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Adirondack Life

Tahawus

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The author, at left, winning a 1954 winter carnival race at the town rink, and with her younger sister, Carol, in their Apartment 52E living room.

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The White Apartments, among National Lead’s company housing.

It is a fact that Tahawus no longer exists as part of the Adirondack landscape. What once was the most remote of communities with no town beyond it has moved into an even more extreme dimension, accessible only through memoir and museum study.

All signage and advertisements to the contrary, Tahawus was never a “deserted village,” and it is expressly different from the villages of Adirondac, McIntyre and the Upper Works. The Tahawus titanium-mining process in the 20th century had no practical use for an impressively restored 19th-century blast furnace. In 1963, National Lead moved most of its buildings to Winebrook Hills in Newcomb, and later, they buried thetitanium-mining operation. Almost nothing remains in its original location to suggest the active and close-knit community that supported the successful mine. Thousands of narratives and images, however, live in the hearts and minds of the surviving Tahawus employees and the Tahawus children. I am one of those children.

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