History, Natural History & the Arts
Lake George Village may have been the site of the largest military cemetery in the original 13 colonies during the American Revolution.
So suspect many officials, historians and archeologists after discovering human remains on a commercial property not far from the construction site where the bones of roughly 40 American Revolutionary War soldiers were found in February, 2019. [Read more…] about More 18th Century War Dead Remains Found in Lake George
Major Christopher Carleton led an expedition of the British Army’s 29th Regiment of Foot comprising soldiers, Loyalists and Native Americans, to implement “The Great Burning” of Continental forts and patriot homesteads in Washington, Warren and Saratoga Counties during the fall of 1780. [Read more…] about The Great Burning: Carleton’s Raid of 1780 Being Memorialized
Peter Gansevoort Jr. was born into the Dutch aristocracy of Albany to Harman Gansevoort (1712–1801) and Magdalena Douw (1718–1796). His younger brother Leonard Gansevoort, was politically active, serving in the state assembly and senate, as well as the Continental Congress. [Read more…] about Albany’s Peter Gansevoort, “The Hero of Stanwix”
A vacant lot adjacent to the site where Revolutionary War soldiers and others who died at the smallpox hospital at Fort George at the south end of Lake George were buried may be preserved as open space, with a historical marker denoting its historical significance. [Read more…] about Lake George Officials Hope to Acquire Revolutionary Burial Ground
Lake George’s drive to honor the many who died at the smallpox hospital at Fort George in the first years of the American Revolution has gained new momentum. [Read more…] about Growing Support for Reinternment of Lake George Colonial War Dead
The 1780 Carleton Raid devastated the present-day New York State counties of Saratoga, Warren, and Washington. It was known as the “Great Burning” because many of the structures along the “Old Military Road” south of Fort George at the southern end of Lake George were destroyed.
British Maj. Christopher Carleton’s raid was part of a larger strategy that played out across upstate New York and Vermont. Together with Carleton’s raiders, Sir John Johnson swept across the Schoharie and Mohawk Valleys, Col. John Munro attacked Ballston Spa, and Lt. Richard Houghton raided Royalton, Vermont during the autumn of 1780. [Read more…] about Carleton’s Raid in 1780 Devastated Saratoga, Warren, and Washington Counties
For more than 25 years, historian Russ Bellico and the leaders of the Lake George Battlefield Alliance, including the late archaeologist David Starbuck, argued that grounds as historically rich and as hallowed as the head of Lake George deserve a visitors’ interpretive center.
Now we have one. [Read more…] about The Battlefield Visitor Center: Lake George’s Newest Attraction
In February 1826 one of America’s seminal works of historical fiction, James Fenimore Cooper‘s The Last of the Mohicans, was first published. Last of the Mohicans has also been adapted to film at least eight times, most recently in 1992 starring Daniel Day-Lewis and Madeleine Stowe. The novel is one of five Cooper wrote that make up the Leatherstocking Tales series, all of them set in Upstate New York between the years 1740 and 1804. [Read more…] about Lake George Battlefield, More Than Just A Setting for Cooper’s ‘Last of the Mohicans’
During the Revolutionary Era much of New York State was a heavily forested frontier, sparsely populated but bitterly divided.
Although the only major campaign in the Adirondacks would end at the Battle of Saratoga, factional raiding parties traversed the mountains and valleys of the Adirondacks throughout the war.
Author Marie Danielle Annette Williams details many of those frontier raids in her new book The Revolutionary War in the Adirondacks: Raids in the Wilderness (Arcadia Publishing, 2020). [Read more…] about The Revolutionary War in the Adirondacks
New York State Museum Cultural Resource Survey Program (CRSP) archaeologists Barry Dale, Aaron Gore, and Steve Moragne will speak on excavations they led of prehistoric and colonial remains adjacent to the historic Lake George Million Dollar Beach. [Read more…] about Lake George Archeology Digs Subject of Barroom Talk