The Forge House: Owners, Proprietor & Managers, Part IV

Alexander Lamberton, a former Presbyterian pastor, had married Eunice B. Hussey in 1864.

Eunice had been a widow who inherited the patent profits due to her deceased husband, Obed Hussey, who invented the mechanical reaper.

Alexander turned to business and the natural sciences and obtained the tract with the hope of establishing a preserve.

Accompanied by Emmett Marks in March 1876, he engineered the first large scale stocking of brook trout, 50,000 small fish, on the Fulton Chain and wrote in FOREST AND STREAM about the experience.

He encouraged Marks’ work with hatching pools under the Desbrough sawmill.

In March 1876, Lamberton renamed the hotel “Forest House” and leased it to Joel T. Comstock who advertised it as “Forest Hotel.”

In May 1876, the state passed the enabling act for the first private preserve on Fulton Chain lands, the Fulton Lake Park Association, whose members soon elected R. U. Sherman as president and Lamberton as treasurer.

Comstock was a Civil War veteran and builder of Boonville’s Empire House which burned in 1869.

He belonged to the 97th Regiment NY veterans’ association which included historian Franklin Hough as its president.

Comstock was a former Boonville Village trustee.

Sportsmen’s accounts in the newspapers complimented the good services and supplies provided by Forest Hotel proprietor Comstock, his wife and son Eddie’s culinary skills.

In 1878, Wilmurt’s voters elected him “road master” to improve the John Brown Tract Road from Boonville.

After ending his term as proprietor, Comstock returned to Boonville politics and later accompanied the 1881 tour of state officials surveying damages from the Old Forge dam built in October 1879.

He moved to Asbury Park, NJ and died in 1910.

Comstock’s lease ended at the end of 1878 and the Lambertons hired James W. Barrett.

But before Barrett took over, Emmett Marks took care of the Forest Hotel for about six weeks beginning February 1879 (Grady).

Emmett returned to his famous role as manager of the homemade “Hatching House” under the sawmill.

The Utica Morning Herald reported in March 1879 that Lamberton leased the Forest Hotel to James W. Barrett who opened the hotel on April 1 under the old name, “Forge House.”

James was born on September 27, 1818 in Cheshire, England and abandoned by his stepfather at the age of 7 upon reaching American shores.

He was adopted in Rome by an owner of Erie Canal boats and drove horses on the towpath.

At age 15, he left this job and piloted canal boats between Rome and Albany.

He later moved to Leyden, purchased and ran Barrett’s Hotel for over 20 years.

In 1870, he purchased the Hildreth Hotel at Constableville which burned almost four months later in a fire that destroyed the village’s business district.

He moved to Lowville, ran the Mineral Springs House briefly and then managed Beach’s Bridge Hotel in Watson for three years.

In 1879, James partnered with his son Charles to lease the Forge House. Another son, Frank, ran stage lines with Charlie Phelps between Boonville and the Fulton Chain.

Jane Sperry would assist James Barrett occasionally at the Forge House.

James died on August 31, 1886 from heart troubles.

Charles Barrett handled most of the Forge House’s operations for his sickly father and around 1885 purchased his father’s interest and ran the hotel on his own for three years.

Lamberton’s hope for a preserve failed and the tract was later transferred to Mary Starbuck, a sister-in-law, and then to his wife Eunice.

But before this occurred, the state grabbed part of the Forge Tract.

In 1879, factories along the Black River claimed damages from the loss of Black River water flow diverted for the Erie Canal.

In response, legislation passed that year called for dams to be built at Old Forge and Sixth Lake, appropriating any lands necessary for dam operations.

Lamberton lost 10 acres, 50 acres of timber for dam construction, a pipeline source for hotel water and his sawmill.

Marks was allowed to continue his fish hatchery operations. Lamberton and other Fulton Chain landowners sued for damages that would not be awarded until 1886.

Though the state now owned and operated the dam, future deeds would continue to include the 1871 deeded right to raise the dam three feet.

Some confusion was probably because the state sometimes appointed the hotel’s proprietor to be paid dam tender.

Lamberton provided financial assistance to William Dart who built a camp on North Branch, Moose River’s Second Lake (later Dart’s Lake). The John Brown’s Tract guide, Johnny Van Valkenburgh, had built a “pretty camp” in 1880 on the south shore of Second Lake on the Fulton Chain considered “semi-public” (Grady). Having just sold the Forge Tract a year earlier, the Lambertons purchased this camp in September 1889. This camp was later conveyed to his daughter’s family and sold to A. W. Soper in 1900 by Lamberton’s son-in-law Charles Hone. Lamberton profited from real estate speculations in Rochester and would attain greater prominence as a manager of its state industrial school, a chamber of commerce president and long time leader on the Parks Board and commissions. He is memorialized at Lamberton Conservatory, built at Rochester’s Highland Park in 1911, and died in 1919.

Continued next week…