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

The Garmon & CrosbyYears: 1888-1895

In February 1898, Arthur H. and Julia Springsteen moved to West Carthage where Springsteen operated a grocery store and was elected village treasurer, but they soon returned to Orwell in 1903.

Julia Springsteen contracted tuberculosis and died in February 1905.

Arthur soon remarried and this marriage produced a daughter, Julia, in 1907, and a son, Savillian, in 1909.

But his son and second wife both died within a week of each other in February 1912.

Springsteen later married widow Mary Monihen (Moniken?, Monahan?) who had a daughter.

The Springsteens moved to Port Royal, Pennsylvania and Arthur would return periodically to visit remaining family and inlaws.

His Port Royal residence would also be home to aged Orwell relatives. Continue reading →

A look at local days gone by 

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

The Garmon & Crosby Years: 1888-1895 The Utica Weekly Herald of March 24, 1891 published an announced and then a retracted selection of John Studer as the new Forge House proprietor.

Studer was a hotel proprietor in Watson and had reached a verbal agreement with Dr. Crosby. But Garmon had signed a one-year agreement with partners George B. Kitts of Boonville and Mortimer D. Alger of Rome. Kitts was experienced in running hotels at Boonville and later at Rome where he may have met Mortimer D. Alger.

After the one year Forge House lease, he ran the Lewis Hotel in Fulton and then the Doolittle Hotel in Rome.

While at the Lewis Hotel in 1895, Kitts invested in a company manufacturing fire alarm systems for hotels.

At the time of his death of tuberculosis on April 29, 1913, he had been proprietor of the Orlando Hotel in Corning since 1898.

Mortimer D. Alger ran a popular hardware store in Rome for many years until June 1891. After his stint at the Forge House, Alger concentrated on his camp at Big Island on Fourth Lake.

Originally, camp builders erected a camp for guide Fred Rivett and his brother Peter.

They sold their squatters’ rights to Continue reading →

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.” Continue reading →