Chazy and the Miner Museum

Chazy is a farm town in Clinton County, near the top of Lake Champlain and about 63 road miles east of the cabins, a drive of about an hour and a quarter. Its main street holds the Alice T. Miner Museum, a stone house of colonial furniture and curiosities that has been open to visitors since 1924, and just west of the village lies the Miner Institute, the working dairy farm that grew out of William Miner's Heart's Delight Farm. Add the apple orchards, a quiet state park on the lake and the fossil reef that carries the town's name, and it makes a full, easy day out.

Chazy at a glance

The museum and the Institute's exhibit keep different days, so the best day for this trip is a weekday from May through October, when both are open. The museum alone stays open on Saturdays and runs into December.

The drive from the cabins

The quickest way is the northern one. Take County Route 25 north toward Malone, then River Road into the village, and pick up US 11 east. US 11 carries you about 46 miles through Chateaugay and across the farm country of northern Clinton County to Champlain, near the Quebec line. From there US 9 runs south about six miles to Chazy. The museum sits on Route 9, which is the village's main street, about 63 road miles from the cabins, and the drive takes about an hour and a quarter.

The Miner Institute is on Miner Farm Road, which leaves Route 9 in the village and runs west past the school to the farm. Chazy Orchards is half a mile from the museum on Route 9. Everything in town is within a few minutes of everything else, so park once at the museum or the Institute and drive short hops from there.

For a different road home, Point Au Roche State Park is about ten road miles south of the museum, and from the park NY 22, the Military Turnpike (NY 190) and US 11 bring you back to the cabins in about 63 road miles, about an hour and a half. The slower, scenic way by NY 374, past Chazy Lake and the Chateaugay Lakes, adds about 16 miles; the getting-to-the-cabins guide covers these roads and the winter driving guide has what to know from November on.

The town of Chazy

The town takes its name from two rivers, the Great Chazy and the Little Chazy. The story goes that in 1666 a young French officer named de Chazy, a nephew of the Viceroy of Canada, was killed by Mohawks while hunting on the western shore of Lake Champlain, and the Viceroy named the two rivers where the ambush happened in his memory.

The first permanent settler the town records is Jean Baptiste La Framboise, a soldier and farmer from Canada who arrived around 1763. In 1777 General John Burgoyne's army, about 7,000 soldiers with 1,500 horses and 700 carts, passed through on its way to Saratoga, built a log road along the shore and drove the settlers out. La Framboise came back in 1783 as a veteran of "Congress's Own," an American regiment, and the town counts its continuous settlement from that year. Chazy was incorporated as a town in 1804.

In 1808 Matthew Sax built a big wharf on the lake, Sax's Landing, and the landing grew busy enough to be known as "The City." The railroad came through in 1850, and the landing's trade faded. Today the town has three hamlets, Chazy, West Chazy and Sciota, about 4,200 people and a great deal of farmland. It is about six miles from the Canadian border, mostly agricultural, and produces eggs and maple syrup in commercial quantities as well as apples.

The town hall is across Route 9 from the museum, at 9631 State Route 9.

William and Alice Miner

William Henry Miner was born in Juneau, Wisconsin, in 1862. Orphaned as a boy, he came to Chazy in 1873 to live with his uncle John and aunt Huldah on the Miner family farm. At eighteen he went west to work for the Wabash Railroad in Lafayette, Indiana. In 1891 he patented a tandem spring draft gear, the coupling equipment that takes the shock between railroad cars, and within a decade it was on more than 10,000 cars and had made him a millionaire. He founded his own railroad equipment company in 1902; it still operates, in Geneva, Illinois.

Alice Emma Trainer was born on September 23, 1863, in Goderich, Ontario, the seventh child of Bernard and Louisa Trainer. Her mother died when Alice was six. She went to school in Goderich until about sixteen and in 1885 moved to Chicago with three of her sisters. She married William Miner in June 1895. Their only child, William Henry Miner Jr., was born on March 16, 1902, and died two weeks later.

