Ganoga Lake is a natural lake in Colley Township in southeastern Sullivan County in Pennsylvania, United States. Known as Robinson's Lake and Long Pond for most of the 19th century, the lake was purchased by the Ricketts family in the early 1850s and became part of R. Bruce Ricketts' extensive holdings in the area after the American Civil War. The lake is one of the highest in Pennsylvania, which led Ricketts to name it Highland Lake by 1874 and rename it Ganoga Lake in 1881; Pennsylvania senator Charles R. Buckalew suggested the name Ganoga from the Seneca language word for "water on the mountain".
The Ricketts built a stone house on the lake shore by 1852 or 1855; this served as a hunting lodge and tavern. In 1873 a large wooden addition was built north of the stone house, which became a hotel known as the North Mountain House. The hotel had one of the first summer schools in the United States in 1876 and 1877. A branch railroad line to the lake served the hotel and also hauled ice cut from the lake for refrigeration. The hotel closed in 1903, though the house remained the Ricketts family summer home. After the death of R. Bruce Ricketts in 1918, his heirs sold much of his to the state for Pennsylvania State Game Lands and Ricketts Glen State Park. The state tried to purchase the lake in 1957, but was outbid by a group of investors who turned the land around it into a private housing development; as such it is "off limits" to the public.
Ganoga Lake is on the Allegheny Plateau, just north of the Allegheny Front, in sedimentary rocks from the Pocono Formation. The Wisconsin Glaciation some 20,000 years ago changed the drainage patterns of the lake; this diverted its waters to Kitchen Creek and carved the 24 named waterfalls in Ricketts Glen State Park in the process. Ganoga Lake has a continental climate, with average monthly high temperatures ranging from in January to in July. Ganoga Lake's drainage basin is heavily forested and it is in an Important Bird Area. The lake and its surroundings have a variety of flora and fauna, although the ecosystem has been damaged by acid rain.
Description
Ganoga Lake is a natural spring-fed lake just west of Pennsylvania Route 487 in southern Colley Township in southeastern Sullivan County, Pennsylvania. It is near the meeting point of Sullivan, Columbia and Luzerne counties, and is less than northwest of Ricketts Glen State Park. Ganoga Lake is on the Allegheny Plateau at an elevation of . William Reynolds Ricketts, who owned the lake in the first half of the 20th century, claimed it was the highest lake in the United States east of the Rocky Mountains; Petrillo repeats this in his history of the region, Ghost Towns of North Mountain.Petrillo, p. 42. While the United States Geological Survey Geographic Names Information System identifies Ganoga Lake as the second highest in Pennsylvania (after Siebert Lake in Somerset County, at ),A search on the USGS GNIS system for lakes above in Pennsylvania finds only four: Siebert Lake (), Ganoga Lake (), Lopez Pond () in Sullivan County, and Lake Jean () in Luzerne County and Ricketts Glen State Park. the Pennsylvania Audubon Society says Ganoga Lake is "the highest elevation natural lake in Pennsylvania".Gross, pp. 1–24.
Ganoga Lake has a long, narrow oval shape, oriented north-northwest to south-southeast. In 1936 William Reynolds Ricketts wrote that the lake has an average width of and is "about one mile long, lacking 600 to 700 ft" or about in length. However, according to a 1917 Pennsylvania Water Resources Inventory Report, in its largest dimensions it is long () by wide. It has an average depth of and a maximum depth of . The drainage basin for the lake is an area of , and its capacity is ().Pennsylvania Water Supply Commission, p. 70.
A branch of Kitchen Creek flows from the southern end of the lake; downstream it enters Lake Jean in Ricketts Glen State Park. From there the water flows through Ganoga Glen and its 10 named waterfalls, then joins the main stem of the creek at Waters Meet; below this it flows over five more named waterfalls. Kitchen Creek is a tributary of Huntington Creek, which flows into Fishing Creek, which is a tributary of the Susquehanna River.
History
First inhabitants Ganoga Lake is in the Susquehanna River drainage basin, the earliest recorded inhabitants of which were the Iroquoian-speaking Susquehannocks. Their numbers were greatly reduced by disease and warfare with the Five Nations of the Iroquois, and by 1675 they had died out, moved away, or been assimilated into other tribes. After this, the lands of the Susquehanna valley were under the nominal control of the Iroquois, who encouraged displaced tribes from the east to settle there, including the Shawnee and Lenape (or Delaware).Richter, pp. 3–46.
On November 5, 1768, the British acquired land, known in Pennsylvania as the New Purchase, from the Iroquois in the Treaty of Fort Stanwix; this included what is now Ganoga Lake.Wallace, p. 159. After the American Revolutionary War (1775–1783), Native Americans almost entirely left Pennsylvania.Wallace, pp. 136–141. The lake was originally in Northumberland County, then became part of Lycoming County when it was formed in 1795. Sullivan County was formed from Lycoming County in 1847, and two years later Colley Township was formed from Cherry Township. The lake drains into Kitchen Creek, where a Native American pot, decorated in the style of "the peoples of the Susquehanna region", was found under a rock ledge around 1890.Wren, p. 56, Plate No. 7.
