USA > New York > Warren County > Warren county : a history and guide > Part 15
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4. On the SITE OF FORT WILLIAM HENRY, at 2 Canada Street, is the Fort William Henry Hotel, a three-story, red-roofed, stucco building overlooking the lake. The walls and ramparts of the old fort can still be traced across the spacious grounds of the hotel. General William Johnson who built the fort in the summer of 1755 named it for the two grandsons of George II. He defended it successfully against a French attack on September 7th. The French also failed to dislodge its defenders with a force that swept up the lake over the ice in March 1757. That summer Montcalm's capture of the fort after stiff resistance was followed by a massacre of disarmed prisoners when the French general was unable to control his provincial troops and Indian allies.
5. PROSPECT MOUNTAIN (2,021 alt.), topped by a fire warden's steel observation tower, the starting point of three of Lake George's six ski runs, is reached by a marked hiking trail that begins at the west end of Montcalm Street. On a clear day the spires of Albany, more than 50
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miles distant, may be seen. Two lean-to shelters at the summit are avail- able for picnics or overnight camping. A dirt road, open in winter, leaves US 9 (L) just north of the village, and reaches the summit by a circuitous route.
From the tower, PROSPECT-COBBLE SKI TRAIL descends east, length two miles, vertical descent 1,800 feet; SKY WAY descends south, 3 miles, 1,400 feet; PROSPECT descends north, two and one-half miles, 1,300 feet. Two more ski trails go west on Mohican Street to the Will Wood Farm clearing, start of the WILL WOOD SKI TRAIL, one and one-half miles, 1,000 feet (intermediate). Half a mile above is the start of the INDIAN SKI TRAIL, 2 miles, 1,250 feet. Here, besides skiing, there is fast bob-sledding and a 2,400-foot ski tow makes access to the head of the trails easy. The STILL POND TRAIL runs three and one- half miles cross-country from the Luzerne Road to Lake George Village.
The Lake Towns
QUEENSBURY, CALDWELL, BOLTON, HAGUE, HORICON, CHESTER
Warren County is divided into eleven towns with one city and one in- corporated village. These two corporations, Glens Falls and Lake George, have already been described. The towns may be grouped geographically in that some of them have certain features and interests in common. The six towns that border Lake George and Schroon Lake, have highly developed summer resort areas, while the other five towns, all of which have the Hudson River for a boundary, occupy the more rugged region in the western part of the County and feature dude ranches, farm tourist homes, camps, and hunting and fishing. In both districts there are elab- orate winter sports programs.
Into the lake group fall six towns of which four, Queensbury, Cald- well, Bolton, and Hague, take in most of Lake George and its islands. They extend from Washington County and the Hudson River where it forms the Saratoga County boundary on the southwest, to Ticonderoga in Essex County on the northwest. Between Hague and the upper Hudson River along the Warren-Essex County line are Horicon and Chester with nearly half of Schroon Lake and the Schroon River separating them. Horicon has Brant Lake, Chester has Loon and Friends Lakes, and both have numerous smaller mountain ponds and lakes.
Of the five mountain towns bordering the Hudson River, Luzerne, wrapped in the bend of the Hudson as it swings east to Glens Falls, juts far south to cut a deep notch in Saratoga County. Warrensburg which also lies on the east bank, just above it, is cut in half by the Schroon River as it turns west to unite with the Hudson. Directly across the Hudson lie Stony Creek and Thurman with Johnsburg adjoining upstream. These three towns occupy the mountainous region west of the Hudson between Saratoga and Essex Counties.
Although many small farms make checkerboards of the valleys as seen from the surrounding heights, agriculture has declined and few of the present generation now depend for a living wholly on the lands that supported their fathers and grandfathers. Today the chief source of income in most of the County is provided by tourist trade.
The growth and development of each town is a story almost uniform in its pattern. Soon after the American Revolution had disposed of the terrors of hostile incursions by soldiers, Tory or Patriot bands, and Indian war parties, and had cleared the controversial land titles, enterprising pioneers pushed their way into the virgin forests to hew out homes for
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themselves. Queensbury and Caldwell, as has been noted, did have settlers a little earlier, but the scourge of war during the American Revolution killed or drove away the first hardy frontiersmen, though many returned.