In 1903 work began on the old Miner farmhouse in Chazy. Chicago stayed the couple's legal residence until 1915, and over the years they spent more and more of their time on the farm. The Chazy Central Rural School was established in 1916, and Physicians Hospital opened in Plattsburgh in 1926; Alice stayed active in supporting both. In late 1923 William signed the trust that became the William H. Miner Foundation. He died in 1930 of complications after a tonsillectomy. Alice stayed closely involved in the museum's day-to-day work until her death in 1950.

Heart's Delight Farm

Heart's Delight began in 1903 with a farmhouse and a couple of barns on 144 acres, the Miner family homestead. The old farmhouse was rebuilt as Heart's Delight Cottage, a house of more than 40 rooms. Over the next years William added a house for his aunt Huldah, a water tower, barns, a gristmill, an icehouse, a fish hatchery, a refrigeration plant and greenhouses.

By 1918 the farm covered 12,000 acres: 4,000 tillable, 2,000 in pasture and 6,000 in woods, with 450 acres of corn and 600 of small grains. At its peak it reached about 15,000 acres. It kept beef and dairy cattle, mules, draft and purebred horses, sheep, pigs, chickens, turkeys, pheasants and brook trout, and shipped ham, sausages, eggs and other produce to hotels and restaurants in New York City and Chicago.

More than 300 buildings went up, among them a dairy barn with its own creamery, a box factory and a string of hydroelectric dams. Miner built several impoundments to water the fields and power the farm; one of them, 81-acre Lake Alice, is named for his wife. About 800 people worked on the farm, living in the town or in boarding houses on the property. Harmony Hall, the guest house, had 20 bedrooms and an auditorium for 300 with a stage and a philharmonic organ.

Miner's 1923 trust called for a college whose courses would cover both practical and theoretical farming, and the William H. Miner Agricultural Research Institute was founded on the farm in 1951. Part of the land became state wildlife land in 1953 and 1970. The farm's story is told today in the Institute's heritage exhibit, described below.

The Alice T. Miner Museum

The museum stands on Route 9 in the middle of the village: a symmetrical stone house with a columned portico and a fanlight over the door. The stone at its core is older than the house it became. Around 1812 Ebenezer Ascher Scott built a one-story stone dwelling and store on the lot. In 1824 two upper floors went on, and the third floor, one big room with a vaulted ceiling, was the meeting hall of Harmony Lodge No. 1, Chazy's first Masonic lodge. The building later served briefly as the town post office in the early 1870s and then, from about 1880 until 1907, as the shop of James Philander Forbes, a cabinetmaker, casket maker and undertaker.

The Miners bought the old stone store in June 1916, with the lot to the south, and work on the new building began in 1923. The Chicago architect Frederick B. Townsend kept the old store at its heart and more than doubled its size with an addition to the east and north. The basement was blasted out of solid rock. The old stones were reset in cement, with more stone from the ruins of Dr. Solomon Fisk's house, a disused starch factory and a farm on Route 9, and the store's ceiling joists became the beams of the Colonial Kitchen.

Old doors came from other houses: the main entrance on the west side is from the Isaac Goodwin house in Worcester, Massachusetts, and the south door from a house in Beekmantown, both with sidelights of bullseye glass made in Redford, New York, between 1831 and 1851. Out of concern for fire, wood went into the trim and cabinets only. The floors are concrete, the walls are tile under plaster and the roof is copper. A mill in Peru made the woodwork, and a local mason, Aaron DeGregory, built the fireplaces, chimneys, front steps and fences.

Alice Miner's "Colonial Collection" opened to the public in 1924. Its first curator, Fanny Herridge Wheeler, served until 1936; the next curators, Charles and Josephine Rea, lived on site. The only major change to the building since then is a new copper roof in 2002. The house was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2010.

Inside the museum

The house has three floors and about a dozen rooms. The ground floor has a central hall with the formal dining room and the parlor on either side, and the kitchen and the weaving room at the back. Upstairs are the bedrooms, the library and the ballroom, which still has its original 1924 wall treatment. The rugs and the light fixtures are the ones Alice bought at Marshall Field's in Chicago; curators have rearranged some of the furniture over the years.

