For the summer of 1906 I rented a cottage on the western shore of Lake George, about a mile north of the village at the southern end of the lake. In the fall, after the season’s experience, I bought the place for our vacations, and later added Tea Island to our purchase. Lake George, thirty-six miles long, and from one to four miles wide, with “an island for every day in the year,” is a wondrously varied and beautiful sheet of water. It is surrounded by precipitate mountains two to four thousand feet high, with occasional perpendicular precipices, and Herbert Spencer called it the most picturesque scenery he found in his visit to America.
For our purposes the lake could not have been better located. It was five to ten hours by automobile from New York, and from seven to ten hours by automobile from Montclair. It lay centrally in the heart of the great mountain ranges of northern New York, of Vermont and New Hampshire. It was the starting point for automobile trips to the East over the Green Mountains of Vermont and the White Mountains of New Hampshire, or to the West through all the scenery of the Adirondacks. It was equally convenient for trips to Canada, with varied and often magnificent views on the several roads to Montreal, and thence one could visit Quebec on the East, or Toronto on the West.
Our cottage was ideally situated. We then thought it the best location on the lake and twenty years’ residence confirmed our judgment.
A former owner had curiously misnamed it “Bonnie Nook.” Bonnie it was, but nook it was not by any means. We renamed it “Halcyon Lodge.” It was on the projecting point where Tea Island Bay unites with the main body of the lake. Our shore line, with its many bays, inlets, capes, and peninsulas measured, we thought, some seventeen hundred feet. Its exposed position gave free sweep to the winds alike of the North and the South, so that we were always cooler than any of our neighbors. The fine buildings of the station and the hotel were in full view a mile to the South. They were beautifully lighted in the evenings, and the music of the band in the village park and on still nights even the orchestral and solo music of the hotel parlors floated to our open porches. The place commanded extensive and picturesque views both up and down the lake, with ever changing lights and shadows. We loved the place, and immediately began a series of improvements which were continued every year until it had cost us three times the original purchase price. Today it lacks nothing that could add to the convenience or pleasure of a summer family.
When we went to Lake George in 1906 Frederick was nineteen, Franklin seventeen, Russell fifteen, Alice, Lucia, and Grace followed in line, and Percival, always the family pet, was a sober and thoughtful little fellow of nine. We at once bought a large, broad, one-cylinder boat which we called the Halcyon, and with this safe but dear old tub the children’s happiness was for two summers complete, except that it would not shine in races. But it was good for all weathers and anywhere, would hold the twenty-seven children of the neighborhood, and our place became the common centre of juvenile interest. We were fearful of accidents, as few of the neighbor children could swim. Our older boys had learned in Montclair. To the girls and Percival we offered a reward of Five Dollars for their first fifty strokes without touching bottom, and they quickly won it. The older children were instructed to permit no one who could not swim to enter our waters, and so we avoided accidents. All the children of the neighborhood, which was well peopled, were of excellent parentage and proved to be suitable playmates. All are now grown to adult life, and nearly all have families of their own. Although now widely scattered, all without exception are still dear and valued friends of our family group.
Our Lake George summers, covering with a few intermissions twenty years, afforded many incidents never to be forgotten by our family, but I shall speak only of such as had noteworthy educational value. Except in water sports, the first two summers at the lake afforded comparatively few advantages over Montclair. The marked advantages began with the summer of 1908. In the early spring I purchased a motor boat thirty-three feet long, with a guaranteed speed of twenty-two miles an hour, in which was installed a fifty-horsepower six-cylinder Peerless automobile engine. In lines, material, and finish it was then the most beautiful family boat that any of us had ever seen. Our name of Lark, while not inappropriate, was really a play on the word. We thought every excursion and race in it would be for us a lark. The children were wild with delight.
But another surprise awaited them. Just before going to Lake George that summer I purchased a seven-passenger, six-cylinder Peerless automobile. We engaged a chauffeur and our first ride was the trip to Lake George. But when there the boys turned their first attention to their beautiful boat. The makers should have known that the Peerless automobile engine was by no means suitable for installation in this boat and before they shipped it to us they did know it. The boys discovered that it would run a mile or two at the guaranteed speed and then stop dead from overheating of the forward cylinders. This called into play all the knowledge of physics, chemistry, and mechanics the boys had acquired. Frederick, then about to enter his final year at Yale, was chief engineer and master mechanic. Suitable tools, material, and appliances were supplied. The engine was taken out, completely taken apart, and supplied with a wholly new system of accessories—a new oiling system, cooling system, a new and ingenious circulation of lubricating oil, increased gasoline pressure, and auxiliary carburetor, and an enlarged spray needle. All the new accessories were proportioned and adjusted to each other. Frederick would lie awake nights making plans, and the boys worked together for weeks with no aid except some machine work done in Glens Falls. When they were through the boat would sustain a speed of twenty-three miles an hour. But now all the important boat races had been held for the season. The Championship of the Lake had been easily won by Mr. Herman Broesel’s Simplex, a forty-foot, eighty-horsepower boat, all races being governed by the official international rules of handicap. Mr. Broesel and his sons were justly proud of their boat with its Simplex engine, of which they were the manufacturers. Accordingly, Mr. Broesel widely advertised a day on which he would afford the dwellers on Lake George a special exhibition of the speed and power of his boat over a measured course. A crowd of thousands witnessed the thrilling sight. The Simplex justified her claim, twenty-eight miles an hour by the stop watch. But we had calculated in advance that under the handicap rules our little Lark could beat this. So at the finish I invited Mr. Broesel to give the assembled crowd the further pleasure of seeing the Simplex race around Diamond Island and back against the Lark, a distance of six miles. Broesel was delighted. The crowd was held. The official handicap was ascertained, the judges appointed, the moment of starting fixed, and the Lark was off first, followed by the Simplex at her fixed moment. She was to overtake the Lark, pass her, and come home first. The Lark was unknown and nobody expected her to win. Fifteen minutes passed and every eye was strained to see the Simplex on her return trip dash into sight off Tea Island. Suddenly a boat going fast, with a huge bone in her mouth, swung into sight. Everybody yelled, “There comes the Simplex.” Pretty soon a boy perched high with his eye on the fast approaching boat shouted, “She looks like the Lark.” Our boys, Frederick and Franklin, crossed the finish line soaked to their skins with spray, amid the roars of the astonished crowd, just as the Simplex, a mile or more behind, hove in sight off Tea Island. Mr. Broesel and his sons proved good friends of ours, but they never again raced the Simplex with the Lark, and later surrendered to us by default the beautiful silver cup which they needed to win once more. The Lark won it twice, and it became ours.
