The woman who answered the phone at Brookside Museum didn’t know what to tell the caller. So she handed the phone to Chuck Latham.
A museum volunteer who lives in Charlton, Latham has learned a lot about Saratoga County over the past few years. But the caller stumped him. He wanted to know about the Yuengling Brewery that had once stood in downtown Saratoga Springs.
“I told him I didn’t know anything about it,” Latham said.
That soon changed, though. Latham started looking at old county records, and he discovered that right on Broadway, above the Hotel Todd, there was once a brewery where Yuengling Lager beer was made.
“I have a book, and it shows that storefront real plain,” Latham said.
And so Latham’s vast knowledge of the area grew even larger.
Latham was named the Brookside Museum’s volunteer of the year in 2011. That’s due in no small part to the assistance he offers visitors to the museum who are trying to trace their family roots.
But beyond that, Latham has spent a lot of time looking into Saratoga history and lore, unearthing stories like the one of the Yuengling brewery and the origin of the potato chip.
Latham enrolled in the Air Force right out of high school. After his discharge, he went to work selling cars for six months.
“That didn’t work out,” he said with a laugh.
So he hooked on with General Electric for 11 years. After that, he worked for Saratoga County, and he finished is career as a military technician for the federal government.
With his newfound free time, Latham, 69, decided to explore his family’s roots. Armed with little more than his mother’s maiden name, Bullard, he went down to Brookside to see what he could find out.
As it turned out, not much. The museum was scarce on resources for Latham, so he branched out on his own. He found a wealth of information about two Bullard brothers from the area. One moved to Greenfield Center and enjoyed great wealth. The other was a doctor who died at 52 while he was out on a call.
“He went out to treat a judge,” Latham said. “He sat down in a rocking chair and keeled over dead.”
The doctor left behind two sons, and “my mother descends from one of them,” Latham said.
His mother had no idea about the family history and delighted in sharing it with him. So Latham decided to help other people find their own stories, and he signed up to volunteer at the museum. It has lots of old county publications and records that can help people who know their family surnames.
But there are certainly limits to what’s available at Brookside, and Latham can help fill the gaps.
“I can point them toward resources they wouldn’t normally look for,” he said.
“Chuck is great,” the museum’s executive director, Joy Houle, said. “He can teach people some of the tricks of the trade.”
Genealogy and history go hand in hand, Latham said. And history is really all about stories. Latham has found countless stories in Brookside’s collection of books and magazines.
“You can put all the resources together and draw your own conclusions,” he said.
That’s what he did with regards to the origin of the potato chip. Several stories are floating around about who invented the potato chip and where. For what it’s worth, Latham puts his money on George Speck, who later changed his name to George Crum (Latham explained that someone once hollered, “Hey, Speck!” and George didn’t like it, so he changed his name to Crum, reasoning that “A crumb is bigger than a speck”).
In all events, Crum and his sister are said to have been cooking at Moon’s Lake House in Saratoga Springs. While his sister was frying a batch of crullers, Crum was slicing some potatoes.
“One fell into her vat of boiling fat,” Latham said. After it was fished out, someone tried it and liked it … and the potato chip was born.
As for Yuengling, the brewery billed as America’s oldest and headquartered in Pottsville, Pa., set up shop in Saratoga around 1887 and occupied its space on Broadway until roughly 1894. Latham said the popularity of the race track was probably one of the area’s draws.
The caller that day, as it happens, was from Yuengling headquarters. He and Latham have stayed in regular contact about the company’s history in this area – a topic, like so many others, that Latham now knows quite well.