The collection centers on American objects of the 18th and early 19th centuries: furniture, textiles, ceramics and glass, books and manuscripts, baskets, samplers, silhouettes, dolls and china. Among the manuscripts are letters written by U.S. presidents. The Colonial Kitchen, with its open fireplace and oven, a baby's cradle, whale oil lamps and a 17th-century table, shows how family life once centered on the hearth. Alice also collected well beyond America, and the house holds Babylonian clay tablets, African baskets and Peruvian textiles among much else.

The museum's own subject is the Colonial Revival, the movement of the late 1800s and early 1900s that looked back to the colonial past for its furniture, houses and ideals. The house is a period piece of that movement: a museum built in the 1920s to look like an early American home. Every visit is guided, so come with questions about the pieces that catch your eye.

The 2026 exhibition, "A Century of Commemoration," runs May through December. It looks at how Americans have marked their history, from the Colonial Revival's celebration of the Founding Fathers to the way commemoration has changed over the country's 250 years.

Visiting the museum

• Season and hours. Open May through December, Tuesday to Saturday, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., so a late-fall trip works too. Check the museum's site or call (518) 846-7336 before you go, especially in the shoulder months and around holidays.
• Admission. Free. Donations are welcome.
• Tours. Every visit is a guided tour. You do not need an appointment; groups of ten or more are asked to call or email ahead.
• Parking. The lot is behind the museum. From Route 9 turn onto Miner Farm Road, then take the next right into the Chazy Central Rural School bus loop; the museum lot entrance is just ahead.
• Access. The museum is listed as wheelchair accessible. The house has three floors, so call ahead about the upper rooms if stairs are a concern.
• Pets. Not allowed inside; leave a dog at the cabin for this trip.

The museum also runs talks and walks through the year. In October 2026 its calendar lists a Riverview Cemetery tour on Saturday, October 17, a program on William Henry Miner's life on Wednesday, October 21, and a book club evening on Tuesday, October 27. In August it holds a walking tour of the Heart's Delight farm buildings at the Institute; in 2026 the tours ran on August 8 at 10 a.m. and 1 p.m.

The Miner Institute today

The William H. Miner Agricultural Research Institute is a private, not-for-profit farm and research center, and it calls itself the present-day continuation of the principles Miner practiced at Heart's Delight. Since 1951 its main work has been improving the economics of farming through research, education and demonstration, with research on how crops, animals and the environment fit together.

The dairy herd numbers about 650 Holsteins, about 350 of them milking, and the farm made 2.3 million gallons of milk in 2025. The barns also hold about 25 Morgan horses, and the Institute studies horse reproduction alongside cow comfort and behavior and the use of milk analysis to manage a herd. The buffalo herd older visitors remember has been gone since the late 1980s.

From 1956 to 1966 the Institute ran a one-year junior college, and since 1966 it has taught environmental science students together with SUNY Plattsburgh. In 2025 it reported 91 students, $1.7 million in research grants and 2,700 people at its events. Its newer Joseph C. Burke Education and Research Center is at 586 Ridge Road.

What visitors can see at the Institute

The grounds are open seven days a week, and a three-panel sign outside the Heritage Exhibit shows which areas are open to the public. Pets are not allowed anywhere on Institute property. The administrative offices keep weekday hours, 8 a.m. to 4 p.m., at 1034 Miner Farm Road, (518) 846-7121.

The Heart's Delight Farm Heritage Exhibit fills the farm's original storehouse. It covers William Miner's early life and the railroad inventions he patented, and its centerpiece is a large diorama of the farm around 1910, its buildings, animals and land, with a model of Heart's Delight Cottage and walls of photographs. A 12-minute video tells Miner's story, a back room holds changing exhibits, and a small theater shows a film on North Country farming and the Institute's place in it. The exhibit also explains the farm's hydroelectric power, its animal breeding and the drain tiles that made the fields workable.

The Coach House next door keeps the vehicles of the farm, from horse-drawn buggies and wagons to sleighs and carriages. The one people look for is the International school bus, one of thirteen given to the Chazy Central Rural School.

The Wayside Walk runs from the exhibit building through the flower gardens, with ten panels that tell the farm's story in short: the work of the farm, its office, its gardens, the Happy Hours Cottage and the stone entrance gates among them.

