Hague Hotels

From the time John and Olive Isham Braisted arrived in Silver Bay with their family of 10, which included their seven children plus Olive’s widowed father, until the present time, there have been a myriad of property transactions involving the Braisted lands, some within the family as children grew up and married and some with outsiders who acquired portions of the land as it was offered by the family throughout the years. The property is on the right side of the road of the Silver Bay Road if you enter from the northern entrance.

Charles G. Gosling carried out extensive research for his book Benjamin Van Buren's Bay (2002), which included a detailed history of the lands and inhabitants of Van Buren Bay (also called Onedia Bay by the locals) in the Silver Bay area. This history included the story of the Braisted family, who arrived from Vermont via the Horicon/Schroon Lake area in about 1865, after buying 144 acres of land in the northwest corner of Van Buren Bay. According to Mr. Gosling's book, a 1876 Warren County atlas of the area shows the Braisted property, which is part of the 96 Ellis Tract, with two structures, both on the south side of the road that then ran from Hague to Sabbath Day Point, one towards the western upper part of the lot and the other closer to the lake on the lower section. The structure closest to the lake was most likely the family's primary residence and a precursor to what later became the Braisted House.

The first and subsequent structures erected on the Braisted property were no doubt built by the Braisteds themselves, as most of the Braisted men were capable carpenters, a skill passed down through at least four generations, and many Silver Bay, Hague, and Ticonderoga residents have houses that one or more of the Braisteds had a part in building. They also took part in work on many of the original Silver Bay YMCA buildings, including the Inn and Fisher Gym.

As for discerning the progression from what first must have been a fairly large house able to accommodate a family of 10 to a boarding house able to accommodate 25 guests, we have to rely largely on old photographs, as property transfers don't reveal much about the structures and how they changed. By pulling out the old pictures, examining them closely, and trying to accurately date them according to the ages of Braisted family members in the pictures (if any), it appears that the Braisted home must have become a boarding house somewhere between 1900 and 1910. In arriving at this tentative conclusion, it also helps to determine what was happening within the family around this timeframe and also to know what was going on in the neighborhood in the late 1800s and early 1900s. According to family records, John and Olive Braisted's children began marrying and leaving the nest in the 1870s and 1880s, some moving out of the Hague area entirely, eventually leaving only John C. and his family and Ed and Rhoby, the two siblings who never married. Olive's husband, John, died in 1895, leaving Olive, Ed, and Rhoby in a fairly large house. The exact date of when their home actually opened for borders may never be determined, but considering what was happening in the Silver Bay area around this time, it was undoubtedly an opportune time for the Braisted family to take advantage of the influx and overflow of new people coming to the area, whether to work or to visit, and this was probably when they decided to make use of their extra rooms.

In 1900, Olive would have been 80 years old, Ed was 43, and Rhoby was 35, so one can only assume that as Ed inherited the property with the large family home when his father died and John C. inherited the upper part of the lot and raised his family there, that Olive was guaranteed a home for life, Ed would be the proprietor and maintenance man, and Rhoby would take care of the daily chores of running the boarding house as it evolved.

The History of The Hague Summer Hotel by Bernard and Francis Clifton (1973) tells us that the Braisted House was built in 1885; however, it is likely that the house was built earlier and perhaps not used as a guesthouse until circa 1885. After Olive was unable to run the house, her daughter Rhoby operated it until it was purchased by Mortimer Bowen in 1944. He ran it as the Sunrise Mountain Bible Conference Center until it burned in 1945.

The Braisted House had at least one guest of some note. The Ticonderoga Sentinel of August 14, 1941 reads “Joseph C. Lincoln, the famous author, from Chatham, Cape Cod, Massachusetts, has been spending a week at the Braisted House with his friends Charles Owen.” According to Wikipedia, “Lincoln's literary career celebrating "old Cape Cod" can partly be seen as an attempt to return to an Eden from which he had been driven by family tragedy. His literary portrayal of Cape Cod can also be understood as a pre-modern haven occupied by individuals of old Yankee stock which was offered to readers as an antidote to an America that was undergoing rapid modernization, urbanization, immigration, and industrialization.”  

Researched and written by Kathy Braisted Santaniello, January 2010