Before summer vacation meant boarding passes, crowded boardwalks, and packed itineraries, it often meant something simpler: heading north.

In the late 19th century, travelers from hot, crowded cities made their way to the lakes, forests, and small towns of Upstate New York in search of fresh air. After the Civil War, guidebooks, hotels, camps, and summer communities spread across the Adirondack region, and a new kind of seasonal ritual took hold. Summer became a season of time spent somewhere far removed from city streets. 

That larger story is often told at the scale of the Adirondacks as a whole. But Washington County was part of it, too, not just as a place travelers passed through, but as a place where they arrived, stayed, and learned how to summer.

Our summer story follows the same routes people followed north: the Hudson River and Lake Champlain corridor, the canal towns that linked the county to larger travel circuits, and the farms and villages that gave visitors the feeling, for a week or for a season, that life could slow down.

Across the broader Adirondack region, summer could look very different depending on who you were.

Some travelers came north with guidebooks and gear, hoping for scenery, good air, and a little adventure. Others built a much grander version of the season in the Adirondack Great Camps, sprawling summer compounds associated with families like the Vanderbilts, Rockefellers, Carnegies, Whitneys, and Morgans. Built of timber and stone, these camps paired rustic surroundings with guest lodges, boathouses, dining rooms, and long summer days arranged around leisure and company.

The same region that welcomed ordinary travelers by rail, canal, and boarding house also attracted industrial wealth on a grand scale. Both grew from the same belief that this part of New York offered beauty, good health, and relief from city life.

When the Champlain Canal opened in 1823, it connected the Hudson River system to Lake Champlain and helped pull Washington County into one of the region’s most important travel corridors. 

Whitehall, at the northern end of the canal, became a natural stopping point, a place where travelers could stretch their legs before continuing north toward larger lake and mountain destinations.

Vacationing in Washington County did not mean grand lodges or hotels. More often, it looked smaller in scale and closer to everyday life.

According to local historical accounts, the area around Cossayuna Lake in Argyle began shifting toward a recognizable summer resort culture by about 1880. Spacious farmhouses opened rooms to boarders. Boat houses went up along the shore. Visitors came for bass fishing, boating, sightseeing, and the social experience of summertime on the lake. In 1889, the Oaks Hotel added another layer to that life, bringing a dance hall and even a small steamboat. 

By the early 1900s, the area was beginning to shift again, away from a hotel-centered resort model and toward a cottage era, a change that accelerated after the hotel was destroyed by fire in 1915.

Huletts Landing, on the Washington County side of Lake George, echoed much of the same. Visitors had been coming since the mid-1800s, and the area began developing more deliberately in the 1870s when Philander Hulett built a steamship landing and secured a post office, helping shape what had once been ‘Bosom Bay’ into a more established summer community.

What had started with farm guests and simple summer stays grew into a season of camps, cottages, and lake traditions that returned with the warm weather year after year.

If spending time on the water defined one part of the season, public gathering shaped the rest.

In Washington County, summer was social, neighborly, and full of reasons to come together. Agricultural fairs, church events, picnics, and community celebrations brought people together in ways that still feel familiar today.

By the mid-20th century, this broader summer culture had expanded into forms many families still recognize. 

Camp life became part of the local picture. Historic postcards and newspaper captions place a YMCA Camp Albany at Cossayuna Lake in the 1960s. By this time, Washington County had become part of the larger American tradition of organized camps and youth recreation.

Lake George’s eastern shore added another layer to that tradition. 

Adirondack Camp, founded in 1904, is one of the county’s long-running summer camps. Camp Chingachgook followed soon after, started by a 1912 exploratory trip by Schenectady YMCA boys. For more than a century, both camps have carried forward a version of the regional summer ideal built around campfire rituals and friendships that last long after the season ends.

And then there are the personal memories, the details that make the history feel close enough to touch. One recollection of Cossayuna Lake’s many day resorts and pavilions in the 1960s mentions “making popcorn, hot dogs, selling homemade pies,” with kids gathered around jukeboxes and pinball machines. 

As America approaches its 250th anniversary, there is renewed interest in telling stories about the nation’s past. Washington County offers a way to tell a story that feels both historical and human.

Yes, this is a county with deep Revolutionary roots. But it is also a place where another distinctly American tradition took shape over time: the habit of letting summer unfold through long days outdoors.

Keep exploring, and you’ll find that Washington County’s summer story is still here, waiting in the shoreline roads, historic villages, and familiar rituals of a day spent outdoors.

Visit our many museums, get hands-on with tools of the past, and walk in the footsteps of history’s leaders and gamechangers. Bring your 250th exploration to life in Washington County.