The exhibit and the walk are free and accessible, and they keep a May-through-October season. Weekday hours are listed as 9 a.m. to 3 p.m.; call the Institute before you plan a weekend visit. The Institute lists its horse and dairy barns with tours available all year; group tours go through the outreach office at extension 115, so ask when you call whether a small party can see the barns that day.

The Institute also opens its doors on set days. In 2026 the open house was Saturday, August 1, from noon to 4 p.m., and Dairy Day, free and open to the public, is Tuesday, December 1, from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. EquiDay, also free, is held each March, and the Heart's Delight Spring Premier horse show takes place at the Clinton County Fairgrounds over Memorial Day weekend.

Lake Alice Wildlife Management Area

Next to the Institute lies Lake Alice, the 81-acre lake William Miner built for irrigation and power and named for his wife. The state bought the land around it from the Miner Foundation, 648 acres in 1953 and 750 more in 1970, and today the Lake Alice Wildlife Management Area covers about 1,500 acres along Duprey Road in the Town of Chazy. It is open all year at no charge.

The land is managed for waterfowl and other wildlife, with marsh, grassland and forest. Nearly three miles of trails start from several parking areas, and a universally accessible nature trail leads to two viewing areas over the marsh and fields. A car-top boat launch puts small boats on the lake, and in winter the trails take snowshoes and cross-country skis. Deer hunters use the area each fall, so wear a bright color on a fall walk. It is a good place for an hour's walk after the museum; the wildlife guide has more on what to look for in the North Country.

The Chazy orchards

Chazy is apple country. Chazy Orchards, half a mile from the museum at 9486 Route 9, calls itself the largest McIntosh orchard in the world, and its farm market and bakery open each September, with a seasonal crew picking and pressing cider from early September into November in 2026. The apple-picking guide covers the orchard, its varieties, its hours and the other orchards within reach.

The Chazy reef

Chazy gave its name to a rock. Geologists call the limestone of the northern Champlain Valley the Chazy, a name first used in 1842 for the exposures at Chazy, and inside it lies the Chazy reef, the oldest known reef built by a community of different organisms. It formed in the Ordovician period, roughly 450 to 480 million years ago, when this ground lay under a shallow tropical sea near the equator.

The reef was built in layers. Bryozoans, small filter-feeding animals, laid its foundation. Stromatoporoids, extinct relatives of the sponges, came next, and later layers add algae, sponges and the oldest known reef-building corals. Trilobites, cephalopods (early relatives of the squid and the nautilus) and large coiled snails lived among them. The wider Chazy formation stretches from Quebec to Tennessee.

In New York the reef shows along the rocky shores of northern Lake Champlain, including Valcour Island and Garden Island. Valcour is state land you reach by boat; the Valcour Island guide covers the crossing and the trails. There is no fossil preserve or reef exhibit open to visitors in Chazy itself. The place to walk on the reef and see its fossils up close is Isle La Motte, Vermont, an island at the top of the lake, where the reef forms the bedrock of the southern third of the island. In 2009 the Chazy Fossil Reef was named a National Natural Landmark.

Seeing the reef on Isle La Motte

Isle La Motte is about 29 road miles from the museum, a drive of about 50 minutes. Take US 9 north to Champlain and US 11 to Rouses Point, cross the Rouses Point Bridge on US 2 into Alburgh, Vermont, and follow US 2 through Alburgh to VT 129, which crosses onto the island. The bridge crosses a state line only, so there is no customs stop and no passport needed.

Goodsell Ridge Fossil Preserve, at 239 Quarry Road (for a GPS, 69 Pine Street brings you to the parking area), covers 85 acres and is open dawn to dusk all year, free. The Walk Through Time trail, almost a mile long, tells the story of life on Earth on a series of panels, and in 2026 it was back on display after six years away. Seven Discovery Areas with signs show the reef fossils in the rock, and the seventh holds a big glacial boulder dropped 13,000 to 20,000 years ago. The visitor center, in a renovated dairy barn, opens from late spring to early fall when volunteers are on hand, mostly on weekends; the Preservation Trust's number is (802) 404-2298 if you want to check.

Fisk Quarry Preserve, at 4088 West Shore Road, is 20 acres with a very short interpretive trail and a gravel parking lot. Spiral shells of ancient snails show in the quarry floor, and stromatoporoids appear as white shapes in the walls. Fisk is the oldest quarry in Vermont: the French first cut stone there in 1666 to burn for lime mortar for Fort St. Anne, and it was abandoned around 1919. It is also open dawn to dusk all year.

