Photograph of Wright biplane at Fletcher Farm. Photo courtesy of Saranac Free Library Adirondack Room
This is a story of two people in love; both with each other and the romance of early aviation. As with all love stories, there is a hero: aviator George Alfonso Gray, and a heroine: “Jack” Edith Stearns.
When our hero took off from a field along Bloomingdale’s Fletcher Farm Road in the Autumn of 1912, he carried our heroine as a passenger, and as you will soon learn, for each the journey to this eventful day was birthed from the urge to fly.
George’s Embraces Aviation
George Alfonso Gray was born on September 23, 1878, in Blue Hill, Maine, a small town with a rich history of shipbuilding and granite on the Atlantic coast not far from Bar Harbor. The third son of farmer and mill owner James Madison Gray and his wife Annah, George was educated at Blue Hill School and soon after found work in Middlesex, Massachusetts. In 1910 at an aviation meet in Boston, George Gray first became interested in flying. When later describing this event, he recalled that he came away quite enthusiastic, thinking “If those fellows can fly, why can’t I?”
With only two aviation schools open in those early days of flight, his choices for instruction were either the Wright Brothers in Ohio or the Curtiss Company in San Diego, California. Choosing the closer of the two, in 1911 Gray left his work as a proprietor of an automobile garage in Middlesex and headed south.
The process of acceptance into flight school was simply having the courage to go aloft and the five-hundred-dollar fee in hand. With this done, George was taken to the factory where the Wright Model B airplane was built for the first step in his instruction. Here he was allowed to observe the construction of the Wright Brother planes and become familiar with what would soon carry him into the air. After days of studying the construction of an airplane, he was taken to the training field for his first exposure to actual flight. His desire for a life as an aviator nearly ended after that first five-minute trip aloft, as he found the sensation strange and uncomfortable. Only after hearing from Orville Wright himself that his reaction was quite normal and would quickly diminish did he decide to continue.
After six months George Gray finished his instruction, fully expecting to immediately take the next and most important step, obtaining his pilot license. With one thousand dollars needed as front money, and another fifty for plane rental, George was without sufficient funds, so he again sought out Mr. Wright for advice. In an amazing act of kindness, Orville offered George free use of a plane that he and his brother personally owned. His test required two flights, one viewed by his instructor and the next by the Aero Club of America, which granted the aviators licenses. His first flight was a success, but the second ended abruptly when after rising to one hundred and fifty feet the engine stopped causing the plane to slip backward and crash to the ground. With the aircraft demolished, his hopes of becoming a licensed pilot in 1911 came to an end.
By June 1912, George Gray succeeded in obtaining his aviator’s license, becoming the 142nd licensed pilot in America. It is here that our story turns to the Adirondacks, specifically the 1912 County Fair held in Malone that year. In the Plattsburg Sentinel on the day that the fair was to open, it was announced that Gray would make four flights from the fair as a “crowning attraction” of the fair. Advertised as one of the most “skillful and daring” aviators in America, his trips aloft in his Wright Bi-Plane were guaranteed to be a big draw for the fair.
Plattsburgh Sentinel, September 24, 1912 “Will Fly at Malone”
His time in Malone was not without incident, as while landing after his first flight his lower wing hit the ground and was damaged. Though this accident ended his exhibition flights during the fair, he did his best to make it up to the community by later flying over downtown Malone, in what was called a “masterful guiding of his plane.”
When the fair concluded, Gray was approached by a man from Saranac Lake inviting him to bring his machine to that village. This gentleman was none other than William F. Cooper, better known at that time as Caribou Bill, an adventurer who had come to Saranac Lake earlier in 1912 at the end of what was purported to be a trip by dogsled from Alaska to the Atlantic Ocean. His heroic journey brought him offers from motion picture companies, which in turn brought him what he saw as an ideal place to make motion pictures, Saranac Lake.
During these early days of aviation, flights were short, rarely over an hour, and usually over a controlled space with clear areas for emergency landings in the vicinity. For Malone, George Gray had shipped his bi-plane in a forty-foot railcar and reassembled it to use at the fair. Without this option for getting the aircraft to Saranac Lake, he decided to fly the 40 miles of sparsely settled wilderness that separated the two communities. When he made his intentions known, the responses ranged from surprise to clearly stated objections, such as “Do you realize, young man, that you have to fly over the Adirondack Mountains? You had better not undertake such a trip.”
