The automobile and the highways built to accommodate them gradually but inevitably displaced the nation’s light rail systems, including those in the Lake George region. Long before there was a Northway (I-87), tourists disembarked from trains opposite the Lake George steamboat pier, trolleys rattled along Canada Street toward Warrensburg, and a cable railway carried hotel guests from Lake George Village to the top of Prospect Mountain. There was even a marine railway to launch the pleasure boats that were transported on freight trains from factories in the Midwest.
But the Delaware and Hudson Railroad (the D&H), transporting people from New York City to Montreal and dozens of points in between, including the steamboat landings on Lake George and Lake Champlain, was the system’s apex.
In 1882, D&H completed the tracks that linked Lake George to its New York to Montreal line at Fort Edward, allowing passengers to travel from New York City to the lake. A passenger boarding a northbound train in New York at 1 pm could be in Lake George by dinner time.
In its first year of operation, D&H’s passenger train brought 60,000 people to Lake George. By 1889, 100,000 day-trippers and lodgers were arriving by train every summer.
From the station, carriages transported visitors up the bluff to the Fort William Henry Hotel; other families would board the Lake George Steamboat Company’s Horicon or Sagamore, which would ferry them to hotels and landings down the lake.
At the time, both the Lake George and the Lake Champlain steamboat companies were owned by the D&H. Under the railroad company’s ownership, the steamboats could easily move passengers and freight from Lake George to Lake Champlain, providing crucial links in the transportation corridor that extended from New York to Montreal.
The company also bought hotels to lodge its passengers, including the Hotel Champlain near Plattsburgh and the Fort William Henry Hotel at the head of Lake George.
The Fort William Henry Hotel had burned in 1909. Working with the prominent architect Henry J. Hardenburgh, who designed the new hotel, Charles S. Peabody developed plans for a new railroad station that would visually and aesthetically complement the larger building (both built in the Mediterranean Revival style).
(Peabody, the nephew of George Foster Peabody, also designed the boathouse at Wiawaka, his father’s Lake George mansion, variously known as Wiokosco, as Blenheim and Holiday House, and the Lake George Club.)
After both the hotel and station opened in 1912, they were flooded with guests and passengers, not only in summer, but sometimes in winter as well.
“Lake George is now an established winter resort, and any day one may see in Grand Central station tourists enveloped in furs, with skates, snowshoes or
skis slung over their shoulders, looking for all the world as though they were about to start on an expedition for the North Pole. Though in reality they are only going to board the train to for a little ride upstate to Lake George,” the New York Tribune wrote in January, 1914.
Like the 1882 station that it replaced, the new building functioned as a base for the company’s regional railroad and steamboat operations. It is among the last surviving elements of what was once a sprawling transportation and resort complex.
The last scheduled passenger train arrived at the Lake George station in November, 1957. Less than six months later, freight service was also discontinued.
The station, now owned by the Lake George Steamboat Company, is listed with the State and National Registers of Historic Places.
A version of this article first appeared on the Lake George Mirror, America’s oldest resort paper, covering Lake George and its surrounding environs. You can subscribe to the Mirror HERE.
Illustrations, from above: A D&H “Camelback” engine No. 442 (built 1903-1904) at the Lake George depot (photo by Joseph A. Smith from the Ken Bradford Collection); the first Lake George depot with a D&H passenger train arriving in the early 1900s, the station was demolished in 1911 to make way for the one that stands today; and trains, steamboats and automobiles at the D&H train station, the Lake George Steamboat’s pier and the Fort William Henry Hotel, a transit hub and a beehive of activity in the decades before World War II (photo by Fred Thatcher courtesy of Bolton Historical Museum).
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