— Part tHREE —
Since the 1870s, Charles Pratt’s family and later that of his son, Charles Millard Pratt, also a director of Standard Oil, would summer annually at the property until 1905.
Galvin also sold adjoining parcels to the Pratts in the late 1890s.11
In July 1903, the son’s camp burned while his children in the care of servants were having dinner at Cedar Island.
It was believed that an oil stove left burning in one of the camp’s rooms had exploded.
However, according to the news account Pratt’s original log cabin, 150 feet from the son’s camp, was not harmed.12
Pratt’s son later had a camp built in 1909 at Little Moose Lake at the Adirondack League Club preserve.13
Before his death, Charles Pratt had founded and endowed the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn in 1886.
The wealthiest man in Brooklyn, Pratt, recalling his early lack of education, felt that rapidly changing industrial needs required a work force trained in special skills and trades.14
With plans being made for a more private, new Adirondack camp elsewhere, the Pratt family in 1907 donated the Fourth Lake camp and buildings to the Pratt Institute.
To manage the exclusive camp, the Pratt Institute formed an organization called the Pratt Camp Association.
Membership ($3 a season) in the Association was limited to Pratt Institute instructors, students and graduates.
Members paid $5 weekly “table board” and $12 travel for the round trip from Brooklyn.
While there were attendants, guests were required to take care of their rooms and bring linens.
Food served would be prepared by trained “domestic science students.”
A 1907 report described the existing main camp as having a large living room, fitted in “real mountain camp style with large fireplace, wood rafters and furniture and hangings.”
The camp included the dining room, kitchen and three bedrooms.
The boathouse was equipped with eight “St. Lawrence skiffs,” five of which were newly provided by Pratt’s son Charles.
A new camp building containing eleven bedrooms was nearly completed.
The Pratt Institute planned that the Association’s income from dues would cover maintenance and other camp costs, not wanting the camp to rely on support from the Institute’s endowment.15
But this would not turn out to be the case.
The new owner would be a prominent Inlet hotel owner named Charles O’Hara.
In 1896, Charles O’Hara had come from Glenfield and built Inlet Inn along the channel from Fifth Lake on land purchased from David Frank Sperry in 1897, operating it as a boarding house.
In November 1907, O’Hara purchased the Arrowhead from Albert C. Boshart and operated both hotels.
But on the morning of September 23, 1913, the hotel originally established in 1893 on the shores at the head of Fourth Lake by Fred Hess, renamed in 1898 the Arrowhead by William Moshier, burned to the ground.
While determining whether to rebuild, O’Hara leased the Eagle Bay Hotel for the 1914 and 1915 seasons. The lease included an option to purchase.16
In 2012, Letty Kirch Haynes donated the annual business files of her grandfather Frank Tiffany to the Inlet Historical Society which I had the opportunity to review.
In addition to being Inlet’s first town supervisor, Tiffany was an investment counselor, a board member of the Raquette Falls Land Company that owned a portion of Inlet’s lands, realtor for Jennie Galvin’s unsold lands after her husband’s 1911 death and began a real estate business in 1908 that is today Burkhard Evans.