Sherwood Davies was six years old in 1923 when he went with his mother to live at the Stony Wold Sanatorium in the Adirondack Mountains where she worked.

His family would have a long history with the place, located on Lake Kushaqua, 20 miles north of Saranac Lake. His grandmother had been a patient at Stony Wold in 1905, and his own mother was also treated and cured there a decade later. Davies himself would return to the Adirondack retreat as a patient in 1937. He was diagnosed with TB during his sophomore year at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

He recovered after three months at Stony Wold, resumed his studies at RPI and earned a bachelor's degree in engineering. He served in World War II and retired from the state Department of Health after a 40-year career.

"It's mind-boggling. I'm very lucky that I survived," said Davies, 97, of Troy, whose oral history and vintage photographs are featured in a PBS documentary on TB as part of its American Experience series. It's titled "The Forgotten Plague" and airs Tuesday on WMHT-TV.

More Information

Gone, not forgotten

What: PBS' American Experience, "The Forgotten Plague"

When: 9-10 p.m. Tuesday

Where: WMHT, Channel 17


As an impressionable boy, Davies watched young women in their early 20s whom he had befriended waste away and die. He witnessed bodies loaded onto trains to be transported back home for burial. He saw an employee carefully collect dozens of paper sputum cups from patients each day, carry them downstairs and destroy them in the furnace.

He also saw patients gain weight, return to good health and go home.

"Taking the cure" it was called. Bed rest, a healthy diet and clean mountain air proved a tonic for some TB patients.

A positive attitude was essential, too.

"My mother always took an optimistic approach. I never saw her depressed," he said. "As I've grown older, I appreciate and respect her even more."

His mother, Grace Davies, died at 90 in Albany.

She said the proudest day of her life was seeing her son graduate from RPI.

Davies knew firsthand the devastation of a disease once called "the captain of death." It killed his father when he was 8. It killed his grandfather too.

In the early 1900s, an estimated 110,000 Americans died annually from tuberculosis. It killed one of seven people worldwide at its peak between the mid-19th and early 20th centuries. The infection attacked the lungs and resulted in a patient's body being wracked by hacking, bloody coughs. It was a wasting disease known as consumption. Eventually, TB patients lost so much weight and strength they could no longer get out of bed. Death could come quickly or as a drawn-out and painful ordeal. It orphaned tens of thousands of children.

A century ago, there was no known cure for TB and doctors struggled to understand it. It was believed to be hereditary. There was no effective treatment. Physicians eventually noticed that those TB patients who spent time in fresh, mountain air while hiking or camping could stop its progression or even "cure" affected lungs.

They began prescribing extended convalescence in sanatoriums like Stony Wold, which opened in 1902, or the better-known Adirondack Cottage Sanitarium in Saranac Lake, founded by Dr. Edward Trudeau in 1885. The name was changed to Trudeau Sanatorium after Trudeau died in 1915.

Today, the site is home to the Trudeau Institute, a biomedical research center.

Stony Wold was a women-only sanatorium for much of its history.

Davies' grandmother, Sarah Gifford Griffiths, was a patient there in 1905. In 1914, his mother contracted TB and was sent to Stony Wold. That's where she met Howard Davies, who worked on its dairy farm. They married in 1915 and moved to Syracuse in 1916, where Sherwood was born.

His father was an engineer for the New York Central Railroad, but he developed TB in 1922 and the family returned to the Adirondacks. His father was admitted to the Ray Brook Sanatorium. His mother was hired in 1923 to run the post office and store at Stony Wold, where she had been cured of TB eight years before.

She had a tiny room above the post office, and her 6-year-old son lived next door in the home of the grounds superintendent and his family, the Wilseys, who had children his age.

"They were very kind, and I was treated well," Davies recalled. "This was the middle of the Depression, and times were tough. It wasn't an easy life, but we always had enough to eat because Stony Wold had a big farm, dairy cows and good cooks."

His mother, an avid photographer, took hundreds of pictures at Stony Wold and preserved them. Davies donated copies of the photos to the Saranac Lake Public Library. Librarians there referred the filmmakers to Davies, and several of those historic photos are in "The Forgotten Plague.".

"It gave my father a lift to write down his memories about Stony Wold," said his daughter, Debbie Gordon, a retired Niskayuna school teacher. She took him to visit the Stony Wold property two years ago, on his 95th birthday. Only the chapel remains. The sprawling sanatorium and the other structures were torn down.

Antibiotics and other effective medications were developed in the 1950s and led to the closure of Stone Wold in 1955 as well as other sanatoriums that were no longer needed.

"I learned new things about his life at Stony Wold that I'd never heard before," said his daughter, who brought her father to the PBS taping.

Davies is an affable fellow who laughs easily, even when talking about hard times. He peppered his conversation with a salty vernacular and old-fashioned phrases such as "hell's bells."

Davies attended a one-room schoolhouse at Stony Wold with a dozen other kids. He rode a school bus one hour each way to Saranac Lake High School.

Entertainment at the sanatorium was limited. They listened to Canadian radio stations. "Amos and Andy" was Davies' favorite show. They looked forward to new films that arrived by train each Wednesday from New York City and were shown that night in the chapel, which was filled to capacity.

He once saw a man kick a football that shattered one of the Tiffany stained-glass windows in the chapel. "It was the owner's driver, and he was forgiven," Davies said.

He also saw deerjackers and bootleggers in big Cadillacs chased down dirt roads by the cops.

Davies and his wife, Marjorie — the parents of three children and grandparents of four — sold their house in Delmar and moved into the Eddy senior living facility in 2000. She died in 2003.

"I always considered myself lucky," he said. "Being interviewed by PBS brought back a hell of a lot of memories."

Davies continues to track TB through articles on the Internet. It remains the leading cause of death worldwide and there are 9 million new cases annually, according to the World Health Organization. Parts of Russia, India, Africa and Asia have high rates of TB today, and it has become a multi-drug-resistant disease.

"I'm worried that TB will continue to spread," he said. "It's going to be very difficult and expensive to eradicate in the developing world."