Otsego Lake, the source of the Susquehanna River, is one of the
prettiest lakes in New York State, and is at an elevation of eleven
hundred feet above tide. It is nine miles long and about a mile wide,
the Susquehanna issuing from its southern end at Cooperstown, a hamlet
of two thousand people, beautifully situated amid the high rolling
hills surrounding the lake. The name of the lake comes from the
"Ote-sa-ga rock" at the outlet, a small, round-topped, beehive-shaped
boulder a few rods from the shore, just where the lake condenses into
the river. This was the Indian Council rock, to which they came to
hold meetings and make treaties, and it was well-known among the
Iroquois and the Lenni Lenapes. James Fenimore Cooper, the novelist,
who has immortalized all this region, called the lake the
"Glimmerglass." His father, Judge William Cooper, founded the village
of Cooperstown in 1786, afterwards bringing his infant son from
Burlington, New Jersey, where he was born in 1789. Here the great
American novelist lived until his death in 1851, his grave, under a
plain horizontal slab, being in the little churchyard of Christ
Episcopal Church. There is a monument to him in Lakewood Cemetery,
about a mile distant, surmounted by a statue of his legendary hunter
"Leatherstocking," who has been described as "a man who had the
simplicity of a woodsman, the heroism of a savage, the faith of a
Christian, and the feeling of a poet." The old Cooper mansion, his
home, Otsego Hall, was burnt in 1854, and its site is marked by a rock
in the middle of the road, surrounded by a railing. "Hannah's Hill,"
named after his daughter, and commanding a magnificent view, which he
always described with rapture, is on the western shore of the lake,
just out of town. The charm of Cooper's genius and the magic of his
description have given Otsego Lake a world-wide fame. In one place he
described it as "a broad sheet of water, so placid and limpid that it
resembled a bed of the pure mountain atmosphere compressed into a
setting of hills and woods. Nothing is wanted but ruined castles and
recollections, to raise it to the level of the scenery of the Rhine."
And thus has the poet sung of it:
"O Haunted Lake, from out whose silver fountains
The mighty Susquehanna takes its rise;
O Haunted Lake, among the pine-clad mountains,
Forever smiling upward to the skies,--
A master's hand hath painted all thy beauties;
A master's mind hath peopled all thy shore
With wraiths of mighty hunters and fair maidens,
Haunting thy forest-glades forevermore."
All around Otsego Lake and its neighborhood are the scenes which
Cooper has interwoven into his novel, _The Deer-Slayer_. About seven
miles northwest are the well-known Richfield Springs (magnesia and
sulphur), near Candarago Lake. This Indian name, meaning "on the
lake," has recently been revived to supersede the old title of
Schuyler's Lake for this beautiful sheet of water, enbosomed in green
and sloping hills, which is the chief scenic charm of Richfield. To
the eastward from Otsego Lake is the romantic Cherry Valley, another
attractive summer resort, and the scene of a sad Indian massacre in
1778, the site of the old fort that was then captured being still
exhibited, with the graves of the murdered villagers, to whom a
monument has been erected. A few miles farther, in a narrow upland
wooded valley surrounded by high hills, are the Sharon Springs
(sulphur and chalybeate), which in earlier times were so popular with
our German citizens, who were attracted by the resemblance to the
Fatherland, that the place was called the "Baden-Baden of America."
The name of Sharon came from Sharon in Connecticut, and the spring
water is discharged with a crust of white and flocculent sulphur into
a stream not inappropriately called the Brimstone Brook. In this
valley, east of the springs, one of the last Revolutionary battles was
fought, Colonel Willett's American force in 1781 routing a detachment
of Tories and Indians with severe loss. There are grottoes in the
neighborhood abounding in stalactites and beautiful crystals of
sulphate of lime. Not far away is the noted Howe's Cave, an immense
cavern, said to extend for eleven miles underground, being an old
water-channel in the lower Helderberg limestone, and which has many
visitors, attracted by its fine display of stalactites and grand rock
chambers, with the usual subterranean lake and stream. All this region
was originally settled by Germans from the Palatinate.
The Susquehanna, steadily gaining in volume, flows in wayward course
down rapids and around many bends to Binghamton, near the southern
border of New York, where it receives the Chenango River, and its
elevation has declined to eight hundred and sixty feet. This is a busy
manufacturing city and railway junction, having forty thousand
inhabitants. The first settlers came in 1787, and William Bingham of
Philadelphia owning the land at the confluence of the rivers, the town
was afterwards named for him. The Chenango Canal connects the
Susquehanna waters from here with the Erie Canal, about ninety miles
northward, at Utica, the Indian word Chenango meaning "the bull
thistle." Entering Pennsylvania, the Susquehanna now flows many miles
past mountain and village, around great bends and breaking through the
Allegheny ridges, passes along the Wyoming Valley, already described,
and finally going out through the Nanticoke Gap, reaches
Northumberland, where it receives its chief tributary, the West
Branch. This great stream comes for two hundred miles from the
westward through the Allegheny ranges, passing Lewisburg, the seat of
the Baptist University of Lewisburg, Milton, and the noted lumber town
of Williamsport, famous for its great log boom. This arrangement for
collecting logs cost a million dollars, and extends about four miles
up the river above the town, with its massive piers and braces, and
will hold three hundred millions of feet of lumber. The river front is
lined with basins and sawmills. In earlier years this boom has been so
filled with pine and hemlock logs in the spring that the river could
almost anywhere be crossed on a solid floor of timber. Unfortunately,
however, the vast forests on the slopes of the Alleghenies have been
so generally cut off that the trade has seriously declined. At
Northumberland lived Dr. Joseph Priestley, the discoverer of oxygen
gas, who died there in 1804, and is buried in the cemetery.
The Susquehanna now becomes a broad river, and just below flows past
Sunbury, the railway outlet of the extensive Shamokin coal district.
This town was originally Fort Augusta, built in 1756 to guard the
Susquehanna frontier just below the junction of its two branches. In
the French and Indian War it had usually a garrison of a regiment, and
it was then regarded as the best defensive work in Pennsylvania. After
that war it gradually fell into decay, although during the Revolution
it was always a refuge for the Susquehanna frontier settlers fleeing
from Indian brutality and massacre. Many prominent officers of the
Revolutionary army received their military training at this fort. The
settlement was originally called Shamokin, from the Indian name of the
creek here falling into the Susquehanna--Schakamo-kink, meaning, like
Shackamaxon, "the place of eels." For fifty miles below Sunbury the
broad Susquehanna winds among the mountain ranges, traversing one
after another, until its channel is narrowed to pass through the great
Dauphin Gap in the Kittatinny, five miles above Harrisburg, where the
river bed has descended to an elevation of three hundred and twenty
feet above tide.