At 5:05 pm on Wednesday, October 2, 1912, Gray took off from Malone for his trip to Saranac Lake. Without even a compass for navigation, his only clues to where he was headed were contained on a small map he attached to his controls. Once in the air, George Gray circled his bi-plane over Malone for fifteen minutes, fulfilling a fifty-dollar agreement with the mayor. With his flyover of Malone concluded George turned his airplane southeast following the New York Central Railroad’s Adirondack Division line, a distinct landmark heading off through the surrounding wilderness.
Reports of his journey soon passed over the telephone lines, first from Mountainview and then Loon Lake, where he waved to the onlookers as he passed overhead. All went well until he noticed that his fuel line was leaking, a problem he quickly solved by tightly tying his handkerchief around the break. At ten to six he began looking for a place to land, and after rejecting one spot, chose a recently cleared field in the distance with a farmhouse nearby. It was good that he had chosen this second place, as he later realized that the first was actually the snow-covered summit of Whiteface Mountain.
His landing spot was the Fletcher Farm, just outside the hamlet of Bloomingdale, and only eight miles from Saranac Lake. With an immediate need to contact his mechanic in Malone, Gray was taken to a nearby group of Tuberculosis cure cottages, the closest phone in the area. As is often the case, hospitality towards an unexpected guest brought our aviator a much-needed meal, which he reciprocated by taking his new friends to view his airplane at ten o’clock that night.
The next morning started with a visit from Paul Smith, who had made the trip from his hotel on the shore of Lower St. Regis Lake in hopes of a trip into the air. Unfortunately, high winds that day did not allow Gray to get his biplane aloft until nearly dark, and only for the short flight to Saranac Lake and his landing spot on the village racetrack.
Emily’s Story
When Emily Stearns was born in 1890, she arrived into the world at Farley, a plantation in Culpeper, Virginia. The daughter, and one of nine children of Franklin Stearns, Jr., she grew up in a life of wealth in an area that was still in many ways the post-Civil War South. Educated in the schoolhouse adjacent to their mansion, then later at a finishing school in Washington, D.C., she entered adulthood with opportunities from her family wealth that offered the time and funds for leisure and travel. The passion for flight was first lit in Edith when she attended the play “Peter Pan” and saw actress Maude Adams fly across the stage. Her first opportunity to take to the air came when Antony “Tony” Jannus began taking passengers aloft over the Potomac River in 1911. Unfortunately, Jannus crashed his plane on the day she was hoping to be his passenger and her dream of flight on that day was lost. It was the very next year in Saranac Lake that her chance came again, and this time she did everything in her power to bring success to the opportunity.
When Edith came to the Adirondacks to spend the early autumn of 1912, she was in her early twenties, an experienced traveler looking for new experiences and still following her passion for flight. It was through a mutual friend that Edith made her first contact with George Gray. After her friend initiated a telephone call to Gray’s hotel, our heroine-to-be was given the phone. Speaking with the aviator, she told of her hopes to fly and asked for a chance to be his passenger. From her book Up, A True Story of Aviation, we learn his response: “Well young lady, I am sorry but you will have to keep on wanting. This is no place to fly women, and besides I am here only for exhibitions. Pardon me—Goodbye.”
Edith, known to her friends as “Jack”, a nickname she once joked was given for being “Jack of all Trades and good at none” was not so easily deterred from her goal. The next morning, she went to the racetrack airfield by horseback wearing a linen pantsuit. In what turned out to be an omen of good fortune, George Gray walked up to the ticket booth soon after her, and with these words, she described their meeting for the first time:
Aviator Gray and I went through the gate together, and I “registered.” He had nice eyes! He was about twenty-eight years old. There were many people looking over the plane, who had been separated from their dollars. I took inventory of my progress toward a flight and thought so far so good.
It was not long before she had talked her aviator into taking her aloft, the outcome likely influenced by the immediate mutual attraction that formed between the two.
At 5 p.m. on October 6, 1912, George Gray guided his Wright Bi-Plane back to Fletchers Farm for “Jack” Stearns’s first flight. Word of the event had spread quickly that day and when he touched down over three hundred people were in attendance. Gray quickly began to search the crowd for his passenger, not realizing that she had already climbed onto the idling aircraft and was being strapped in by his mechanic.
