Anna Constable

Anna Constable [1820 – 1906], pioneer of Adirondack family camping, lived at Constable Hall for much of her adult life. The Constable family was quite wealthy. Anna’s grandfather, William Constable, Sr., made his fortune in the shipping business. In 1792 he purchased a large portion of the Adirondacks known as the Macomb Purchase and as a consequence became for a short time the largest landowner in New York State. 

In 1807 her father, William Constable Jr., inherited about ten townships of the Macomb purchase that had not yet been sold. He decided that it would be easier to sell these lands if he had a home in the North Country. He had toured the area he now owned in 1806 during which time he visited Shalerville in the southern hills of Lewis County. He never forgot the beauty of the place. After his marriage to Mary Eliza McVicker in 1810, the couple decided to build their country estate and farm, Constable Hall, just outside the village. Shalerville was soon renamed Constableville.

 

Constable Hall was not completed until 1819 due in part to its remote location and in part to interruptions caused by the War of 1812. During these years the family lived in New York City. William Jr. was badly injured while supervising construction of the Hall in 1819. He never fully recovered from this injury and died in 1821. Mary Eliza McVicker at age 32 was left to raise their five children on her own.

 

Anna’s older brothers, William III, John, James and Stevenson, grew up with a deep love for the central Adirondack wilderness. They made extensive explorations of the Fulton Chain, Big Moose, the Beaver River and many of the surrounding waterways in 1833, 1835, 1836, 1839, 1840, and 1843. Anna may have been disappointed by not being included in these early trips. When she learned in early 1850 that her brothers were planning a trip to Raquette Lake where they were considering buying land to serve as their wilderness outpost, Anna insisted on going along. She was 30 years old at the time.

 

Anna and her oldest brother William spent months planning the camping trip. Camping at Raquette Lake was a major undertaking with many logistical hurdles. A long list of supplies had to be acquired including food for a month and all the camping equipment. There was the problem of transporting all of this far back in the wilderness. Anna made most of the practical arrangements following strict written instructions from her older brother. Anna Constable invited six close women friends to accompany her on the trip. Her four brothers were joined by William III’s teenage son and by a male friend. They hired William R. Higby as their guide [see my post of Feb. 26, 2021].

 

Because a fixed camp did not exist on Sand Point, the property they intended to buy, the plan was for brothers John and Stevenson Constable along with Higby to take a wagon load of supplies to Raquette Lake two weeks before the main party. This would give them time to clear a campsite and construct two open lean-tos, one for the men and one for the women, separated by a decent distance for privacy. Stout boards were ordered delivered from Long Lake to construct tables and seats. Three boats were rented from Long Lake to supplement the two boats already at Raquette Lake owned by the original settlers Mathew Beech and William Wood.

 

At 8 o clock on the morning of July 16^th 1850 the rest of the party departed from Constable Hall. Anna had hired a neighbor, Peter Evans, and his horse and wagon to haul the remaining baggage to Raquette Lake then return for them at the trip’s end. The campers traveled in two carriages for the first day of the trip along decent roads from Constable Hall to Lowville, thence across the Black River and along the Number Four Road to Fenton’s where they had dinner and spent the night. [see my post on Fenton’s from Feb. 23, 2021] The first day’s trip covered about 35 miles. 

 

Early the next morning they left Fenton’s on the newly completed wilderness road called the Carthage-to-Lake Champlain Road. Due to the terrible condition of the road most of the party walked almost all of the time. By about noon they reached the log bridge across Twitchell Creek at Stillwater. The bridge was so precarious they had to carefully walk their horses across with the help of the hermit Jimmy O’Kane who lived alone in a cabin right by the bridge. [see my post of Feb. 14, 2021]

As they hurried to reach their second night’s camp at the foot of Albany Mountain before dark, it started to rain, then an axle on their supply wagon broke. They were greatly relieved that the axle could be repaired using materials at hand. The second day’s journey totaled about 23 miles and took from dawn until after dark. They covered the remaining 12 miles to the shore of Raquette Lake during the morning of the third day. 

 

When they reached Raquette Lake, Anna’s two brothers and the guides were waiting to row them about four miles across the lake to Sand Point [later called Constable Point, now Antler’s Point] where the two recently completed open camps were ready.

It is worth pausing a moment here to consider the clothing worn by the members of the party. The men wore basically the same clothes they used on any casual occasion. The women did the same. We should remember, however, that women’s dresses of the era required wearing a corset. One major drawback of the corset was that it almost entirely prevented a woman from bending at the waist. It was necessary to stoop to reach the ground. A woman had to put on her stockings and shoes before her corset because she could not reach her feet if she put her corset on first. Try, if you can, to imagine hiking long distances and camping while wearing a corset. 

No account of the activities that occurred during the following weeks survives. There is good evidence that at one point the seven women, the guides and possibly some of the men took boats up the Marion River and Eckford Chain so they could climb Blue Mountain thereby becoming the first women documented to do so. Doubtless most of their time was spent exploring, fishing, hunting and enjoying camp life. 

The first trip must have been judged a success for Anna organized a second trip held in late August, 1851 that four women attended. Unfortunately, no record of that trip has survived. Then in the month between July 25 and In August 23, 1855 four of the women and six men returned for a third family camping trip. Higby also guided the 1855 trip along with Asa Puffer, another experienced guide from Watson. Fortunately, the Knickerbocker magazine printed a detailed record of the 1855 trip. The article titled, “A Month at the Racket,” by Bob Racket [a pseudonym of John Constable] ran for three issues in 1856. 

At one point during this trip the women decided they wanted to climb Blue Mountain again to see the sunset from the top and remain there overnight to see the sunrise. As luck would have it, it rained torrents that night soaking the mountaintop party. It rained all the next day, so by the time they got back to camp they were exhausted. One woman fainted but was quickly revived with the application of hot tea and brandy. 

 

Even though the family camping trips involved considerable exertion and rough conditions it was the consensus that the three trips were a lot of fun and good for everybody’s health. As “Bob Racket” put it, “It was productive not only of a vast deal of enjoyment to all the party, but conduced wonderfully to their health, especially of the ladies, who gained so much weight as scarcely to be recognized by their friends.”

 

Documentation is scarce about how many camping trips the Constable family took after the trip of 1855. Edith Pilcher, who reviewed the surviving family papers closely, was of the opinion that members of the Constable family made trips to Constable Point and elsewhere in the Adirondacks on at least an annual basis until the end of the 1860s. Some evidence that the family continued to use the camp at Constable Point for many years comes from the fact that they hired a man named Charlie Phelps to clear the brush on the Carthage-to-Lake Champlain Road from Number Four all the way to Raquette Lake in the spring of 1867.

 

There is no record of any Constable family camping trip after 1867. This may be related to the fact that Anna Constable, chief instigator of the family trips, married her first cousin Archibald McVickar in 1868 and moved from Constable Hall to Lyons Falls. They had no children. Anna Constable, the woman who launched family camping in the Adirondacks, died in 1906 at the age of 86. 

Source:

Edith Pilcher, The Constables: First Family of the Adirondacks (1992)

 

Earlier versions of this article were included in my illustrated lectures in 2018 at the Big Moose Community Chapel for the Town of Webb Historical Association and at the Lewis County Historical Society, and in 2019 at the 200^th Anniversary Celebration at Constable Hall.