From the ranks of the pioneers rose such leaders as Abraham Wing in Queensbury, James Caldwell of Lake George, and John Thurman, devel- oper of the northern and western parts of the county. It was they who built the earliest gristmills; their initiative launched the vast lumber trade, and led the way in developing tanneries, potash factories, and distilleries, and providing taverns. Cut over twice or thrice, the forest gradually disappeared, but meanwhile communities boomed with easily acquired wealth, and farmers moved into the clearings to begin the short-lived agricultural era.
In 1885 the State stepped in with conservation laws to stop wanton timber cutting. The forests, however, had made their contribution to the colonizing of the frontier. Wealth flowing from forest products had built towns and villages, highways and bridges, and railroads, and with the influx of tourists, better hotels and accommodations had been provided. Thousands of summer visitors were even then furnishing the towns with an industry to replace lumbering. It remained only for the automobile, modern highways, facilities for entertaining and accommodating visitors, and the introduction of winter sports to complete the present-day eco- nomic picture.
QUEENSBURY, most southerly of the lake towns, extends from the summer resort bays and points east of Lake George Village to the Hudson River at Glens Falls. The region of the city and its suburbs is a sand plain, reforested in part with pines by County and city, beyond which the terrain becomes gently rolling farmland, changing to mountain heights in the north and west.
First to be settled, Queensbury, with its 4,199 inhabitants, has almost double the population of any other town in the county, but about half of these are suburbanites who work in Glens Falls and other nearby indus- trial centers. The rest are farmers, and folk who depend for their living on the summer resorts of Cleverdale, Assembly Point, Kattskill Bay, Glen Lake, Round Pond, and Lake Sunnyside.
North and south through the center of Queensbury runs route US 9, the most important highway in the Adirondacks. Its evolution from a wilderness path to a busy avenue of approach to a great resort area typifies the growth and development of the town. In less than two centuries the route, at first a military road hastily cut through virgin forest, became, in time, a turnpike, a plank road, and finally a modern concrete highway. During those years the town progressed from a primitive lumbering and agricultural region to a highly organized urban industrial and recreation
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area. But agriculture is still important, for Queensbury has prosperous dairy farms and truck gardens.
It was in 1755, the first year of the French and Indian War, that Major General William Johnson, His Majesty's Commissioner of Indian Affairs in command of an army of several thousand Colonial troops, hewed in three days the military road from Fort Edward to the head of Lake George. Tree stumps protruded, gullies crossed it, and bridges were merely rough logs laid side by side. Every heavy rainfall washed it out, a few seasons of neglect and it disappeared. But for four years it was traversed by marching troops and wagon trains, and was the scene of Indian attacks and massacres; for it was the most vulnerable stretch along the "Pathway of Empire" between Albany and Montreal.
The war over, Abraham Wing came to Queensbury with his pioneer settlers, hardy families in homespun, toiling along with heavily laden oxcarts, the women and children riding, the men and older boys walking ahead, and perhaps driving a cow, a horse, or a few sheep. Soon little clearings along the military trail became the sites of homes and farms wrested from the forest with almost incredible toil. Tiny communities took form at the southern and northern extremities of the road, present- day Glens Falls and Lake George Village.
They were not lasting settlements. By 1776 the military road was once again a scene of carnage, with ruined crops and burned homes telling their story of another war, the American Revolution. Sadly those pioneers who escaped with their lives fled to places of safety, some to their old homes in southern New York, or New England, their dreams of life on a new fron- tier gone up in smoke.
The Revolution won, homeseekers, some of them the former settlers, began to travel the military road into the town in ever increasing num- bers. On March 7, 1788, Queensbury was erected as one of the original towns of the State by an act of the legislature. It then embraced more territory than the present Warren County. Luzerne and the original town of Thurman were set off from the town in 1792 and a part of Caldwell in 1810. In 1802 a one-mile strip was taken from Luzerne and reannexed to Queensbury.
A little later, stage coaches were rumbling over the old Military Road as the town took on an industrial aspect with tanneries, potash plants, and more and more sawmills. By the middle 1830's a newly built branch of the Champlain Canal was winning commercial supremacy for Glens Falls. Lumber was no longer hauled down the turnpike but logs were floated down the Hudson to make Glens Falls the sawing and shipping center, while the rest of the town gradually turned away from lumbering to develop farms, resorts, and suburbs for the rapidly growing city.
