Essex, New York Guide and Community Blog
The Split Rock Yacht Club (SRYC) maintains a small but active racing fleet of Cape Cod Knockabouts which are raced weekly during the summer. This enduring tradition provides excitement for Crater Club sailors and an elegant backdrop for landscape photographers and painters. Sometimes dubbed “the poor man’s yacht,” Cape Cod Knockabouts are “ruggedly built; with extreme [...]
The Split Rock Yacht Club (SRYC) is located at the Crater Club’s Burnham’s Landing in Essex, NY. “Adjacent to the Crater Club dock, the Split Rock Yacht Club, a small informal club, sponsors weekly sailing races during mid-summer. For the past 60 years, the Club has followed the course from the southern shore of Essex [...]
A winning recipe and savvy marketing underpinned the success of Adirondack Mountain Creams in the early 20th century, but John Bird Burnham believed that good fortune also had played a crucial role in the early success of his Essex, NY, based maple sugar candy business. Almost at the start he was fortunate enough to place [...]
During the early 1900s Adirondack Mountain Creams’ increasingly robust manufacturing facilities in Essex, New York, guaranteed consistent flavor, quality and supply for distributors and retailers, but John Bird Burnham understood early on that creating demand for his unique Adirondack maple sugar candy was as important as making it delicious. Burnham scheduled his early sales forays [...]
After establishing the Adirondack Mountain Creams factory at the Old Brick Schoolhouse in Essex, New York in 1904 0r 1905 John Bird Burnham focused his entrepreneurial energy on expanding and improving the manufacturing process to meet growing demand for his maple sugar confections. His son, Koert Burnham remembered 6-8 female employees and one man in the [...]
Upon John Bird Burnham‘s return from the Klondike Gold Rush, he settled into the life of a Champlain Valley share-farmer and budding entrepreneur. Today The Crater Club ensures his legacy, but at the dawn of the 20th century it was his recent adventures in Canada’s Yukon and his wife’s maple syrup dowry that sustained the [...]
Underpinning John Bird Burnham’s legacy as a conservationist was his interest in local Adirondack enterprise. From logging and sawmilling to manufacturing log homes and maple sugar candy, Burnham’s business interests were diverse and his influence widespread. At the leading edge of the 21st century the most enduring memorial to Burnham’s entrepreneurial ambitions is The Crater [...]
Although several names emerge repeatedly in early Essex history (Gilliland, Ross, Noble, Gould, van Ormand, Eggleston, etc.) there is another legendary figure who infiltrates virtually any conversation about Essex since 1899, and that is John Bird Burnham (1869-1939). Born at the Amstel House in Newcastle, Delaware, Burnham quickly matured into an opinionated and adventurous naturalist. Though [...]
I recently had the good fortune of a leisurely afternoon luncheon in a handsome home at The Crater Club during which I peppered my host with questions about the seasonal enclave nestled along the shore of Lake Champlain between downtown Essex and Whallons Bay. If you are unfamiliar with The Crater Club, let this post [...]
Essex poetry and Essex taxes infrequently cohabit the same sentence. Clearly this is an oversight. In a letter to Jean-Baptiste Leroy on November 13, 1789 Benjamin Franklin opined that “nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.” This fundamental tenet promptly assumed right of place between the Golden Rule and Newton’s apple. [...]
