Lake George

Lake George is thirty-two miles long, held between mountains, and it was the invasion route between the Hudson and the St. Lawrence for a century and a half. Everything about its history follows from being a road made of water.

The French built Fort Carillon at the north end, the British took it and renamed it Ticonderoga, and the whole corridor was fought over through the French and Indian War and again in the Revolution. The Battle of Lake George in 1755, the massacre after the surrender of Fort William Henry in 1757, Ethan Allen taking Ticonderoga in 1775 \u2014 all of it happened along these shores.

Jefferson visited in 1791 and wrote that it was without comparison the most beautiful water he had ever seen, which is quoted on a great many things sold in the area to this day.

The tourist era began in earnest after the Civil War, and it was built on steamboats. Vessels like the Minne-Ha-Ha and the Horicon ran the length of the lake calling at hotel docks, and the hotels themselves were enormous \u2014 the Fort William Henry Hotel had a veranda hundreds of feet long and accommodated hundreds of guests who came for weeks rather than days.

Millionaires\u2019 Row on the western shore is the other subject. Between the 1880s and the First World War, industrial families built substantial summer houses along the lake, and the photographs of those places, their boathouses and their steam launches are a record of American wealth at its most confident.

The islands are unusual and worth knowing about. There are well over a hundred of them, most owned by the state and available for camping, which was true in the nineteenth century as it is now. Photographs of camping parties on small islands with canvas tents and a rowboat are common and they are the more democratic half of the lake\u2019s story.

For dating, the boats help. Steam launches and large excursion steamers run through to the 1920s. Motor launches and then outboards come in after, and the great hotels start burning down or being demolished from the 1900s onward.

The name is a colonial imposition and worth knowing. The Mohawk called it Andiatarocte. The French named it Lac du Saint-Sacrement. William Johnson renamed it for George II in 1755, partly to honor the king and partly, he said, to assert British possession of it — which is a rare instance of a man stating the political purpose of a place name outright.

The lake is unusually clear and that fact drives the photography. It supported an ice-harvesting industry into the twentieth century, and the underwater visibility means shipwrecks from the colonial wars are still on the bottom, including a fleet of bateaux deliberately sunk by the British in 1758 to keep them from the French.

The Sagamore on Green Island is the hotel that survived. Opened in 1883, burned twice, rebuilt twice, and still standing, which makes it a useful fixed point when dating photographs of the lake’s central basin.

The Memorial That Took Fifty-Seven Years