atlantic Coast, but France controlled Canada to the north and the wilderness lands to the west of the English territories.  Along with the English were colonists from the Netherlands, Scotland and Ireland.  The French befriended the native peoples, and worked with them to drive the encroaching settlers from their ancestral lands.

The first recorded claimants to the lands of the Mechanicville/Stillwater/Schaghticoke area were the Mohican Indians, ruled by Uncas, who claimed ownership of the entire upper Hudson Valley starting at a point near Cohoes.  This was Uncas’ very special hunting grounds, beginning near Waterford and running all the way to Schuylerville. While Uncas may not have actually lived right here, history does place him at Schaghticoke.  But his warriors did come this way as did those of other tribes.  All the Indian trails coming out of the St. Lawrence Valley crossed here for this was known as the dark and bloody neutral grounds that separated the Iroquois Confederacy of central New York from the territory of their ancient and hereditary enemies, the Algonquins of Canada.  Throughout time, there were many savage encounters among these tribes.

Indians had planted, hunted and fished on these lands for centuries, leaving behind stone implements and arrowheads which chronicled over 1,000 years of their civilization. The first Dutch settlers came into the Upper Hudson River valley in 1714. The newcomers hewed out a half dozen log huts in a forestland near Waterford north of the river’s confluence with the Mohawk and called it Half Moon.  Within a year, 101 people had settled here.

Situated in a flat river valley, with a major north/south route passing by it, on a road that would be called the King’s Highway, or eventually the Waterford to Whitehall Turnpike, what would become known in later years as the Leland House was part of that pioneer settlement.

Major Dirk Wessels (Ten Broeck) was commissioner of Indian affairs, a mayor of Albany and a trader and merchant. He owned a one-seventh share of the Saratoga Patent.  From this patent, the Ten Broeck family had obtained 700 acres of land along the river.  The substantial house was built on that property by 1732.  Land was cleared and farmed by not just the family occupying the house, but by the black slaves they owned.  At that time, the Albany Dutch community owned many slaves.

What is now Mechanicville sat smack on the edge of “the Paradise of Hunting Grounds” known as Sa-ra-gh-to-ga. The southern boundary of the hunting grounds was a creek that ran from Round Lake to the river and was known as Tien-en-da-ho. Eventually the Mohawks, the most powerful tribe of the Iroquois confederacy, drove out the Mohicans and took over this area.

Early settlers in Mechanicville in the area of Ensign Avenue unearthed evidence of a Mohawk village along the flatlands of the river.  Another encampment was located near the powerhouse where fish were plentiful. What would become known as the French and Indian War, which would ultimately secure this part of North America as a British colony, would not begin until 1755, but raids, killings and burnings by the French and their Indian allies were commonplace throughout this area in the early to middle years of the 18th century as they attempted to drive out the encroaching trappers and settlers from Britain and the Netherlands.

So it was that in 1748, the family that was living in the house and farming the land then owned by the Ten Broecks alongside the Hudson River was attacked in the night by a band of Mohawk Indians and their French allies.  The farmer, his wife and five children were killed and scalped.  Also murdered in the raid were their five black slaves. The house was burned.

Since that fateful day, this historic house, which was rebuilt in 1749, and its accompanying farm have seen many changes.  Originally belonging to the Ten Broecks, it was then occupied by Daniel Fort, sold to Scotsman John Strachan and then passed on through marriage or inheritance to the Lelands, the Leyerles and the Stevensons. The original Ten Broeck grant comprised 700 acres, but several hundred more acres were added by Strachan, so that the farm then occupied nearly two square miles of land.  Occupants of the house that was rebuilt after the massacre, in its more than 272 years of existence, have included lawyers, government officials, educators, engineers, farmers, horticulturists and caregivers.

The land itself has over the years been much diminished as with its prime location on a major river and north/south highway, it has been given over by sale or by government claim for two railroads, two major power lines, two canals, a dam, lock and hydroelectric plant and the Saratoga County sewer plant along with a number of homes and several businesses.  The house, once known as the mansion, was converted to apartments a half-century ago and several of the barns have been converted to houses.

But some things don’t change.  There were stories passed on for many years that the ghost of a headless Dutch woman frequently appeared in a well near the Leland House.  Perhaps she was that farmer’s wife, killed and scalped by a raiding party of French and Indians in 1748.  So spooked were subsequent occupants of the home by her frequent visitations that they filled in the well.  From some reports, however, that has not kept her away.