Fulton Chain Steamers III: The Fulton Navigation Co. Years, 1901–1932
Part III-Conclusion
After 1910, the motor car became the favored mode of transport in the region and across America and to this day has not been replaced.
This reduced the steamers to excursion or freight duties.
They were advertised as being free from sharks, submarines and torpedoes during World War I.
When the Old Forge-Eagle Bay highway was paved in 1926, the “Clearwater” was in its twilight and soon retired with the “Mohegan,” “Nehasane” and a few years later, the “Old Forge.”
When three steamers burned in the 1927 Raquette Lake village fire, there were discussions about moving the “Clearwater” to that location.
But highways soon completed to Blue Mountain Lake removed that need.
A 1934 Boonville Herald article recalling the “Nehasane” indicated that the steamer was scrapped “a few years ago,” the boat cut in half and towed to Old Forge and burned. Perhaps the “Old Forge” and “Mohegan” were destroyed at that time.
The Hollywood Hills Corporation leased the “Clearwater” in 1930 and ran “Friendship Tours” on Mondays and Tuesdays.
The Fulton Navigation Company ceased operations in 1932 with only the steamers “Irocosia” and “Clearwater” remaining.
A year later, the “Clearwater” was purchased by the Hollywood Hills Corporation, repainted and restored from its “mothballs.”
The organization planned to use it for moonlight cruises from their development’s dock.
A week after this article appeared, the “Clearwater,” captained by Jay Barker, was returning from a night cruise with 125 passengers from the Neodak and it struck a submerged log in shallow waters, stopping in a channel between First and Second Lakes.
The panicked passengers were transferred to numerous motorboats as the steamer settled, submerging its first deck.
Divers later plugged the hole and towed it to the Hollywood Hills site.
Six years later in the spring of 1939, the Hollywood Hills Corporation sold the steamer for its scrap metal and it was destroyed.
The Utica Observer-Dispatch reporter noted “ as her charred embers smoldered and steamed on the beach beside the Hollywood Hills Hotel, it brought memories of the days when the lake business ‘was good’.”
SOURCES: “Life and Leisure in the Adirondack Backwoods” and “Adirondack Steamboats on Raquette and Blue Mountain Lakes” by Harold Hochschild; Dr. William Seward Webb correspondence courtesy of Jerry Pepper Librarian Adirondack Museum; “Notes Collected in the Adirondacks 1895& 1896 Arpad Geyza Gerster” editor Sidney Whelan; and the following newspapers from fultonhistory.com and the Northern New York Library Network: Utica Daily Press, Utica Sunday Journal, Utica Observer-Dispatch, Lowville Journal & Republican, Albany Evening Journal, The Utica Observer, Ogdensburg News, Watertown Herald, Watertown Daily Times, Utica Herald Dispatch, The Syracuse Journal, Utica Herald Dispatch and the Boonville Herald.
