From river to rail to reservoir.

The Adirondack Town of Northampton has lived two lives. From its colonization in the post-Revolutionary period to the late 1920s, it was an interior wilderness frontier defined by the grand sweep of a mountain river. The Sacandaga, a name early linguists believed to be Algonquian in origin (meaning something akin to “reedy or grassy water”), found its headwaters in Lake Pleasant some forty miles to the north before traversing the towns of Wells, Hope, Benson, Northampton, Mayfield, Edinburg, and Day and meeting up finally with the mighty Hudson in the Town of Hadley. For Northampton, and especially its principal population center in the Village of Northville, the river was the lifeblood of the wilderness economy in both production and consumption. It formed a riparian highway for softwood logs emerging from the depths of the Adirondack forest to feed sawmills to the south, as well as a beloved shoreline for leisure, particularly in the Sacandaga Park resort just south of the Village, which began as a Methodist tent revival before blooming into the “Coney Island of the North.” Both industry and tourism were bolstered by the extension of the FJ&G Railroad, whose northern spur reached Northville by 1875, providing ingress for tourists and travelers and egress for logs and lumber, connecting both to the Glove Cities and the Mohawk Valley. All of this changed in 1930 with the construction of the Conklingville Dam, the flooding of the Sacandaga valley and the vanishing of the railroad along with a third of the Town of Northampton beneath the dark waters of what would become the Sacandaga Reservoir, later renamed the Great Sacandaga Lake. The story of the great flood, and the enormous rural loss it inflicted in the name of urban need, is still being told, most recently inspiring a documentary film and even a proposed museum. What is certain is that the creation of the reservoir constituted a historical rupture, its vastly expanded shoreline providing the geographical basis for a seasonal home economy that was being seeded across the Adirondacks just as Northampton was acquiring the lakefront real estate to support it.

Today, with over 2500 residents, the Town of Northampton is one of the more populous in the Adirondack Park, a sparsely-populated, 6 million-acre wilderness region with roughly 130,000 year-round residents and many times that in seasonal visitors. Its beating heart remains the beautiful Village of Northville, located on a peninsula between Northville Lake and the Sacandaga. The Northville-Northampton Historical Society is dedicated to the preservation, interpretation and dissemination of their history.