Among the celebrities who have spent summers on Lake George, we can include Amelia Earhart, who visited the lake long before she became the most famous female aviator in the country.

For six months in 1919, she, her mother and sister rented a cottage in Huletts Landing. Earhart, then aged 22, took an automobile repair course in Massachusetts in the spring and then rejoined her family for the summer, intending to enter a pre-med program at Columbia University in the fall.

The Earharts rented a cottage known as “Whileaway,” owned by the Pedersen family. The pictures reproduced here are from the Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University.

By the end of 1920, Earhart had dropped out of Columbia, returned to California and taken her first ride in an airplane. She disappeared during her attempt to circumnavigate the globe in 1937 and was declared dead in 1939. Her Lake George cottage, by the way, still stands and is being offered for sale through AdirondackByOwner.

A version of this story first appeared in the Lake George Mirror.