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So complete has been this change that hardly a trace remains of the old days. A war monument, the ruins of an old fort, markers on the sites of bloody engagements, recall early military history, but there are few visible links to connect the present with the past social and industrial life. Through the years the one constant thing has been change. Each era has merged rapidly into the next and the returning forest tends to obliterate all trace of earlier generations. So swiftly has Queensbury become mod- ern that it is easy to forget its historic past.
CALDWELL, north of Queensbury, is a long narrow rectangle that extends around the head of Lake George, north along its west shore to Bolton and westward to the Schroon River, near Warrensburg. Its whole area is mountainous with only narrow strips of level land along the lake- shore and in the deep valleys that extend northwest across the mountains from Lake George to Warrensburg, southwest between lofty ranges to Lake Luzerne, and south along the old Military Road to the plains of Queensbury. On these upland terraces and in hollows along the mountain streams live most of the town's 1,467 inhabitants.
The highest elevations, Prospect Mountain (2,021 alt.) and Rattle- snake Cobble (1,213 alt.), rise from the western edge of Lake George Village and provide the slopes for the village's ski trail system. Indeed the general ruggedness of the town and the beauty of its woods and waters have dictated its main industry, providing for summer and winter tourists and visitors. A little farming still survives on the back roads among the hills, but, important as it is for a few hardy, independent souls, it is a small item in the economic life of the community.
On the soil of Caldwell, history was made during the French and Indian War and the Revolution. The first settlement, begun in the clear- ings around Fort William Henry and Fort George about 1766, was wiped out during the Revolution and rebuilt only after the fall of Yorktown had given assurance that the British Colonies were to become an inde- pendent American nation.
The war had placed a grievous burden of taxation upon the colonists who had also sent a large proportion of their men of military age to join the armed forces. But nowhere else was there such suffering as on the frontier. Even before Burgoyne's army with its fringe of marauding Indians approached in 1777, the Patriot army had adopted "scorched earth" tactics. Thus they had confiscated or destroyed everything that might possibly be of use to the British along the path of their advance.
However, at least some of the pioneers at Caldwell and along the Mili- tary Road that led through Wing's Corners (now Glens Falls) to Fort Edward held on until 1780. That was known as "the year of the burn- ing" when Major Carleton and his band of Tories and Indians left behind
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them not a single living settler nor anything that they could burn, destroy, or carry away. Those who escaped with their lives were fortu- nate; yet within a few years some of them returned to their ruined homes in the abandoned clearings.
Pioneers again began to push their way into these undeveloped lands at the head of Lake George when, in 1787, James Caldwell, an Albany merchant with a grant of broad acres, led a band of settlers there. Among the settlers were Jehoiachim Staats, Daniel Shaw and Eli Pettis, who, with others, under Caldwell's leadership, established lumbering, tanning, and farming as early industries.
By 1810 Caldwell's patent had acquired sufficient people and property for its inhabitants to seek incorporation as a town. This was accomplished the same year by taking portions of land from Queensbury, Bolton, and Thurman, and naming the new town for its most important citizen.
At an early date the little community of Caldwell, now Lake George Village, began to assume commercial importance because of the shipping facilities for logs afforded by its location at the head of the lake. Huge rafts were floated from this lake port to Ticonderoga at the other end of Lake George, thirty-two miles away. These were made in square sections by fastening the logs in layers at right angles to each other, often fifteen logs deep, so that the top was lifted above the surface of the water by the buoyancy of the logs below. Many sections were bound into a single raft, and the crews rigged sails to help propel the unwieldy mass which had to be steered through deep channels as they threaded their way among the islands of The Narrows.
At Ticonderoga the sawmills along the short outlet between Lake George and Lake Champlain, where there was ample water power, con- verted the logs into lumber for shipment by barge down Lake Champlain and the Richelieu to Canadian ports on the St. Lawrence. In 1832, how- ever, the Feeder Branch of the Champlain-Hudson canal was opened to Glens Falls, and thereafter the shipping business began to go to that rapidly growing village. Another blow came about 1860 when logging and sawmill operation practically ceased with the clearing of the adjacent forests.
