Lake George: Named by a General, Fought Over by Empires

The French missionaries who canoed this lake in the sixteen hundreds called it Lac du Saint Sacrament, the Lake of the Blessed Sacrament. That name lasted more than a century, until the British general William Johnson arrived in seventeen fifty-five, won a battle against the French on the lake's southern shore, and promptly renamed the water in honor of King George the Second.

Johnson then built Fort William Henry at the southern tip, and two years later the French commander Montcalm besieged it. The fall of the fort in seventeen fifty-seven, and the massacre of the surrendering garrison by Montcalm's Native American allies, became one of the most haunting episodes of the French and Indian War, later dramatized in James Fenimore Cooper's novel The Last of the Mohicans. The village here, long called Caldwell after its eighteen-ten founder James Caldwell, did not take the name Lake George until nineteen sixty-two. The reconstructed Fort William Henry still stands at the waterfront.