Sunday, Sept. 2, 1917
Some of Saratoga Springs’ leading citizens, as well as leading lawyers from across the country, travel to Lake George today to honor the memory of Edward M. Shepard.
Shepard, who died in 1911, was a New York City lawyer “whom Saratogians are proud to recall as a member of the Reservation Commission which restored with so much success the famous mineral springs of Saratoga.”
Today’s ceremony dedicates an open air forum in the Edward M. Shepard Memorial Park. Many of Shepard’s peers in the legal profession are in Saratoga Springs this weekend for the national convention of the American Bar Association, which begins on Tuesday, September 4.
“The Forum, or ampitheatre, stands in the north end of the park, and has for its background the famous lake to which lovers of nature are attracted from all parts of the country,” The Saratogian reports.
Shepard’s nephew, the architect Edward Shepard Hewitt, designed the forum. “The stage is surmounted by two sets of handsome Grecian columns with a large ornamental urn in the center of each set. On the northern set is inscribed: ‘Given by the People of Lake George,’ and on the southern one: ‘In Memory of Edward M. Shepard.’”
The event is “held just at the close of one of Lake George’s most wonderful days,” a reporter writes, “and the picture presented to the audience looking around the Forum upon the quiet of the blue water, enriched by the setting sun, was one long to be remembered.”
Saratoga Springs is represented among today’s speakers by George Foster Peabody, another member of the old Reservation Commission and a friend of Shepard’s dating back to their involvement in Brooklyn politics in the 1890s.
Peabody reads a poem composed for the occasion by Katrina Trask, the reclusive mistress of Yaddo. “On the historic shores of Horicon,” she writes, “An open Forum stands amid the trees;/It stands encircled by the winds of Heaven,/Roofed by the sky and carpeted with flowers;/ The lofty mountains are its sentinels.”
Of Shepard, Trask writes: “He was a Scholar who had studied life,/And daily learned new wisdom from on high;/Who ever held, in this confusing day/Of random rush, an academic calm --/Yet still with progress kept his virile pace….
“He was a Friend – He knew great friendship’s heart!/No man, no woman unto whom He gave/The shining crown of friendship, can forget --/His chivalry, his courtesy, His care,/His lavish generosity which showed/All honor, all preferment to the friend,/And only asked to be allowed to serve.
“That friendship is a loving Memory,/Too deep for tears, too eloquent for words.”