Schroon Lake: The Name Nobody Can Quite Explain
New York
Deep in the Adirondacks, Schroon Lake stretches for nine miles through a valley that was carved by glaciers and used for centuries as a natural north-south corridor. Europeans did not settle here until around eighteen hundred, after the Revolutionary War opened the Adirondack interior. The Town of Schroon was formally established in eighteen oh four from part of the Town of Crown Point.
Where the name comes from, nobody agrees. One theory ties it to a Native American word for large lake. Another holds that French soldiers named it in honor of Françoise d'Aubigné, who was first the widow of the French playwright Paul Scarron and later, as Madame de Maintenon, the secret wife of King Louis the Fourteenth. In that reading, Schroon is a corruption of Scarron. The mystery has never been resolved, which makes it one of the Adirondacks' more charming unsolved puzzles.
