At some point in the early 1870’s, John Quincy Adams Treadway (known to his nieces and nephews as “Uncle Quint”), and his brother, William Denton Treadway (known to his nieces and nephews as “Uncle Dent”), took it into their heads to build a summer hotel on Lake George. As far as anyone knows, neither brother had acquired as much as a single day’s experience in the hotel business. Their family owned a woolen mill in the bustling town of Ticonderoga in the lower Adirondacks. Water rushing down from the outlet at the northern end of Lake George powered their looms. Sheep raised by local farmers supplied the fleece that the looms wove into a high quality worsted fabric known as cassimere. The mill was a thriving enterprise for several years, and so was a general store the Treadways opened on what is now Montcalm Street, but it’s unlikely the mill and the store were so profitable they supplied all the capital needed to build a relatively large, well appointed hotel. William Denton Treadway, unlike his brother, had left Ticonderoga as a young man and gone into business in New York City. He eventually settled in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. It’s likely he contributed at least half the financing for what must have struck many people in the region as a daring, even foolhardy venture. Some hotels on the lake were filled with guests, but times were hard and getting harder, and no one had ever built a hotel of any size before at the northern end of the lake. Who could say whether summer visitors would flock to a resort situated that far beyond the confines of the lake’s fashionable southern and middle regions?
Nothing daunted, the two brothers purchased about 100 acres of land on northern Lake George from Andrew Jackson Cook, a local farmer who owned an extensive tract of lakefront. He called his farm Homelands, and the recently constructed residential community situated on what was once his farm still bears that name. The Treadway brothers engaged a young architect named Oscar Burnham Hinckly to design a hotel.
