In 1885 he purchased The Arlington Hotel, which had previously been known as The Marvin House. He changed the name to Worden House at the request of his guests who honored him with a dinner celebrating his purchase.

The Worden House had a special distinction in the nineteenth century, a boiler which generated steam heat, which brought comfort during upstate New York’s harsh winter weather. The other large Saratoga hotels were only open during the summer season.

The Worden was an impressive masonry edifice, located along Broadway and across Division Street from the renowned United States Hotel. The elevator equipped inn stood five stories tall, with the fifth floor incorporated into a slate covered mansard roof. The columned two-story piazza faced Broadway, with the entrance to the rathskeller beneath that structure.

The hostelry would sponsor the valuable Worden House Stakes race for juvenile fillies, a tradition of the Spa hotels. Mr. Worden had a sunny working relationship with the notorious “Dutch Fred” Walbaum, who operated the Saratoga Race Course in the waning years of the nineteenth century. This allowed Mr. Worden to play a critical role in the 1900 sale of the Saratoga Race Course to a syndicate headed by William C. Whitney and Richard T. Wilson, as he was a trusted go-between to both parties in the transaction. Mr. Worden would become a director of the Saratoga Association for the rest of his life, as he represented the local interest in track operations.

Mr. Worden was a progressive thinker who embraced new ideas and had other interests besides operating a major hotel, such as partnering in the Victoria Vaudeville open-air theatre.  He was a principal in the Adirondack Trust Bank and the Congress Spring Company, was a New York State Republican party delegate, and became the Saratoga Springs Postmaster, appointed by President Theodore Roosevelt.

The most unusual of Mr. Worden’s varied interests was a mining company in Hadley, which sought to extract precious metals, including silver and gold.

As a leading citizen of Saratoga Springs, Mr. Worden interacted with other prominent citizens of the (then) village. These men, perhaps inspired by the 1896 Yukon gold strike in Alaska’s Klondike region, banded together and founded Sacandaga Mining and Milling. On March 14, 1898, Albany Argus wrote, “Some of the most influential men of Saratoga are interested in the company.” This included among others, State Senator Edgar T. Brackett, William Allerdice, Frederick Tarrant and R. Newton Brezee, the architect who designed so many of the fabulous homes at the Spa.

The ranks of the new corporate entity also included John E. Sutphen, originally of Albany, who had become associated with William Bullis and his smelting and refining works in Glens Falls. There, he developed his refinement methods, which came to be known as the “Sutphen Process.”

Their hopeful operation, in contract with David Davidson of Saratoga was to construct a three-story steam powered mill along a terrace on the north bank of the Sacandaga River near the junction of the Hudson, on seventy acres Mr. Worden procured in 1897. Here it was believed sand and gravel deposits washing out of the Adirondacks contained valuable heavy minerals like gold. This is formed when denser, more durable minerals eroded from source rocks, and were left behind in concentrated amounts by the natural processes of the flowing water. William Worden deeded this property to the Sacandaga Mining and Milling corporate interest, which was subsequently followed in the same liber with a “Discovery of Mine” claim instrument filed by John E. Sutphen, which describes the intention to “mine gold and silver and also platinum and other metals contained in soil, sand and gravel deposits...”

The men who formed the new corporation had witnessed in their lifetime the evolution of steel, which took civilization from the unrefined iron age to a national network of steel rails and skyscrapers. They were willing to invest what was, for them, a modest amount in the development of a new initiative with shining future potential, where they could see for themselves the widespread distribution of theoretically auriferous sands in the existence of extensive quartz deposits.

Sutphen amalgamators at the Hadley Gold Mill. NYS Museum Fifty-Second Annual Report

Sacandaga Mining and Milling Gold Mine and Mill at Hadley. J.N. Nevius photo, made for NYS Museum Fifty-Second Annual Report, transmitted to the Legislature January 4, 1899.

The sand obtained from the riverbank was composed mainly of quartz grains, associated with small quantities of magnetite and mica, with a small percentage of garnet and other minerals. It was wheeled into the mill via a second story ramp. Overhead shafting transmitted power to the mill machinery through belts and sheaves.

The first step for processing the aggregate sent it through a dryer and sifter, consisting of a revolving cylindrical screen into which hot air was directed. As it dried, the coarser gravel was sifted out and discarded.

The dried sand was raised by a conveyor belt to a receiver, which distributed it into a grinding mill of rollers. Air pressure met the pulverized sand as it came from the rolls and threw it against a screen. The refinement was lifted to the third floor of the mill and deposited the sand into a hopper, where it was bagged to establish uniform weight.

The next step in the Sutphen Process was based on the theory that a bromide of gold existed throughout the interiors of the quartz grains. The finely ground sand was mixed in vats with the chemicals on which the success of the procedure depended, and the formula of its composition was a closely guarded secret. The processed sand, one bag at a time, was mixed with the chemicals that reduced the bromide of gold and left the gold free to amalgamate in the next step of the process. The solution was next conveyed to a specially contrived amalgamator, where the pulverizing-pickling process would do its work.