The untold history of Lake Carnegie

"I am just back from a walk along Carnegie Lake with Dick," began Robinson Frost '08's weekly letter to his mother on Dec. 2, 1906.

"My, you cannot imagine how it adds to the landscape. Today in the clear sharp air and sunshine, it looked such a deep blue. Not quite such a deep blue as Seneca has sometimes but still it looked like a genuine lake. . . . It is going to be a grand place for skating this winter."

Today, the breathtaking view of Lake Carnegie, dappled by a fall New Jersey sun, is one of the first things many freshmen see when they arrive in Princeton and turn off Route 1, and the almost 200 undergraduates who row crew enjoy the lake's beauty almost every day.

But Frost was among the first to enjoy the scenic vista of the man-made lake, which was funded by the Scottish-American industrialist and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie and dedicated on Dec. 5, 1906.

Princeton students had long bemoaned the lack of a satisfactory rowing venue. In the 1870s, the crew team tried rowing on the Delaware and Raritan Canal, but it was too narrow and heavily trafficked.

Howard Russell Butler, a member of the class of 1876, shared these complaints with Andrew Carnegie one day when they were on the same Dinky train. Carnegie, who had built a number of lakes in Scotland, was intrigued. He asked Butler to research what it would cost to fulfill the fantasy of Butler and his old school friends — to create a lake by flooding the marshy wetlands south of campus.

At the time, those lands were, as one engineer put it, "a malarious and unwholesome swamp, covered in places with bunches of briars and brambles, and in other parts with scanty growths of timber."

Butler replied to Carnegie's offer in a letter dated July 16, 1902, which assured Carnegie of the project's feasibility and estimated its cost at just over $100,000.

"I trust that . . . Princeton University will soon be indebted to you for 'Loch Carnegie,' " Butler wrote.

Sure enough, Carnegie was more than willing to write the necessary checks. Four years later, the 300-acre marsh and surrounding lands had been purchased, their plant growth uprooted, and the mud dredged out by horse-drawn carts.

An area of Stony Brook and Millstone River between Kingston and Princeton was dammed, flooding the marshlands with water that would rise up to 12 feet deep. Princeton had its lake — three miles long and up to 800 feet wide.

The lake's opening ceremonies were later described by Alexander Gulick, one of the engineers, in a letter to Butler, as "one of the best days Princeton has ever had."

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Carnegie, along with a party of about 80 guests, arrived that morning on a special train from New York. He was greeted at Blair Arch, where the trains used to stop, by some 1,000 cheering undergraduates.

The project's trustees had written to Carnegie a few days before that there was "great enthusiasm at Princeton over this event. The boys are to have a holiday ... If you were a candidate for the Presidency of the United States, and the election were to take place tomorrow, I am sure you would have the Princeton vote solid."

Carnegie formally presented the lake in a schoolwide assembly in Alexander Hall, in a speech frequently interrupted by the loud cheers of the excited students. They had even prepared a song for the occasion: "Carnegie, Carnegie, he is giving us a lake! . . . Andy, Andy, you're a dandy!"

That afternoon, Carnegie was delighted to see about 150 students skating and playing hockey on the lake's frozen surface.

"He everywhere expressed satisfaction with what had been done, and said that the undertaking was far beyond anything he had thought, and that the lake was much more beautiful, and much larger than he had any idea of," Gulick wrote.

Perhaps the only person who wasn't happy with Lake Carnegie was Woodrow Wilson, then university president. He, and President James McCosh before him, had repeatedly solicited Carnegie for a donation to the university, with no success.

Instead, Carnegie offered a lake. Wilson is said to have remarked, "We asked for bread, and he gave us cake."