Visitors to Lake George Battlefield Park will soon be able to explore the historic site with a new 12-stop, self-guided audio tour developed by the Lake George Battlefield Park Alliance.
Alliance trustee Todd Earl said the tour is expected to be released Sept. 8, the anniversary of the 1755 Battle of Lake George. Visitors will access the tour on their smartphones through Stories from Open Space, Southern Adirondacks, a platform operated by Warren County and Smarticus Spatial Storytellers.
The tour builds on an earlier QR code-based tour of the park and combines audio narration with maps, photographs and written historical information. Earl said Warren County’s Planning Office connected the Alliance with Smarticus and Dan Forsberg, who used artificial intelligence-assisted tools to help organize historical material supplied by the Alliance. That material included text from interpretive signs, previous video tours and other historical information.
Each stop will feature a common narrator guiding visitors through the park, while many stops will also include first-person voices representing people connected to the site’s history. Earl said those passages were drawn from journals, letters and other historical sources rather than invented dialogue.
“We want to make sure that all of first-person voices that are representing somebody that was there and are not just anonymous verbiage,” Earl said. “They’re things that actual person said.”
During his remarks, Earl played a preview from a stop devoted to Henry Knox and the “noble train of artillery,” the arduous winter expedition that transported captured cannon from Fort Ticonderoga and Crown Point toward Boston in 1775-76.
The tour audio tells visitors:
“As you leave this monument, keep the lake in view. The water before you was not scenery. It was a highway. For indigenous travelers, this was a route of movement, trade, and connection. For French and British armies, it became a military corridor. And in the winter of 1775, for a young Boston bookseller named Henry Knox, it became the first great test of an almost impossible mission.”
The audio goes on to describe Knox’s arrival at the southern end of Lake George as winter closed in and his preparations to move cannon overland toward the Hudson Valley. It incorporates excerpts attributed to Knox from his Dec. 17, 1775, report to Gen. George Washington, including his determination to continue despite the difficulties of transporting the artillery across the lake.
Knox spent about two weeks at the southern end of Lake George gathering oxen, horses, sleds, wagons, ropes and other supplies before continuing toward Saratoga, according to the tour narration. The artillery eventually reached Boston, where Washington positioned the guns on Dorchester Heights. The British evacuated the city in March 1776.
Earl said the Alliance chose to place the tour on an existing platform rather than develop and maintain its own app. Other tours on the platform are already available on the platform include walking tours of Lake Luzerne and Thurman.
The project came together in about eight weeks, far more quickly than Alliance members initially expected. Earl credited other Alliance members and Smarticus for helping assemble the tour and said additional work on photographs and maps was still underway.
Earl said the Alliance hopes the combination of traditional historical interpretation and first-person storytelling will make the battlefield’s history accessible to a broad audience, including families and younger visitors.
“We hope that the style of the first-person mix in there will be attractive to families too, that maybe younger people will be entertained by that a little bit as well,” Earl said.
