Raquette Lake dispute forever filed

Albany

For years, Carolyn Gerdin has had a wooden sign at her family’s Adirondack camp with the official yellow and brown letters that spell out “State Land.” On Monday, that sign went from areal possibility to nothing more than an inside joke to her and more than 200 other landowners around Raquette Lake.

A property ownership dispute with the state dating back nearly acentury had meant that Gerdin, whose father bought the 40-acre lakeside camp in 1949 for $2,500, could never be sure the place was hers.

All that doubt formally ended Monday at the State Museum, when Environmental Conservation Commissioner Basil Seggos signed new maps to end the legal saga of Township 40 in Hamilton County, a dispute that had given countless headaches to so many for so long.

The flap was created because state survey records were incomplete and unclear, causing some questionable tax foreclosures and leaving no clear answers to who actually owned the land.

Under adeal, which was approved three years ago by New York voters as an amendment to the state Constitution, 216 property owners such as Gerdin each paid at least $2,000 to the town of Long Lake. The town in turn used the money — about $630,000 total — to pay the not-for-profit Open Space Institute for a nearly 300-acre parcel with an historic canoe carry between Raquette and Utowana lakes.

The town then donated the purchased land, which the conservation group had bought for $2 million, to the state to include in the forever-wild Forest Preserve. And the state in turn extinguished its claim on the landowners’ property, meaning Gerdin and the others finally own their land free and clear.

“I think that I just might leave that ‘State Land’ sign up ... and just write ‘ha ha ha’ under it,” said Gerdin, an Albany resident and retired principal from the Lincoln Elementary School in Scotia-Glenville. “Township 40 was a horror story ... but it shows what can finally happen when people work together.”

She said her father, now deceased, never expected the complicated legal tangle to be sorted out, and warned her never to utter the words “contested property” when talking about the camp in public. But years of work between local residents, conservationists and state officials finally cut that knot.

The decades-long lack of clear title had been a constant vexation for property owners, who always had to wonder whether state officials would one day show up and throw them out of their homes. Also, the dispute meant that obtaining title insurance could be a problem; without such insurance, mortgages or home equity loans could be difficult, if not impossible, to obtain.

“This is truly a momentous occasion. The Township 40 property dispute has languished for more than 100 years, and to see it finally resolved is extremely gratifying,” said Long Lake Supervisor Clark Seaman. The agreement also drew praise from state Sen. Betty Little and Assembly member Daniel Stec with Little saying it was the result of “perseverance.”

The land being added to the Forest Preserve is the Marion River Carry, which has been a portage for paddlers between the two lakes for some two centuries. “This carry is the Suez Canal of the central Adirondacks,” said Neil Sheehan, executive director and counsel of the Adirondack Mountain Club.

To make the deal work, OSI donated the $1.3 million difference between what it paid for the Marion property and what it was paid by the town. Institute official Joe Martens — a former state DEC commissioner — said the group did so to accomplish two goals in the public interest: protecting the land from potential future development by adding it to the Forest Preserve, and ending the property dispute.

Also, under the settlement, two people with disputed property claims are donating the land to the state to add to the Forest Preserve. That covers more than 130 acres at Sucker Brook Bay, 3,000 feet of pristine shoreline, and includes a trail to the summit of West Mountain.

• bnearing@timesunion. com • 518-454-5094 • @ Bnearing10