Storytown, Motels, and Summer Memories: How Lake George Became America's Vacation Paradise
Lake George history exhibit at The Bolton Museum.
There was a time when a Lake George vacation meant packing the family into the car, checking into a roadside motel or cottage colony, spending the afternoon at Storytown and—if the adults still had energy—dancing until 3 am.
It wasn't simply nostalgia. In the decades after World War II, Lake George transformed from a summer retreat for wealthy families and grand hotels into one of the Northeast's great middle-class vacation destinations.
In this episode of ADK Talks, hosts Jane and Steve travel back to that Lake George with Lisa Hall, Vice President of the Bolton Museum and curator of Welcome to Lake George: Vacation Paradise of the 50s & 60s, and Tony Hall, publisher of the Lake George Mirror.
Listen to the episode.
Hear Lisa and Tony share the stories behind Welcome to Lake George: Vacation Paradise of the 50s & 60s—and discover how motels, highways, theme parks and two-week family vacations helped create the Lake George generations still remember today.
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A treasure trove of artifacts from Lake George in the mid-20th century.
When Lake George went modern.
The story begins after the Depression and World War II.
Rising incomes, paid vacations and increasing automobile ownership suddenly gave middle-class Americans something earlier generations hadn't necessarily enjoyed: both the means and the freedom to take a two-week family vacation.
Lake George was ready for them.
As aging grand hotels and private estates disappeared, a new landscape emerged—motels, cabin colonies and self-contained resorts where families could spend their entire vacation.
And they came.
Tony and Lisa describe an era when tens of thousands of visitors descended on Lake George each summer, and a tourism economy grew up around them.
Once families arrived, of course, somebody had to entertain them.
Enter Storytown.
And Frontier Town.
And dude ranches. Water-ski schools. Roadside attractions. Nightclubs. Showgirls. Polynesian entertainment. Restaurants serving dinner long after midnight.
Lake George wasn't trying to preserve the past.
It was selling the future.
Vacation Land, USA
The Northway changed everything.
The automobile plays an enormous role in this story.
Before the Adirondack Northway, families heading north traveled Route 9. By the early 1960s, completed sections of I-87 made Lake George dramatically more accessible.
That accessibility helped fuel another burst of tourism and development.
The era also produced projects such as Million Dollar Beach, the Prospect Mountain Veterans Memorial Highway and ambitious plans for Prospect Mountain itself.
But here's where the story takes an unexpected turn.
By the end of the 1960s, attitudes were changing.
The Prospect Mountain Highway was completed just as the modern environmental movement was gathering momentum. Concerns about development, automobiles and the future of the Adirondack Park were growing.
Tony argues that the very forces that helped create Lake George's tourism boom also contributed to a new environmental consciousness in the Adirondacks—and ultimately to efforts to protect the Park from unchecked development.
Suddenly, an exhibit about motel signs and Storytown becomes a story about the Adirondacks' future.
Couture from the estate of Patricia Bixby Hoopes.
What you'll hear.
How postwar prosperity and the automobile transformed Lake George tourism
Why Storytown, Frontier Town, cottage colonies and roadside attractions became part of the classic Lake George vacation
The surprisingly glamorous nightlife of mid-century Lake George—including dancing until 3 am and breakfast afterward
How a collection of extraordinary 1950s and '60s dresses helped inspire the entire museum exhibit
Why the Lake George tourism boom and the rise of the Adirondack environmental movement may be more closely connected than they first appear
An exhibit built from memories.
For Lisa, the exhibition had an unexpected origin.
The museum inherited a remarkable clothing collection from the late Patricia Bixby Hoopes, a member of a prominent Lake George family whose wardrobe created an almost perfect timeline of fashion from roughly 1949 through 1969.
Lisa, whose background includes fashion and costume history, immediately saw the possibilities.
Those glamorous dresses could tell a larger story about Lake George at the time.
The Bolton Museum.
From there came vintage advertising, photographs, postcards, souvenirs and objects from the museum's collection and the Lake George Mirror archives.
Some artifacts are wonderfully ordinary.
A plaid Thermos cooler, for example, sent Jane straight back to childhood. Lisa discovered that the familiar pattern wasn't a coincidence: this was the "mad for plaid" era, and suddenly tartan picnic gear, thermoses and other everyday objects became part of the story.
Other artifacts include the advertising placards once attached to visitors' cars at tourist attractions—a clever way for attractions to turn vacationing families into rolling billboards.
It's history told not only through important events, but through the things people actually touched, wore, carried and brought home.
When visitors find themselves in the museum.
Perhaps the most compelling part of the exhibition isn't an artifact at all.
It's what happens when visitors recognize their own lives.
Lisa says people have walked into the exhibit and discovered photographs of themselves from the 1960s. Families have returned to photograph those visitors standing beside their younger selves.
Others recognize places where they worked, vacationed or spent summers.
For people who lived through the era, the exhibition does something unexpected: it places their own memories within history.
That response helps explain why an exhibition originally planned for one season returned for 2026.
More than 6,000 people visited the museum last summer—a significant number for a small community museum—and some visitors spend an hour or two exploring an exhibition packed with things to discover.
A pocket museum worth seeking out.
The Bolton Museum sits in Rogers Memorial Park in the heart of Bolton Landing, inside a former Catholic church (built as the Blessed Sacrament Church in 1890) with a newer exhibition wing inspired by the vernacular architecture of local barns and boathouses.
It's exactly the kind of place ADK Taste loves: a "pocket museum" that doesn't require surrendering an entire vacation day.
The museum is open daily from 10 am–4 pm through Columbus Day, making the exhibit an easy addition to a late-summer or fall Lake George trip.
And after exploring the galleries, visitors step outside into one of Bolton Landing's most welcoming public spaces—with Lake George just beyond the museum doors.
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