Both preserves belong to the Isle La Motte Preservation Trust, run with volunteers. Look, photograph and leave the rock as you found it. From Fisk Quarry back to the cabins is about 80 road miles, about an hour and three-quarters, by Rouses Point and US 11.

Point Au Roche State Park

Point Au Roche State Park is about ten road miles south of the museum, a drive of about 20 minutes down US 9 and Point Au Roche Road, at 19 Camp Red Cloud Road on the lake's western shore. It is open all year from sunrise to sunset, with nature, hiking and biking trails, bridle trails, a boat launch with an accessible kayak launch, picnic pavilions and an accessible playground.

The nature center is open all year, Thursday to Monday, 9 a.m. to 3 p.m., and closed Tuesday, Wednesday, Thanksgiving and Christmas; its programs run year-round, with family programs on summer weekends. In October 2026 its calendar includes the eighth annual Creepy Creatures Haunted House on October 17. In winter the trails take cross-country skis and snowshoes, and the park gives access for ice fishing.

The park also has a sandy beach with a summer swim season and a vehicle fee in the peak months. The swimming guide and the Plattsburgh guide have the beach, the season and the fees.

Food stops

Chazy is a small village, so plan lunch around the season and the day.

• Chazy Orchards farm market and bakery, 9486 Route 9. From mid-September into the late fall: pies, cider doughnuts, cider and apples, half a mile from the museum. The market posts hours of 6:30 a.m. to 5 p.m., Tuesday to Sunday, so it is open every day the museum is; check the orchard's site before you go.
• Clare and Carl's, 4727 Route 9, on the way south toward Point Au Roche and Plattsburgh. A roadside michigan stand with carhop service, family owned since the 1940s and counted among the oldest in the North Country; it took part in the Town of Plattsburgh's Michigan Month in July 2026. Its hours are not posted online, so call or check before you plan lunch around it. A michigan is a hot dog in a split-top bun under a seasoned meat sauce, with mustard and onions on top or buried under the sauce.
• Plattsburgh, about 16 road miles south of Chazy, has the full run of restaurants and grocery stores; the Plattsburgh guide lists them.

Outside the summer and apple seasons, a picnic packed at the cabin and a stop in Plattsburgh is the reliable plan. The cabins' full kitchens make that easy; the groceries page has the Malone stores on your way out.

Dogs and children

This is a trip to leave the dog at the cabin. The museum does not allow pets inside, and the Miner Institute does not allow them anywhere on its property. Point Au Roche takes up to two pets in its day-use areas on a leash no longer than six feet, and keeps them off the guarded beach, the playground and the buildings. The dog guide has the cabins' pet rules.

For families with children 10 and up, the farm is the draw: the diorama, the Coach House school bus and the barns, then fossil spotting on Isle La Motte, where Goodsell Ridge's Discovery Areas point out what to look for in the rock. The museum's guided tour moves through a house full of fragile things, which suits older children and teenagers best. The family cabins page covers the house rules for families at the cabins.

A day in Chazy from the cabins

This plan suits a Thursday or Friday from May through October, when the museum, the Institute's exhibit and the Point Au Roche nature center are all open.

The fossil variation. Swap Point Au Roche for Isle La Motte: leave the museum by 2:15 p.m., walk the Walk Through Time at Goodsell Ridge and the quarry floor at Fisk, and drive home by Rouses Point and US 11, about 80 road miles. You will be back around dinnertime in summer; in October the days are shorter, so start home from the island by mid-afternoon.

The Saturday version. The museum is open on Saturdays and the Institute's grounds are open all week, so a Saturday works with the museum, the Wayside Walk and Lake Alice, and the orchard market in the fall.

Pairing it. Chazy is on the same side of the map as Plattsburgh and the Champlain crossing into Quebec, and the fall foliage guide has the color on the way. For more museums within reach, see museums near the cabins and Malone's House of History.

Questions

Sources

Facts on this page were checked against these sources in October 2026. Hours, fees and schedules change; confirm before you go.

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