Mac of Placid (1920) is not the most widely known work by Thomas Morris Longstreth, but it stands well as one of the classic early novels of the region. I come across copies occasionally, and currently have three for sale. Pictured is the Grosset & Dunlap edition in a dustjacket (most these days have lost their jacket sometime in the 90 years since publication). The Century Company put out the green covered edition, also circa 1920. They are printed from the same plates.

At its core, and on many levels, Mac of Placid is a Romantic Novel in the truest sense. Longstreth romanticized the early European American residents and pioneers of the region; he romanticized and perhaps idolized Robert Louis Stevenson; and his work itself reflects the romantic ideal of literature and of the age that seemed to be on the wane in that era. His prose, throughout all his works, underscores his attachment to the romantic sensibility.

I first read this book in the 1970’s. To me then it was a straightforward adventure, all the more interesting for its being set in my home town. As with other of stories of the region, it was fun to associate the action with specific places I knew, and to compare the places then to how they are now. Of course, Longstreth was writing in the 1920’s about the 1880’s, so who knows how accurate his descriptions are. His sources, other than his own intimate knowledge of the area, included folks like Alfred L. Donaldson and local people such as “Mac” himself.

Fictionalized, Mac grows up in a disordered and unhappy home, leaving Lake Placid for the distant (9 miles) Saranac Lake after inadvisably coming to the aid of an underdog in a barroom brawl. The friendship with the man he saves is fleeting, and the betrayal that follows, coupled with the coming of age and romantic threads of the story, lays the basis for the standard-template plot that unfolds. Befriending and being abetted in love by the recently arrived Stevenson adds a unique if somewhat forced twist to the story.

I am still not clear exactly how much of the novel is based on fact. Robert Louis Stevenson, of course, was real and resided at the time of the story at Baker cottage, as he does in the book. In his introduction, Longstreth lays out his conversations with Donaldson and Anson MacIntyre, revealing his longing to have met Stevenson, as well as his usual romanticizing of the woodsman, a kind of noble, silent stoicism that he imbues this breed of man with. He says of his own novel: “The result is not out of keeping with the flannel shirt that dries on the back of a s true a gentleman that ever blazed a trail; and yet it tries not to exclude the essential dignity of those set, for these woodsmen are so full of so-called poetry and if they took the trouble to write there’d be more real literature on the American shelf.”

So we are not the poorer for a story, drawn from the frustrated desire of an early 20^th century writer to have known one from a quarter century before. To have taken the tidbits he could from others and turn it into his own story served his own need, I am sure. And it has left us with a fun, interesting, and definitely dated book to collect and enjoy. It belongs, to be sure, in any Adirondack collection, and I guess in any complete Stevenson collection. As literature, it would likely not appeal more broadly.

The Baker Cottage, on the side of Mount Baker in Saranac Lake