Lucius Evans Cottage. Adirondack Daily Enterprise, March 29, 2008 
This image, cropped from the photograph at Saranac Lake Village, c. 1885, shows the Evans Cottage's location on Main Street 
The Evans Cottage on Main Street, just left of the DRUGS sign. Adirondack Daily Enterprise, January 26, 2012. Address: 66 Main Street
In 2009, the Sears store occupies two former 10-cent stores next to one another, near the former site of this cottage. (See Newberry's)
Old Address: 61-65 Main Street
Year built: Before 1885
Other information: Owned by Lucius Evans. After he died on October 29, 1894, his wife, Mrs. Nellie Vosburgh Evans, continued to run the cottage as a boarding house (known as "Mrs. Evan's cottage") until 1905, when she sold it. It was the second residence in Saranac Lake of Dr. E.L. Trudeau and his family.
The Adirondack historian Alfred L. Donaldson wrote:
"...Lucius Evans [was] a well known guide who bought a lot on Main Street and built a low old fashioned house that became famous as a homelike and exclusive stopping place for sportsmen and invalids. Dr. Trudeau made it his home for several winters. After Lute Evans died his widow ran the house till 1905 when she sold to Mr. F. H. McKee who erected a store building on the site." 1
And
"I find that a Mr. Edward C. Edgar is generally credited with being the first tuberculosis patient to stay in Saranac Lake for his health. He spent the winter of 1874 at the "Lute" Evans Cottage, and was the first of the long and notable list of invalids that house was to entertain. Mr. Edgar appears to have "taken the cure" before the phrase for doing so was coined—that is, he would occasionally wrap himself up in a fur coat and blankets, and sit out in the cold. And this, be it remembered, was two years before Dr. Trudeau came to the village, and several before he had become acquainted with Brehmer's and Dettweiler's "sitting out" theories." 2
Donaldson also claims that it was the first house in the village to have an open brick fireplace.
Dr. E. L. Trudeau wrote in his Autobiography:
Mrs. Evans's "cottage was very comfortable, though somewhat primitive in its arrangements.Of course we had no running water in Saranac Lake in those days. A big barrel was kept behind the kitchen stove, from which with a dipper we filled our pitchers, and from time to time "Lute" Evans would walk down to the river with two pails suspended from a neck-yoke and replenish the barrel. I built a large fire-place in the sitting-room, and many long, happy winter evenings we spent around that fire-place with the children.
"Mrs. Evans was an excellent housekeeper and cook, and became very fond of the children. She disliked dogs intensely, but she was so good to us that my hounds were always allowed in the house, and permitted to sleep, after their return from a long hunt, in front of the fire-place in the parlor." 3
Comments
Footnotes
1. Donaldson, Alfred L. A History of the Adirondacks, New York: The Century Co., 1921, p.232
2. Donaldson, Alfred L. A History of the Adirondacks, New York: The Century Co., 1921, p.267
3. Trudeau, E. L. An Autobiography, p. 125-26
