Big Wolf Lake

Lumber, fire, and rebirth

Lumber country (1850–1912)

The Tupper Lake region was one of the great logging theaters of the Adirondacks. Commercial lumbering around Tupper Lake began around 1850 with the Pomeroy Lumber Company, and the arrival of the Mohawk & Malone Railway in the early 1890s — with its junction at the village of Faust, still called “The Junction” today — turned the area into a booming mill town. The surrounding township, organized in 1890 as the Town of Altamont, was only renamed the Town of Tupper Lake in 2004.^[5]

The dominant lumber operator in the country north and east of Big Wolf was the Santa Clara Lumber Company, founded in 1888 by Titus B. Meigs. His son Ferris J. Meigs (Yale, 1889) learned the business in his father's mills and woods, became the company's president in 1911, and led it until it wound down operations in 1941. The company was an early practitioner of what would become scientific forestry — it was noted for planting at least one tree for every tree it cut, and was among the first to prepare and sell processed pulpwood for papermaking.^[6] Meigs would prove to be the pivotal figure in Big Wolf's story.

At the turn of the century the lake and its surrounding tract were owned privately — according to the community's own founding memoir, by “a successful retail druggist with several stores located in New York City,” who built a sawmill on the shore of the lake. That mill building survives today, converted into the Big Wolf Club House.^[4]

The great fire of 1912

The early 20th century brought catastrophic fire years to the Adirondacks — 1903 and 1908 are the most infamous — driven by drought and the tinder of logging slash left along the new railroads. In August 1912, fire came to Big Wolf. Most of the lake's shoreline forest burned.^[4]

Dudley B. Lawrence, Ferris Meigs' brother-in-law and one of the founding campers, left the community's most vivid account of that summer, written from the deck of an ocean liner hundreds of miles offshore:

“When I came on deck I noticed we were proceeding in what seemed to be a fog but was somehow different. I asked one of the officers and he told me that this was no fog, it was smoke from the burning Adirondacks which had blown so far to sea. That very day most of Big Wolf Lake was on fire. It was the end of one era but the beginning of another.” — Dudley B. Lawrence, founding-era camper, quoted in the Big Wolf history preserved by lake families^[4]

The druggist-owner, the story goes, was so distraught that he refused ever to visit the lake again. He ordered everything salvageable sold — “even to netting the lake for fish” — and offered what remained at a low price to Ferris Meigs.^[4]

Founding a community (1915–1916)

Meigs bought the burned-over lake and its surrounding lands with a plan: sell campsites and rebuild the forest. Lawrence, visiting at Meigs' suggestion around 1915, described “a discouraging outlook… nothing to see except blackened stumps and burned-over hills and fields” — but also the first birches and poplars of second growth pushing up through the ash. Meigs meanwhile was “busily engaging in planting tiny pines, spruce and hemlock on both sides of the road to town and in other parts of the burned-over acres.” The tall trees lining the camp road today are his plantings.^[4]

Big Wolf was officially established on July 1, 1916, originally as a community of some 32 families.^[4] [7] Early camp life was deliberately primitive: kerosene lamps and candles, ice cut in winter and hauled from the ice house, hand-cranked gasoline motors to pump water, wood-fired kitchen stoves. Electric lines began reaching the camps in 1917. And from the earliest years, the lake developed its signature pastime — the sailing canoe, a tradition Lawrence proudly noted was still going strong four decades later, and which the AARCH architectural tours still remark on today.^[4] [2]

Preservation: the Association era

The community Meigs founded matured into the Big Wolf Lake Association, formally organized around 1960, which stewards the lake and preserve today.^[7] Its clubhouse — the converted pre-fire sawmill, now more than a century old — remains the social heart of the lake and the keeper of its history.^[2] [4] Roughly 65 camps now stand around the lake, all Association members, under rules designed to keep the water pristine: no off-lake watercraft, trailers, or fishing gear that has been used elsewhere may be brought in — an unusually early and strict invasive-species regime.^[3]