A hunter named Robinson, whose cabin was at the lake's northern end about 1800, was the first recorded inhabitant. He gave the lake its earliest known name: Robinson's Lake. However, for most of the 19th century the lake was known as Long Pond, because of its elongated shape. From 1822 to 1827 the Susquehanna and Tioga Turnpike, which followed the lake's western shore, was built between the Pennsylvania communities of Berwick in the south and Towanda in the north. Beginning in 1827 the northbound daily stagecoach left Berwick in the morning and stopped for lunch at the Long Pond Tavern on the lake about noon. The stage operated until 1851; the road was the Susquehanna and Tioga Turnpike until 1908, when the modern Pennsylvania Route 487 was built. Route 487 follows the course of the turnpike as it approaches the lake from the south, then passes to the east of the lake instead.Ricketts, pp. 2–6.Petrillo, pp. 40–43.
While on a hunting trip north of the lake in 1850, brothers Elijah and Clemuel Ricketts were frustrated at having to spend the night on a hotel's parlor floor. In 1851 or 1853 they bought , including the lake, as their own hunting preserve, and built a stone house on the lake shore by 1852 or 1855. The stone house served as their lodge and as a tavern; it was known as "Ricketts Folly" for its isolated location in the wilderness. Clemuel died in 1858 and Elijah bought his share of the land and house.
R. B. Ricketts Elijah's son Robert Bruce Ricketts, for whom Ricketts Glen State Park is named, joined the Union Army as a private at the outbreak of the American Civil War in 1861, and rose through the ranks to become a colonel. After the war, R. B. Ricketts returned to Pennsylvania and purchased the stone house, lake, and some of the land around it from his father on September 25, 1869 for $3,969.81 (approximately $ in ); eventually he controlled or owned more than , including the lake and the park's glens and waterfalls.Tomasak, p. 77.
From 1872 to 1875 Ricketts and his partners operated a sawmill near the lake, southeast of his house. In 1872 Ricketts used lumber from the mill to build a three-story wooden addition next to the stone house; this opened as the North Mountain House hotel in 1873, and was run by Ricketts' brother Frank from then until 1898. The hotel hosted many of the Ricketts friends and relations as well as guests from Wilkes-Barre, Philadelphia, New York City, and other places. Many of the guests arrived after school let out in June and stayed all summer until school resumed in September. In 1876 and 1877, Ricketts ran the first summer school in the United States at his house and hotel; one of the teachers was Joseph Rothrock, later known as the "Father of Forestry" in Pennsylvania.
Ricketts and the others living in the area were not aware of the waterfalls in what is now the state park until about 1865, when they were discovered by two of the Ricketts' guests who went fishing and wandered down Kitchen Creek. In 1879 Ricketts started the North Mountain Fishing Club, for anglers on the lake and creek. Guests of the hotel paid one dollar to fish as a club member. By 1874 Ricketts had renamed Long Pond as Highland Lake,Tomasak, p. 98. and by 1875 had named the highest waterfall on Kitchen Creek as Ganoga Falls.Bachelder, pp. 186–189.Tomasak, p. 85. In 1881, Ricketts renamed Highland Lake as Ganoga Lake. Pennsylvania senator Charles R. Buckalew suggested the name Ganoga, an Iroquoian word which he said meant "water on the mountain" in the Seneca language. Donehoo's A History of the Indian Villages and Place Names in Pennsylvania identifies it as a Cayuga language word meaning "place of floating oil" and the name of a Cayuga village in New York.Donehoo, pp. 63–64. Ganoga Lake is the source of the branch of Kitchen Creek that flows through Ganoga Glen, which has the tallest waterfall.
Ricketts was a lumberman who made his fortune clearcutting nearly all his land, but no logging was allowed within of the lake,Petrillo, pp. 50–55. and the glens and their waterfalls in the state park were "saved from the lumberman's axe through the foresight of the Ricketts family". One hemlock tree cut near the lake to clear land for a building in 1893 was in diameter and 532 years old.
Ricketts and his business partners built the lumber town of Ricketts about northeast of the lake starting in 1890; it had up to 800 inhabitants and several saw mills and operated until 1913, when the timber was exhausted. A branch line of the Lehigh Valley Railroad ran from Ricketts to the north end of the lake, opening in 1893. There was daily passenger service to Wilkes-Barre and Towanda on this line, which also served freight trains hauling ice from the lake for use in refrigeration from 1895 on. The ice cutting business on the lake employed 175 men, and had an ice house at the north end of the lake, near the small train station made of logs. The Ganoga Lake Ice Company was incorporated in 1897, and operated until about 1915. Ricketts' son William Reynolds Ricketts was one of five partners in the ice company. Ice skating was also a popular pastime on the lake.Petrillo, pp. 1, 50, 53, 55Taber, p. 345. In 1913 the lake had a boathouse and was used by rowboats.
The North Mountain House was threatened by a forest fire in 1900; the subsequent loss of much of the surrounding old-growth forest led to decreased numbers of hotel guests. In 1903 another large fire on North Mountain threatened the sawmill in the village of Ricketts.Tomasak, pp. 328–329. The wooden addition to the stone house was torn down in either 1897 or 1903, and the land became a garden. The hotel closed in November 1903, and the fishing club and passenger train service ended with the closure.Tomasak, pp. 338, 357.
The stone house remained the Ricketts family's summer home. After the hotel closed, several small cabins were built around the lake for rental to sportsmen. Ricketts proposed moving the highway from his front yard in 1904; the Pennsylvania General Assembly approved this in 1908, after he paid for the construction of the new highway. The house was renovated and added to in 1913, and Ricketts died there during the 1918 flu pandemic. His wife died shortly thereafter, and they are buried in the small Ricketts family cemetery near the north end of the lake.Tomasak, pp. 338, 352, 357.
Modern era