Bearing the Lantern at the Robert Louis Stevenson Cottage Museum

 

 

 

 

 

 

By Trenton B. Olsen

An earlier version of this article was published in the Adirondack Daily Enterprise. ​

 

       When the Scottish author Robert Louis Stevenson arrived in New York in the fall of 1887, he was a global celebrity. In the previous four years, he had published Treasure Island, Kidnapped, A Child’s Garden of Verses, and, most sensationally, Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. An unauthorized stage adaptation of the Gothic thriller premiered that week at Madison Square Theatre, and America was awash with pirated editions of Stevenson’s work. Publishers, reporters, and fans crowded him before he could get off the ship.

      But Stevenson, who suffered from chronic pulmonary illness, had come in search not of publicity, but health. For nearly three years, he’d been too sick to leave his house on the English coast and had been told he may not survive another winter in the British Isles. A doctor recommended open-air treatment in the Adirondack mountains of upstate New York where Dr. Edward Trudeau, founder of the American Lung Association, was researching and treating tuberculosis. Stevenson’s presence and published newspaper endorsement put the small village of Saranac Lake and its new sanatorium on the map. Tens of thousands followed him there.

       Trudeau’s open-air therapy, called “the cure” before the discovery of antibiotic treatment, shaped the town. Houses were built or remodeled to include “cure porches” with adjustable glass enclosures. Tubercular patients spent their days on these porches in the hope that their infected lungs would drain and heal in the mountain air.

         While Stevenson’s half-year stay at the Baker house, now the Robert Louis Stevenson Cottage Museum, was significant for Saranac Lake, it was also pivotal for the author. He called it “a mighty good place” in a letter, and rightly predicted, “it shall do me good.” While there, Stevenson wrote some of his best-known essays for a lucrative magazine contract. A few months earlier, he’d been too sick to attend his father’s funeral. Now he walked along the Saranac River, snowshoed in the woods, and regularly ice skated on a nearby pond. His improved health and finances enabled a bold gamble: from the cottage, he planned an ambitious Pacific voyage, which led to his ultimate relocation to Samoa. In one of his final letters before departure, Stevenson wrote, “I have found a yacht, and we are going the full pitch . . . If I cannot get my health back (more or less), ’tis madness; but, of course, there is the hope, and I will play big.”

​​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​​​

​​​​

​

​

       In his essay “The Education of an Engineer,” written at the cottage, Stevenson recalls his apprenticeship in the family business long before his literary success. His grandfather, father, and uncles were nationally celebrated lighthouse engineers who illuminated Scotland’s dangerously rocky coastline. Much to his father’s disappointment, Stevenson had no interest in this trade, though he would pursue his real work on the nighttime schedule of a lighthouse keeper. Sickly, ambitious, and entirely unknown, he traded sleep for writing. Working “under the very dart of death,” he sat “between the candles” and against the darkness of uncertainty, fear, and failure tried to pen something that would outlive him.

While Stevenson was no engineer, he was proud of his family’s legacy: “the towers we founded and the lamps we lit.” He named his house in Bournemouth, England Skerryvore after his uncle’s famous lighthouse. Shortly before crossing the ocean, Stevenson reflected in his father’s obituary, “In all parts of the world a safer landfall awaits the mariner” thanks to his designs. Wanting his forebears to be remembered, Stevenson was writing “Records of a Family of Engineers” in his final years and even lamented, “I ought to have been able to build lighthouses and write David Balfour too.”

       But in a sense, Stevenson did continue his ancestral vocation. Rather than building towering lighthouses, he sent out a different sort of beacon from the “literary tapers” that flickered at his writing desk. In his famous poem “The Lamplighter” and the essay “A Plea for Gas Lamps,” he celebrates the workers he had watched each night from his window as a sickly and nightmare-haunted child. Before electric lighting, they “ran with a good heart” to manually light the streetlamps before nightfall: “speeding up the street and . . . knocking luminous hole[s] into the dusk.” These lamplighters embodied what Stevenson valued most in literature and life, even and especially when their work fell short of “perfection.” His famous essay “The Lantern-Bearers,” written in Saranac Lake, recounts seaside holidays in childhood when he and his playmates hid bull’s-eye lanterns under their coats. Stevenson compares this hidden lantern “alternately obscured and shining” to the innermost self—a secret poet and “golden chamber at the heart” of every person—which “fades and grows clear again” like a revolving lighthouse in the night. For him, the personal essayist’s work was “to discover, even dimly … this veiled prophet of ourselves” and reveal it to others.          Stevenson’s illuminated and illuminating inner life unveiled on the page struck a chord with his contemporaries, many of whom believed that his “final fame will be that of an essayist.”

​​

​

        It was these essays that led me to travel from Idaho, where I work as a professor of English literature, to the Adirondacks in the summer of 2023. I had recently edited The Complete Personal Essays of Robert Louis Stevenson: the first complete collection ever published, and I wanted to visit the place where he wrote some of the best ones.