The lake's story was set down by Lucia Meigs Andrews — Ferris Meigs' granddaughter — in her book Big Wolf Lake, 1916–1966, written for the community's fiftieth anniversary, and in her memoir Switchback.^[7] [8] Adirondack Architectural Heritage (AARCH), whose founding board president Howard Kirschenbaum's family has kept a camp on the lake for a century, has led guided tours of Big Wolf's historic camps by canoe.^[2]

Timeline

• ~1850Commercial lumbering begins in the Tupper Lake region (Pomeroy Lumber Co.).^[5]
• 1888Titus B. Meigs founds the Santa Clara Lumber Company; his son Ferris learns the trade in its mills and woods.^[6]
• 1890The Town of Altamont (renamed Tupper Lake in 2004) is organized; the railroad arrives soon after and the mill town booms.^[5]
• 1890s–1900sBig Wolf and its tract are held by a New York City druggist, who builds the sawmill that later becomes the Club House.^[4]
• Aug 1912Fire burns most of Big Wolf's forest; smoke is visible 600 miles at sea. The owner never returns and sells to Ferris Meigs.^[4]
• 1915–16Meigs replants pine, spruce, and hemlock across the burn and lays out campsites.^[4]
• Jul 1, 1916Big Wolf officially established — a community of 32 founding families.^[4] [7]
• 1917Electric lines begin reaching the camps, ending the kerosene-and-icehouse era.^[4]
• 1918The Moorings built on the eastern shore — still in the Kirschenbaum family a century later.^[2] [8]
• 1925The Quinn Camp built for the Fielder Coffin family, its chimney of cobblestones pulled from the lake bottom.^[4]
• 1930Architect Penrose V. Stout and Lucia Meigs Stout build Santa Clara Camp.^[8]
• ~1960The Big Wolf Lake Association is formally organized to manage the preserve.^[7]
• 1966Lucia Meigs Andrews writes Big Wolf Lake, 1916–1966 for the community's 50th anniversary.^[7]
• Today~65 camps on a 1,100-acre lake in a 4,000-acre private preserve; sailing canoes still race; the old mill still serves as clubhouse.^[2] [3]

The Sailing Canoes

If Big Wolf has a signature image, it is a canoe under sail. The custom took hold in the community's earliest years — the founders arrived with paddling canoes and rowboats, and sail rigs followed soon after — and it became so much a part of lake life that Dudley B. Lawrence, writing his memoir at mid-century, singled it out with evident pride:^[4]

“An unusual feature of life for forty years at Big Wolf has been the sailing canoe which continues, I'm glad to say, at this time. In the beginning the campers all had paddling canoes with their rowboats.” — Dudley B. Lawrence, founding-era camper^[4] — “forty years,” written at mid-century, dates the fleet's origins to roughly the 1920s.

The boats themselves are the classic conversion of the early twentieth century: wood-and-canvas paddling canoes fitted for sail with a leg-o'-mutton — triangular — rig on wooden spars, typically steadied by leeboards and steered with a paddle. Builders like Old Town offered exactly this arrangement as a kit, and it became the standard way an American camp family turned a canoe into a sailboat.^[12] No published source names a specific builder behind Big Wolf's fleet, nor a “Big Wolf one-design” class; the fleet's full story lives in the Association's own records and in Lucia Meigs Andrews' Big Wolf Lake, 1916–1966.^[7]

The lake's sailing habit reached the local boatshops, too. R.W. Frenette of Tupper Lake custom-built a 15½-foot sailing guideboat for Big Wolf Lake — fitted with curly-maple oars and a carved wolf on its deck — a one-off that later crossed the block at an Adirondack auction for $14,400.^[11]

And the tradition is unbroken in a literal sense. Because Big Wolf admits no boat that has touched another waterbody — the invasive-species rule that has kept its water pristine — the canoes that sail the lake today live on it year-round.^[2] For anyone tracing the history of an individual hull, the Wooden Canoe Heritage Association maintains the build records that identify historic wood-and-canvas sailing canoes by serial number.^[12]