With preparations for the flight accomplished, Gray started his plane across the field and into the air. With only eight miles to Saranac Lake, the flight lasted just 17 minutes, but every second counted towards two soon-to-be-revealed milestones for our intrepid passenger. Having only worn her linen riding suit, Edith was chilled to the bone by the conclusion of her flight. With the crowds immediately surrounding the airplane, she was left strapped on her seat while the Biplane was pushed into a heated hanger where she was able to get warm. It was quickly discovered that entrance into the enclosed tent was one dollar a person with the goal for each to see the “lady who flew over the Adirondacks.”
With this flight “Jack” Stearns became not just the first woman to fly above the Adirondacks, but also the first woman from the state of Virginia to take to the air. The Malone newspaper reported that she announced afterward that she very much enjoyed the flight, and that “it was all over so quickly that there wasn’t time to form any impressions of the flight” but that she was very willing to do it again.
This first flight was just the beginning of a lifetime together for George Gray and Edith Stearns. Just weeks after their time in the Adirondacks they were together again when George brought his plane to Edith’s hometown. In early December the pair took to the air over Culpepper, this time for charity, as the money raised from the gate receipts was going to help a young friend of Edith’s battling tuberculosis back in Saranac Lake. After a successful takeoff and taking the plane 300 feet in the air, the engine quit forcing them into an emergency landing. With no open areas in sight, Gray dropped down along a railroad taking down a row of fencing in the process. It was a week before they could get back in the air to give the people of Culpepper the promised sustained flight they had paid to see.
Edith made at least one more visit to Saranac Lake when she built a replica of the airplane carrying her over the Adirondacks as a float in the January 1913 Saranac Winter Carnival. One of sixty entries that year she was awarded a trophy for fifth place.
“Jack” Edith Stearns and George Alfonzo Gray were married in June of 1913, and for the next three years, the couple barnstormed across the nation, bringing the innovation of manned flight wherever they could attract a paying audience. With the onset of World War I George Gray enlisted and served his country as an officer in the Air Service. George and Edith were married for 33 years and together raised three children. George Alfonso Gray passed away at the age of seventy-seven, with Edith following him five years later in 1961.
Sources for this article besides what is noted were the online resources at ancestry.com and newspaper archives at nyshistoricnewspapers.org.
Editor’s Note: A version of this piece was originally published in 2023 by the Franklin County Historical Society.
Photo at top: Photograph of Wright biplane at Fletcher Farm. Photo courtesy of Saranac Free Library, Adirondack Room.
Love at First Flight
This is a story of two people in love; both with each other and the romance of early aviation. As with all love stories, there is a hero: aviator George Alfonso Gray, and a heroine: “Jack” Edith Stearns.
When our hero took off from a field along Bloomingdale’s Fletcher Farm Road in the Autumn of 1912, he carried our heroine as a passenger, and as you will soon learn, for each the journey to this eventful day was birthed from the urge to fly.
George’s Embraces Aviation
George Alfonso Gray was born on September 23, 1878, in Blue Hill, Maine, a small town with a rich history of shipbuilding and granite on the Atlantic coast not far from Bar Harbor. The third son of farmer and mill owner James Madison Gray and his wife Annah, George was educated at Blue Hill School and soon after found work in Middlesex, Massachusetts. In 1910 at an aviation meet in Boston, George Gray first became interested in flying. When later describing this event, he recalled that he came away quite enthusiastic, thinking “If those fellows can fly, why can’t I?”
With only two aviation schools open in those early days of flight, his choices for instruction were either the Wright Brothers in Ohio or the Curtiss Company in San Diego, California. Choosing the closer of the two, in 1911 Gray left his work as a proprietor of an automobile garage in Middlesex and headed south.
The process of acceptance into flight school was simply having the courage to go aloft and the five-hundred-dollar fee in hand. With this done, George was taken to the factory where the Wright Model B airplane was built for the first step in his instruction. Here he was allowed to observe the construction of the Wright Brother planes and become familiar with what would soon carry him into the air. After days of studying the construction of an airplane, he was taken to the training field for his first exposure to actual flight. His desire for a life as an aviator nearly ended after that first five-minute trip aloft, as he found the sensation strange and uncomfortable. Only after hearing from Orville Wright himself that his reaction was quite normal and would quickly diminish did he decide to continue.
