Speculator, NY 📍

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A sign of the times ⚡

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While I’ve done this a dozen times before, it always amazes me that with my laptop, VPN connection and my phone as a hotspot I can grab a file off the work server and email it to a colleague in milliseconds, just like I was in the physical office – in the Adirondack wilderness five miles from the nearest electrical wire or ethernet. 

Maybe if I wasn’t such a luddite who refuses to have television or home internet I might be less amazed about the technology. Or even a fancy phone or laptop. My equipment is decidedly inexpensive and outdated compared to what a lot of kids have nowadays.

Old Route 8B in 1954

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I was surprised to see that NY Route 8 and 30 followed Old Route 8B well into the 1950s, if not the 1960s before the modern alignment. I would have thought such a twisty road with sharp, dangerous curves would have been re-aligned in much earlier on.

The original road was built in 1915, according to bridge inspection reports (click on blue box to pull up the report). Before then, people used Gilmantown Road past Gilmantown Lake to get from Wells to Speculator, with the portion of NY 8 along the East Branch heading south to Wells, until the 1935 bridge was built between NY 30 and NY 8 over the Sacandaga River.

The current alignment was built in 1968 it would appear, based on the fact that the Scandaga River Bridge in Speculator was constructed that year and that looking at historical topographic maps from the mid-1960s still shows the old alignment.

Map: Battery Diagram
Map: Severence Hill Trail
Map: Beaver Brook Tract
Map: Severence Hill Trail
Map: Silver Lake
SVGZ Graphic: Indictments from the January 6th Uprising