Community rallies to restore Adirondack resort boat
Like many Eastern Seaboarders-turned-adirondackers, Donna Gingell and Peter Halsch spent years looking for that perfect piece of property.
When they found it, they were charmed by its shoreline on a secluded cove of Blue Mountain Lake, accented by classic Adirondack boathouse designed by architect Robert Graham.
The property had quite a pedigree. Previous owners include railroad tycoon Thomas Durant and industrialist Harold Hochschild, founder of the Adirondack Experience museum.
In Durant’s time, one of the few ways to access the lake was by steamboat. One of those: the elegant 75-foot, double-decker named Tuscarora. It was widely hailed as the grandest vessel to ever steam the waters of the park’s central lakes.
That was the other thing: Situated on the lot that Gingell and Halsch were eying was the great Tuscarora herself. Against all odds she had survived, fashioned into a camp by the Graham family, long after most of the storied Adirondack steamboats of the late 19th and early 20th century had been unceremoniously scuttled or burned on shore. Much the way a worn out city bus would today be unsentimentally sent to the crusher.
“They were utilitarian,” said Halsch, adding that people at the time assigned them no particular value beyond basic transportation. Except for the Grahams, who bought the steamer after it was taken out of service in 1929 and several years later, by way of an unspeakably picturesque assemblage of rafts, cradles and train rails, managed to tow the leviathan in the