🎙️Special Episode Drop from the #WindsOfWMountain Podcast 🎙️
📍 Straight from East Bellmont’s Old Mill Studio, perched along the Chateaugay River where the rafters still hum with the hammer’s ghost, comes a tale too true to ignore—and too eerie to forget.
Folks, gather close and listen careful, ‘cause this ain’t your average old-geezer baloney. This is the real history of the Chateaugay Lake Forge, told right, like only Roy Ivanhoe Cootey of Brainardsville could say it—straight-backed, bright-eyed, and with the kind of gravel in his voice that comes from ninety winters and twice that many lies sorted out true.
Produced by the inimitable Miss Zenda Crane, of the Chateaugay Lake Steamboat Pirate Gazette Podcast Company, and hosted, transcribed, and edited by Brainardsville recording sage Ralph L. Hoy, this rare tape-recorded interview from 1972—unearthed after decades up in his mill attic—is a living time capsule.
💀 CAUTION: Listeners be warned!
This episode contains historical details so vivid, so strange, and so tinged with late-night clangor and ash-drift mystery that you might imagine that you can see the glow of forge fires out your window—or hear a waterwheel turnin’ where there ain’t no stream. Best not to listen alone!
🪓 Come walk with us down the ghost-plank road to “The Forge”—once a thriving company town of 800 folks, now just a blue marker, a field gone fallow, and some iron teeth in the Chateaugay Lake riverbed. Roy spins the tale of bloomers and separators, barge runs from Lyon Mountain, 16-forge fire cycles, and the day a young Senator Monroe Marshall lost his arm—and still sent word home with his left hand on the telegraph key. We tip our hats to him and the Bellows family both. Fine people, honest stock.
You’ll hear of:
- Cedar boats born from a single South Inlet log 🪵
- The Maggie tug puffin’ ore through the Narrows 🌫️
- The Bellows cousins and their rival boatyards ⚓
- The Dock and Coal timber barons, and the ghost kilns along Trout River🪵🔥
And by gar, you’ll learn a thing or two about the real iron backbone of this lake. Not all stories from the #ShatageeWoods are made up—even the true ones’ve got teeth!
🎧 Available now on all major podcast platforms. Search “Winds of W Mountain – Roy Cootey Remembers: Tales from The Forge at Chateaugay Lake” and prepare yourself for a history steeped in sweat, cinder, and authentic remembrance.
🐟 Like smoked trout pulled from the cold depths—this episode’s rare, rich, and may leave you feeling a little haunted.
#SteamboatDispatch #ChateaugayLakeLore #OralHistory #IronHistory #CatalanForge #AdirondackGhostTown #OldTimerBroadcast #WindsOfWMountain #NumberFiveRoad #ShatageeWoods #BackwoodsHorror #ForgeFiresStillGlow #CatalanTruthsAndRiverGhosts 🔥👁️🗨️
What mysteries of Chateaugay Lake haunt you?