Almanack Contributor Larry Miller

Formerly the president of a mortgage bank, Larry Miller changed careers to become an historian for the National WWII Museum in New Orleans. His interest in the Adirondacks began in the mid-70s while staying at Raquette Lake. Larry is working on a narrative nonfiction history which tells the story of Raquette Lake/Long Lake through the lives of a handfull of its earliest settlers.


Wednesday, June 27, 2018

At Eagle’s Nest: Ned Buntline In The Adirondacks

ned buntline

Stocky red-bearded Ned Buntline, the unruly dime novelist, and Buffalo Bill’s promoter was born Edward Zane Carroll Judson in 1823. He left home at thirteen and took to the high seas, and at fifteen he had already worked as a cabin boy on a freighter bound for the Caribbean, become a midshipman, and published his first story. He chose the pen name Buntline as a reminder of his sailing days (a buntline was a rope at the bottom of a square sail).

When his maritime career ended, he spent the next two years, by his own embellished accounts, killing buffaloes and grizzlies and roaming the western plains for the Northwest Fur Company. In 1844 while writing for a New York “flash” newspaper, the Knickerbocker, he started his own magazine, Ned Buntline’s Own. It was mixture of adventure stories and scandalous gossip in the flash press style. » Continue Reading.


Sunday, June 24, 2018

Blue Mountain Lake: Chauncey Hathorn and Bennett Brothers

arctic houseOn a cool autumn evening in 1874, 19-year-old Edward Bennett stood in line holding his two-dollar ticket and waited to board the night boat to Albany. If all went as scheduled, he would arrive by morning just in time to catch the train to Saratoga. There the newly opened Adirondack railroad would take him to the last stop on the line, North Creek, one of the gateways to the Adirondacks. Those who would come to know him as a robust mature adult would not have recognized this skinny, pale Irish farmhand.

And anyone inquiring as to his destination must have smiled when he told them that he was headed for a remote lake in Hamilton County, one of the least populated sections of the woods. The entire county had less than 3,000 souls living on 1,721 square miles, that’s well over a million acres of forest land. The winters were as brutal as they were long; four months, and temperatures as low as -40. » Continue Reading.


Thursday, May 4, 2017

A Short History of Wilbur’s Raquette Lake Hotel

The Forked Lake House built near the carry between Forked Lake and Raquette in about 1873.This is the story of how an unambitious, unsociable man who could barely support himself, much less his family, and had no experience whatsoever in running a hotel, came to build and run the first hotel on Raquette Lake. That such a person who, according to one of his relatives, “was neither suited to the country, nor the people” and “made enemies through the country” could be capable of this feat seems to defy all we know about other proprietors of pioneer hotels.

Wilber, the man who built the hotel, came into the Adirondacks from the West around 1855, a time when all the inhabitants of Raquette Lake could fit into a present-day family’s SUV. He named his establishment the Raquette Lake Hotel, but contemporaries called it Wilbur’s or Wilber’s. But very little was known about this pioneer hotel owner, why he came here, why he built the place. Even his proper name remained something of a mystery. » Continue Reading.


Tuesday, April 8, 2014

Lucy Carnegie’s Great Camp On Raquette Lake

Lucy CarnegieMy family began vacationing at Raquette Lake sometime in the mid-1970s, attracted by what is arguably the most beautiful lake in the Adirondacks. As the family grew, I began to look for a larger home and contacted a realtor who sent me a write up on North Point, considered one of the Great Camps and the former summer home of Lucy Carnegie.

I had seen the home while boating and, my curiosity piqued, looked it up in Harvey Kaiser’s book Great Camps of the Adirondacks (2003). I was interested to see who had designed this Swiss chalet style home, so unusual in design compared to the other camps in the area. Kaiser stated that, “The building plans and execution of interior details suggest influences beyond the techniques of local craftsmen, although no record of the architect exists.” » Continue Reading.



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