—Part TWO —
Before the railroads, to reach Seventh Lake and points beyond, the hunters, trappers, sportsmen and their guides used the Chain’s lakes and, when necessary, the portages between the lakes as their highways during most of the 19th century.
Today, participants in the annual Adirondack Canoe Classic use this route.
Then, with the increase in travelers, women as well as men, hotels and hunting camps were built.
Along the Fulton Chain, these started with Arnolds in 1837, then the Forge House in 1871 and by 1874 Fourth Lake had Buell Camp (later Perrie’s Third Lake House and Barrett’s Bald Mountain House), Snyder’s Camp, Lewis H. Lawrence’s Camp and Jack Sheppard’s Camp.2
Others such as Alonzo Wood’s and Fred Hess’s soon followed in the early1880’s.
One of the first encroachments by the State on the upper chain lakes was its appropriating 1.8 acres from Munn’s lands to build a dam at the outlet of Sixth Lake, raising the levels of Sixth, Seventh and Eighth Lakes.3
Travelers would comment on the flooding’s desolation for the next twenty years.4
Soon after the dam’s construction, the popular sportsman Nessmuk wrote: “The shoreline of trees stood dead and dying, while the smell of decaying vegetable matter was sickening.”5
As the building of John Brown’s dam in 1799 changed the nature of the first four lakes from river (Middle Branch Moose River) to a chain of lakes, this dam raised the level of Sixth through Eighth Lakes, extending that chain, now the Fulton Chain.
The author, A. Judd Northrup, stopped at Seventh Lake while touring with his son in 1877.
He found “two or three deserted bark camps…They were dirty and forlorn as a deserted camp had a right to be. A stately grove of Norway pines stand on a clear sandy shore, on the East, backed by a thick forest growth.”6
A few years later (1881), Nessmuk (George Washington Sears) reached Seventh Lake and reported only an “open, free-for-all camp…, there for many years, and many are the names and dates carved on the square logs of which the sides are built.”
Perhaps this was the “cozy, log cabin on the upper north shore” of Seventh Lake built by Artemus M. Church.
Joseph Grady’s history also mentions Church building the “Manhattan Club” camp a few years later.7
The Rome Daily Sentinel in 1886 reported that, except for one or two of the Fulton Chain’s camp owners, none of the owners “have any title whatever to the soil on which the buildings stand… the occupants select an eligible location, erect buildings, make improvements, ask no questions and pay no taxes.”
The writer notes that on Fourth Lake, Fred Hess’s Cedar Island camp, a New Haven, Connecticut owner’s camp on Dollar Island and Lawrence’s Camp were built without title to the land.
On Seventh Lake, Ed Arnold was erecting a frame camp on its shores.8
But then new owners with a different business plan came on the scene.
On March 13, 1889, an agreement was signed by James Galvin, Ephraim Myers, Allen Kilby, Charles Emery and Theodore Basselin for sharing equally in the purchase of the 6000 plus acre Munn Tract, encompassing a rectangle including the head of Fourth Lake, Fifth, Sixth, two thirds of Seventh Lake and a portion of Limekiln Lake’s shores.
Papers reported that “for the convenience of the parties in selling the land …the deed was taken in the name of Mr. Galvin only”(Lowville Journal Republican).
This is why only James Galvin’s name and, after January 1890, his wife Jennie appear on the deeds for most present day Seventh Lake property owners.
In a transaction dated May 1, 1889, the Munn estate (Permelia died in 1876) sold their tract to the group, James Galvin as agent, for $10,000.9
But the purchased tract did not include the entire Seventh Lake.
The Totten & Crossfield Purchase boundary partitions the eastern third of Seventh Lake, as well as the large island, and east of it was State land.
I mention this because camps built on State land when the Park was formed in 1892 had to be removed.
Popular feeling had begun in the 1860s for protection of the Adirondack region, the sale of State lands for nonpaypment of taxes stopped in 1883, a forest commission was formed in 1885 and the Adirondack State Park would be established in 1892.