The Clemuel Ricketts Mansion (also known as the Stone House, the William R. Ricketts House, and Ganoga) is a Georgian-style house made of sandstone, built in 1852 or 1855 on the shore of Ganoga Lake in Colley Township, Sullivan County, Pennsylvania, United States. It was home to several generations of the Ricketts family, including R. Bruce Ricketts and William Reynolds Ricketts. Originally built as a hunting lodge, it was also a tavern and post office, and served as part of a hotel for much of the 19th century.
After 1903 the house served as the Ricketts family's summer home; they kept it even as they sold over to the state of Pennsylvania from 1920 to 1950. The house was included in the Historic American Buildings Survey (HABS) in 1936 and listed on the National Register of Historic Places (NRHP) in 1983. A group of investors bought the lake, surrounding land, and house in 1957 and developed them privately for housing and recreation. The house became the Ganoga Lake Association's clubhouse, and is not open to the public.
The original mansion is an L-shaped structure, two-and-a-half stories high, with stone walls thick. It was built in a clearing surrounded by old-growth forest with a view to the lake to the east. In 1913 a -story wing was added to the north side of the house and the original structure was renovated. The house has seven rooms, four porches, and its original hardware and woodwork. Dormers and some windows were added in the renovation, and electrical wiring and modern plumbing have been added since. According to the NRHP nomination form, the Clemuel Ricketts Mansion "is a stunning example of Georgian vernacular architecture".
Site The Clemuel Ricketts Mansion is on the southwest shore of Ganoga Lake in Colley Township in the southeastern part of Sullivan County. The mansion and lake are on a part of the Allegheny Plateau known as North Mountain; the plateau formed about 300 to 250 million years ago in the Alleghenian orogeny. Rocks—gray sandstone with conglomerates and some siltstone—of the Mississippian Pocono Formation more than 340 million years old, underlie the house and lake.Braun, Inners, pp. 1–13. The lake is in a shallow valley, deep, which is impounded by glacial till up to thick at the southeast end, where Kitchen Creek exits.Braun, p. 12.
The earliest recorded inhabitants of the region were the Susquehannocks, who left or died out by 1675. The land then came under the control of the Iroquois, who sold it to the British in the Treaty of Fort Stanwix in 1768.Wallace, pp. 99–108, 159. The land on which the house was later built was first part of Northumberland County, then became part of Lycoming County in 1795. The Susquehanna and Tioga Turnpike, which followed the lake's western shore, was built between 1822 and 1827; it connected the Pennsylvania communities of Berwick in the south and Towanda in the north. The lake was then known as Long Pond, and the Long Pond Tavern, just north of where the house was later built, was a lunch stop for the stagecoach on the turnpike.Ricketts, pp. 2–6.Petrillo, pp. 40–43. Sullivan County was formed from Lycoming County in 1847, and two years later Colley Township was formed from Cherry Township.
History
Lodge and tavern Brothers Clemuel Ricketts (1794–1858) and Elijah G. Ricketts (1803–1877) were frustrated at having to spend the night on a hotel's parlor floor while on a hunting trip on Loyalsock Creek north of Ganoga Lake in 1850, and wanted their own hunting preserve. They bought the lake, Long Pond Tavern, and of surrounding land in the early 1850s and soon began building a stone house between the turnpike and the lake shore to replace the log tavern. According to William Reynolds Ricketts' HABS history of the house, Petrillo's history of the region Ghost Towns of North Mountain, and the house's NRHP nomination form, the Ricketts brothers bought the lake and surrounding land in 1851, began building the stone house that year, and finished it in 1852. The year 1852 is also carved in stone on the front (west side) of the house, which faced the highway.See this photograph of the date 1852 carved on the front of the house. However, according to Tomasak's The Life and Times of Robert Bruce Ricketts, the brothers purchased the lake, tavern, and land on April 13, 1853, for $550 (approximately $ in ), and had the house built from 1854 to 1855.Tomasak, p. 38.
According to Ricketts family tradition, Gad Seward built the mansion. While it was originally known as "Ricketts Folly" for its isolated location in the wilderness, the official name was the Stone House. The house served as the brothers' lodge and as a tavern for travelers on the turnpike. Clemuel was named postmaster of a new post office at the lake on October 3, 1853, and received a tavern license from Sullivan County on August 7, 1854. When Clemuel died in 1858, Elijah bought his share of the house and land. The post office closed April 12, 1860.Ricketts, pp. 2–6.Petrillo, pp. 40–43.Tomasak, pp. 38–40.
Elijah's son Robert Bruce Ricketts (1839–1918), for whom the nearby Ricketts Glen State Park is named, joined the Union Army as a private at the outbreak of the American Civil War in 1861, and rose through the ranks to become a colonel in the artillery. After the war, R. B. Ricketts returned to Pennsylvania and purchased the stone house, lake, and some of the land around it from his father on September 25, 1869, for $3,969.81 (approximately $ in ); eventually he controlled or owned more than , including the lake and the park's glens and waterfalls.Petrillo, pp. 40, 77.
