By Trenton B. Olsen
The Scottish author Robert Louis Stevenson arrived in Saranac Lake in October of 1887 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. Stevenson suffered from pulmonary illness and came for the open-air treatment of an Adirondack winter. He brought significant attention to the new tuberculosis sanatorium of American Lung Association founder Dr. Edward Trudeau. Tens of thousands followed him there.
While Stevenson’s half-year stay was significant for Saranac Lake, it was also pivotal for the author. A few months earlier, he was too sick to attend his father’s funeral. Now he walked along the Saranac River, snowshoed in the woods, and ice skated on Moody Pond. While living at Baker Cottage, now the Robert Louis Stevenson Cottage Museum, he wrote half of his novel The Master of Ballantrae, set partially in the Adirondacks, along with some of his best essays for a lucrative magazine contract. Stevenson planned and financed an audacious Pacific voyage, explaining, “fame is nothing to a yacht,” and finally settled in Samoa before dying at forty-four.
Two decades after Stevenson’s death in 1894, the Stevenson Society of America was established in Saranac Lake on October 30th, 1915, and the Robert Louis Stevenson Memorial Cottage was opened to the public—the world’s first site dedicated to the author. Charter members included Associated Press founder Charles Palmer, prominent journalist Robert Hobart Davis, and Mount Rushmore sculptor Gutzon Borglum, who unveiled his bronze relief sculpture of Stevenson on the occasion.
Stevenson’s essays, considered some of his best work, were a key part of the rationale for preserving the cottage. In “The Education of an Engineer,” he recalls being an apprentice 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, and began his real work at night. 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 his own voyage, 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 ancestors 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. His essay “The Lantern-Bearers,” written in Saranac Lake, recounts seaside holidays in childhood when he and his playmates hid lanterns under their coats. Stevenson compares this hidden lantern “alternately obscured and shining” to the innermost self which “fades and grows clear again” like a revolving lighthouse. For Stevenson, the personal essayist’s work was “to discover, even dimly … this veiled prophet of ourselves” and reveal it to others.
These essays brought me from Idaho to the Adirondacks last year. I’ve visited 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. In place of a professional staff, the deeply knowledgeable Mr. Mike Delahant serves 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, and the support of his brother Tom, Mike has served as resident curator since Labor Day of 1980, making his tenure 44 years this month: the entire length of Stevenson’s life.
Like Stevenson, Mike wasn’t sure he wanted to carry on his family’s work. He reluctantly began 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. I never expected to be the volunteer manager of a museum more than 2,000 miles away, but as Stevenson wrote, “the most beautiful adventures are not those we go to seek.”
Stevenson’s work resonated in the Adirondack village where so many people faced their darkest time. In 1906, a New York City doctor sent a tubercular young man to Saranac Lake with this prescription: “keep up your courage. Fresh air—fresh eggs—and read Robert Louis Stevenson.” The Stevenson Society of America formed both to preserve his residence and “spread his brave philosophy of living” because, in the words of the late essayist Brian Doyle, Stevenson “[brought] light against the darkness . . . as well as any man who ever set pen to paper.”
As president of the Stevenson Society of America, I’m proud to officially recognize the Delahants’ three generations of service with a memorial display framed by 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. It will remain there as a lasting tribute to the family who literally and figuratively kept the lights on for more than 70 years. It’s also a beacon of a better future for the Cottage Museum because in Saranac Lake a porch means hope. Your financial support will help us make that light shine brighter on Stevenson Lane and beyond.
Trenton B. Olsen is an associate professor of English at BYU-Idaho, editor of The Complete Personal Essays of Robert Louis Stevenson: Expanded Second Edition, and president of the Stevenson Society of America, which owns and operates the Robert Louis Stevenson Cottage Museum www.rlscottagemuseum.org
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