The story
Griffin grew around a single industry with a short clock on it. Stephen Griffin II built a tannery on the East Branch of the Sacandaga River in 1880, and a village of workers' houses, a hotel, and a store rose around it in the southern Adirondacks near Wells.
Adirondack tanneries ran on hemlock bark, whose tannin cured the hides, and they consumed the surrounding forest at a furious rate. When the accessible hemlock was stripped and the trade shifted to chemical tanning, the tannery's reason for existing went with it; the Morgan Lumber Company's logging kept the settlement breathing a while longer, flushing logs downriver on released flood-dam water. By the early 20th century Griffin was finished.
The forest took it back almost completely. A single highway bridge still crosses the Sacandaga where the hamlet stood, and cellar holes hide in second growth now inside the Siamese Ponds Wilderness. The river ledges and pools below the old town are a well-known local swimming spot.
What remains today
Foundations and cellar holes in the regrown forest, the river ledges and pools, and the highway bridge over the East Branch Sacandaga.
Questions from the field
- What was Griffin, New York?
- An 1880s tannery and logging hamlet on the East Branch of the Sacandaga River; it died in the early 20th century when the hemlock bark the tannery depended on was used up.
From the field
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Primary sources for this record
- — USGS GNIS feature 951815
- — North Country Public Radio — Griffin
- — Hamilton County / Adirondack histories