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Adirondack Railroads Real and Phantom By Harold Hochschild Soft Cover
Adirondack Railroads Real and Phantom By Harold Hochschild
Soft Cover 1962
20 pages, fold out map.
If all the railroads proposed to cross northern New York by way of Blue Mountain Lake, Raquette Lake, Forked Lake and Long Lake had come into being and remained in daily operation, half a million trains would by now have rumbled past these tranquil Adirondack waters. The planning of the railroads began in the fourth decade of the nineteenth century and continued into the first decade of the twentieth. None was built.
In some instances the route was surveyed and land along the right of way was bought or taken under option. In others, the surveys, judging by the resulting maps, were conducted from a desk in New York or Albany.
The earliest railroad project to poke its head into the neighborhood - on paper only - was to stop just short of the Eckford lakes. It was the Manheim and Salisbury Rail-road Company ( named after two towns in the Mohawk Valley) , chartered by the New York Legislature in 1834. In 1837 its name was changed to the Mohawk and St. Lawrence Rail Road and Navigation Company. This route was to run "from Little Falls to the headwaters of the Rackett River or Southern termination of Rackett Lake through Rackett, Crotched [Forked] Lake, Long Lake and down the Rackett River." The line from Little Falls to South Inlet of Raquette Lake was surveyed by Ira V. Germain in 1837 and is shown on a map (Plate I) in a state report on the proposed system, published in 1838. In the same year 0. L. Holley, Surveyor General of New York, in a letter on this project to the New York State Assembly Committee on Railroads, observed :
The value of the lands throughout the whole of the secluded region to be traversed by the contemplated road will be very greatly enhanced; and the interest of the state as connected not only with unsold lands, but with the increase of population and general wealth, is of such importance as to constrain every good citizen to desire the completion of the work.
The 1841 edition of Burr's map shows a canal running from the head of Long Lake due south for several miles to an unnamed lake where it connects with a railroad running to Piseco and Little Falls. Blue Mountain Lake is the nearest to the position of the unnamed lake on the map, but the cartographer probably meant to show either Forked Lake or Raquette Lake.
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