A Saratoga Story Told in The Grand Irish Seanchaí Storytelling Tradition | Part 5, Final
Written by Eamon Ó’Coileáin (Ed Collins)
Exterior view of The Gables showing the road. Durant purchased the residence in 1871. He died there in 1885. The structure burned in 1959. Photo courtesy of Adirondack Experience
Before Thomas Durant died at his beloved Gables in North Creek on October 5, 1885, he had lost much of his wealth, fittingly so, as many would claim, because it was wealth that so many accused him of accumulating deceitfully. A local man’s personal journal recorded a brief entry on October 6, 1885, about North Creek’s mourning the magnate’s death: “T.C. Durant is dead. The great railroad king of North Creek. The engine is draped in mourning, as is the depot. A great parade because he had a big pile of money, which is not of the least use to him now. He has gone where he cannot take it with him. Neither could it save his life.”
His family transported his body on the very train service he established, returning him from North Creek to Saratoga Springs and then on to New York City’s Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn where he was interred in a grand stone mausoleum, as magnificent as his stately home in the Adirondacks. Durant’s beloved mansion in North Creek, “The Gables,” survived well into the 20th century until a fire consumed it on an extremely cold morning in March 1959. In a newspaper account of the conflagration, a small boy, who stood bundled up out in front of the inferno and witnessed so many firemen armed with hoses pouring water on the fire, was quoted wondering aloud, “How can there be ice?” as imposing icicles the length of stalactites formed from cascades of dripping, freezing water around the smoldering manse. The icy scene served as an ironic ending to a story of an ambitious man whose apparently cold, calculating heart created great personal family wealth at others’ expense.
Thomas Clark Durant, M.D. (1820-1885),
Vice President of the Union Pacific Railroad. From an engraving by Robert O'Brien based on a photograph by Matthew Brady. c 1865-70
Thomas Clark Durant's residence, known as "The Gables," in North Creek. Photo courtesy of Adirondack Experience
Orson Welles, in describing his movie Citizen Kane, widely acclaimed to be one of the greatest motion pictures ever made, explained, “I wished to make a motion picture which was not a narrative of action so much as an examination of character.” The most famous line from Welles’s masterpiece is perhaps a one-word mysterious last-breath utterance by Kane at his life’s end, “Rosebud.” Welles stated that “Rosebud,” the name of Kane’s childhood sled, was a symbol: “It was one of hundreds of objects of art, objects of sentiment, and just plain objects which could stand for a public career and a private life. I wished to represent the very dust heap of a man’s life. There was no way for me to do this except to make my character, as I have said, a collector, and to give him a great house in which to keep his collections. The house itself occurred to me as a literal translation in terms of drama of the expression ‘ivory tower.’ ”
The fictitious Citizen Charles Foster Kane, supposedly modeled on powerful newspaper publisher and politician William Randolph Hearst, could be said as well to be a character study of tainted Thomas Clark Durant and his magnificent stately home “The Gables” with all of his gilded collectibles, paid for by wealthy travelers to and through Saratoga Springs. As one visits The Durant Mausoleum, one can almost imagine hearing echoes inside the cold granite facade of the old railroad financier’s voice as the dying Citizen Durant lay in his North Creek opulent mansion whispering his last words in a gruff low, hushed tone, in the spirit of Charles Foster Kane, lamenting for his beloved home in the Adirondacks, “Oh . . . My Gables.”
- An Deireadh ("The End") -
Thomas C. Durant Mausoleum,
Green-Wood Cemetery, Brooklyn.
Photo by Sheila Myers.