From a dusty crate flows the genesis of Lake Carnegie

University exhibit reveals never-before-seen photographs

By: David Campbell
   Curator Dan Linke, head of the Seeley G. Mudd Manuscript Library at Princeton University, said the wooden crate was dropped off one summer day in 1996 on the library’s loading dock. In it was a treasure trove of photographic images of the making of Lake Carnegie in 1905 and 1906 — before and after.
   The result of that delivery is "O, What a Place for a Lake: The Centennial of the Construction of Loch Carnegie," an exhibition of photographs at Firestone Library’s Milberg Gallery that depicts the Princeton landscape before, during and after the creation of the lake.
   The exhibition, which is free and open to the public, began April 9 and runs through Sept. 24. It showcases more than 60 photographs enlarged from the original 1905-era glass plate negatives, along with documents such as Andrew Carnegie’s deed gifting the lake and his penciled note to President Grover Cleveland seeking his opinion about the feasibility of the project.
   Mr. Linke said the collection of glass plate negatives documenting the lake’s construction was discovered, coated with dust, in a storage closet at the MacMillan Building in 1996 by some staff at the university’s physical planning office, which he said offered to pass them along to the manuscript library.
   "I said, ‘Sure, send them over,’" he recalled. "A couple of days later, this big wooden crate appeared on our loading dock."
   The collection was transferred to the university archives and the glass plates restored in a project funded by the New Jersey Historical Commission. After careful cleaning, a contact print was made from the cleaned negatives, and each glass plate then was housed in its own paper wrapper and retired from use. The prints in the exhibition represent the first time in the negatives’ history that they have been enlarged and displayed.
   "At first blush, it seems obvious the lake was a gift not only to the university but also the town," Mr. Linke continued. "It certainly changed the landscape, in ways people don’t think about. If you take people down to the lake and they didn’t know the background, they might think, ‘what a beautiful piece of nature.’"
   But in fact the lake is manmade — built with a lot of money and willpower. Before, there were marshlands and pastures.
   "O, what a place for a lake!" was what Mr. Carnegie reportedly declared when he saw Princeton’s Millstone River valley — pre-lake — with Howard Russell Butler of Princeton’s class of 1876, who convinced Mr. Carnegie to just go ahead and build what wasn’t there at the time.
   Mr. Butler recounted how he and his teammates on the varsity crew disliked rowing on the narrow and heavily trafficked Delaware & Raritan Canal, and how the poor conditions led to the crew team’s disbanding in the 1880s. It was his mention of damming the Millstone River that fired Mr. Carnegie’s imagination.
   He asked Mr. Butler to investigate the feasibility and costs of building a lake. After consulting with a New York engineering firm, the original estimate — $118,000, or about $2.5 million in today’s dollars — was optimistic, to say the least. The final cost of the project would be about $450,000, about $9.5 million today.
   With Mr. Carnegie’s authorization, a group of Princeton alumni in 1903 began buying up the farmland that occupied much of the envisioned lake’s basin, which they in turn sold to Mr. Carnegie.
   Their discretion allowed the project’s rich patron to amass the acreage without raising the suspicion of local residents — not to mention prices. By 1905, the necessary land was secured, and crews set to work felling trees, pulling and burning stumps, moving earth and constructing bridges and the dam. The lake’s official opening was on Dec. 5, 1906.
   Mr. Linke said the glass-plate images were technical photos taken by someone — nobody knows his name — working with the engineering company that did the work. "Nameless though he may be, we’re in his debt, because he has shown us part of Princeton’s history that can’t be recovered," the curator said.
   
"O, What a Place for a Lake: The Centennial of the Construction of Loch Carnegie" is open from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday, until 8 p.m. on Wednesdays, and from noon to 5 p.m. on weekends. Starting June 12, the summer hours will be 8:45 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Monday through Friday, until 7:30 p.m. on Wednesdays through the end of July, and from noon to 5 p.m. on weekends.