When my cousin Francis Hogan, former Postmaster General of Rainbow Lake, called me and then mailed me pieces of a copy of the Enterprise from Oct. 11, 1966, little did I know that it would lead to this column.

Francis’ father Bill Hogan, son of Esther Keegan Hogan, and my mother, Elizabeth (Bessie) McKillip Keegan Riley, are first cousins. Then somehow we started talking about Brother Andre’ of Montreal. He is now a Saint, was a friend of my cousin Father Frank Cornish and visited us at the Sister’s farm. Father Cornish’s mother, Maggie Clark Cornish, was a sister to my grandmother Julia Clark Riley. There was, and may still be, a Riley Road and a Clark Road in Old Township #9 in Malone.

I have only the “jump” piece of the Enterprise story which was a feature on the history of the village of Gabriels and Gabriels Tuberculosis Sanatorium founded by the Order of the Sisters of Mercy about 1895.

Our Catholic religion brought about a bond that was created when my grandmother Julia Riley died at a young age and left four children, three sons and a daughter. My father Dennis was sent to live with the Christian Brothers in Hyde Park. Dorothy, who was age 14, entered the convent of the Sisters of Mercy, became a nun and served with the Sisters as an RN until she died in her 90s still working at the Uihlein Center in Lake Placid.

Tom Riley, the oldest, came to Saranac Lake to live with an uncle, a Civil War veteran who had built a house on Jenkins Street, and Charles, the youngest, went to live at the seminary in Ogdensburg. He later graduated from Mt. Carmel College Seminary in Niagara Falls, Canada and was to be ordained at Ogdensburg. He came to visit at the big Sisters Farm in Gabriels where my father was the manager. A week or so later, after he left, there was a call from the Ogdensburg seminary, where he was to be ordained, looking for our Uncle Charlie. My father had seen him off at the train station in Gabriels but he never went back to Ogdensburg. He went to California and worked on his brother Tom’s 4,000 acre ranch, one mile south of Carmel. Tom was a WWI combat veteran and made his way West after discharge. He must have been a hard-working guy, because he became successful overnight … tall and handsome, he got a job with a wealthy family chauffeuring their young daughter and married her.

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Gabriels history

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Remember, I don’t have the beginning of this piece so it picks up with a railroad story …

“There was a log cabin, home of the first track section boss Charles Downs and his wife who come with the railroad construction crew from their original home in Ellenburg. The site had been selected for a temporary section camp housing track workers and their families, and when the camp moved on, the Downs stayed.

“Charles Downs’ daughter, Mrs. Gertrude Otis, thinking back to these times remembers long standing names like the Sylvester ‘Veen’ Payes, John Flynn’s (John was killed in WWII and I remember going with my mother to their home while she consoled Mrs. Flynn), Zeb Robares, George Russells, Wheelers and Hobarts were already attached to the land here and there, the men either farmers or guides by profession.

“A railroad station came into being just north of the Downs cabin primarily to serve the wealthy campers of the Upper St. Regis Lakes and Paul Smith’s Hotel. Among them the Whitney’s, Trevors and Merriweather Post (who also owned Mar-a-Lago in Florida). They were happy to make use of what was then called Paul Smith’s Station rather than suffer the alternative trip by stagecoach from Plattsburgh.

“After the sanatorium was built, the station became known as Gabriels, and the Dennis Riley’s recall that four or five trains would come through a day and that there would likely be a cure patient on every train in addition to campers and tourists. (I remember Mom telling me that Grandpa Billy Keegan, her dad, would take my older brothers by train into Saranac Lake to go to the movies and be back by late afternoon, proving they had pretty good train service.)

“Well, the Gabriels station is gone now and the New York central line along with it. They ripped up the tracks in 1960, and Mrs. Charles Downs lived to see it. (Francis told me that there used to be a similar size railroad station in Rainbow Lake.)

“Sometime around 1900 the first general store came to Gabriels under the proprietorship of Barney Lantry, a native of Brushton. He kept the post office there for a while until the sisters began their own. [George Riley was the post master for the San in a new building was erected just to the left of the entrance.] Charles Riley later owned the Lantry store. (Three families in that small town named Riley and none of us were related.)

“In 1918, a building count of Gabriels, showed, besides the sanatorium, two stores, one hotel, a blacksmith’s shop, a garage and three saloons.”

I remember going to the San often when I was kid because our Aunt Sister Mary Dorothy was a member of the nursing staff. There was a very long enclosed walkway from the building where the sisters lived directly to the main building of the San.

So sad that the rich history of those buildings erected to care for the ill now sit as an abandoned state prison.