Saranac Lake became one of the nation’s centers for tuberculosis care because of Dr. Edward Livingston Trudeau, who established the Adirondack Cottage Sanitarium in 1884, starting a cottage industry of curative cottages. The discovery of effective antibiotics in the late 1940s ended most cases of the disease, and Trudeau’s sanitarium closed in 1954. Trudeau first came to the Adirondacks in 1873, seriously ill with tuberculosis. He found the mountain air to be curative, and decided to stay and to help others recover from the disease as well. His work expanded from a lab in downtown Saranac Lake into the sanitarium with dozens of cure cottages and administration and hospital buildings, on a hillside north of town. In 1957, after it closed, Trudeau’s grandson sold it to the American Management Association, an educational business organization, which still owns it to this day. Though on the National Register of Historic Places, the site is underutilized, and several buildings have been torn down.