This River Walk Trail celebrates the extraordinary variety of industries that clustered around the waterfalls and rapids that punctuate the river’s course through town. Beginning at the Ticonderoga Heritage Museum, located in the office built by Ticonderoga Pulp and Paper Company in 1888, the trail loops around Bicentennial Park, a vast expanse of waterfront greenery reclaimed from the sprawling paper mill and its wood yard.
LaChute River Walk
an enhanced and beautified walking and biking trail
The Trail continues past pulp mill grindstones, the historic Frazier Bridge (1879; restored 2008) and a whirlpool, where the river takes a sharp bend, to the Richards dam, where water still flows through a former pulp mill flume gate. A new pocket park marks the point where the trail crosses Montcalm Street, heading up Lake George Avenue before returning to the bank of the “upper river,” with close-up views of two more historic dams and a pool teeming with wildlife.
The entire trail, including a loop around the baseball fields (across the covered bridge) measures nearly three miles, with a bracing climb up the last stretch to the high ground where the river leaves Lake George for its two-mile plunge to the foot of Bicentennial Falls, where a handicapped fishing platform sits opposite a car-top boat launch. A dozen wayside exhibits illustrate and describe the history of every stretch of the river.
LaChute River Walk is one of hundreds of community projects supported by North Country Rural Development (NCRD), a nonprofit Rural Preservation Company established in 1984 for the purpose of preserving, revitalizing, implementing, directing and effecting (P-R-I-D-E) community development. NCRD raises funds to rehabilitate housing, revitalize businesses, conduct community planning and enhance the quality of community life.
Over the course of fifteen years, NCRD has supported all the steps necessary to turn the industrial waterfront of centuries past into a community asset that celebrates both the natural and the historic resources of the river corridor. The vision that began with a survey of surviving industrial evidence has evolved into a paved path with kiosks and wayside exhibits that tell the stories of the landscape