         Two decades after Stevenson died in Samoa in 1894, the Stevenson Society of America was established in Saranac Lake on October 30th, 1915. Literary pilgrims had flocked to the Baker farmhouse since Stevenson took up residence there nearly thirty years earlier, but on this date, the Robert Louis Stevenson Memorial Cottage was formally opened to the public—the world’s first site dedicated to the author. Charter members included Associated Press founder Charles Palmer and Mount Rushmore sculptor Gutzon Borglum. Borglum unveiled his bas-relief sculpture of Stevenson on the occasion, depicting the author as he’d been photographed in a buffalo coat and fur cap on the cottage porch. The engraved text highlights another moment in the same spot. Stevenson recounts walking the veranda: “It was winter; the night was very dark; the air clear and cold and sweet with the purity of forests . . . For the making of a story here were fine conditions. ‘Come,’ said I to my engine, ‘let us make a tale.’” The tale was Stevenson’s novel The Master of Ballantrae, set partially in the Adirondacks, and Borglum’s tribute to “the great sculptor of words” remains on the porch today.

​

​

​​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

       

 

 

​

​

       

          I’ve visited Stevenson museums and archives around the world, but in Saranac Lake, I found the most impressive collection of Stevenson artifacts I’d ever seen, from his infant cap to the last pen he ever used. The author’s friends and American stepchildren donated these treasures to what was at the time the only Stevenson museum in the world. In place of professional staff, I found the deeply knowledgeable Mr. Mike Delahant serving as volunteer resident curator just as his father (John “Jack” F. Delahant Jr.) and grandparents (Maude and John F. Delahant Sr.) did before him. This family has maintained the cottage, cared for the collection, and shared it with the public for more than 70 years. With the help of his wife, Karla, Mike has served as resident curator since 1980, a tenure of 44 years: the entire length of Stevenson’s life.

​

​

​​

​

​

​

​

           

 

 

       

 

 

       Like Stevenson, Mike wasn’t sure he wanted to carry on his family’s work. He recalls reluctantly beginning as a sort of security guard: “I was not planning on spending the rest of my life here, but here I am.” After nearly half a century with the collection, he reflects, “I, too, seem to have fallen under the Stevenson spell.” I know what he means. My efforts to help Mike in his work led to a new role. I never expected to be the volunteer director of a museum more than 2,000 miles away from my home, but as Stevenson wrote, “the most beautiful adventures are not those we go to seek.”

       Saranac Lake seems an unlikely place for the world’s first Stevenson museum and its unmatched collection. After all, the author spent more time in Scotland, England, France, Switzerland, California, Hawaii, and Samoa than he did in upstate New York. But Stevenson’s writing on facing death and embracing life resonated deeply in the mountain sanatorium where so many people experienced their darkest time. One New York City doctor sent a tubercular young man to Saranac Lake in 1906 with this prescription: “Keep up your courage. Fresh air—fresh eggs—and read Robert Louis Stevenson.” The Stevenson Society of America was formed both to preserve his residence and “spread his brave philosophy of living.” Its founders believed what the Oregon essayist Brian Doyle would later express: Stevenson “[brought] light against the darkness . . . as well as any man who ever set pen to paper.”

The Robert Louis Stevenson Cottage Museum is entering a more active and visible chapter in its rich history. Though based in Saranac Lake, the new board is committed to re-establishing the national and international reach of the Stevenson Society of America. As one of our founders said, “Stevenson’s genius was so universal, his philosophy so boundless, that no one country can claim him. He belongs to the world.” I was proud to stand this summer on the porch of the historic cottage and officially recognize the Delahant Family. We presented them with a plaque commemorating their three generations of service with three lights: a lantern and the iconic Stevenson lighthouses Bell Rock and Skerryvore. It will hang on the Cottage Museum porch where Stevenson stood and paced and dreamed of new possibilities, a lasting tribute to the family who literally and figuratively kept the lights on for more than 70 years. Without them, the museum would no longer exist. More than honoring the Cottage Museum’s past, the Delahant plaque is a beacon of a better future because in Saranac Lake a porch means hope. We’re committed to bearing the lantern of Robert Louis Stevenson, which has burned at the cottage for more than a century, and making that light shine brighter on Stevenson Lane and beyond.

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​​​​

 

 

 

​Note: The Stevenson Cottage Museum was one of only 71 institutions in the United States selected to participate in the 2024 Collections Assessment Preservation (CAP) Program: a federal grant from the Foundation for Advancement in Conservation and the Institute of Museum and Library Services. This grant provided an on-site, professional assessment to determine preservation priorities for the historic building and its collection. Now the Stevenson Society of America is raising money to secure the museum’s future, beginning with essential, urgently needed building repairs.

 

                                                                                      Donate below.