

“They should’ve gone north,” she muttered. She drew a straight line from the prison to the Canadian border. Wood, a bartender at the tavern, was puzzled why the men did not just go due north out of Dannemora, along, say, Plank Road.

In diners and hardware stores, at roadside vegetable stands and bars, acquaintances and strangers shared what they knew - or, more accurately, what they had heard - about the investigations. Still, the escape and manhunt were never far from conversation throughout the North Country. People were back to their old habit of not locking their doors, and they were no longer sleeping with loaded weapons next to their beds. “You got a prison break that’s all you’re going to get,” said Kassie Charland, 23, who was born and raised in the village and now works at the Mobil station.Īnd that seemed to be fine with local residents as they re-established some degree of normalcy. Others retreated with family and friends to their hunting camps in the hills or spent the weekend “four-wheeling” along woodland trails on all-terrain vehicles.ĭannemora, meanwhile, had nothing - no fireworks, no parade.

There was a boat parade on Chateaugay Lake west of here, and the annual clambake at Square Pond Campground in Saranac. Some residents took their children to the Fourth of July celebration in Rouses Point, on Lake Champlain, about a 35-mile drive from Dannemora. (Census Bureau estimates put the population at about 3,800 people, of whom about three-quarters are inmates, according to village officials.) Nearly every household has at least one member who works in the prison or has a close relative that does. A permanent settlement in the area dates from the late 1830s, only a few years before the prison was established. The drama of the past month was felt most acutely here in this village in the lee of the Clinton Correctional Facility and its towering walls.ĭannemora is a company town and has always been. Weir, a house painter, who comes from a family of corrections officers. “It kind of turned us upside down for a while,” said Mr. So, eventually, did most of the journalists, giving the region’s residents, as they entered the long Fourth of July weekend, a chance to regroup and reflect on an experience that had been at turns exciting and upsetting. In short order, command centers were dismantled and agents from an array of state and federal agencies packed up and left the area. The breakout set off a dramatic three-week manhunt that came to involve more than 1,300 law enforcement officers and stretched throughout this region where the mountains and foothills of Adirondack Park give way to rolling agricultural land that stretches beyond the Canadian border. On June 6, prison officials discovered that two inmates had escaped from the prison, tunneling under its wall, popping out of a manhole and disappearing into the night. “Back to our little small town,” he said.

He was tending a small garage sale on his front lawn, a block away from the Clinton Correctional Facility, which looms over this small village. “It’s nice to get back to normal,” Jamie Weir, 45, a lifelong resident here, said on Saturday. Out-of-town cyclists appeared from time to time, blurs of colorful spandex and purring freewheels, once again enjoying the hills unimpeded by police roadblocks and traffic. Children played in their front yards and rode bikes, their voices carrying to the next block.
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For the first time in weeks, Cook Street was free of television news trucks - the swarm of journalists had moved on.