Rather slowly but surely, the town, which from earliest times had welcomed summer "strangers," began to realize that these vistors offered the one remaining opportunity to recoup its losses in revenue from logs and shipping. Plank roads had improved transportation, and gaudier stagecoaches with six to eight lively steeds trundled hundreds of summer visitors in the 1870's from a new railroad station at Fort Edward to the sedate and very fashionable hotels. Their numbers increased as the rail- road, in 1882, extended tracks to Caldwell.
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Shortly after 1900 came macadam roads. Toll gates and stagecoaches began to disappear, and with them the old taverns where passengers ate good food or relieved dusty throats with a cup of good cheer. A new crop of summer visitors, all decked out in dusters, veils, caps, and goggles, began to appear in the latest transportation device, the automobile. With these newcomers the resort development entered its present phase.
In the past twenty years the tempo of life has rapidly accelerated. Thousands of people travel to and through Caldwell each year. Filling stations and modern roadhouses have arrived in place of the toll gates and stagecoach taverns. Summer camps, tourist homes, cabin colonies, and dude ranches have gone far toward replacing the more sedentary life of the hotels. At the same time the attractiveness of spring and autumn motor trips, and the arrival of winter sports has tended to give Caldwell a year-round resort season.
The six ski trails in Caldwell are listed among the Lake George points of interest. Two miles north of the village on State 9N is the Wikiosco Barn Theater where the Colony Opera Guild presents light operas during the summer.
BOLTON, north of Caldwell and south of Hague, is the center of the three towns that border on the scenic west short of Lake George. Except for a narrow intervale along the lakeshore the town is mountainous, timbered, and wild, a natural vacationland. The only sizable village is Bolton Landing on State 9N, close to the shore of the lake.
Adjacent to Bolton Landing is the region of fine estates known as "Millionaires Row." Nearly 800 feet above the community of Bolton nestles Trout Lake on Cat Mountain (1,954 alt.), a resort of summer camps. On the northeastern edge of the town Tongue Mountain projects far into Lake George to enclose Northwest Bay and form The Narrows. Roads from Bolton Landing lead over the mountains to the Schroon River which divides Bolton from Warrensburg.
Aside from travelers passing in canoes on Lake George, the first white visitors to the town were detachments of French and English soldiers who marched through the region with their native allies during the French and Indian War. It was 1790, and the Revolution was over, before the scarcity of land in Massachusetts sent New Englanders seeking new opportunities on this primitive frontier. They found the hills of Bolton covered deep with a magnificent pine forest, and, braving the danger of wolves, bears, panthers, and rattlesnakes, they brought a new civilization to a country where the only traces of earlier human habitation were- Indian trails, a few Mohican utensils and weapons, and the encampments of transient hunters and warriors.
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But the energetic pioneers soon did away with the beasts and reptiles by felling the forest giants whose trunks became log rafts to feed the hungry sawmills. By 1799 Bolton was of sufficient importance to be recognized as a separate community, and on March 25 the town was carved from the older town of Thurman. A section of the new town of Bolton was lopped off in 1807 to form the town of Hague, and in 1810 and 1838 slices of Bolton became parts of Caldwell and Horicon.
As early as 1800 Bolton was hospitable to visitors. A history of the town says that while "there was not any regular tavern . . . at every house the doors were open to guests, and liquor was dispensed with intoxicating liberality." A little later Roger Edgecomb, who had a frame house (rare in those days of log cabins) and sold liquor, enlarged the building to make the first tavern.
But, despite this forecast of Bolton's future importance as a summer resort, lumbering continued to be the principal industry until the War between the States. About 1820 John J. Harris operated three sawmills, Samuel Brown two, and John Moss, first judge of Washington County, one. Samuel Brown also established a potash factory and David Lock- wood had what was probably the first tannery in the town. In those days the tanning process required great quantities of hemlock bark. A second potash mill was opened by Reuben Smith in 1815 and a third by Thomas Wright, an enterprising settler who already owned a store, oper- ated a carding machine, and, in 1830, built the only forge in Bolton.
All these industries disappeared, chiefly because the mountains, stripped of their forests, no longer supplied raw materials. Summer boarders were the basis of the one business that grew steadily. The Mohican House, long since gone, became famous as the first hotel in Bolton and one of the earliest on Lake George. Contemporaries were the Wells House, 1865, the Bolton House, 1870, and the Locust Grove House, Lake View House, and Vandenburg House of later years. The first Sagamore Hotel on Green Island was opened in 1883. More than once rebuilt, it is still a well known hostelry.