From 1872 to 1875 Ricketts and his partners operated a sawmill southeast of his house. In 1872 Ricketts used lumber from the mill to build a three-story wooden addition about north of the stone house, with a verandah connecting the two. The addition cost $45,000 (approximately $ in ), and was known as the Ark for its resemblance to Noah's Ark. That same year Ricketts put new white birch floors in the stone house, which are still there as of 2008.Tomasak, pp. 83, 323.
Hotel
The Ark and stone house together formed the North Mountain House hotel, which opened in 1873, and was managed by Ricketts' brother Frank until 1898. Many of the guests, who came from Wilkes-Barre, Philadelphia, New York City, and other places, were Ricketts' friends and relations. The hotel was open year-round; in summer, guests frequently arrived after school let out in June and stayed until school resumed in September. In 1876 and 1877, Ricketts ran the first summer school in the United States at his house and hotel; one of the teachers was Joseph Rothrock, later known as the "Father of Forestry" in Pennsylvania.
By 1874 Ricketts had renamed Long Pond as Highland Lake,Tomasak, p. 98. and by 1875 had named the highest waterfall on Kitchen Creek as Ganoga Falls.Bachelder, pp. 186–189.Tomasak, p. 85. That year the North Mountain House hotel was featured in John B. Bachelder's travel guide Popular resorts, and how to reach them, which praised its location in a virgin forest, the lake and nearby waterfalls, and opportunities for hunting, fishing, and hiking.Bachelder, pp. 184–192. In 1881, Ricketts renamed Highland Lake as Ganoga Lake. Pennsylvania senator Charles R. Buckalew suggested the name Ganoga, an Iroquoian word which he said meant "water on the mountain" in the Seneca language.
The house and hotel were on the east side of the old turnpike; a field on the other side of the road had a small herd of milk cows and a vegetable garden to provide for the guests' needs. The field also had a rifle range and a nine-hole golf course. Guests could enjoy tennis and croquet, and a lawn stretched from the house east to the lake, which offered boating and bathing. There was an outlook point southwest of the house, and Ricketts built a observation tower at the highest point on North Mountain, south. After the first tower collapsed, he built a replacement, and named the site Grand View.Tomasak, pp. 100, 323, 327.
Ricketts was a lumberman who made his fortune clearcutting nearly all his land, but no logging was allowed within of the lake,Petrillo, pp. 50–55. and the glens and their waterfalls in the state park were "saved from the lumberman's axe through the foresight of the Ricketts family". One hemlock tree cut near the lake to clear land for a building in 1893 was in diameter and 532 years old. The North Mountain House hotel was threatened by a forest fire in 1900; the subsequent loss of much of the surrounding old-growth forest led to decreased numbers of hotel guests. Changing tastes may have also played a role in the decline in popularity; the hotel had over 150 guests in August 1878, but only about 70 guests in August 1894.Tomasak, pp. 88, 323, 326, 328–329.
In 1903 another large fire on North Mountain threatened the sawmill in the lumber town of Ricketts northeast of the lake. Beginning in 1893, a branch line of the Lehigh Valley Railroad ran from Ricketts to a log station at the north end of the lake; a boardwalk and coach service brought guests from the station to the hotel. There was daily passenger service to Wilkes-Barre and Towanda, and the line also served freight trains hauling ice from the lake for use in refrigeration from 1895.Tomasak, pp. 324, 328–329.
The North Mountain House was long known for its rustic charms; it was heated with open fireplaces, decorated with animal skins and hatracks made of antlers, and had two live black bears on chains in the field across the road from the house. In 1895 and 1900 the stone house was refurbished, and telephone service, acetylene lighting, and steam heat were added.Tomasak, pp. 313–314, 324, 327–328. In 1900 The Sullivan Review newspaper recalled its former state and wrote of the changes: "We hardly call that an improvement. ... When the North Mountain House is lighted by gas, heated by a modern furnace, etc., its great charm is gone."The Sullivan Review, November 1, 1900, quoted in Tomasak, p. 328.
House The wooden addition to the stone house was torn down in either 1897 or 1903, and the land became a garden. The hotel closed in November 1903, and passenger train service ended at that time. The sawmills at Ricketts closed when the timber was exhausted in 1913, and the ice company closed in 1915.Petrillo, pp. 1, 50, 53, 55 The stone house remained the Ricketts' summer home. Ricketts proposed moving the highway from his front yard in 1904; the Pennsylvania General Assembly approved this in 1908, after he paid for the construction of the new highway, east of the house. Thomas Henry Atherton of Wilkes-Barre was the architect for a new wing that was added to the stone house in 1913, as well as renovations to the original structure. Ricketts died in 1918 at the stone house; his wife died a few days after and they are buried in the small Ricketts family cemetery near the north end of the lake.Tomasak, p. 313. As part of Ricketts' will, the stone house and its outbuildings were valued at $12,000 in 1918 (approximately $ in ).Tomasak, p. 398.