The Hulett Hotel Fire on Lake George

Author

Preface

Huletts Landing, New York, is a relatively quiet place. Ask anyone who lives or visits here and you will most likely get unanimous agreement that little happens in Huletts most of the year. It is primarily a summer destination. I think most would probably say that the reason they come to Huletts, besides the scenic beauty of Lake George, is for the peace and quiet.

That’s not to say that things don’t happen here. It’s just that there are plenty of places where the mix of people and activity has a faster pace, and as such, things happen that make news at a greater frequency than in Huletts.

Looking back over the last one hundred years, I’ve always believed that the biggest event that happened in Huletts was the fire that burned the Hulett Hotel in 1915. The resulting news was a sensational arson trial that was picked up by many local papers during that time. The rebuilding of the Hulett Hotel in a slightly different location started a series of events that, in many ways, forms the identity of Huletts Landing today.

I always wished that there was a time capsule from 1915 that would answer the many questions I have about what happened on that horrendous day when the first Hulett Hotel burned. Likewise, I have searched for years—to no avail—for the blueprints of the second hotel that was built to take its place.

The year 1915 was a long time ago. The historical record doesn’t leave much about what happened in a quiet place like Huletts in an era when news traveled much more slowly than it does today. The people who were alive then are not alive now, and their recollections are lost to antiquity. Likewise, photography was still in its infancy, and pictures from that time are hard to come by. Historical documents regarding this tiny hamlet, in my estimation, are even more rare.

After writing my first book on the history of Huletts Landing, which was really a compilation of photographs that detailed the history of Huletts, I truly believed that would be my first and last book. I felt I had exhausted the historical pictures in my family’s collection, and I believed there was nothing more I could add to my narrative. It was an exhaustive work that took me many years to compile, and it was an exercise that, quite frankly, I never saw myself repeating.

That all changed, though, when some pictures came into my possession that literally took my breath away. This book is the story of those pictures, and the fact that they center on the rebuilding of the Hulett Hotel after the fire of 1915, I believe, makes this a very compelling story.

It is not my intent to prove the innocence or guilt of any particular person(s) or challenge the verdict issued in the arson trial that resulted from the fire. While I have my own opinion, which I will lay out in the succeeding pages, my goal here is to share history. What history is that, you might ask. Well, as you will read, some of the images presented here have their own unique stories that coincide with the fire and the rebuilding of the hotel during the winter of 1915–16. In order to tell these stories, the respective histories of the fire, arson trial and individuals involved have to accompany them.

Unlike with my first book, the words for this book jumped off my pen—or my computer, as the case may be—but there are some questions I couldn’t answer and which remain mysteries. I do my best to present these lingering mysteries and will leave you to find their answers on your own. You may draw different conclusions from mine, but that’s what makes history interesting.

The work that follows is part mystery, part history and part story of revelation. I have enjoyed writing it. I hope you will enjoy reading it.

Introduction

LAKE GEORGE RESORT IS SOLD EXPERIENCED HOTEL MAN BUYS PICTURESQUE PROPERTY

W.H. Wyatt of Troy has purchased from H.W. Buckell the property known as Huletts at Huletts Landing on Lake George. The transaction includes the hotel, fifteen cottages, a store near the boat landing, a saw mill and 120 acres of land. The consideration was $50,000. Huletts is one of the best known resorts on Lake George, and for many years has been one of the most popular of the numerous summer resorts on the lake. Mr. Buckell has owned and been in control of the property for twenty seven years. Mr. Wyatt will take possession April 1 and proposes to make many improvements to the hotel and cottages. He will give his personal attention to the management of the hotel.

The resort has been popularly called Picturesque Huletts because of the magnificent scenery, both on land and lake in the nearby vicinity. The hotel and cottages are located eighteen miles down the lake on the east shore and in the midst of one of the prettiest spots of Lake George. Nearby is the Elephant, a mountain rising to a height of 1,700 feet, and just beyond this is Black Mountain, 2,600 feet in height, making an impressive background for the beautiful view spread before the hotel.

Mr. Wyatt is an experienced hotel man, having been for a number of years the proprietor of the Clark house in Troy. He also owned and conducted the Glenwood at Lake Bomoseen, which was destroyed by fire September 23, 1912. Under the direction of Mr. Wyatt, Huletts will maintain the high standard it has enjoyed among summer resorts and if it be possible it will be raised.

—Ticonderoga Sentinel, January 30, 1913

NOTE: While the above newspaper article says that the Glenwood Hotel on Lake Bomoseen was destroyed on September 23, 1912, the actual date of the fire was September 17, 1912.

