North Country at Work: Grover Cleveland captured the early days of Lake Placid tourism in photographs
The village of Lake Placid was a growing resort just before and after World War I. Trains carried thousands of tourists there every year. Many would bring their own cameras, or they’d look for picture postcards to send home — all to capture memories of their Adirondack vacation.
This demand drew the attention of professional photographers, to take pictures, and develop film and print postcards. A recent event put on by the Lake Placid-North Elba Historical Society celebrated the work of one such photographer, Grover Cleveland, including an appearance by his 100 year-old daughter.
A gift of "glowing" photographs
At just under 5 feet tall, Clara Cleveland Bass walked through the front door of the Lake Placid train station, wearing eyeglasses, black slacks, and a gray sweater, and a white sash stretched diagonally across her body that read “100 & Fabulous.”
It was Tuesday, Sept. 7 — Cleveland Bass’ 100th birthday. Today, she lives part-time in Texas with her daughter Sam and part-time in Arkansas with her daughter Ruth. This was a special trip home to Lake Placid, not to receive a gift on her birthday, but to give one.
She handed over hundreds of her father’s glass-plate negatives and photos to the Lake Placid-North Elba Historical Society. Her father was Grover Cleveland, a photographer in Lake Placid from 1916 to the late 1950s.
“My father was a genius at taking pictures, especially of the lake after dark,” Cleveland Bass said.
She said she was impressed with the historical society’s care of its photo archives, and that’s why she gave her father’s work to the organization.
“When we saw that you all had workshops on how to care and store glass-plate negatives, we knew this is where the collection definitely needed to be," Cleveland Bass' daughter Sam told historical society officials, "not just because of subject matter but because we knew you guys knew how to take care of all of that.”
Young and restless
This Grover Cleveland was not the former two-time president, New York state governor, and mayor of Buffalo.
Cleveland Bass’ father was actually named Jesse Grover Cleveland, but he didn’t like his first name. “We never did find out why he hated that name, except he had a girl cousin named Jesse,” she said.
So Jesse Grover became J. Grover, and finally Grover J. Cleveland. Cleveland Bass doesn’t know whether her father was named after the former president, but he was born on June 15, 1887 in the Madison County town of Oneida during the president’s first term in Washington (1885-1889).
A year after his birth, George Eastman of Rochester introduced the Original Kodak camera, which was pre-loaded with a 100-exposure roll of flexible film. That meant people no longer had to rely on bulky glass-plate technology for their cameras.
It was the beginning of a photographic revolution, one that Cleveland got caught up in when he was a young man. Yet he took his photography interests to a professional level. A 1907 photo shows Cleveland with a suit, tie, and hat, holding a folding camera with a cable release — not a box camera with preloaded film.
Cleveland worked for the Eastman Kodak Company in Rochester for a couple of months in 1906. Otherwise, he jumped from job to job, working for a number of places in central New York during his 20s, including the Remington Typewriter Company in Ilion, as a news photographer in Syracuse, and at the Syracuse Portrait Company.
In November 1915, Grover was admitted to the Ray Brook State Hospital in the Adirondacks, where he spent several months being treated for tuberculosis. After a brief visit home in 1916, he traveled to Lake Placid in June to work for Irving Lynn Stedman (1874-1957), who ran a photography shop on Main Street.
The year 1917 was a pivotal one for both photographers. Stedman closed his shop to become the official photographer for the Lake Placid Club, and Cleveland was drafted, joining the U.S. Army in September 1917, and being assigned to a field artillery regiment. He arrived in France on Aug. 5, and his unit reached the front lines in northern France about a week before the Armistice on Nov. 11.
Settling down in Lake Placid, with a camera everywhere he went
Grover Cleveland came back to Lake Placid in 1920, first working for photographer George Rabineau and then opening his own shop. He took photos of events, famous people, and landscapes. He sold postcards of his own photos. And, as Cleveland Bass explained, he developed film for residents and tourists.
“He would sit at his bench in the red light in the developing room," she said, "and the bench was open down about that far, and he had a paddle of switches that he could put a negative up here, and then he could click the switches and illuminate that part of the negative or the film and bring it to life. That’s why so many of his pictures look glowing like that.”
When she was old enough, Cleveland Bass helped out with the family business. She picked up film at shops, brought it home to be developed, and delivered it back to the original pickup spot.
“We never got to deliver the pictures early in the evening,” she said. “My father had his own work schedule, work ethics. And he never hurried. He never hurried to get it done early in the afternoon, so oftentimes I was late picking things up or taking them there, and sometimes it was my brother Grover who went with me because we were too late.”
Clara said she was impressed with her father’s ability to compose a picture. “And then he knew how to angle a camera so that he brought out the best part of what he was looking at. Sometimes it was a simple angle of the camera, but he knew up in his because when you looked in the camera, one time he let me look, I don’t know which camera it was, he had a Graflex sometimes, but when I looked into it, it was upside down. And how he could do that and still know how to get the maximum out of a picture — he was focusing and wanting to print — so it was just amazing that he had that talent.”
Documenting Lake Placid and its Olympic history
At the historical society's event last month at the train station, Cleveland Bass’ daughter Sam picked a postcard out of a box. It was an image of the Olympic Arena taken in June 1941. In the bottom left corner was the number “300.”
“The photograph you just took had a number at the bottom,” Sam said. “That was the number of the postcard. He would take a book around with all of these photographs, postcards, and they’d each have a number. And the store owner would say, ‘I want 10 of number 300 or 12 of number 117,’ something like that.”
Cleveland enjoyed taking photos of local events and famous people when they came to town. He took photos of President Calvin Coolidge, coming out of church when he spent the summer of 1926 in the Adirondacks. He also often captured events as they were occurring.
“He liked to be where the story was happening. We have several groups of fires, Lake Placid Inn fire, Paul Smiths fire, and a couple others where he was on the scene,” Sam said. “He has a lot of photographs from the Club of members of the Club in winter scenes. Margaret Dewey and her sister and Mr. Dewey.”
Cleveland especially like covering Franklin D. Roosevelt when he came to town, first as governor and then as president. “And so my father always managed to be there,” Cleveland Bass said. “He had a press pass, and he would call out. ... He called him governor.”
Cleveland Bass remembers seeing FDR in Crown Point when the Lake Champlain bridge opened in 1929 — and going to the 1932 Winter Olympics in Lake Placid with her family. Her father took a lot of photos at the Olympics.
In 2015 in Little Rock, Arkansas, she was at a taping of the “Antiques Roadshow” PBS television show with an album of her father’s photos from the 1932 Olympics. Grant Zahajko of Seattle said it could sell between $15,000 and $20,000 at auction.
A 1939 graduate of the Lake Placid High School, Cleveland Bass eventually moved away and, in 1942, married Earl Bass, a pilot in the U.S. Army Air Corps who was originally from Arkansas.
Grover Cleveland closed his shop in the late 1950s and died in Lake Placid on Dec. 22, 1975 at the age of 88. He is buried next to his wife Hazel at Constantia Center Cemetery in Oswego County.
Photos from the Grover Cleveland collection are expected to be on display at the History Museum in the Lake Placid train station in 2024.
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