Our Adirondack bookshelf here in North Bolton got a bit deeper after a serendipitous stop at an out-the-way, used bookstore recently. When Sally Brillon, owner-operator of 1786 Wilson Homestead Books and Antiques near Salem, NY, learned where we lived, she pulled a box of books from behind her desk.
It included early editions of Seneca Ray Stoddard’s guidebooks, Russell Carson’s Peaks and People of the Adirondacks, collections of W.H.H. Murray’s Adirondack writings and Woodcraft by George Washington Sears, aka Nessmuck, among others.
We limited ourselves to the purchase of an 1870 edition of Murray’s Adventures in the Wilderness; or Camp-Life in the Adirondacks; an 1877 edition of his Adirondack Tales and the 11th edition of Nessmuck’s Woodcraft, published in 1895.
Adventures in the Wilderness was, of course, the book that – according to Murray himself – “made the wilderness famous and sent the thousands into it.”
In 1869, the year that Adventures in the Wilderness was first published, there were only three hotels and a few rustic boarding houses within the Adirondack interior.
It would have been impossible to accommodate a trickle of tourism; Adventures in the Wilderness went through ten printings within six months and unleashed a cataract, known to this day as “Murray’s Rush.”
However, the wilderness experience that Murray promised his readers existed, for the most part, in his own imagination. Those who actually made it to “the great north woods” swatted black flies, sought shelter from the incessant rain, grumbled, and what was worse, found themselves derided as “Murray’s Fools.”
Woodcraft, published nearly twenty years after Adventures in the Wilderness, was intended by Nessmuck to be a corrective, a remedy to its many defects.
“Perhaps more than fifty years of devotion to ‘woodcraft’ may enable me to give a few useful hints and suggestions to those whose dreams are of camp-life by flood, field and forest,” Nessmuck wrote.
(The author, a tiny shoemaker from Pennsylvania, is best known today for his voyages along the waterways of the central Adirondacks aboard the Sairy Gamp, a 9-foot, 10½ pound canoe made for him by J. Henry Rushton.)
Much as we liked our finds, we enjoyed our conversation with the shop’s indefatigable owner, Sally Brillon, even more.
A “heartland” native, the daughter of a man who collected whaling harpoons and other unlikely historical artifacts, she came east as a young woman because, as she put it, “I wanted to be in a place where the things were old, and I found it.”
First in New Hampshire, where she qualified to teach art in public schools and in Washington County, where she inventoried local historical resources, surveyed cemeteries, restored old buildings and opened two shops with her late husband: Towpath Antiques in Fort Anne and the 1786 Wilson Homestead Books and Antiques, which is located a few miles west of the Vermont border off Route 22.
For a while, she even conducted colonial cooking classes for kindred souls on her open hearth. “I got bit by the local history bug,” said Brillon. “Between historical societies and antique shops, old things have taken up my life ever since we moved here.”
Those “old things” include the houses in which she and her family have lived, not least of which is the 1786 Wilson Homestead. According to Brillon, the Wilsons were Scots Irish who emigrated to Rhode Island and found their way to Washington County by the early 1770s.
“We were the first to buy the house away from the Wilson family,” said Brillon, who has transcribed thousands of pages of the Wilsons’ letters, journals and diaries, which may constitute one of the best sources of Washington County history still unpublished.
The bookstore occupies a barn on the property, which was renovated to accommodate a year-round commercial space. The store opened with 13,000 books, an inventory that only continues to grow as Brillon travels throughout the northeast on book-buying excursions.
“I would never stop buying books or antiques. I’ve found just wonderful stuff,” said Brillon.
In November and December, the book shop is open by appointment or happenstance. “If it’s a nice day, and I feel like coming in, I’ll put out the ‘open’ sign. If the door is open, come in!” she said.
But bring your check book. The bookstore doesn’t take credit cards. Like its owner, it’s old fashioned.
The 1786 Wilson Homestead can be found at 1117 Chamberlin Mills Road in Hebron, NY.
A version of this essay first appeared in the Lake George Mirror, America’s oldest resort paper, covering Lake George and its surrounding environs. You can subscribe to the Mirror HERE.
Photo: 1786 Wilson Homestead Books and Antiques near Salem, NY.
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