After six months George Gray finished his instruction, fully expecting to immediately take the next and most important step, obtaining his pilot license. With one thousand dollars needed as front money, and another fifty for plane rental, George was without sufficient funds, so he again sought out Mr. Wright for advice. In an amazing act of kindness, Orville offered George free use of a plane that he and his brother personally owned. His test required two flights, one viewed by his instructor and the next by the Aero Club of America, which granted the aviators licenses. His first flight was a success, but the second ended abruptly when after rising to one hundred and fifty feet the engine stopped causing the plane to slip backward and crash to the ground. With the aircraft demolished, his hopes of becoming a licensed pilot in 1911 came to an end.
By June 1912, George Gray succeeded in obtaining his aviator’s license, becoming the 142nd licensed pilot in America. It is here that our story turns to the Adirondacks, specifically the 1912 County Fair held in Malone that year. In the Plattsburg Sentinel on the day that the fair was to open, it was announced that Gray would make four flights from the fair as a “crowning attraction” of the fair. Advertised as one of the most “skillful and daring” aviators in America, his trips aloft in his Wright Bi-Plane were guaranteed to be a big draw for the fair.
His time in Malone was not without incident, as while landing after his first flight his lower wing hit the ground and was damaged. Though this accident ended his exhibition flights during the fair, he did his best to make it up to the community by later flying over downtown Malone, in what was called a “masterful guiding of his plane.”
When the fair concluded, Gray was approached by a man from Saranac Lake inviting him to bring his machine to that village. This gentleman was none other than William F. Cooper, better known at that time as Caribou Bill, an adventurer who had come to Saranac Lake earlier in 1912 at the end of what was purported to be a trip by dogsled from Alaska to the Atlantic Ocean. His heroic journey brought him offers from motion picture companies, which in turn brought him what he saw as an ideal place to make motion pictures, Saranac Lake.
During these early days of aviation, flights were short, rarely over an hour, and usually over a controlled space with clear areas for emergency landings in the vicinity. For Malone, George Gray had shipped his bi-plane in a forty-foot railcar and reassembled it to use at the fair. Without this option for getting the aircraft to Saranac Lake, he decided to fly the 40 miles of sparsely settled wilderness that separated the two communities. When he made his intentions known, the responses ranged from surprise to clearly stated objections, such as “Do you realize, young man, that you have to fly over the Adirondack Mountains? You had better not undertake such a trip.”
At 5:05 pm on Wednesday, October 2, 1912, Gray took off from Malone for his trip to Saranac Lake. Without even a compass for navigation, his only clues to where he was headed were contained on a small map he attached to his controls. Once in the air, George Gray circled his bi-plane over Malone for fifteen minutes, fulfilling a fifty-dollar agreement with the mayor. With his flyover of Malone concluded George turned his airplane southeast following the New York Central Railroad’s Adirondack Division line, a distinct landmark heading off through the surrounding wilderness.
Reports of his journey soon passed over the telephone lines, first from Mountainview and then Loon Lake, where he waved to the onlookers as he passed overhead. All went well until he noticed that his fuel line was leaking, a problem he quickly solved by tightly tying his handkerchief around the break. At ten to six he began looking for a place to land, and after rejecting one spot, chose a recently cleared field in the distance with a farmhouse nearby. It was good that he had chosen this second place, as he later realized that the first was actually the snow-covered summit of Whiteface Mountain.
His landing spot was the Fletcher Farm, just outside the hamlet of Bloomingdale, and only eight miles from Saranac Lake. With an immediate need to contact his mechanic in Malone, Gray was taken to a nearby group of Tuberculosis cure cottages, the closest phone in the area. As is often the case, hospitality towards an unexpected guest brought our aviator a much-needed meal, which he reciprocated by taking his new friends to view his airplane at ten o’clock that night.
The next morning started with a visit from Paul Smith, who had made the trip from his hotel on the shore of Lower St. Regis Lake in hopes of a trip into the air. Unfortunately, high winds that day did not allow Gray to get his biplane aloft until nearly dark, and only for the short flight to Saranac Lake and his landing spot on the village racetrack.
Emily’s Story
When Emily Stearns was born in 1890, she arrived into the world at Farley, a plantation in Culpeper, Virginia. The daughter, and one of nine children of Franklin Stearns, Jr., she grew up in a life of wealth in an area that was still in many ways the post-Civil War South. Educated in the schoolhouse adjacent to their mansion, then later at a finishing school in Washington, D.C., she entered adulthood with opportunities from her family wealth that offered the time and funds for leisure and travel. The passion for flight was first lit in Edith when she attended the play “Peter Pan” and saw actress Maude Adams fly across the stage. Her first opportunity to take to the air came when Antony “Tony” Jannus began taking passengers aloft over the Potomac River in 1911. Unfortunately, Jannus crashed his plane on the day she was hoping to be his passenger and her dream of flight on that day was lost. It was the very next year in Saranac Lake that her chance came again, and this time she did everything in her power to bring success to the opportunity.
