Andrew and Mary Baker were the landlords of Robert Louis Stevenson in Saranac Lake. (Provided images)

Sept. 25, 1887, was the day Mrs. Robert Louis Stevenson and her 19-year-old son, Lloyd Osbourne, found themselves on a riverboat going up the Hudson River from its pier in Lower Manhattan. Only 18 days had passed since a cargo steamer out of London, England, the Ludgate Hill, had dropped them off at another pier and with the rest of their party which included Mr. Stevenson himself, the newly famous author of “Treasure Island” and the “Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde”; also his mother Margaret, or “Maggie,” and their Swiss servant Valentine Roch, in her third year of employment with the Stevensons.

The first destination for this group of travelers upon reaching the USA had been Rhode Island where its invalid leader was invited to convalesce for a spell by their new friends Charles and Elizabeth Fairchild, super-rich and culture-hungry Bostonians with a summer home on the ocean in Newport. The original plan had been to take Stevenson to Colorado, where the Rocky Mountains air was supposed to be good for his diseased, sometimes bleeding lungs. However, a cold he caught aboard ship had brought its usual debilitating effects upon him and required a change to their itinerary. A New York City physician, “the best lung doctor there,” according to Maggie, told them about a new place much closer, just as good if not better than Colorado, led by a Dr. Trudeau whose reputation was already radiating at least as far as the Big Apple. Also, this Adirondack Sanatorium of Trudeau’s was only half a mile from a backwoods hamlet called Saranac Lake, where it would be much cheaper to live than Colorado if they could only find a place. RLS hated sanatoriums and didn’t like being around sick people, either, but now that he was a celebrity, it was imperative to find a place that could promise a degree of privacy.

To find that place was the mission of the recon team of Fanny Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne. Upon reaching Saranac Lake by Sept. 29, they could have checked into either Blood’s Hotel at present-day Riverside Park or the Berkeley, which didn’t burn down till January 1981. Once settled in, they would have stepped out onto Main Street and started asking questions. It was about this time that Andrew Baker made a trip into town from his farm on present-day Stevenson Lane. Whether he walked or was using horse power, we can’t say. What we do know comes from his daughter Bertha, twin of Blanche, ages 10 at the time. Bertha was 22 when she responded to inquiries by a Mr. Duncan, a Stevenson biographer, as to how it was that this unexpected intrusion into the Baker family’s way of life began. Bertha said it began as “an accidental meeting. Papa was on his way to town and on reaching the village, he saw one of his neighbors standing in the street talking to Mrs. Robert Louis Stevenson. It seems this gentleman had just given directions to Mrs. S. as to finding our house. He then said that she could speak with Papa since he was coming. She did so and arrangements were made for rental of the house.”

There wasn’t much time to make ready for the main body of the expedition, which planned to follow the pathfinders by leaving NYC on Sept. 30, so they had about four days. For the Bakers, that meant vacating their private quarters, including the fireplace and the upstairs, to accommodate the Stevensons. They would make $50 a month from their surprise tenants for this inconvenience, and that included letting the strangers use their furniture, too, like Andrew’s desk, now a museum piece. But back then $50 was considerable. If they could cope with these new and temporary conditions, it would be a nice windfall profit for the Bakers.

Andrew had built his home with kitchen and storerooms at the north end. This kitchen would be shared by both families. To make that feasible for the Bakers, Andrew would have to build a passageway between the kitchen and an outbuilding just 3 feet away on the east side. This would connect with the so-called summer kitchen, from which Mary Baker fed the “sports,” meaning their tent-dwelling summer guests who paid Andrew for room and board during their wilderness vacation. Baker was a professional guide, and his farm doubled as a tent-city hunting lodge for many decades. Many tent poles remain stored in the barn, over 9 feet long. This summer kitchen with storeroom and barn attached would be home for Andrew and his family for months to come. The passageway Andrew built so his family could come and go with ease between the shared kitchen and their temporary quarters is what Stevenson’s mother was referring to in a letter to her sister, Jane Balfour: The Bakers “have agreed to give over to us part of the house, their own portion being entirely shut off by double doors.”

Such was the arrangement by which an odd couple of families — American pioneer and Old-World Britannia — made it through a tough winter, altogether 11 people in close quarters sharing one kitchen. They didn’t even have a well to share. Still to be seen at Baker’s is the modified guideboat yoke with dangling hooks to carry buckets of water from the river below or a nearby spring. In winter, they sometimes had to carry ice to melt on the stoves. It was real 19th-century farm living, a place where Winslow Homer could have just as well painted his popular farm scenes. There were two cows named Silky and Sulky, whom RLS would mention in connection with the noise they made in the mornings as they fed against the outside wall of his little study under the southern gable.

For heat there were several wood stoves serving five chimneys, and RLS would pay his landlord $2 a cord for firewood to feed them. There was yet another chimney for the smoke from the sitting room fireplace, the one with the mantel on which the chain-smoking author would carelessly leave his iconic cigarette burns. Baker’s flaming hearth was the centerpiece for life as the Stevenson expedition would know it for the whole winter. Normal occupants like the Bakers would have covered the fireplace to keep in the stove-generated heat, which was already a losing battle because nobody was using insulation yet. But Robert Louis Stevenson was not normal, and he had long enjoyed sitting next to controlled fires. Circumstances now made Baker’s fireplace special for this invalid exile, who liked to play-act in his mind and, when possible, in real life. It symbolized his “Hunter’s Home,” the name by which Louis would christen his newest temporary home, this one located in an untamed wilderness. Soon Mrs. RLS would be writing to a friend, “I went to Montreal and came back laden with buffalo skins, snow shoes and fur caps. Louis wants to have his photograph taken in his, hoping to pass for a mighty hunter or sly trapper.”

Fanny Stevenson and Andrew Baker were people who knew how to get things done, and we can only assume that everything was in place by Monday, Oct. 3, 1887, when Robert Louis Stevenson would enter his “Hunter’s Home” for the first time. But first he had to get there.