The next year the boys took down the engine a second time, for new increases of power, and drove the boat to a speed of twenty-five miles. According to the calculations of a power-boat engineer, the sons had added forty percent to the power of the boat. The Lark ran in practically every regatta so long as the international power-boat rules prevailed on Lake George. In races she was twice swamped by high winds and waves, when far ahead, but otherwise was never beaten. We had many glorious races, but the permanent reward to the boys lay in the educational value to them of planning and, without professional help, constructing these new and varied elements of mechanical power. I do not exaggerate in saying the boys at length acquired the reputation of being mechanical wizards. But they excelled in other things also. “I wish I could do anything as well as the Gates boys do everything.” This remark of a bright neighbor boy of their own age, I at least thought penetrating and very creditable to his intelligence.
My favorite game, for the boys and girls alike, from early childhood has been tennis. To my notion, for complete self-mastery of mind and body, this game surpasses any other, unless it be boxing. Our first tennis court was constructed in Montclair as early as 1904. I built another at heavy cost at Lake George. By 1908 Frank and Russell had won local distinction at Montclair, South Orange, and Brooklyn by spectacular wins against well-known players. At Lake George they quickly came to the front. The Sagamore Hotel was accustomed to hold an annual tennis tournament of a week or so, open to all comers, and often attracting fine players as guests. Against the Sagamore was pitted the south end of the lake, headed by our two boys. There were many humorous incidents in these tournaments, but towards the end of each the conflicts were fierce and the excitement ran high. The Sagamore had the crowds and they tried by hoots and horns and derisive yells and one-sided applause to disconcert our young boys. The most exciting match of all the years was the one with the two Bacon brothers, then the champions of Wesleyan University. The struggle lasted more than three hours before our boys finally drove in the winning stroke.
Among the minor useful and delightful experiences of the children I can enumerate only a few. The neighborhood song festivals on Sunday evenings in our “studio” were delightful. The regular neighborhood diving and swimming took place daily at our dock. We could count twenty or thirty heads at times in the water, and many and varied were the aquatic stunts performed at home and in competitions at the club. Russell always won the aquaplane contests, Percival always the tub races, and Frank won the tennis and golf tournaments. Grace also, alone or in doubles with Frank, won several cups in tennis. The real significance of these successes lies, of course, in the constant practice they involved. There were cultural values also in the Saturday evening club dances, the mountain climbing of Prospect, Buck, and Black, with their magnificent views, the annual visit to Lockhart’s world-famous bee farm, where queen bees were bred and shipped to many countries, the two sidesplitting comedies of the young people and their friends on our lawn, to the infinite delight of their parents and all the grown-ups round about. Fred’s color photography was learned from a near neighbor at Lake George, who first introduced into America from France color photography, and found in Frederick his first pupil. Frederick’s highly artistic color photographs of American and European scenes have since given pleasure to an ever widening circle. Some days and evenings of one summer were occupied by all the young people of the neighborhood with Russell’s exciting and successful hidden treasure hoax. It was planned and carried out with an ingenuity worthy of Stevenson or Poe. The treasure with its box of ancient discolored papers, hundred-year-old letters, rare coins, and cabalistic maps, was actually found (on a distant island, where Russell had secretly buried it) and dug up by the neighborhood group in their eager search. Nor did any of them suspect that they had been decoyed there until the evening appointed by Russell for an important gathering in our studio, where he confessed the whole to his chagrined and astonished auditors. The later years were varied with long automobile trips, eastward into Vermont, and as far as Mount Washington in New Hampshire, and west until we had explored the Adirondacks, and also north to Lake Champlain and Montreal.
Nearly three months of our summers were spent at Lake George. I count no three months of any year, though spent by our children in school or college, as more highly and variously cultural, or better suited to fit them for the manifold requirements of a sane, happy, successful and useful life.
But our happy summers at Lake George were interrupted by our country’s entrance into the war, in 1917. Our family did not reassemble until some months after the Armistice, and then only to separate to enter upon their various permanent interests and pursuits, for all had grown to adult life. Then came marriage and the establishment of homes of their own. Full family reunions at Lake George became impossible and, without the sons and daughters, the lake lost its charm.
In the spring of 1928 the Lake George home, with Tea Island and the dear old Lark, was sold, reluctantly and with tears, and not until every son and daughter had become convinced that for us it had fully served its purpose. We all count our vacations at Lake George as in all ways among the happiest, most fruitful, and most rewarding experiences of our family life.
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Chapters In My Life 