Lake George, at the southeast base of the Adirondack Mountains, was sparsely populated by family farmsteads and subsistence loggers until the Erie Canal connected the region to the commercial world in 1825. Taking advantage of the new, easy and cheap transportation, factories and lumber mills began to arise in the mid-19^th to 20^th century. Thomas Cole’s illustrations for James Fennimore Cooper’s 1826 bestselling novel The Last of the Mohicans popularized the area. The crowds of tourists who traveled north on the Canal’s steamboats soon swarmed the shores of the lake. A booming tourism industry emerged, and the wealthy began purchasing the lakeside real estate that had been ignored by the local farmers because of its limited agricultural value.

The lake’s shorelines rapidly developed to house hotels, sanitariums, summer camps and personal ‘camps’. Unique to this region, an ‘Adirondack camp’ is a “permanent summer home where the fortunate owners assemble for several weeks each year and live in perfect comfort and even luxury, tho [sic] in the heart of the woods, with no very near neighbors, no roads and no danger of intrusion”.² The grandest camps, known as ‘great camps,’ formed Millionaires’ Row near Bolton Landing and Diamond Point on the shoreline. Although they were referred to as ‘cottages,’ they were in fact palatial homes, as large as 20,000 square feet and situated on large tracts of landscaped property with luxurious amenities such as private tennis courts. The juxtaposition between the region’s older, rural, hardscrabble, agricultural inhabitants and the new influx of urban upper- and middle-class summer residents radically changed the region’s demographic climate. Both the tourism and logging industries demanded a seasonal workforce, pulling locals from their farms and flooding the woods with migrant camps.