Canada Lake Jigsaw Puzzles

The circular map is a recreation of the table map that would have been used in the cab on top of the Kane Mountain Fire Tower.  The recreation uses the same USGS maps that were used in the originals. The original map had a thirty inch diameter so that with the scale of the map being close to one inch to a mile the map covered a fifteen mile radius around Kane. The other towers in the area, Tomany and Cathead, are identified.  Attached to the center of the map would have been an alidade or sighting device that would have been used by the Observer to locate a fire.  For more on the circular map see the webpage dedicated to the Kane Mountain Fire Tower on the Caroga Museum website. Click here to see a large format version of this recreation of the Kane Mountain Circular map.

The background Drone photograph was taken by Nick Gale.

The Kane Mountain Fire Tower was constructed during the summer of 1925 and went into service the following summer.  The tower was in service until 1988 and was decommissioned in 1989.  For a history of the tower, see the webpage dedicated to it on the Caroga Museum website.

This postcard was published by the Curt Teich company in 1939.

The Auskerada along with the Fulton House Hotel was one of the grand hotels that dominated life at Canada Lake at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries.  It was built on the site of the Canada Lake House Hotel which had burned in 1884.  Construction began during 1892 and began operations in the summer of 1893. The four story hotel had 100 rooms and was designed to be lighted by electricity.  In April, 1921 the Auskerada suffered the fate of many of the grand hotels of the era including the Fulton House Hotel when it was destroyed by fire. For more see Barbara McMartin’s Caroga: An Adirondack Town Recalls its Past (chapter 3, pp. 70-75).

This is one of a series of postcards produced by the Curt Teich Company of Canada and Caroga Lakes. Like others in the series, this Auskerada card was based on a Real Photo Postcard. Based on the production numbers on the card and postmark evidence, the series can be dated to about 1910.

The Fulton House Hotel, sometimes called the Canada Lake House, was constructed in 1888 by James Y. Fulton in the southeastern corner of Canada Lake.  Over time a number of additions were made to the original building. It was destroyed by fire in October, 1914. For more history of the hotel see Barbara McMartin, Caroga: An Adirondack Town Recalls its Past (chapter 3, pp. 63-69)

The postcard was part of the series of Canada and Caroga Lake postcards produced by the Curt Teich company about 1910. Like others in the series, the Fulton House Hotel card is based on a Real Photo Postcard.

View of the Fulton House Hotel docks with its two steamers.  The larger one was the Kanaughta, the name derived from what was believed to be the Native American name for Canada. The smaller steamer was the Clermont, named after the steamboat completed in 1807 by Robert Fulton  that was the world’s first commercially successful steamboat that transported passengers from New York City to Albany.

Steamers were popular on Canada Lake at the end of the nineteenth and the first two decades of the twentieth century. The steamers would transport passengers to picnics on West Lake and Lily Lake or down to Stewart’s Landing.  Visitors from the west could take the steamers up from Stewart’s Landing to the hotels on Canada Lake.  A Johnstown Daily Republican from June 30, 1897 includes the following notice:

The Auskerada club of Dolgeville…have made arrangements whereby the steamers will come from Canada Lake to the Stewart mill and thereby avoid the long row formerly necessary to get to the lakes. The Dolgeville telephone company have strung wires all the way up to the Auskerada hotel, and communication can be had by this means between Dolgeville and the lakes.

The postcard is another in the series of postcards of Canada and Caroga Lakes produced by the Curt Teich Company of Chicago. Like the others, it is based on a Real Photo Postcard.