By: Jennifer Tufano
The first settlers in North Elba beginning in 1800 were exceedingly lucky. There was already a primitive wagon track passing through our town to give them access. This began at Westport on Lake Champlain and went all the way to Hopkinton in St. Lawrence County. Surely, without such a road, it would have been extremely difficult for our early settlers to have found a way through the mountains and moved their possessions to Lake Placid.
This primitive wagon track came into existence in this way. After the Revolution, the state of New York –like all the other original states – found itself very poor, deeply in debt and with little revenue to carry on the business of statehood. It was imperative to sell its unappropriated lands, much of it situated in the northern frontier, which was not yet settled. In 1792 the state sold to Alexander Macomb a huge track of land, almost 4 million acres, in St. Lawrence County for the paltry sum of 16 cents an acre. The land was divided and passed into the hands of several men who were anxious to have it colonized. They therefore built a road, if one can call it such today in this age of superhighways, all the way to Lake Champlain to facilitate travel across the Adirondack wilderness to St. Lawrence County.
It’s interesting to note that in 1809 the bridge across the Saranac River on this road, in the town of North Elba, was carried away by a flood.
The road was originally called the Northwest Bay Road, because Westport was known as Northwest Bay at the time. Probably many of you have seen the historical marker near the Olympic ski jumps commemorating this old road. It eventually became known as the Old Military Road, not because the military ever used it, but because it passed through the Old Military Tracks.
There is always a romantic appeal, I think, in old roads, and certainly this is not lacking in the Old Military Road, the first road to cross the Adirondack Wilderness. Most of it is still in existence – and still in use –today. Of course, part of it in North Elba and Saranac Lake is still called Old Military Road. The rest of it, all the way to Hopkinton in St. Lawrence County, now bears bureaucratic road numbers. A part of it in North Elba and Keene came to be called the Old Mountain Road. This, too, is still in existence, although it has been closed to automobile traffic for some 50 years. It is used by hikers and skiers today.
How did the towns and lakes get their names?
The first map of North Elba was made in 1804 by surveyor Stephen Thorn but it was never published. I was lucky to find it in the archives of the state Secretary of State.
It is very interesting indeed. Every pond and lake and stream is named but, except for Placid Lake, they all have difference names today. For instance, Mirror Lake was then labeled Bennet’s Pond, Echo Pond was Duck Pond, and Connery Pond was Sable Pond. Moody Pond over at Saranac Lake was Pine Pond. And strangely, the surveyor shows three ponds knows as Long, Round, and Spruce, connected by outlets, for our present-day McKenzie Pond with its three bays was once divided.
As for our streams, Chubb River was labeled in 1804 as Pond Creek, Ray Brook was Beaver Meadow Creek, and Whiteface Brook was Mill Creek. The AuSable River was identified as River Sable. Even the islands of Lake Placid bore different names. Buck, Moose and Hawk, in that order, were then Moose, Hawk, and Little Islands.
Of all the names for bodies of water on this map, one still survives: Lake Placid. We will probably never know who christened the lake. It could have been surveyor Thorn or it could have been the first settlers.
Our present names evolved over a period of time and we have no explanation for some of them. Chubb River honors Joseph Chubb, an early settler. As for Mirror Lake, it was known as Bennet’s Pond for almost 75 years. An 1870s guest at Brewster’s Hotel, Miss Mary Monell, used the delightful and fitting name of Mirror Lake in a poem she wrote in the hotel register. That caught on locally and became official.
The first settlement at North Elba was called Plains of Abraham. When the Elba Iron Works moved in here in 1809, the settlement adopted the same name of Elba, after the islands of Elba, which had rich iron deposits from ancient times. But when the first post office was established here in 1849, it was learned there was another Elba down in Genesee County and the ‘”North: had to be tacked on here.
When the first post office was established in our present village in 1883, it was given the name Lake Placid, and in 1900, when the village was incorporated, it, too, was given this designation.