When Edith came to the Adirondacks to spend the early autumn of 1912, she was in her early twenties, an experienced traveler looking for new experiences and still following her passion for flight. It was through a mutual friend that Edith made her first contact with George Gray. After her friend initiated a telephone call to Gray’s hotel, our heroine-to-be was given the phone. Speaking with the aviator, she told of her hopes to fly and asked for a chance to be his passenger. From her book Up, A True Story of Aviation, we learn his response: “Well young lady, I am sorry but you will have to keep on wanting. This is no place to fly women, and besides I am here only for exhibitions. Pardon me—Goodbye.”
Edith, known to her friends as “Jack”, a nickname she once joked was given for being “Jack of all Trades and good at none” was not so easily deterred from her goal. The next morning, she went to the racetrack airfield by horseback wearing a linen pantsuit. In what turned out to be an omen of good fortune, George Gray walked up to the ticket booth soon after her, and with these words, she described their meeting for the first time:
Aviator Gray and I went through the gate together, and I “registered.” He had nice eyes! He was about twenty-eight years old. There were many people looking over the plane, who had been separated from their dollars. I took inventory of my progress toward a flight and thought so far so good.
It was not long before she had talked her aviator into taking her aloft, the outcome likely influenced by the immediate mutual attraction that formed between the two.
At 5 p.m. on October 6, 1912, George Gray guided his Wright Bi-Plane back to Fletchers Farm for “Jack” Stearns’s first flight. Word of the event had spread quickly that day and when he touched down over three hundred people were in attendance. Gray quickly began to search the crowd for his passenger, not realizing that she had already climbed onto the idling aircraft and was being strapped in by his mechanic.
With preparations for the flight accomplished, Gray started his plane across the field and into the air. With only eight miles to Saranac Lake, the flight lasted just 17 minutes, but every second counted towards two soon-to-be-revealed milestones for our intrepid passenger. Having only worn her linen riding suit, Edith was chilled to the bone by the conclusion of her flight. With the crowds immediately surrounding the airplane, she was left strapped on her seat while the Biplane was pushed into a heated hanger where she was able to get warm. It was quickly discovered that entrance into the enclosed tent was one dollar a person with the goal for each to see the “lady who flew over the Adirondacks.”
With this flight “Jack” Stearns became not just the first woman to fly above the Adirondacks, but also the first woman from the state of Virginia to take to the air. The Malone newspaper reported that she announced afterward that she very much enjoyed the flight, and that “it was all over so quickly that there wasn’t time to form any impressions of the flight” but that she was very willing to do it again.
This first flight was just the beginning of a lifetime together for George Gray and Edith Stearns. Just weeks after their time in the Adirondacks they were together again when George brought his plane to Edith’s hometown. In early December the pair took to the air over Culpepper, this time for charity, as the money raised from the gate receipts was going to help a young friend of Edith’s battling tuberculosis back in Saranac Lake. After a successful takeoff and taking the plane 300 feet in the air, the engine quit forcing them into an emergency landing. With no open areas in sight, Gray dropped down along a railroad taking down a row of fencing in the process. It was a week before they could get back in the air to give the people of Culpepper the promised sustained flight they had paid to see.
Edith made at least one more visit to Saranac Lake when she built a replica of the airplane carrying her over the Adirondacks as a float in the January 1913 Saranac Winter Carnival. One of sixty entries that year she was awarded a trophy for fifth place.
“Jack” Edith Stearns and George Alfonzo Gray were married in June of 1913, and for the next three years, the couple barnstormed across the nation, bringing the innovation of manned flight wherever they could attract a paying audience. With the onset of World War I George Gray enlisted and served his country as an officer in the Air Service. George and Edith were married for 33 years and together raised three children. George Alfonso Gray passed away at the age of seventy-seven, with Edith following him five years later in 1961.
Sources for this article besides what is noted were the online resources at ancestry.com and newspaper archives at nyshistoricnewspapers.org.
Editor’s Note: A version of this piece was originally published in 2023 by the Franklin County Historical Society.
Photo at top: Photograph of Wright biplane at Fletcher Farm. Photo courtesy of Saranac Free Library, Adirondack Room.