1

Beginnings

The illustration is of a poor black sharecropper appealing to Abraham Lincoln, with the man’s wife and children standing in the doorway of a nearby log cabin. The American flag hangs touching the ground on the left side, while Union and Confederate troops battle in the background for the soul of a young nation. Lincoln is pictured holding his top hat in his right hand. Perhaps this is an illustration of the same top hat he wore to Ford’s Theatre on the fateful night of April 14, 1865. The light streams into the center of the illustration, perhaps signifying hope.

Underneath the depiction, the following words appear:

Published by Gwendolyn Publishing Co., New York

Appealing to be Allowed to Help Fight for the U.S.

-or-

The Condition in 1863.

Its dimensions are only approximately eighteen inches high by thirty inches wide. The artist’s name, J.E. Taylor, and the date, 1892, are clearly visible in the lower right-hand corner. The Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum in Springfield, Illinois, doesn’t even have a copy of the drawing. The library’s curator presumes that the artist’s initials refer to James E. Taylor, an illustrator who did similar sketches for Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper.

The sketch was framed, hung and finally stored. It was almost thrown away. But that is where this book begins. It begins here because any really good story has a mystery attached to it. This is the mystery of this story.

It is not the front of this drawing that is important here; rather, it is what was glued to the back of the drawing that this book will focus on.

Attached to the back of this depiction of Abraham Lincoln—hidden, ignored and almost discarded—were nineteen pictures, perfectly preserved, dating back to the winter of 1915–16, showing the aftermath of the Huletts Landing hotel fire of 1915 and the building of the next Hulett Hotel. The events that the nineteen pictures document prefigure a sensational arson trial that took place in May 1917 in which the hotel’s owner, William H. Wyatt, was charged for allegedly having the hotel burned down.

LOST AND FOUND

While the new Hulett Hotel was taken down in the winter of 1959–60, the dormitory that housed its employees stood for another forty years. Dilapidated and run-down, it remained a testament to a wonderful time when the sounds of music drifted from the lakeside Huletts Casino and the guests at the hotel frolicked on the shoreline of Lake George.

The Hulett Hotel employee dormitory in the mid-1980s. The Lincoln illustration was tossed from a window as the dormitory was being cleaned of debris. Kapusinski family collection.

When the Town of Dresden closed its local landfill under mandates from New York State to local municipalities in the mid-1980s, my family, who owned the dormitory, started the process of cleaning the hulking structure of years’ worth of accumulated debris.

While old mattresses, rubbish and assorted junk were thrown from windows and hauled out doors, a mildewed illustration in a broken frame was tossed from a second-floor window. It found a resting place in the high grass below the far end of the ramshackle old structure, just far enough removed from the hands disposing of the garbage that day. It wasn’t until the next day, when the commotion had stopped and quiet had returned, that the old dormitory’s nearest neighbor, Mr. Alex Manuele, wandered over. That’s when a gleam from the frame caught his eye.

To be quite honest, I didn’t even see the illustration of Lincoln when I first saw it, recounted Mr. Manuele. It was resting facedown, and what caught my attention was the frame, which I thought was quite nice and which I thought might be repaired. I assumed that it wasn’t wanted, and I picked it up to work on it.

It wasn’t until many years later, when Mr. Manuele went about trying to repair the frame, that he took out the illustration of Lincoln and found the pictures from the winter of 1915–16 glued to the back.

When I realized what they were, I wanted to return them to you, recounted Mr. Manuele in a conversation with me during the summer of 2010. They belong to your family, and if there was someone who would tell their story, it would be you.

And that’s where this book begins—with an illustration of Lincoln that was almost thrown away and then was found but stored again for many years, with pictures glued intentionally to the back.

1861

William Seward, president Lincoln’s secretary of state and former governor of New York. Seward was severely injured in an assassination attempt the night Lincoln was murdered. U.S. Library of Congress.

In 1861, Abraham Lincoln was inaugurated as the sixteenth president of the United States. This was also the year he chose William Seward—the twelfth governor of New York, a U.S. senator and one of Lincoln’s rivals for the 1860 Republican nomination—to serve as his secretary of state. Seward was known as a fierce abolitionist.

Seward developed his views about slavery while he was still a boy. His parents, like other residents of the Hudson Valley in the early nineteenth century, owned several slaves. (Slavery was slowly abolished in New York between 1797 and 1827 through a gradual, mandated process.) He discerned very quickly the inequality between the races, writing in later years, I early came to the conclusion that something was wrong…and [that] determined me…to be an abolitionist. This belief would stay with Seward through his life and permeate his career.

Seward is remembered for surviving an assassination attempt the same night Abraham Lincoln was shot. On April 14, 1865, Lewis Powell, an associate of John Wilkes Booth, gained access to Seward’s home by telling a servant, William Bell, that he was delivering medicine for Seward, who was