Thus began Bolton's present all year resort business. Today most of its lakeshore not pre-empted by estates of the wealthy is occupied by hotels, summer camps, cabin colonies, and State campsites. There is fertile farm- land high up on the mountain sides and along the Schroon River but only a small part of it is worked. Most of Bolton's 1,310 permanent inhabi- tants live along the shores of Lake George and nearly all of them depend for their livelihood upon attracting visitors whom they serve not only during the summer but increasingly at other seasons.
In the auditorium of the Bolton Central School at Bolton Landing, the Bolton Landing Players present modern dramas during the summer.
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HAGUE extends from the north boundary of Bolton along the west shore of Lake George to the Ticonderoga town line and westward to Horicon. Its only lowlands are along the lakeshore, while all the rest is a mass of independent rounded peaks rising as high as 2,300 feet, and scattered with scant reference to the general trend of mountain ridges elsewhere in the county.
Between the peaks are narrow valleys, watered by swift streams that once supplied motive power for gristmills and sawmills. Today the farms that occupy these uplands present an unusual picture from State 8, which crosses the town from east to west. Bravely they cling to the hillsides, dip into little ravines and valley bottoms shut in by towering heights, or top a rounded summit to spread a small patchwork of meadow, pasture, field and garden on the fringe of the forest.
Along State 9N, close to the shore of Lake George, are the main resort centers, Hague, Silver Bay, and Sabbath Day Point, with their summer hotels, tourist homes, camps and cottages, and most of the town's per- manent inhabitants. In the mountains of the northwest is Graphite, once a graphite mining center, but now almost a ghost town. On the north- eastern boundary, Rogers Slide rises out of the waters of the lake. This spot attracts many visitors because of the legendary escape from the Indians of the famed scout, Major Robert Rogers, by sliding down the steep cliff.
The village of Hague, one of the first settlements in the town, grad- ually became the chief summer resort and shopping center as the early industries declined. The old Trout House and the Hillside House, well known to summer visitors of an earlier day, were burned within the past twenty years, but on the site of the latter stands the New Trout House. The Island Harbor House, once a favorite resort for army and navy offi- cers, has had among its famous guests the late General George Goethals, builder of the Panama Canal.
Silver Bay, a summer colony, is noted for the educational and religious conferences of the Silver Bay Association, a program sponsored by the Y.M.C.A. and Y.W.C.A. The hotel and cottages look out upon an im- pressive panorama of mountains, islands, and waters.
At Sabbath Day Point, a low headland and the site of a hotel and cottages, the Tongue Mountain Parkway leaves the lakeshore to carry State 9N to an altitude of 1,109 feet over Tongue Mountain, an engin- eering achievement which has given access to this part of the lake by providing a main highway that is always in good repair and cleared of winter snows.
Hague was formed from Bolton February 28, 1807 and was first known as Rochester. The reason for changing the name to Hague on April 6,
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1808, and indeed for choosing either of these names, is not apparent, because the early town records have been lost. Settlers began to arrive just before the beginning of the nineteenth century. Small sawmills and gristmills were established and lumbering, under the able direction of lumber barons Samuel Ackerman and Stephen Hoyt, soon became the most important economic factor. Even the farmers became woodchoppers in winter and, in 1860, great rafts of logs were floated to Ticonderoga. The forests were rapidly cleared so that by 1880 the lumber industry was waning and instead of saw logs, poplar was being cut for the pulp mills at Ticonderoga and Mechanicville. As the early industries vanished, small- scale farming and summer resorts along the shore of Lake George became the chief means of livelihood. In 1940 there were 739 inhabitants in the town.
HORICON, which lies along the Essex County border between Hague and the Schroon River, adopted the name used for Lake George a century ago by James Fenimore Cooper in his Leatherstocking Tales, a series of romances of which The Last of the Mohicans is still the most popular. A five mile stretch of Schroon Lake juts into the northwest corner of Horicon. The five-mile expanse of Brant Lake at an altitude of over 800 feet lies among lofty peaks and ridges in the center of the town, and there are more than a dozen lesser lakes and ponds higher up among the mountains.
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