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] Some thirty-odd member families make up the Association today, 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' daughter — 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 has a camp on the lake, has led guided tours of Big Wolf's historic camps by canoe.^[2]

More lore

Big Wolf was on the Gilded Age tourist map before it was a community. When Dr. W. Seward Webb's new railroad (the Mohawk & Malone, later the Adirondack Division of the New York Central) opened the region in the early 1890s, guidebook writers traced its route pond by pond — E.R. Wallace's Descriptive Guide to the Adirondacks (1894) told travelers that from Tupper Lake Junction “the line takes an easterly direction past Little Wolf Pond, and turning northerly passes Big Wolf, Rollin's, Floodwood and Long Ponds to Saranac Inn Station.” Passengers bound for the grand hotels of Upper Saranac rolled past Big Wolf's shore two decades before the first camps rose there.^[13]

Ferris Jacobs Meigs (1868–1943) was a more complicated public figure than the lake's gentle founding story suggests. A delegate to the 1915 New York Constitutional Convention, he proposed the article placing the Adirondack forests under a commission — and was pilloried for it in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, whose columnist Julius Chambers branded him “chief of one of the lumber corporations now before the courts for denuding the Adirondack Mountains of their timber.” The same man state forestry officials later complimented publicly for his tree nurseries and replanting — the hands that reforested Big Wolf — spent 1915 being caricatured as a land grabber. His own summer base was White Birches Camp on Follensby Pond, held in the Santa Clara Lumber Company's name.^[14]

Meigs also left a memoir of his own — a history of the Santa Clara Lumber Company, serialized posthumously in the Tupper Lake Free Press and Herald in 1970. It preserves, among much else, the drama of the winter of 1898–99: to close the land sale that created the St. Regis Paper Company, young Meigs contracted to sell 58,000 acres of pulpwood land when his company owned only 36,000 — then talked the receiver of a bankrupt neighbor into optioning him the missing 22,000 acres at $2.00 an acre, land he had already sold at $6.00. The gamble carried the company through the bitter split with its senior partner George E. Dodge that followed.^[15]

And the lake's architecture is now earning official recognition: in June 2025 the New York State Board for Historic Preservation recommended The Moorings — nominated under the name “Wintergreen,” for the 1965 house William G. Distin designed there at the twilight of his career, alongside the camp's 1918 lake house, beach house, and carriage house by architect Frederick P. Kelley — for the State and National Registers of Historic Places, calling it a rare example of how rustic Adirondack camp architecture evolved into the post-war era.^[16]

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 by the Moore family.^[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]
• 2025The Moorings (“Wintergreen”) is recommended for the State and National Registers of Historic Places.^[16]
• TodaySome thirty-odd Association families on the 1,100-acre lake and its 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]

Loons

No sound belongs to a Big Wolf evening the way the loon's does. The common loon (Gavia immer) has four main calls, each with its own job: the long, wolf-like wail that carries across the water to locate a mate or chick; the quavering tremolo — the famous “laugh” — which is actually an alarm; the yodel, given only by males defending territory, each male's version distinct enough that researchers can tell individual birds apart; and the soft hoot that passes between mates and chicks at close range.^[21]

Loons are built for water so completely that they cannot walk on land — their legs sit too far back — so they nest right at the water's edge, on quiet shorelines and small islands. For the first weeks of life, chicks ride on their parents' backs, snuggled into the wings for warmth and safety from predators. A loon rearing up and slapping across the surface in a “penguin dance” isn't performing; it's distressed and defending its territory or its chicks. The kindest thing a paddler or sailor can do is give a nesting or dancing loon a wide berth — birds flushed off the nest too often will abandon it.^[20]

The annual census

Adirondack loons have their own research institute: the Adirondack Center for Loon Conservation, headquartered at the Loon Center in Saranac Lake, about half an hour from Big Wolf. Every year since 2001 it has run the NY Annual Loon Census — one hour, 8 to 9 a.m., on the third Saturday of July — with volunteers counting loons on their assigned lakes across the state.^[17] The 2025 census set a record: 815 volunteers on 306 lakes, ponds, and rivers counted 1,059 loons, the first time the count has ever topped a thousand. The loon remains a New York State “species of special concern,” and the census data helps the DEC decide whether that label can someday come off. Private waterbodies take part through their own volunteer coordinators — a natural fit for a lake association.^[18]

What threatens them

The grimmest threat is the smallest: lead fishing tackle. Loons swallow pebbles to grind food in their gizzards, and a lost lead sinker looks just like a pebble — a single half-ounce sinker kills an adult loon in two to four weeks, and ingested lead remains a leading cause of adult loon deaths. New York bans the retail sale of lead sinkers of half an ounce or less, but not their use, so conservationists run tackle-exchange programs swapping lead for tungsten, steel, and bismuth.^[19] Discarded fishing line entangles and starves loons; shoreline disturbance flushes them off nests.^[20] And climate change is squeezing them from both ends of the season: heavier June downpours flood shoreline nests and chill the eggs, while warmer, later winters tempt loons to linger until their flightless mid-winter molt — if the lake then freezes suddenly, they are trapped in the ice, a growing problem researchers call “molt-migration mismatch.”^[17]

There is good news in the record, too. Loons are bellwethers for water quality, and since 1998 researchers have used Adirondack loons to track mercury pollution carried in on the air. After the Clean Air Act amendments and mercury emissions standards took hold, mercury levels in Adirondack loons leveled off and acidified lakes began to recover — a rare, measurable environmental win, written in loon blood samples.^[17]

No loon census results are published for Big Wolf itself — like everything else about the lake, its loon records stay within the Association. But a quiet 1,100-acre lake with undeveloped shoreline, no visiting boats, and no outside fishing tackle is, almost point for point, the habitat prescription loon conservationists write. The birds on the evening water suggest the lake has been following it for a century.^[2] [3]