page_title: Clemuel Ricketts Mansion
section_title: House
hierarchical_section_title: Clemuel Ricketts Mansion / History / House
caption_attribution_description: Garden side and rear of the Stone House, the Clemuel Ricketts Mansion — at Ganoga Lake in Sullivan County, Pennsylvania
context_page_description: The Clemuel Ricketts Mansion 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 in the 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 65,000 acres to the state of Pennsylvania from 1920 to 1950. The house was included in the Historic American Buildings Survey in 1936 and listed on the National Register of Historic Places 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 2 feet thick. It was built in a clearing surrounded by old-growth forest with a view to the lake 900 feet to the east.
context_section_description: 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. 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, 1.5 miles (2.4 km) 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. As part of Ricketts' will, the stone house and its outbuildings were valued at $12,000 in 1918 (approximately $204,000 in 2020).
  R. B. Ricketts and his wife had three children; their son William Reynolds Ricketts (1869–1956) lived in the house after his parents' deaths. Beginning in 1920, the Ricketts heirs began selling land to the state of Pennsylvania, but still owned over 12,000 acres (4,900 ha) surrounding the house, Ganoga Lake, and the glens with their waterfalls. The stone house was included in the Historic American Buildings Survey (HABS) in 1936 as the William R. Ricketts House. Atherton, the architect for the 1913 addition, helped prepare the HABS architectural drawings, which gave the house's name as "Ganoga". William Reynolds Ricketts' history for the HABS refers to it as the stone house. The area was approved as a national park site in the 1930s; a 1935 article in The New York Times reported that the federal government planned to purchase 22,000 acres (8,900 ha) in the area, mentioning the waterfalls and the Ricketts estate and house, which it called "the oldest stone hotel in Pennsylvania". The National Park Service operated a Civilian Conservation Corps camp at "Ricketts Glynn" (sic), but budget problems and World War II brought an end to national plans for development.
  In 1942 the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania began buying the glens and their waterfalls from the heirs for $82,000 (approximately $1,283,000 in 2020) and opened Ricketts Glen State Park in 1944; from 1920 to 1950 the state bought more than 65,000 acres (26,000 ha) from the Ricketts family for the park and Pennsylvania State Game Lands. William Reynolds Ricketts died in 1956 and the lake and surrounding land were sold in October 1957 for $109,000 (approximately $992,000 in 2020).  The Department of Forests and Waters (predecessor of the Pennsylvania Department of Conservation and Natural Resources) bid on the 3,140 acres (1,270 ha) including the house and lake, but were outbid by a group of private investors. These "formed the Lake Ganoga Association in September 1959 to regulate and preserve the recreation and residential facilities at Lake Ganoga". The association built a road around the lake, cleared some land at its southern end, and its members built about 50 houses on the lake shore. In 1983 the stone house was listed on the National Register of Historic Places as the Clemuel Ricketts Mansion; it serves as the association's headquarters and clubhouse, and is used for association meetings, weddings, and picnics. As part of a private development, the house and lake are not open to the public: "To all outsiders that have no property around the lake, the lake and grounds are off limits."
caption: View from the northeast of the 1913 wing with its wrap-around kitchen porch; the original house is at left.
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